White Courtesy Telephone

Raising Awareness of Our Awareness of Darfur

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The Darfurians “don't know the significance of the fact that Matt Damon is worried about them.”

Get ready to hit the mute button when the Dewars commercials come on.  Otherwise enjoy this Washington Week-style satire from our friends at The Onion.  Happy Thanksgiving! ...

Selling Soap, Saving Lives

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Susan Herr’s recent post on Filmanthropy raises some interesting questions in aesthetics: Why is it so difficult to marry art with advocacy?  Why is so much political art shrill or heavy-handed?

Population Communications International, a New York-based nonprofit organization, has, for the past twenty years, pioneered the use of telenovelas in the fight against poverty, AIDS, and other social ills.  The organization has politely rejected every socially conscious script I’ve sent them, including this latest, titled, La Flor Apolonia:

(Apolonia is a beautiful woman with big beauty-parlor hair and long nails.  Her dress makes a small “X” across her chest, barely concealing her breasts.  Marta, her closest friend, wears a white mini-skirt, a bright blue Spandex top, and long, bangly earrings.  She has applied her makeup with unmatched zeal.  The two women speak in quick, unaccented Spanish.)

Apolonia:  Enrique told me that his parents had disowned him.  I pitied him, Marta—you’ve seen those big brown eyes of his!  (Apolonia juts out her chin defiantly.)  The barbarian repaid my kindness by forcing himself on me.  (The orchestra swells, heavy on the strings, as Apolonia clenches her teeth.)  Now I’m pregnant with Enrique’s baby and I’m afraid I might have AIDS!  (Music sting.)

Marta:  You were clearly born to suffer, Apolonia!  Listen, I know a woman who works at the local health collective.  Just the other day she was telling me how they had convened diverse community stakeholders around issues relating to the sourcing of positive health outcomes for economically-challenged persons of female.  Let’s go see her …

What’s the secret of seamlessly integrating the preachy earnestness of poverty-fighting messages, say, into melodramas starring sexy Latinas and hunky vaqueros?  Apart from being one of the greatest playwrights of the last century, what made Bertolt Brecht so good at using theatre as a forum for political ideas?

Countess Apraxina Does the Hudson Institute

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Editor’s note:  We publish occasional letters written to us—typically on hotel stationery—by the Countess Apraxina.  We’ve invited her to be a regular contributor to the White Courtesy Telephone, but she consistently refuses, stating flatly that “Apraxina does not blonk.”  In this missive she takes WCT editor Albert Ruesga to task for his lackluster performance at a recent panel discussion sponsored by the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, a conservative Washington, DC think tank ...

My Dearest Alyosha:

You will know by now that I am go see you speak at Hudson Institute.  I am arrive late, during remarks of charming Mr. Shamrock.  Why you always fight with him like Russian bear?  So handsome!  Groomed to within inch of life—unlike you, my little gemorróy, who look like bony chicken stuffed into ill-fitting suit from Wal-Mart.  You have learn nothink, nothink about fashion in all these years with Apraxina!

And who could understand one little think you say?  Your words flow over audience like embalming fluid—and I mean this only in nicest way.  Sin.  Atonement.  What is this you are saying, my little zaychick?  You remind me of Aunt Sofia, may she rest in peace, who cross herself each time she had impure thoughts.  The woman was in perpetual motion.

You were so focus on inducing narcolepsy in audience, you didn’t notice when Apraxina passed out from boredom and hit head on tray of undercooked brownies.  Fortunately, two very handsome Libertarians carried me out of conference center.  I am meet my good friend Mr. Scooter Libby while I wait in Hudson lobby for ambulance.  He told me he is writing monograph on how to re-introduce honesty and respect for rule of law into low-income African American communities.  I am also ask after childhood friend, Lord Conrad Black, and am surprise when told he has “no comment on allegations.”

New personal secretary, Dmitri, has attach photographs and notes he took at event.  I will use these to sue Hudson Institute, you will believe me! ...

	Mr. Rezga reacts to this comment by Mr. Ed Skloog: “[B]y tying together seriously rich people with harder metrics and better long-term strategy, we may be seeing a new role being created for social capital. And social entrepreneurship—as it is called now, or one of the many terms—may well be getting traction.”
	Mr. Rezga is deep in thought when Mr. Ed Skloog says: “Andrew Kassoy and a couple of his colleagues are talking about the creation in law of a new form of institution that is not an NGO and it’s not a for-profit. It’s a B Corporation, or a Benefit Corporation, whose charter of incorporation speaks not just to serving shareholders but serving all stakeholders ... It’s very, very exciting. B Corporations.”
	Mr. Rezga flubs pronunciation of word “epistemological.”
	Mr. Rezga’s reaction when Mr. Besharov says: “So what do I think is actually happening out there? I think that my colleagues in the academic world and my colleagues in the think tank world ... go through a sort of a charade with the foundations: ‘Oh, yes, you’re very wise, and oh, yes, it’s right—this is the year to worry about black men.’”
	Mr. Rezga is stumped by question from audience member who managed to stay awake during his remarks.

Images: Lake Oswego Public Library; Rezga photos by Max Niedzwiecki

Seat of the Pants Philanthropy: Riffing on Strategy

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1.  The Center for Effective Philanthropy recently published Beyond the Rhetoric: Foundation Strategy.  It should have made front page news, but it barely made a splash, even inside the world of foundations.  Here’s its primary finding:

We learned that even though most [foundation staff] interviewed believe that having and using a strategy increases a foundation’s ability to create impact, many do not use strategy in their own work. We asked respondents to describe the frameworks they use to guide their decisions. While some decisionmaking frameworks met our basic definition of strategy, a majority did not.

If I may be permitted to do a little translating: The majority of foundations do their grantmaking completely by the seat of their pants.  There’s no framework; no well articulated strategy for achieving desired ends.  The fate of some of our most vulnerable communities rests in the hands of grantmakers who do their work by feeling their way in the dark, as many of us do.

This sounds like a bad thing.  Is it?

2.  Keep in mind that for many people inside the foundation world, charity represents a kind of weak, emotional response to a social problem, while philanthropy, because it is strategic, attempts to get to the root of a problem and solve it once and for all.  Strategy is also what keeps our grantmaking from becoming a random walk through many bogus ideas about the mechanics of social change.

We use the word “strategy” frequently in our work.  But what is it really?

3.  Here’s the definition of “strategy” used by the Center for Effective Philanthropy:

A framework for decision-making that is 1) focused on the external context in which the foundation works and 2) includes a hypothesized causal connection between use of foundation resources and goal achievement.

What’s most striking about this definition is that it’s absurdly weak: Which foundation’s grantmaking doesn’t focus on the external context in which it does its work?  Which foundation CEO, when challenged, cannot articulate a connection between what his foundation funds and what his foundation sets out to accomplish?

Consider this example:  The Levittown Community Foundation aims to end gang violence in Levittown’s low-income neighborhoods.  Its strategy is to fund gang summits to achieve this end.  Foundation board and staff members believe that bringing members of different gangs together can help these gangs resolve their differences.

This has all the earmarks of a strategy, according to the Center for Effective Philanthropy definition: a framework for decision-making focused on the external context (Levittown’s low-income neighborhoods), positing a causal connection between what the foundation funds (gang summits) and its goals (the ending of gang violence).

And yet this strategy has almost no chance of succeeding.  It doesn’t address the issues that bring members of youth gangs into conflict; it does nothing to prevent young people from being drawn into gangs in the first place; it doesn’t incorporate what others have learned from failed attempts to sponsor gang summits; etcetera.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy definition is so broad that almost any kind of nonsense can count as a strategy.  And therein lies its strength:  Despite the fact that the definition is broad, it’s still the case that a majority of foundations fail to use any kind of strategy at all—good or bad—in their grantmaking.

The conclusion, lurking just behind the study’s primary finding, is that the foundation field is in disarray, having little effect, at best, and squandering enormous sums of money, at worst.

Is this a fair assessment?

4.  It might not be.  We have yet to determine empirically the correlation between explicit, well articulated foundation strategies and the production of social goods.  Foundations armed with detailed strategies and metrics might not consistently outperform grantmakers who work opportunistically without a rigid plan, who constantly adjust their tactics to a landscape that presents new opportunities and challenges.  Napoleon, for example, never developed a theory of change before going into battle.  There was no grand plan that connected the fall of Paris, say, to his winning of France.

Keep in mind also that a strategy only makes sense when the path to your goal isn’t direct, when there’s some significant uncertainty about whether your efforts will achieve your ends.  You don’t need a strategy for driving to the grocery store, but you might need a strategy for getting your school-aged child out of bed in the morning.  Likewise, a grantmaker who sets out simply to “improve the lives of children in our region” doesn’t need anything as complicated as what the word  strategy would suggest.  Just about any kindly act toward a child would achieve his desired end.

I suspect that many of the foundations studied by the Center for Effective Philanthropy had goals that were equally open-ended.  This fact, if it is a fact, would tend to inflate the numbers of the “unstrategic,” making the study’s conclusions appear much more dramatic than they are.  Why so many grantmakers would have such fuzzy goals must remain the subject of another post ...

The Foundation Board in 60,000 B.C.

White Courtesy Telephone reader Tidy Sum set the Way Back Machine to 60,000 B.C. to visit the Upland Neanderthal Fund’s board meeting.  Here’s his report ...

It was not much different than what you see now only it smelled real stinky and I had to eat a rat.

They spent a lot of time talking about the high and lows of their hunting. (Lots of posturing from the men on this subject.)

They funded an evaluation of their arts initiative—some cave thing. Nobody really cared about it but old Grogg.  He’s 24 and will die soon so they did not argue.

They funded a nice community program celebrating bipedalism and morphological diversity.

They funded a small stone tool-making program for youth after the stern objections of one trustee who wanted better data on spear effectiveness.

One member, Oog from Dear Clan, raised the big extinction issue in reference to news about Cro-Magnons and humans but this discussion was squelched because someone wanted to talk about the new CavePoint mapping antler that would track their donations.

I guess some things never change.

Some Bold, Inexpensive Predictions About Philanthropy's Future

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Maureen Robinson, the mother character in the 1960s TV series, Lost in Space, is the perfect metaphor for the future of philanthropy.  Her silvery space suit and other-worldly hairdo represent philanthropy’s progressive aspirations.  She’s the imagined future of a philanthropy transformed by cosmic sums of money, by networked donors and metrics-wielding CEOs.

And yet while Maureen packs a ray gun and travels from planet to planet in a flying saucer, she also plays the reassuring role of post-war housewife and mom, staying at home to prepare a nice meatloaf while her husband goes off to protect the ship from tentacled aliens.  Let’s face it: she’s a bit of a throwback.  It’s easier for us to imagine a world in which solid objects spontaneously shift form than one in which the basic relations of power between men and women are renegotiated.

In philanthropy, as in science fiction, we tend to imagine a future in which everything changes—except us.  We’ll bring to the year 2173 our small ambitions, our competitiveness and unwillingness to collaborate, our downstream attempts to solve upstream problems.  The new donor will arrive at the spaceport with an appalling ignorance of philanthropy’s past.

Foundations periodically commission consultants to picture philanthropy’s future.  Perhaps it’s too much to expect these consultants to tell the truth about how eerily familiar that future is likely to be.

America's Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member

On the eve of the consumerist orgy we call “the holidays,” we republish this classic Phil Anthropoid satire.  It’s a cheeky take-off on America’s Next Top Model, a reality television show in which 13 beautiful young women compete for a grand prize that includes multi-page photo spreads in Seventeen magazine and lucrative modeling contracts.  Each week the competitors are given a new fashion challenge, and one of them is eliminated from the competition.  Our colleague Phil explores what would happen if nonprofit staff members were forced out of their comfort zone and into the world of modeling …

ANNOUNCER	Tonight on America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member, it’s down to the final three: Arthur, the 57-year-old executive director from Services, Inc. in Hendersonville, North Carolina; Bebe, the 43-year-old artistic director from the Granite Falls Community Theater in Oregon; and Cheryl, the fiery 26-year-old communications coordinator from People for a Better Universe Overall. As the final elimination looms, each contestant faces his or her own special challenge. Arthur must overcome the limitations of his geography and upbringing ...
ARTHUR	Nobody in Hendersonville calls minorities “people of color.” What does that make me? A person of clear?
ANNOUNCER	Bebe needs to prove she’s open-minded enough to work in any nonprofit environment ...
BEBE	Well, yes, I did make some unguarded remarks about Cheryl during the Nonprofit Advocacy photo shoot, but these New York princesses really chap my ass!
ANNOUNCER	Cheryl needs to find a style that her more experienced colleagues can connect with …
CHERYL	I mean, if we’re about progressive social change, why don’t we just say so?
ANNOUNCER	Tensions run high as our three contestants approach their final challenge.
	(Scene: The inside of the contestants’ apartment. The contestants are in various stages of undress as the camera pans to a large envelope perched on an easel. Bebe’s the first to see it. She snatches up the envelope, tears it open, and reads the message out loud.)
BEBE	“A limousine will pick you up at noon for today’s challenge. Once you get to the studio, you’ll have 15 minutes to throw together an outfit for a photo shoot on the theme, ‘Haute Couture Site Visit.’ Here’s the catch: You don’t know what your program officer is going to ask you because you didn’t write the proposal!”
	(Music sting. The three contestants shriek. Close-up on Bebe.)
BEBE	Oh my God!
CHERYL	You look like a scabby old egret, Arthur. You’re going down!
ARTHUR	Shut up, bitch.
	(Shot of limousine picking up the contestants at their apartment and dropping them off at the studio. They’re led into a room filled with clothes racks, shoes, and accessory bins.)
MESSENGER	You have 15 minutes. Go to it, contestants!
	(We see tantalizing images of the contestants pulling clothes from the racks and trying on shoes. As Arthur undresses, the camera does a tight close-up on his boxer shorts which are decorated with little fox hounds. Bebe uses her considerable girth to push Cheryl out of the way as she reaches for a leather belt. Cross fade to the judges’ room where we see the three contestants fidgeting in front of a panel consisting of head judge Tyra Banks, fellow judges Jay Manuel and Twiggy, and guest judge Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector.)
JUDGE TYRA	Welcome, contestants. Today we’ll determine who moves on to the final round of America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member. Let’s start with you, Cheryl. Here’s your best photograph from today’s shoot. (Some of the judges roll their eyes, others sigh.) What were you trying to do here, Cheryl? (Cheryl is too shocked to respond.)
JUDGE TWIGGY	You look like the headmistress of a school for proctologists.
JUDGE DIANA	It’s very Senator Grassley—not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
CHERYL	(Defiantly.) Last week you said I needed to tone down my enervating youth and arrogance.
JUDGE JAY	The look isn’t working for you, Cheryl. It’s hyper-zombie, totally glacial.
	(Music sting as camera cuts to Cheryl who wistfully cracks her gum.)
JUDGE TYRA	You’re next, Arthur. Here’s your best photograph from today’s shoot. (The judges shake their heads.) Tell me about your outfit, Arthur.
ARTHUR	Well, I saw this tan bedspread and I thought I could use it as a scarf …
JUDGE JAY	You look like a giant buttocks.
JUDGE DIANA	Or perhaps something flatter, like the Principles for Good Governance report recently released by the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector ...
JUDGE TYRA	Hold that thought, Diana. (Coldly.) Arthur, I think we all agree you look like a giant buttocks. (Music sting as Arthur is left twisting in the wind.) Bebe, let’s look at your best photograph.
JUDGE JAY	The look is fierce!
JUDGE TWIGGY	I like how you use the nun shoes to balance the effect of the whip. Sister Bertrille meets Candidia Cruikshanks. (Camera cuts to Bebe, who smiles, exposing a row of yellow teeth.)
JUDGE TYRA	Bebe … (Suspense music as the camera cuts first to Arthur, then Cheryl, then Bebe.) … you’ll be moving on to the final round! Congratulations, girlfriend!
BEBE	(In tears, turning to Arthur and Cheryl.) Hah! Eat my dust! Eat my not-for-profit dust!
ANNOUNCER	When we return: Who will be America’s Next Top Nonprofit Staff Member? ...