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The Island of the Yooks and the Zooks: Notes on the Systems Heresy

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In philanthropic and nonprofit work, discussions of “systemic reform” can sometimes beguile us.  We might, without realizing it, succumb to the Systems Heresy: the naïve belief that fair institutional structures and a fair enforcement of laws will inevitably produce fair social outcomes.

We understand that unequal initial conditions—a legacy of slavery for one group, say, but not for another—can lead to unequal outcomes, however fairly constituted our institutions and laws might be.  But the problems associated with the Systems Heresy go deeper than this.

Imagine an island of ten million souls inhabited by two tribes, one called the Yooks, the other the Zooks.  The Yooks, who outnumber the Zooks ten to one, part their hair on the right while the Zooks part their hair on the left.  Imagine further that a god—call him Milton—endows the island’s inhabitants with equal abilities and gives to each Yook and Zook five thousand Talents with which he or she might participate in a system of production and exchange.

There’s one problem: the Yooks hate the Zooks.  This bigotry drives the Yooks to give all their business to Yook merchants.  Yooks, who by their overwhelming numbers own most of the island’s wealth, more readily aggregate their capital to increase the productive capacity of their businesses, further favoring Yook communities.  Over time, the Zooks fall behind the Yooks.  Unable to compete effectively with their more numerous and increasingly more prosperous neighbors, Zook communities languish then decay.

This thought experiment suggests one way a fair system with equal initial conditions might lead to unequal social outcomes over time.  It’s certainly not fair of the Yooks to shut out the Zooks, but it’s a bit of a strain to say that this lack of fairness is a property of the island’s system of institutions and laws.  It’s more accurately a moral failing on the part of the Yooks.  This moral failing undermines whatever degree of fairness might be built into the island’s institutional structures.

This is for me the great lesson of the Systems Heresy: systemic reform that doesn’t somehow attend to the values we bring to a given system is a shot in the dark and borders on social engineering of the most speculative variety.

The classically Liberal conception of the state provides a values-neutral framework of rights in which each individual can pursue his or her own vision of the Good.  In a Liberal state, it’s not the government but rather civil society that’s most clearly charged with perfecting and transmitting the values we share as a people.  This great civilizing work happens—or rather, should happen—in our schools and churches, in our trade unions, on the streets, wherever people gather to reflect and deliberate.

I’m not convinced, however, that our discussion and negotiation of values is robust enough to prevent us from injecting the venom of the Yooks into any system we might yet devise or evolve to.  Our ignorance of history, the corporate ownership of the media and its concentration in fewer hands, and the abiding anti-intellectual climate in this country are among the factors exploited by those who resist the kind of social transformation many of us desire and work for.

Systemic reform is necessary, but it’s only one of the battles progressives need to engage.

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Image source: Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book

New Nonprofit Study Promises to Change Everything

A groundbreaking new study by the Institute for Better Philanthropy concludes that sound management, good governance, and smart fundraising are strongly correlated with nonprofit success.

“We weren’t completely surprised by the findings,” commented Zach Skywalker, CEO of the 2Cool4U Foundation which sponsored the study.  “We’ve been saying for years that a completely new paradigm is needed for nonprofit work.”

Philanthropic Market Alignment: Getting That Green, Green Feeling

Everything’s within the realm of plausibility as we gad about in our consumerist trance, sated with our latest purchases.  In a bid to corner the new “eco-tainment” market, Discovery is launching Planet Green, a channel that will forego a hard look at Man’s effect on the environment to present consumers with new product lines they can use to redecorate their homes in eco-friendly ways.  General Motors, maker of the nine-mile-per-gallon Hummer, is a lead advertiser and partner.

I believe that in contemporary parlance this is called “making philanthropic markets more efficient.”  It’s what happens when you attempt to align market demand with social benefit.  The alignment isn’t perfect in this case—is it ever?—but we can sweeten the deal by offering to save a square inch of Amazonian rainforest with each purchase of 100 gallons or more of gasoline.  With an Environmental Product® to which we can now dedicate our consumer dollars, we can make our other purchases with a clearer conscience.  And we can forego a fruitless search for the root causes of our present predicament since that too would likely end up being a waste of precious natural resources.

We’ve come a long way since the days of Plato’s Republic.  Far from electing philosopher kings, we’ve chained them deep inside the Cave along with the rest of us and made them watch the dance of shadows on the wall, now called the NBC Nightly News.  It’s not that we can’t turn our heads to see the puppetmasters, it’s that we simply choose not to: we might in that moment of aspiration miss the ad for an important new product that will change our lives.

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Disclaimer: Only recycled 1s and 0s were used in the machine code for this blog post.

Image source: Nunc Scio

A Revolution Is Not A Dinner Party, Nor Is It Doing Embroidery

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Editor's note: Guest blogger Jiang Qing has been called the last hardliner in the Chinese Communist Party.  According to her resume, she's the director in chief of Public Security Bureau Detention Centers, the system of prisons used to detain Chinese dissidents.  She's also chair of the Hospitality Committee for the Beijing Summer Olympics.  We publish her post in the spirit of open discussion and debate.

I salute Comrade Phil for tapping into the cubicle rage that's growing across America.  Allow me to quote his blogging:

The wealthy through foundations and nonprofits manage social change via inputs, outputs, outcomes and petty rules and management hierarchies that denature a potentially revolutionary social movement of the disenfranchised into a well managed and non-threatening project to assist the disadvantaged upon their release from the State Pen. …

Could it be that philanthropy is ... the expression of a managerial tradition, of a capitalist, and technocratic, rather than moral tradition? I could give you 1,000 links to 100 philanthropy or giving blogs that would make this obvious to the point of tedium and despair.  All technocrats, all managerial wannabes.  Hot for their MBA, talking among themselves about how to be better social investors, more venturesome, more businesslike, more capable as a manager, more accountable to capital, and so gain an upward career path, with the full approval of Board, investors, wealthy donors.

Mr. Phil understands that where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.  Domestic foundation executives will never take their defeat, they cannot be reconciled, they will fight to the last ditch!  After peace and order are established throughout the country they will still engage in sabotage activities and create disturbances in a variety of ways.  In no case should we relax our vigilance.

Although Mr. Phil is himself a capitalist lackey Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, I have spoken with comrades and obtained for him role as People’s Internet Use Monitor in post-revolutionary America:

In solidarity with the housekeepers who clean Mr. Phil's office,  ¡Viva la revolución!

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Editor's note: To create the revolutionary slogans, excerpts from Quotations From Chairman Mao Tsetung (a.k.a. Mao's Little Red Book) were translated from English into Chinese and then back again using the beta version of Google Translate.  The photograph is of an actual Cuban Internet monitor (source: New York Times).

New Wine in Old Skins: Attracting the Next Generation of Nonprofit Leaders

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Attend any earnest discussion of nonprofit issues and there’s frequently an elephant in the room.  On the issue of how to attract and retain the best nonprofit talent, the room that houses all those elephants in the room is, in my view, the chronic and significant undercapitalization of nonprofit organizations. 

“Undercapitalization” is a fancy way of saying that nonprofits are always madly scrambling for money.  This undercapitalization leads to fundraising burnout (figuring prominently in both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead  reports*), underinvestment of time and money in staff capacity, lack of attention to new staff, and an impoverished organizational infrastructure.

But chronic undercapitalization also exacerbates something I’ll call the nonprofit “frump factor.”  That’s frump as in “frumpy.”  Think Roz Chast doing a cartoon about a bake sale for the local 4-H Club.

A friend and I were watching a film about the making of Cloverfield, one of those big budget summer blockbusters featuring extraordinary special effects: thirty-storey monsters tearing off the head of the Statue of Liberty and hurling it down Broadway—that kind of thing.  At one point my friend, a veteran of nonprofit work, turned to me and asked, “Why can’t our sector do anything as cool as that?”

His question gave me pause.  You’ll have investors lining up to get a piece of the Cloverfield franchise, but few who’d expect to make a buck by housing the homeless.  To my friend’s point: there is something yawn-inspiring about the way we describe our work and communicate its impact to would-be employees and other audiences.  We invite the idea that nonprofits are pokey, unglamorous, 19th century places to work, mired in process and wed to outdated business models.

A widespread misunderstanding and undervaluation of the sector contributes to the nonprofit frump factor.  We tell our parents we want to be environmental advocates, and they roar back, “What the hell kind of job is that?”

In this country, we’re not for-profit organizations; abroad, we’re not governmental.  We’re the in-between sector, the neither-this-nor-that sector, the invention of IRS lawyers and policy wonks.

We’re the sector that does things nobody really wants to pay for.

In the Ready to Lead study, we saw significant “sector agnosticism,” the notion that a person could contribute to the public good in any sector.  And I increasingly run into people who wish we’d save ourselves the embarrassment by simply dumping the term “nonprofit” altogether.

Yet I also remember what attracted me to the sector years ago, and what keeps me committed to it.  I know that each day tens of thousands of nonprofit workers in my city are getting out of bed to do somebody an unambiguous good.  I’m convinced—foolishly perhaps—that after great art and literature, nonprofits are the last remaining civilizing force, this function having been long ago been abandoned by government, business, and the media.  I believe strongly that nonprofit work is the glue that keeps us bound together as a society.  And I believe that nonprofits and the foundations that fund them are the last institutions capable of shaking a fist at government and business when a fist-shaking is called for.

We can do much more to make this work appear less frumpy.  But we’d be challenged to make it any more meaningful.

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* Full disclosure: I was one of the authors of the Ready to Lead report; my foundation funded and helped create both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead reports.

The Twelve Most Common Objections to Social Justice Philanthropy

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Inside the painfully polite, frequently conservative world of mainstream U.S. philanthropy, the term “social justice philanthropy” often suggests an unwholesome radicalism in one’s approach to grantmaking.  This fact, if it is a fact, should give us pause.  What kind of an enterprise is mainstream philanthropy that it can be so easily rattled by the notion of social justice?

The 2005 publication, Social Justice Grantmaking: A Report on Foundation Trends, did much to help make the philanthropic world safer for discussions of social justice.  It attempted to step carefully around—or rather through—the thornier questions, some of them related to a precise definition of the term “social justice philanthropy.”  The report’s working definition was this:

Social justice philanthropy is the granting of philanthropic contributions to nonprofit organizations based in the United States and other countries that work for structural change in order to increase the opportunity of those who are least well off politically, economically, and socially.

The authors of that report did an admirable job of balancing competing perspectives.*  Going forward, while there might be some skirmishes related to the category of the “least well off,” most of the battle will shift, in my view, to the kind of “structural change” that effectively addresses the roots of social injustice.

Of special interest in the report was a chapter written by Henry Ramos and Scott Nielsen in which they described their interviews with program officers and foundation executives, some of whom were apparently skeptical about the project of social justice philanthropy.  These interviews uncovered an eye-opening—and sometimes eye-popping—array of objections to social justice as an organizing concept.

What follows is my attempt to address the objections I believe are most commonly raised against social justice grantmaking.  Some of these are drawn from the work of Ramos and Nielsen; many come from my own experience as an apologist for the field.

So here goes, in no particular order.  Hold on to your megaphones …

1.  The poor will always be with us.  

The unfair advantages accorded one group over another might or might not result in substantial income and wealth disparities, so that while a strikingly unequal distribution of income and wealth is frequently an outcome of social injustice, it isn’t necessarily so.  Racial discrimination, second-class citizenship for gays and lesbians, draconian treatment of legal immigrants under IIRAIRA laws: these are unjust in and of themselves, whether or not they lead to significant income disparities. 

There’s no denying that in Matthew 26:11 Christ tells us that the poor are always with us.  But a sensitive reader of the Gospels would not on this basis conclude that we should do nothing to reduce their numbers or alleviate their suffering.

The deeper question here is, what can social justice philanthropy reasonably hope to accomplish for the poor (see objection 8, below)?  We have a fairly clear idea of how to help individuals and individual families escape poverty.  The challenge in the U.S. context is to better understand how our values, habits of mind, institutions, and economic and political structures enable poverty to persist in marginalized communities defined by race, ethnicity, class, national origin, and other characteristics.

Finally, if eliminating poverty were the only goal of social justice work, this objection might carry some weight.  But it isn’t, so it doesn’t.

2.  Social justice work is anachronistic at best and radical at worst: my board would never agree to it.   

The objection here, if I understand it correctly, is that the trustees of U.S. foundations would generally resist the notion of social justice.  If that’s the case, could there be a stronger argument for damning the enterprise of American philanthropy and dismantling its institutions?  If the notion of fairness raises so many objections in the boardroom, hasn’t the American foundation stopped serving a useful social purpose?

I’m not convinced, however, that notions of justice or equality of opportunity will ultimately prove so alienating to trustees.  Remove the rhetoric, the partisanship, the unpleasant associations, and you’re left with an idea—justice as fairness—that all good people can embrace.

As for the charge of anachronism, it’s true that discussions of social justice have an ancient pedigree.  Mencius, Plato, Christ, and thousands of others have weighed in.  But we’ve been arguing about morality for as long a time, and nobody’s suggesting we move past the notion of ethical behavior.

3.  Social justice philanthropy can’t be properly evaluated.  

It can be and has been.  Many frameworks for assessing social justice philanthropy have been developed over the years.  Here’s a link to just a few.

4.  Funding for social services or youth enrichment programs or housing development etc.  is social justice funding.

I’ll cede the point: there’s no use arguing over the ownership of the term “social justice.”  Moreover, I can imagine contexts in which giving a hungry man a piece of bread would count as a deeply political act.  It’s true that funding social services or youth programs, for example, fails the definition I’ve given above of social justice philanthropy.  After all, providing funding for these services doesn’t typically lead to structural change and might in some cases impede it.  Nevertheless there’s something wonderfully human, deeply just about giving assistance to someone who needs our help.

There is, however, another kind of funding that aims to address the upstream causes of our downstream problems, that asks why some communities are much more desperately in need of social services or affordable housing than others, or why the young people in these communities attend schools that are falling down around their heads.  It’s the kind of philanthropy that analyzes how power and privilege are brokered and maintained in this country.  It’s the kind of philanthropy I’m championing here.  I’ll call it “social justice philanthropy plus” perhaps, “or turbo philanthropy” or “Maureen.”  Rather than fight for possession of the term social justice philanthropy, I’d happily yield it to whomever would claim it since ultimately it doesn’t matter what we call it, it matters only that we do it.

5.  We fund social services or youth enrichment or housing etc.  Social justice philanthropy has nothing to do with us.

Periodically, history affords us a few moments of clarity.  By the grace of a higher power, or by chance, the light of insight burns away the mists and we come to understand more clearly who we are and what we do.  Hurricane Katrina was for many not only an opportunity to respond but also to reflect.  Few events in recent U.S. history have so clearly put the lie to the idea that we can effectively address the challenges faced by low-income communities by ignoring the effects of race and class or by side-stepping issues of power and privilege.

6.  Social justice philanthropy is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

In an NCRP publication titled Understanding Social Justice Philanthropy the contradiction was expressed this way:

Foundations are tax-exempt institutions with the dual purpose of holding excess wealth and benefiting the public good.  This excess wealth is quite often the result of the inequitable distribution of economic, political or social power.  The question becomes then, “How can tax exempt institutions that benefit from power inequalities and control great wealth work toward equal opportunity and social, economic and political power for those without it?”  Without market (economic or political) signals to determine the demand for social justice, how can institutions that are the result of the private market and inventions of public policy determine such a demand?

Along these same lines, there are critics who argue that it’s no accident that grand philanthropic gestures coincide with moments in our history when wealth becomes concentrated in very few hands and the gap between the rich and the poor grows unacceptably large.  (Consider, for example, the founding of the first large American foundations around the time of the Robber Barons, or the record-breaking foundations being created today.)  These critics argue that now, as in ages past, philanthropy has functioned as a social safety valve, redistributing just enough wealth to keep people in low-income communities from becoming uncontrollably militant.  In a context such as this, they ask, is it really possible for philanthropy to become the snake that bites its own tail, to challenge the very institutions from which it draws its power?

Some of these critics assume that social justice philanthropy will necessarily lead to revolution rather than evolution; that any effort to help the marginalized will require bringing capitalism to its knees.  This is an absurdity of the first water, equal in absurdity, perhaps, to the claim that a perfectly efficient market will solve all of our social ills.

We have not, in my view, taken the first step toward change, which is simply to see, to understand where we are and why.  If and when we attempt this, I would urge us to avoid what I call the “systems heresy”—the idea that just systems will necessarily lead to just people who produce just outcomes.  Let’s not presuppose what the solutions will be until we clearly understand the problems.