P O S T E D B Y S A L L Y
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You can download or order copies of the comic book by clicking here.
I.
Please, God, don’t let the stewardess see me lose it. I turn towards the window and switch off the overhead light. Fortunately the nice woman next to me is asleep, drooling into her lap. I’ve just finished reading Isherwood’s A Single Man and the novel has taken me back to 1965, the year it was published, four years before the Stonewall riots. I was a seven-year-old sissy boy then, just beginning to understand that something wasn’t right with me. In those days, I was forgiven my soft, pre-pubescent voice. But the way I walked, the way I sat, how I rested my head on my hands—these, I learned, would betray me in what was a man’s world through and through.
These tell-tale traits were dutifully corrected by my well-meaning mother who, I learned many years later, had always wished she had been born a boy. I remember how once she went so far as to criticize the way I slept. Even as a child I had to laugh out loud at this conceit. “How can I control the way I sleep?” I protested. But she mimicked the disposition of my arms and legs while I dozed and I had to agree that I looked damningly efeminado. Maybe I could carry this comic image of myself into my dreams and let it shame me while I lay prone, straightening my limbs and clenching my fists. Perhaps the next morning I could do my mother one better, stirring in a manly way and, to her great delight, roaring awake like a true hombre.
It had been a long day with many flight delays and I was weeping from exhaustion for George Falconer, the gay protagonist of Isherwood’s novel. His death didn’t disturb me: it was quite beautiful the way the author described it, how the “long day ends at last; yields to the nighttime of the flood.” George had a lovely passing. I was devastated instead by the misery of his life: his painful self-awareness, his continuous self-editing, his inability to share freely what he felt most deeply. His mother, or perhaps his father, had made the appropriate adjustments to him when he was a child. And I realized with a stab of pain that there were seven-year-old sissy boys alive today who were just beginning their journey of self-hatred; that there were seven-year-old black children being bidden by their parents to be strong so they could survive in what was a white man’s world; that all over the planet, the journey was beginning again and again, and that what power I had to keep these truths from flooding over me was already spent.
II.
I had been in Chicago with many thoughtful colleagues to discuss how we might fix philanthropy. Not generosity—that needed no repair—but so-called “organized philanthropy.” In the course of our deliberations the happy news arrived that DOMA had been struck down and we shared some moments of joy. There was a long road ahead, as well as behind us, but time, we felt, was on our side. To add to the feeling of celebration, here I was in a room strangely devoid of ego and self-promotion, in the middle of a conversation that had somehow taken a sharp turn towards the subject of humility in grantmaking. Humility! In the work of foundations! In a field where so many once level-headed people had had their souls sucked from their bodies, leaving shells of self-important goo to strut about opining and intoning.
I speak with authority about these creatures because I’m one of their tribe, seeing all the less flattering aspects of my own character reflected in theirs. We’re so unremarkable—we, the philanthropic undead; our great sin, the sin of pride, so petty in its expression. An unattractive lack of empathy; periodic bouts of arrogance; prophetic curses cast upon the more flamboyant evil-doers. We’re easy to spot because we often match the meanness of our wrongdoing with the meager good that we produce.
I’m reminded of this last point because there’s something in the air these days, a voice speaking to me from the past, lifted above the shouts of “Gay power!” and the choruses of We Shall Overcome still emanating from the streets in front of the Stonewall Inn. According to one account of that time:
A scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs was escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon several times. She escaped repeatedly and fought with four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. Described as “a typical New York butch” and “a dyke—stone butch,” she had been hit on the head by an officer with a billy club for, as one witness claimed, complaining that her handcuffs were too tight. Bystanders recalled that the woman, whose identity remains unknown, sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at them and shouted, “Why don’t you guys do something?” After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went “berserk.”
We, the philanthropic undead, have never gone berserk over anything. In this country, we are an informed tribe. We know about drone strikes, racism, elections bought and sold, environmental depravity. These barely quicken our pulse. Going berserk is the response of a person sorely in need of a logic model.
III.
It was many years ago and I was sitting at a long table lined with academics. One of these described the research he had just conducted on the role of philanthropy in the civil rights movement. Turns out that foundations were circumspect and very slow on the draw. They came round eventually, as they did with many progressive movements, when all the difficult work had already been done. Even then they played a minor role.
I, the self-appointed spokesman for the philanthropic undead, was indignant. I knew personally of many instances in which foundations had taken great risks to advance the cause of social justice. Here I had in front of me yet another uninformed foundation-basher. But still his thesis gnawed at me for years, and the more I tried to negate it, the more clearly I saw how the exceptions proved the rule.
The Movement for Gender Equality, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring—we will let them spend their rage and bury their dead. After that, we will convene them and fund those who know how to speak to their betters. This is what’s called “being pragmatic,” taking care not to bite the hand that feeds you. This is photo opp philanthropy, the kind that smiles for the camera as it places one foot on a trophy that others had the courage to bag.
IV.
So, my love, I’m coming home to you exhausted. I’m coming home to celebrate with you the striking down of a law that should not have been passed in the first place, in a state that doesn’t recognize our union. And poor George—do you remember him? George is dead. I hold Isherwood’s account of his passing in my hands. Over him
and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean—that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars.
That consciousness that is Mother and Father Stonewall.
That consciousness that is the one struggle for justice—for the young girls murdered because they wanted to learn; for the bull dykes, the genderqueers, the sissy boys we failed.
The one consciousness that floats like a jet in the great black void of heaven.
The following article will appear in a special issue of the National Civic Review titled Philanthropy & Resident Engagement: The Promise for Democracy, available October 2013. It will feature case studies, reports, and essays on the resident engagement experiences of public and private foundations. This article was co-authored by Barry Knight, Director of CENTRIS-UK, and Albert Ruesga, President & CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
It goes by many names: citizen participation; community or resident engagement; “bottom-up” grantmaking; grassroots philanthropy. For some community foundations in the US, it’s a pro-forma exercise; for others, a source of power and pride. For a significant number it’s still little more than a fond dream, something wished for but somehow never attained.
When program officers and other community foundation leaders speak of stakeholder engagement, they often point to the desire to have their grantmaking interventions “informed” or “shaped” by the communities they serve. These philanthropic professionals might go a step further—at least rhetorically—and seek the “meaningful participation” of underserved communities in the design and leadership of grantmaking programs. The expression of these desires is sometimes motivated by a regard for democratic ideals or by a sincere respect for self-determination. It might spring from a deep respect for fairness or an adherence to some form of the Golden Rule. Stakeholder engagement might at times be sought to put a democratic patina on what are essentially elite decisions.
Whatever their source, calls for resident engagement have become normative in the field, as reflected, for example, in the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations publication titled Do Nothing About Me Without Me: An Action Guide for Engaging Stakeholders (Bourns, 2010). The primary argument here is one about efficacy: Foundations that engage stakeholders are “part of a growing movement in philanthropy—a movement founded on the belief that grantmakers are more effective to the extent that they meaningfully engage their grantees and other key stakeholders” (Bourns, 2010; 1, emphasis mine).
And yet, when do our efforts to make our grantmaking less “top-down” move from the token to the meaningful? Beyond the norms of professionalism, beyond the demands of our philanthropic technocracy, is there a moral dimension to the requirement that our grantmaking efforts be more citizen-informed and directed?
Fortunately for organized philanthropy, the issue of how to understand and assess resident engagement efforts is not new. In 1969, for example, Sherry Arnstein published a powerful article addressing these key issues (Arnstein, 1969). She proposed a typology, called the “ladder of citizen participation,” that has been widely used. Her typology looked like this:
Ultimately for Arnstein, citizen participation is about citizen power. The ladder reproduced in Figure 1 is designed to highlight the “critical difference between going through the empty ritual of participation and having the real power to affect the outcome of the process.” The higher up the ladder you go, the greater the degree of citizen empowerment. At rung four, for example, we invite citizen opinions but offer no assurance that these views will be heeded. At rung five, we place a token number of the “worthy” poor on advisory committees and the like, but “[i]f they are not accountable to a constituency in the community and if the traditional power elite hold the majority of seats, the have-nots can be easily outvoted and outfoxed” (Arnstein, 1969; 9). And so it goes as we climb or, in many cases, descend the ladder of engagement. For in the world of community foundations, the kind of resident engagement that Ms. Arnstein holds up as the ideal—full citizen control—is rare or perhaps nonexistent, at least in the US context.
In what follows, the authors attempt to answer three primary questions:
It’s certainly easy for community foundations to claim some form of citizen engagement. But as we shall see, there are reasons why it’s difficult to do well.
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
Does the recent Komen Foundation debacle signal an increasing scrutiny by the giving public of nonprofit activities? Just as we can’t attribute every record-breaking heat wave to global warming, neither can we assume that recent high profile cases (ACORN, NPR) represent anything like a trend.
Recall that many years ago foundation support for the Boy Scouts took a nose dive after it was revealed that the organization was discriminating against gay men. As long as I can remember, our senators and representatives—both at the national and state levels—have attempted to score political points by targeting charities. I would guess that during any session of Congress there will be at least a handful of bills with provisions to curtail the advocacy rights of nonprofit organizations. (The Alliance for Justice can provide all the sordid details.) Consider also the restrictions on legal service providers that receive funding from the Legal Services Corporation—in force since 1996—and the occasional high-profile ACLU case that’s kicked around like a political football.
What’s clearer to me is that as the American culture wars drag on, more and more charities will be caught in the crossfire.
Charities need to attend to three factors in addition to an increasingly nasty civic culture. We’re living in an age of more activist donors (though I wonder if the research would support this view). The advent of the Internet has raised citizen expectations about the accessibility of information. And finally, calls for transparency in private and public institutions have increased.
Charities beware: You can bet that as we get closer to the November elections, every contribution made by a candidate will be scrutinized. Political operatives will attempt to score big points from a public that generally doesn’t understand the nonprofit sector and can be easily whipped into a froth about the work of shadowy foundations.
I have two primary suggestions for charities. The first is for boards to sit down with their staffs and determine what mission-appropriate transparency means for their organizations. However insistent the calls for transparency might be, I would never, for example, unless I were compelled by law, agree to audiotape board meetings and post these recordings on the Internet. I believe this would stymie the free and open exchange of ideas and ultimately compromise our mission. Other organizations might have a different take on this, but it’s critical for each organization to think through the issue of transparency.
Second, and more importantly in my view, your organization needs to determine whether it has a moral center, and if so, get in touch with it. That means understanding your identity and mission. Years back, the Girl Scouts were willing to take a hit for their nondiscrimination policies. The great value of a not-for-profit organization is that it has no shareholders whose pecuniary desires it needs to satisfy. It can afford to be governed by the love of mankind. Sure, the Girl Scouts lost some donors, but we can assume it gained others in the process.
The time for charities to do their soul-searching is now. Once a campaign against your organization goes viral, it’s time for you to step up to the microphones and tell the world who you are and where you stand. Faced with the question, “What are you about?”, in the wake of an unpopular decision, do you have a clear idea what you would say?
Do you exist to maximize donor support, to perpetuate the life of an institution? or do you exist to advance the cause of justice, however unpopular that might be?
Until those of us who are progressive funders and advocates learn to better coordinate our efforts, we will lose consistently to the well bankrolled forces who oppose us.
Here’s the good news: we don’t have to sit through tedious convenings or master the newest social media technologies to attain this coordination. To borrow from the language of the Wall Street occupiers, there is a no-cost “horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based” way to work together more effectively for social justice.
The idea is simple: The next time an issue—let’s say it’s immigration reform—garners sustained national public attention, all of us who are progressive funders, advocates, and community organizers should drop whatever we’re doing and get behind the issue. Even if immigration reform is not our thing, we should devote a substantial part of our organizations’ resources to helping the progressive advocates for that issue win their legislative or policy victory.
Call this the “Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule,” if you like.
Recall what happened two years ago during the national debates on health care reform. Here was an issue that would affect the fates of people in low-income communities for years to come. Yet while many health advocates struggled valiantly to win support for a national health care system, I saw many more activists ignore the issue because it simply wasn’t theirs. They saw themselves as education advocates, or housing advocates, or criminal justice reform advocates, or something other than simply advocates for low-income people.
Imagine what would have happened if funders, advocates, and community organizers across the country had adopted the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule. Imagine if the voices in the pews, in the schools, in the neighborhood centers had been able to shout down the policy-makers who had been bought by powerful interests.
Now in the advent of the Arab Spring, with the rise of multiple people-led movements in the United States, we’ll be challenged again to break out of our siloes and support Americans who are taking to the streets for economic justice.
Consider supporting the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule. Bring it up and debate it with your friends and colleagues. If you have other ideas for coordinating progressive action, please share them. How do we keep progressive advocacy from becoming a random walk?
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
I.
I’m at a philanthropy conference luncheon listening to some household names speak about social justice. They trade friendly barbs as they describe the horrors of Guantánamo and flog the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. At intervals they draw polite applause.
One of the speakers describes President Bush’s vetoing of a bill to outlaw waterboarding. ‘There should have been a public outcry,’ he chides us.
I gaze into my salad of mixed greens, my head heavy with guilt. Is there any vegetable more melancholy than kale?
II.
I had been attending these conferences for years and had never heard such strong language coming from the dais. The speakers’ calls to conscience felt like the blows of a blunt weapon, like acts of verbal insurrection.
At the same time, there was something inescapably ironic about a plenary luncheon on human rights in which everything from our underwear to the salt shakers on our tables was made in China. If I wanted to understand what sustained human rights abuses in China, my inner voice told me, I needed only to inspect the labels on my BVDs.
III.
This last point deserves some elaboration.
I’m attending this conference at an opulent hotel that rises like a crystal box from the banks of the Potomac. It’s large enough to have its own zip code. The inner space of the building is defined by a dramatic atrium soaring hundreds of feet above a fountain that periodically dances to recorded symphonic music. A picture window the size of two football fields looks across a sparkling river to Old Town, Alexandria.
As I sit here under the newly planted figs and paper birches, I struggle with the gauzy sense that the best I can do for human rights is vote the current pols out of office. I feel it’s me, not them, I most need to worry about. I’m fully implicated. The purchases I make, the time I devote to scanning ads, the television channels and websites I surf—all those things I do without a moment’s reflection—sustain a system of exchange that keeps some people in chains and allows others to walk free. My government does its part, I suppose, by hiding most of the bodies overseas. Sitting in this place, isolated as I am from the hurly-burly of the world, I forget that the wars we most recently waged in the name of human rights have been tied to the protection of American consumption—my consumption, and that of my family and friends.
The key to ending human rights abuses is written not only on the labels to my BVDs, but also on my paycheck—the income from investments in corporations not always friendly to their workers overseas. The key to the puzzle lies in this grand hotel that few of my poorer neighbors can afford to use.
IV.
The system is complex. Where is my place in it, as a consumer, as a citizen who wants to do right but who over-values his creature comforts? To what degree do I permit the demands of conscience to interrupt the flow of cheap goods? Each time I successfully boycott some brand or some nation, don’t my fellow wage slaves lose their jobs? The entire edifice is built stone upon stone. Pull on one stone with enough force and it appears the whole thing threatens to come down on our heads.
At the same time, I was never one to buy the stories we tell ourselves about triple bottom lines and more efficient markets. These, in my view, are self-serving fairy tales that enable us to sleep with ourselves inside these beautiful jeweled boxes we build on the banks of the Potomac.
Postscript
The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, touted from the stage of the luncheon mentioned earlier, is an odd document. For starters, there’s no U.N. Declaration of Human Responsibilities to balance the publication. One has to read through to Article 29, the second-to-last article of the Declaration, to discover that we have duties to the community “in which alone the free and full development of [our personalities] is possible.” Twenty-eight articles detailing our rights. One article alluding to unspecified responsibilities.
This is a striking asymmetry. Twenty-eight articles before we reach what is for some the essence of good citizenship. And even here our duties to the commonweal are framed in terms of the free and full development of our personalities, a hint of Aristotle in a document that tries its hardest to appeal to every man and nation.
P O S T E D B Y D I X I E
My friend Rick Hohensee is back. He’s single and a Virgo, and you can visit him at his MySpace page or in front of the Treasury building in Washington, DC. As for his credit line proposal, perhaps Rick can offer his talent for satire as collateral. I believe the expression is “Oh, snap” …
A group of citizens has called for a general strike on 9/11. Read about it here.
Has there ever been a successful nationwide general strike in the United States? Thank God the organizers aren’t calling for a “turn off your TV day.” I wouldn’t have the strength to forego the Bionic Woman fall sneak peak. I’m only human.
 John Anger |
 Countess Apraxina |
 Stuart Johnson |
 Dixie Moline |
 Albert Ruesga |
 Sally Wilde |
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