White Courtesy Telephone

Liberal Foundations: Raising a Fuss in the Age of Trump?

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I.  Where we at

This is a moment of crisis for our country and for the institutions that stand against a lawless tyranny. In this environment, what is the role for liberal foundations whose mission it is to serve vulnerable communities? How neutral and growth encouraging can they afford to be when lawmakers are being bought up and down the Potomac by the very wealthy, when even the trenchant term “class war” seems an overpolite way to refer to the crushing of the poor and middle class?

We look up from our screens, leaving for a moment the politically charged atmospheres of Twitter and Facebook, and we step into an engulfing and healing calm. We have our children to take care of, our chores to do. Unlike the places we read about in the news, we don’t see rioters carting off pieces of the central government; there are no sprawling refugee camps just outside our cities. If we work at a foundation or a nonprofit, we might have a clearer sense than most about the challenges to vulnerable communities, to the environment, to American democracy itself. And we might be lulled into believing that the present is no more than an extension, by gradual degrees, of a familiar past.

On this last point, we would be tragically mistaken. The world has not so much shifted as lurched these past few years. The acorn is now unmistakably an oak.

Attacks on democratic processes and institutions. Activists have struggled for years to introduce democracy to the United States. And while OpenSecrets.org and other organizations have been documenting and warning us about the effects of obscene amounts of cash in political races, the Citizens United vs. FEC Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to influence-buying by the very wealthy on a grand scale. Gerrymandered districts; intense voter suppression efforts; and this administration’s ho-hum attitude towards Russian interference in US elections tell us that it’s open season on our republic.

Inciting violence. This country has seen many long periods of state-sanctioned violence, beginning with the genocide of Native Americans and continuing through the slave trade to the new Jim Crow. What is not new, but rather a new spin on an old sin, is this administration’s sustained dog whistling and its more direct calls to violence, especially against people of color, Muslims, immigrants, women, and members of the LGBT community. The jackbooted skinhead and your bigoted uncle have been unleashed, championed by the most powerful man in the world.

Attacks on the rule of law.  We currently have a President who flouts rather than enforces our nation’s laws. From direct attacks on judges to packing the courts with unqualified ideologues, Trump and his enablers understand that the only thing standing between them and complete victory is a fawning judiciary (however much our framework of laws generally favors the well-off). The danger cannot be overstated. To paraphrase Thomas More in Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons: ‘When the last law is down, and the Devil turns round on you — where will you hide?’

Attacks on the media.  According to a recent New York Times article, Trump’s attacks on the media are having their intended effect, with 46 percent of Americans now believing the news media makes up stories about him. As noted by communications strategist Steve Schmidt, we tolerate a news network “indistinct from propaganda in authoritarian countries … aimed directly at weakening essential institutions and misinforming the American people.”

I very much appreciate Robert Reich’s unusual candor in his description of the current state of affairs:

This was the oligarch’s deal with the devil (Trump) from the start: Get us a huge tax cut, use the resulting deficit to justify cutting Medicare and Social Security, and get rid of environmental and financial regulations. In return, we’ll finance you, we’ll back your allies in the GOP, and we’ll mount PR campaigns on your behalf that magnify your lies. Hell, we’ll even make you look like a populist. …

These American oligarchs don’t have to worry about whether Social Security or Medicare will be there for them in their retirement because they’ve put away huge fortunes. They don’t worry about climate change because they don’t live in homes that might succumb to hurricanes or wildfires. They don't care about public schools because their families don't attend them. They don't care about public transportation because they don't use it. Truth to tell, they don't even care that much about America, because their personal and financial interests are global.

They are living in their own separate society, and they want people who will represent them, not the rest of us.

The Republican Party is their vehicle. Fox News is their voice. Trump is their champion. 

It might seem a stretch to call the actions of these plutocrats instances of “class war” since this implies the existence of a war room, a coordinated effort among hyper-wealthy families to screw the rest of us. But of course no cabal is necessary. Each of these families can simply seek to maximize its own benefit and all else falls into place. If there are deals to be struck, these can be arranged over a round of golf or a baptism.*

Recall that all of this is happening against a background of staggering wealth inequality in the United States and a lack of universal access to medical care. Also keep in mind that while the oligarchs’ de facto waging of class war has intensified in recent years, it is by no means new.

II.  If not raising a fist, then maybe just raising a fuss?

In one night in November 2016, hundreds of millions of dollars in liberal foundation funding essentially went up in smoke. Trump judicial appointments would now set the country back decades. The regulatory environment that was the fruit of years of advocacy and impact litigation would be cudgeled. Criminal justice reform efforts would die on the vine. An all-out assault would shred even further the little bit of safety net so many advocates had fought to preserve.

I’ve been following what my foundation colleagues have been writing ex cathedra, and I feel there’s a strange gulf between what I read and the urgency of the moment. If I’m mistaken about this, I’m happy to be set right, but for now I’m left wondering (and here I'm speaking to the leadership of these foundations directly**): Where is your voice? What kind of leadership can you provide in these troubling times? Where is your coordinated, sustained, and overwhelming response to this crisis? I understand that public foundations need to raise a buck from wealthy donors they dare not alienate. I’ve been there. But overall, where’s your sense of urgency? Can you show us your theory of change?

I have some suggestions: Instead of the more business-as-usual tones of your websites and other communications, might you instead join with your colleagues in affirming that these nefarious times require extraordinary measures; that the attacks on our democracy and its institutions, the incitements to violence, the demonizing of the media, and the laying waste to our environment are unprecedented and unacceptable? Will you commit to bringing the people most affected by these attacks directly into your planning and your work? What will be your extraordinary thinking and extraordinary acts in these extraordinary times? Will you content yourselves with asserting your “obligation to capitalism,” or will you encourage the exploration of other options for a people and a planet that are getting hammered by Big Capital?

I applaud Darren Walker’s call for moral courage. I have been—and I continue to be—a coward. When I was a community foundation CEO, I didn’t love and I didn’t care hard enough, and now I’m fearful for my country. I hope I’ll have another chance to find the moral courage Mr. Walker so eloquently describes.

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*  Nor is it necessary to posit evil intent. In the US, we adhere largely to good Judaeo-Christian values. Rather than kill poor families directly, we prefer to let the markets do it for us.

**  As if they would be caught dead reading this blog! Our leadership has better judgment and taste.

 

Big Philanthropy in the Age of Covfefe

 

Gentleman: Finished?! Your portrait's a bit spare, isn't it?

Artist: On closer inspection, you really didn't give me much to work with.

Gentleman: Preposterous! Didn't you read my monograph on moral courage?

Artist: I must have missed it.

Class Struggle in the Third Sector: Still Messing With the Poor

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This post is the second in a series dedicated to raising questions about the role of class in the Third Sector. It was originally published in July of 2009 but feels especially appropriate now in light of Trump’s and the GOP’s savage attacks on working families and the poor. You can find the first article in this series by clicking here.

1.

In an essay titled “Paper Mills,” Heather J. Hicks invites readers to witness her transformation from “rural class” ingénue to career academic.  She writes:

I escaped from the working class not when I first read Shakespeare or Foucault but when I first found others to discuss them with, when I took shelter with a class that insulates its financial vulnerability with a rich fabric of shared ideas.*

Her words moved me to reflect on my own experience of class mobility.  My mother, a Cuban immigrant, began her life in this country as a member of a class that it’s currently fashionable to call “the working poor.”  By the time I was twelve, we were unambiguously in poverty.

Forty years have passsed and now my memory of that time functions less as a mirror than as a lens.  Looking at my work in the nonprofit sector through that lens I see reasons for hope and caution—but mostly caution.

2.

I met recently with a group of funders interested in supporting community organizing in the South, and we started discussing the development of a strategy for our work.  One very wise woman agreed with the idea of developing a strategy but insisted that it come from the communities we aimed to serve.

I understood her caution.  My entire career I’ve struggled with grantmakers who thought they knew better but didn’t—myself included.  I confess to having frequently practiced sociology without a license.

On the other hand, let me assure anybody reading this post that the poor do not know how to change their basic condition any better than we do.  As I was growing up, no one in my immediate family, no one in our circle of friends, discussed systemic change around the dinner table.  I knew my mother was struggling to make ends meet in something between a meritocracy and a bare-knuckled plutocracy, but that’s as far as my analysis went.  Then, as now, it was generally well educated, middle class people earning salaries well above the federal poverty level who had a clearer idea of the ways in which power and privilege were brokered and maintained in this country.

Well educated, middle class people like me know how the system works (or at least we should).  We participate in it; and some of us, for reasons that are not always self-serving, are invested in its preservation.

3.

Moving from poverty to the middle class was like moving through a series of doorways, each leading to a new room with a new vista.  I remember clearly the first time I ordered a meal at a restaurant without feeling a pang of anxiety about its cost.  Further along, there was the time my partner and I lit a fire in our first home together.  I remember how uneasy I felt as I luxuriated in the warmth of that fireplace, watching the flames reflected in the beautiful oak floor of a house decadent enough to have a spare room.

The greater my net worth, the more insulated I became from the tragedies that visited the people I grew up with.  I was not one but many paychecks away from living on the streets.  A bad turn of health would set me back, but it wouldn’t force me to choose between buying my medications and paying my rent.

The more I had, the easier it became for me to accumulate even more.  This seemed to me the most perverse lesson of my movement from poverty to the middle class.

Money bought me confidence.  It bought me good dentition and clearer skin.  It bought me eloquence.  I was more likely to speak up because I knew the right words to use and in the right order.  It bought me an audience that would listen to whatever preposterous thing I had to say.

We tend to focus on the physical condition of the poor.  This is not insignificant.  But poverty is as much an internal prison as an external one.  Those who experience it may sit in their cells long after the doors have been thrown open and the inmates declared free.

4.

I know of a foundation that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on a “listening tour” of the communities it served.   After this significant investment of time and money, it concluded that “the poor were just like us”—that they wanted a good education for their children; decent, affordable housing; quality health care; and meaningful, well-paying jobs.  This foundation drew one additional conclusion: the poor, it appears, also wanted to participate actively in the decisions that affected their lives.  That is, they wanted to join neighborhood councils, serve on commissions, have more time to petition the mayor, and the like.

I never saw the transcripts that supported this last conclusion, but I found it suspect for many reasons.

Thus characterized, these low-income people didn’t seem real to me; they weren’t exhausted after 8, 10, or 12 hours of work.  They were instead super-beings able to work two shifts, go home to cook a meal for four hungry people, give quality time to their children, and then lead the charge at their town council meeting.

Like the “noble savages” of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, they had become screens upon which we projected ideal versions of ourselves.  Under the influence of our most darling theory of social change, the working poor lost their corporeality altogether.

5.

Who speaks for the poor?  We know the poor don’t always speak for themselves.  Recently in my city we hosted a conference titled Stepping Up: Creating a New Social Compact.  A compact, as we all know, is an agreement between two or more parties.  But it will not surprise the reader to learn that the poor, those who most often get the raw deal in these negotiated “agreements,” were nowhere in sight.  Ironically they were being represented by people like me who had struggled all their lives to forget what it was like to go without.

6.

I wish there were more people in the nonprofit and foundation sectors who would speak out about their experiences of having grown up in poverty.  It would be a good tonic.  I and others might be more likely to discard some of our questionable experiments in social engineering.  If I were able to see the poor neither as super-beings nor as eternal victims, I might gain a truer picture of how they sometimes participate in perpetuating their own misery.  I might spend less time feeding my sentimentalism and my self-righteousness, and more time feeding the hungry.

The next step for us is even harder.  It’s to admit that even with our privilege and our education, in spite of all the learned men and women at our beck and call, we typically haven’t the slightest clue about how to transform a system that not only keeps people in poverty but continues to create them in prodigious numbers.

_____

*Appearing in This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law.

Philanthropy’s Response to Katrina: A Ten-Year Perspective

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 An edited version of this post was published by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) in the Summer 2015 edition of its Responsive Philanthropy newsletter.

A CITY OF TWO TALES

Local responses to the upcoming commemoration of Hurricane Katrina have been decidedly mixed. Some who lived through the storm and its aftermath are anxious. They expect many of the images and stories in the media to be painful. They have their own memories of homes and neighborhoods destroyed and loved ones lost. Some harbor a grief that has never cycled through its stages or been properly resolved.

Others see an opportunity to show the city in its glad rags, having come so far in so many ways from the destruction that millions witnessed on their television sets. Ironically, a new levee system makes New Orleans one of the best-protected coastal cities in the United States. There’s a strong ecosystem for entrepreneurs. The city is open for business.

Certainly one of the casualties of the storm will be a nuanced account of what happened in the ten years after Katrina made landfall. As Thomas Kuhn famously remarked, there are no theory-neutral observations. Each of us will see these events through the filter of our own worldviews, our “theories” of how to interpret the mundane and the extraordinary. Our assessment of the progress New Orleans has made since 2005 will be shaped (some might say “distorted”) by our own agendas. As the tenth anniversary of Katrina approaches, many of the stories served to us will be in the style of Dickens, brimming with rogues and children in rags. Others will be triumphalist tales with titles like, “The Five Things Successful People Do After An Unprecedented Catastrophe.”

Let the reader beware. My own prejudices and obsessions will become apparent soon enough.

THE PHILANTHROPIC RESPONSE TO KATRINA

The official Katrina@10 observances will rightly commemorate the individuals who lost their lives and livelihoods in the storm. During these somber occasions we’ll mourn the citizens who left the region and never returned, and we’ll count our own lucky stars. We’ll also take the opportunity to thank once again the individuals, families, foundations, church groups, businesses, and others who contributed so much to the reconstruction and rebirth of New Orleans. There are still thousands of volunteers who return year after year to put up houses or paint ramshackle schools. I’m still moved when I see them, walking back to their hotels from their labors. The locals toot their horns at them and wave in appreciation.

I’ve been a frequent critic of the philanthropic sector. I’ve poked fun at pompous CEOs and bloviating program officers. In the spirit of self-improvement, we can legitimately raise the question of whether or not, in response to Katrina, organized philanthropy did the right things in the right measure. We can justifiably ask what $3 billion in private contributions accomplished for New Orleans’ most vulnerable citizens. I’m happy for the field to engage these questions, but prefer that this happen some other time, perhaps, in some other essay.

More pressing, I believe, is the question of why, when current realities are as harrowing as anything we might have witnessed ten years ago, we lavish so much attention on the past. If a normally constituted human being had eight fingers instead of ten, we’d have finished our commemorations two years ago and have a good head start on forgetting, once again, the lessons of 2005.

A TALE OF TWO ZIP CODES

Rather than drag the reader through the entire chamber of horrors, let me focus on a representative statistic,* published three short years ago in a report titled, Place Matters for Health in Orleans Parish:** “Life expectancy in the poorest zip code in the city is 54.5 years, or 25.5-years lower than life expectancy in the zip code with the least amount of poverty in the city, where it is 80.”

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which of these ZIP codes is predominantly black and which is predominantly white.

And I invite the reader to slow his or her headlong rush through this article and allow that one statistic to sink in a bit. Twenty-five and a half years. The difference in life expectancy between males and females in the United States is currently about five years. This should be enough to get our attention. Perhaps like me you’ve wondered why this difference in life expectancy hasn’t generated more hand-wringing, more conference panels, more calls to action. A ten-year difference in life expectancy would be nothing short of a national scandal. A fifteen-year difference would be unthinkable.

But twenty-five and a half years? Here we have a kind of Katrina unaccompanied by torrents of rain. Here’s an implacable flood driving the poor in our city to deaths that are obscenely premature.

The Negro spiritual bids us to

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children
Wade in the water
God’s gonna trouble the water

What an image for a city that still experiences the trauma of too much water! What an act of faith our obedience requires, for we’re told that it’s God’s angel who troubles the water, and it’s this act that brings healing to those who wade in.

What kind of healing do we need to feel the full weight of that solitary number: twenty-five and a half? What can foundations do to help trouble the water a bit, to quicken our pulses at the idea that our neighbors might be dying twenty-five years before we do?

Ten years ago, I watched events in New Orleans unfold from a safe distance. I was living in Washington, DC, at the time and my fellow Washingtonians and I clucked our tongues at the images on our TV screens. Some of us remarked that ‘there for the grace of God goes Washington, D.C.’ We shared a sense that black lives appeared to matter as little in our nation’s capital as they did in the American South.

Is there perhaps some way that philanthropy can help us remember the present more vividly than we recall the past?

A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

If you work at a foundation, if you have the privilege of funding the good people who help us remember the present, please know that much is expected of us. A higher consciousness, a greater sense of urgency, a more robust response to current suffering and injustice.

Years ago, I sat with a group of academics, one of whom described the research he had just conducted on the role of philanthropy in the Civil Rights Movement. His primary conclusion was that foundations had initially been circumspect and very slow on the draw.# They came around eventually, as they did with many progressive movements, when all the difficult work had already been done. And even then, they played a minor role.

I, the self-appointed spokesman for organized philanthropy, was indignant. I knew personally of many foundations that had taken risks to advance the cause of social justice. Here in front of me was yet another uninformed foundation-basher. But still his thesis gnawed at me, 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 let them spend their rage and bury their dead. After that, we convened them and funded those who knew how to speak to their betters. This was photo op philanthropy, the kind that smiles for the camera as it places one foot on a trophy that others had the courage to bag. Perhaps this will happen with the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps it too will devolve into an endless series of convenings in cold hotel meeting rooms, a polite request to stop the killing, an infographic or two.

The foundation response to Katrina was very different. It was not at all photo op philanthropy but rather something sacred. It might not have been perfectly strategic (whatever that means), but it came very much from the heart and therefore had its own kind of perfection. I know the overwhelming majority of my fellow New Orleanians share my gratitude for the generosity of so many.

The problems with organized philanthropy—the work of foundations and the like—are more systemic; they extend far beyond our attempts to respond to any one disaster. These problems explain why it’s the Pope, rather than a foundation president, who’s deemed by Fox News to be the most dangerous person on the planet. Understanding this slight to our field should presently be occupying the greatest minds in philanthropy.

For now, dear reader: If you’re moved to do so, make your pilgrimage to New Orleans this summer. Give us an opportunity to thank you again. We can mourn together for the dead. And, most importantly, arm in arm, we can find a way to honor the dignity of those who are thankfully still with us.

 

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* For a broader picture of “Inclusion” in the New Orleans metro area, see The New Orleans Index at Ten: Measuring Greater New Orleans’ Progress Toward Prosperity, available from the Data Center website.

** Prepared by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Orleans Parish Place Matters Team in conjunction with the Center on Human Needs, Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research. The full report is available at http://www.orleansplacematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CHER-Final-text.pdf.

# There were some notable exceptions. Cf. http://ncrp.org/campaigns-research-policy/36-campaigns-research-a-policy/1081-freedom-funders-philanthropy-and-civil-rights-movement. 

White Courtesy Telephone Laff Fest

This post was prompted by the Countess Apraxina, currently the guest of Vladimir Putin at his Sevastopol dacha. She sent us this telex: “Alyosha, my little turd swallow, please help Apraxina! Send Pussy Riot quick! This dreary man does nothing but sit shirtless entire day displaying effete pectorals and reciting lines from Zhukovsky! ‘A black raven, its wings whistling / Drives above the sleigh / Prophetic wail affirming sadness!’ ... It is summer for God’s sake! Desperately need good laugh!” …

 Link: Strategic Philanthropy for a Complex World

 

 

 

 

How to Cause Things in Philanthropy

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1. Minding the nature of cause and effect.  In philanthropic and nonprofit work, we model causes and effects when we plan a program, evaluate an intervention, articulate a theory of change, sketch a logic model, or, more generally, attempt to give an account of what the heck it is we’re trying to do.

2.  Causal attribution.  At times, after making sober pronouncements about our fundamental inability to identify our work as the cause of a desired effect, we will still gladly take credit for the latter. This is what’s known in the biz as the “problem of attribution,” which, as many of you know, is really no problem at all.

3. Representing causal attribution. We use pictures to represent the connection between our intervention (i.e., the cause, labelled C in Figure 1, below) and its intended effect, dutifully labelled E.

 

One troubling feature of this cause and effect diagram is its simplicity. This is not what we pay our consultants top dollar for. Prima facie, it fails to represent the fact that it usually takes more than one step to get from our intervention to our intended effect, so that instead of the situation pictured in Figure 1, we require something more like:

 

Our initial intervention, C₁, causes effect, E₁, which is itself a cause, C₂, of another effect, E₂, and so on, until we arrive finally at our intended effect.  Here at least we’re getting more causal connections for our money!

Unfortunately, even Figure 2 will not do for any theory of change worthy of the name. As we know, effects can—and in fact almost always do—have multiple causes, and their causes have causes, and so on. The situation for most social interventions is more like that depicted in Figure 3:

 

This is called a fishbone diagram¹, for obvious reasons, and of special interest to us is the fish’s spine, the primary chain of causes and effects (here represented by a dark arrow) that leads to our hoped-for outcome. This diagram faithfully captures the fact that each cause has its own causes (labelled “secondary”), and that these causes too have their causes (labelled “tertiary”), etc.

Judging by the shape of this particular fish, I would guess that it’s a flounder, which, if you think about it, is not a bad metaphor for what many of us do in philanthropy.

4. Playing Pachinko with people’s lives.  Are we there yet? No, not even close. In spite of our flounder’s impressive skeletal structure, it turns out we might be barking up the wrong fish. Figure 3 represents only one possible chain of events arriving at our final destination, the “Effect” in the rightmost box. But as we know from experience, just about any intervention we dream up can lead by multiple paths to our desired outcome.

Represented in Figure 4, for example, is a theory of change for a program that gives tenants representation on the management board of their public housing project, with the intended effect of improving the condition of the property.² I've excluded all possible secondary and tertiary causes to simplify the exposition, but you’ll notice immediately that there is not one, but several, paths that lead to our desired goal.

An extraordinary feature of the theory of change depicted in Figure 4 is that despite its overwhelming complexity and despite all the vagaries of human action, causes and their effects tumble like Pachinko balls toward their lowest state of potential energy, here represented by the box labelled “Improved condition of property.”

Is this reasonable?

To answer this question, it’s worth pausing to consider the reason why some grantmakers require mind-bending theories of change from their grantees. Theories of change, like the one depicted in Figure 4, are intended to make explicit our beliefs about the causal paths that lead plausibly from our social interventions to our desired outcomes. But therein lies their greatest weakness: Our theories of change are limited primarily by our imaginations. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we can imagine a thousand reasons, none of them pictured in Figure 4, why the placement of residents on the management board of a public housing project might lead ultimately to an improvement in the property. One of the resident managers, for example, might have a brother-in-law whose contracting company does excellent work for half the price; or one of the resident-managers might be very successful at organizing volunteer work crews that dedicate one Saturday each month to repairs and upkeep; or the very presence of residents on the management board might inspire a local donor to endow and thereby double the public housing project’s maintenance budget; etc.

It’s also possible that events might take one or all of the paths pictured in Figure 4 and the condition of the property not improve one bit!

Once we introduce human actors into our causal chains we move outside of the art and science of philanthropy [sic] and into the realm of fortune telling (with some exceptions that I describe below). Requiring grantees to construct detailed theories of change for their interventions is the kind of cruelty that only a grantmaker can think to inflict.

5. Gettin’ our loops on.  Reality is much more complicated than even Figure 4 suggests.  In the world of organic and inorganic beings, certain anticipated effects “loop back” to reinforce, or, in some cases, impede other elements of our program design. Consider, for example, the diagram below, in which various lines of causes and effects lead ultimately to “failed states.”³

In this simplified exposition, notice how GLOBAL WARMING is part of a reinforcing loop that includes RISING SEA LEVEL, SALTING OF COASTAL AQUIFERS, SPREADING WATER SHORTAGES, PUMPING FROM DEEPER WELLS, and INCREASING ENERGY FROM FOSSIL FUELS.  Feedback loops like this are the rule rather than the exception for many if not most social interventions.  The great pioneers of system dynamics were quick to acknowledge their importance and model their effects in complex social phenomena. We ignore them at our peril.

Notice also the mixing of physical causes (e.g., RISING TEMPERATURES) with human causes (“increased demand for food”), another perplexing feature common to many theories of change.

6. Felicity conditions. To complicate matters further, even the simple cause and effect connection pictured in Figure 1 conceals enormous conceptual difficulties. The figure appears to assert that cause C is inevitably followed by effect E. But this cannot be what it depicts.

Suppose C is my request that you pour me a glass of wine, and E is your pouring me a glass of wine. You might decide to pour me a glass of wine without my asking you (and for which, by the way, thank you). But if I ask you to pour me a glass of wine and, moments later, you do so, we can safely assume that my request was the cause of your kind action.⁴

If, however, you have no more wine, or I ask you impolitely and you decide to deny my request, or a piano falls on your head before you have a chance to reach for the bottle, the intended effect E will never materialize.  The cause C leading to the effect E depends critically on the presence of certain conditions (wine in the bottle) and the absence of others (falling pianos).

Shouldn’t these felicity conditions somehow be part of our theory of change? If so, where do we put them? Even more importantly, is there enough time before our sun goes nova to adduce all the felicity conditions that would make possible your pouring me, upon request, a nice glass of Merlot?

7.  The full monty. Once we take into account the inevitable feedback loops, the required felicity conditions, the multiple branches emanating from a simple intervention, the secondary and tertiary causes, etc., here is the complete theory of change for the simple act of mailing of a letter:

8. Some preliminary conclusions/observations. Grantmakers fall into error when they engage in armchair speculation about effects that lie at the distal ends of long causal chains. If our intervention depends on a tightly choreographed march of causes and effects, we will almost certainly be disappointed.

Are we therefore to abandon trying to pinpoint causes and effects in social interventions? Are we to declare the causal nexus an impenetrable mystery? Not at all. Causes and their effects are as much at work in the social as in the physical realm and we need to understand them as best we can. As for felicity conditions, most times when I ask you to pour me a glass of wine, there will be no menacing pianos about.

Our problems begin when we overreach. Our arrogance is on full display when we ask grantees to engage in exercises beyond the abilities of Stephen Hawking. Moreover, a great deal of what’s been written and discussed about theories of change and other jetsam from the world of “strategic philanthropy”—this post included—is a bunch of arm-waving that will continue to enrich technocrats like me but fail to advance the cause of justice, the latter having much more to do with truth and repentance than with logic models. But I digress ...

9. Keeping it real.  That said, even in the domain of human behavior, even with all the quirks of human personality, there are surprising regularities we can exploit in order to do good for the world.  I’ll describe some of the more esoteric examples in subsequent posts.  For now we can at least acknowledge that philanthropy is filled with simple, effective interventions, supported by equally simple theories of change.  For example:

[1]  I make a grant to Organization XYZ to pay the light bill → Organization XYZ uses my grant to pay the light bill → Organization XYZ’s lights stay on

Nice. Elegant. Too simple, perhaps, to garner you a Genius Award, but arguably the kind of intervention most critical to the health of our republic.

In the Spring 2010 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review⁵, Paul Brest, then-president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, took two of my colleagues, William Schambra and Bill Somerville, to the rhetorical woodshed.  He criticized them for their skepticism about theories of change, for advocating that we make grants to extraordinary nonprofit leaders without requiring them to spell out the causal chains that lead to their good outcomes. “These skeptics,” Brest argued, “are implicitly analogizing grantees to idiots savants—individuals who are able to do complex calculations … in their heads without knowing, let alone being able to explain, how they do it.”⁵

Putting aside the issue of the misplaced idiot savant analogy⁶, I believe that Schambra and Somerville have it exactly right. Their idea of providing funding to great nonprofit leaders who have succeeded in the past is supported by a compelling theory of change.  It looks something like this:

[2]  I make a grant to an organization run by a great leader who consistently delivers great outcomes year after year → The organization delivers great outcomes

Some of you will note the similarity between this theory of change and the following familiar example:

[3]  The rotation of the earth has caused the sun to rise every day for the past five billion years → The sun will rise again tomorrow

There are no guarantees in the theory of change outlined in [2] just as there is no guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow. But you can hardly do better than this as a grantmaker.

An organization’s “theory of change” can, in most cases, be directly inferred from what it proposes to do. Instead of agonizing over confusing and manifestly inaccurate cause-and-effect diagrams, simply apply the plausibility test: Is it plausible that the grantee’s actions might lead to the desired outcome? How plausible is it and how do we know?

10. Complaints department. The reader likely has many questions and objections.  I’ve listed only those that show my argument to best advantage:

Objection:  Sixty-eight percent of our grantees report benefitting from the construction of theories of change.

Reply:  I’m not here denying that theories of change, and the process of constructing them, have helped many people in the nonprofit world. I’ve been assured that they have. But while I myself find it helpful to discuss my work plans with my dog, Gracie, I would never dream of requiring this of my grantees. We can perhaps settle the matter as follows: Divide your grantees into two groups. Ask the first group to construct theories of change for their interventions. Ask the second group to describe their work to their pets. Now poll the two groups to find which of them claims to have benefitted most from the exercise. I’ll publish your results on this blog. This, I believe, is what’s called “data-driven decision-making,” the alternative being, I suppose, to ignore the evidence of our senses altogether.

Objection:  Figure 4 is overly complicated. It should include only those branches that are most relevant to our intervention.

Reply:  Which branches are those? Are some of them perhaps missing from Figure 4? How do you know? What are your criteria for including some branches and excluding others?

Objection:  Struggling with complicated theories of change makes our grantees stronger, more able to cope with the vicissitudes of grantmakers even more confused than you or I.

Reply:  Point well taken.

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Notes:

1.  From the RFFlow5 website, available at https://www.rff.com/fishbone.htm.

2.  From Carol Weiss’s,  “How Can Theory-Based Evaluation Make Greater Headway?” Evaluation Review, Vol. 21 No. 4 (1997).

3.  From Lester R. Brown’s “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” in the May 2009 issue of Scientific American.

4.  This was the argument of the philosopher Donald Davidson in the essay “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” presented at the 1963 meeting of the American Philosophical Association and published in the Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963). I’m not making this up.

5.  Paul Brest, “The Power of Theories of Change” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2010. 6.  Ibid., p. 48.

6.  One of the interesting characteristics of idiots savants is that the complex calculations they perform in their heads are often correct.  If the nonprofit world harbored the analogues of idiots savants—executive directors, for example, who could correctly intuit the interventions required for lifting whole communities out of poverty—I would strongly encourage them rather than force them to give an account of their methods.  Despite their inability to explain how they arrived at their program designs, I would prefer that they changed the world the way they do, rather than the way most of us don’t.

 

Coming up:  Human motions and human actions; cause and effect in the law; Donald Davidson and naïve belief-desire psychology; rational actor theory; Pavlov, Skinner, and Duhigg; the Law of Large Numbers; crowdsourcing; leadership development and other empowerment strategies; movement building; arts corridors and anchor institutions; tipping point arguments; and structural change.

Lessons From The Undeserving Poor

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The motivation for distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving poor is familiar to many who’ve been approached by a homeless person for a handout.  Will we give without condition? Will we draw a line at those who are visibly intoxicated, reasoning that these supplicants are inviting their own ruin? Will we brush off the request and opt instead to make a contribution to the local shelter? Even after we’ve responded in some way, will we feel we’ve done the right thing? Perhaps our rationalizations will seem a little cold, a little too far removed from what might otherwise have been a simple human response to a simple human need.

The distinctions we sometimes make between the deserving and the undeserving poor have a revealing history.  The first American colonies modeled their poor laws on Elizabethan systems of relief for the needy, where the primary division was between neighbors and strangers.  Your responsibility to those who fell on hard times extended to family members and neighbors.  If evil befell a sojourner, he was sent to his community of origin where, it was assumed, he would receive assistance.  Another distinction divided your struggling neighbors into two classes: the truly impotent and the poor who were able-bodied, believed capable of at least some kind of work.

This latter category was problematic for early policymakers.  Just as an acorn could, by slow degrees, transform into an oak, so could the category of the truly impotent shift through multiple shades of difference into the category of rogues attempting to game the system.  The imperative for drawing clear lines increased as we moved from helping the poor to managing them.

Other challenges were afoot.  In the early days of our republic, there were many poor who struggled privately with their need as a kind of unavoidable evil.  The community’s “paupers,” by contrast, received some kind of public assistance, and it wasn’t long before pauperism became associated in the public mind with moral degradation.  According to Michael Katz:

The redefinition of poverty as a moral condition accompanied the transition to capitalism and democracy in early nineteenth-century America.  It served to justify mean-spirited treatment of the poor, which in turn checked expenses for poor relief and provided a powerful incentive to work.  In this way the moral definition of poverty helped ensure the supply of cheap labor in a market economy increasingly based on unbound wage labor.  The moral redefinition of poverty followed also from the identification of market success with divine favor and personal worth. …

Persistent and increasing misery did not soften the moral definition of poverty.  Neither did the evidence available through early surveys or the records of institutions and administrative agencies, which showed poverty and dependence as complex products of social and economic circumstances usually beyond individual control.*

Over time the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor became deeply embedded in American culture, supported by Calvinist arguments in the antebellum period, by Darwinist arguments after the Civil War, and by the proponents of eugenics in the early twentieth century.  Within the very short span of my own memory, the undeserving poor have broken into the public consciousness as the “underclass,” as “welfare queens,” and, most recently, as Mitt Romney’s “47 percent.”

The labels have changed.  What have remained remarkably constant are the myths that cloud our understanding of poverty.  In an age when information is so freely available, when we stand to benefit from decades of excellent scholarship, we continue to misapprehend the structural and cultural causes of poverty.  We conflate structural arguments with radical denials of human agency.

There are other lessons for us in the story of the undeserving poor.  Some of these have to do with the question of who defines what constitutes an appropriate locus of philanthropic intervention.

In the same manner that elites reserve for themselves the privilege of drawing lines between the deserving and the undeserving poor, so too do their judgments determine what constitutes a “social problem” worthy of charitable investment.  It will be a rare community that wrestles with the distinction between the deserving and undeserving wealthy, or that launches a five-year philanthropic program to increase the elite’s feelings of solidarity with their less fortunate neighbors.  More often than not, philanthropy will be directed at fixing the poor, deserving or otherwise.

The homeless person asking for spare change intrudes on more than our physical space.  He brings before our eyes the dictates of our faith traditions, our responsibility to model good behavior for our children, our desire to act with decency.  At the same time, he surfaces our doubts about his bona fides, and here we are left without a clear script, reproducing on an intimate scale the ongoing, sometimes shrill, American debate about persistent poverty.

Experiences such as these can throw light on the gulf between our personal and our institutional responses to poverty.  Understanding these differences can, I believe, help make us better citizens, better champions of civil society, more fully aware of the frames we impose on our acts of giving, professional and otherwise.

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* The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare; Pantheon Books, 1989; p. 14.

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The Philanthropic Undead and the Untimely Death of George Falconer

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.

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The View From the Heights of Arnstein’s Ladder: Resident Engagement by Community Foundations

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:

1. How do we understand the community foundation engagement of residents and other stakeholders and why is it important?
2. How well suited is the community foundation to the task of resident engagement?
3. What does successful resident engagement look like?

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.

Double Jeopardy for Philanthropy?

In a field not generally known for the extraordinary, an extraordinary thing happened some three years ago at the Council on Foundations annual meeting in Denver: philanthropy was put on trial.  By philanthropy I don’t mean the outpouring of generosity by individuals and families, but so-called “organized philanthropy,” characterized by the work of foundations and other institutional grantmakers.

Gara Lamarche, then-CEO of Atlantic Philanthropies, was the prosecuting attorney, opening his case with a spirited “J’accuse!”  Ralph Smith, Senior Vice President at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, parried with a heartfelt defense.

A jury of twelve was assembled from the audience and they were taken away to deliberate on the evidence presented.  Was philanthropy, or was it not, underperforming in its quest to help create social change?  Should it, or should it not, be convicted for its lackluster outcomes?

In the end, these twelve jurists failed to reach a verdict and the jury was declared hung.

I mentioned that an extraordinary thing happened three years ago.  In fact, several extraordinary things happened.  First, the Council on Foundations had the courage to organize such a trial in the first place.  Strangely, although the session was enthusiastically received, nothing like it was ever staged again, as far as I know.   And although it wasn’t widely reported at the time, ten out of twelve jurists voted to convict.

Most extraordinary of all, perhaps, was the fact that there was no follow-up to explore what it meant for the grantmaking profession that five out of six of its practitioners, chosen at random, voted to condemn it.  No outcry, no sackcloth and ashes, no gnashing of teeth over martinis in the hotel lounge. Try to imagine five out of six phlebotomists denouncing their trade, or five out of six train conductors.

Was the session’s outcome an embarrassment to the panjandrums of philanthropy (to borrow a phrase from Bill Schambra)?  Was it now to be swept quickly under the rug, like so much else of moment in our amnesic field?

While philanthropy may have gone on trial three years ago, we’re not past the moment when we can fruitfully ask those five out of six why they voted as they did.  If, as I suspect, their judgment represents the general sentiment of the field, what, in their view—in our view—are the primary reasons why grantmakers tend to underperform?  Is it because foundations generally fail to identify and address the root causes of our problems, treating only their symptoms?  Is it because foundations are too top down, woefully in the habit of doing “to” rather than “with”?  Do they fail to deliver social change because their work is little governed by metrics or business principles? or is it because there’s such an attenuated sense of accountability at many of these institutions?

Moreover, wouldn’t it be valuable to know if there’s any measure of consensus on the two or three factors that, in the view of foundation leaders or of the people they purport to serve, contribute most strongly to holding back the field?  How would our most experienced grantmakers answer this question?  And why on earth haven’t we bothered to ask them?

Based on closed-door conversations with peers, I believe that near the top of our list of failings (or the reasons for them), we would find a general lack of candor—with our colleagues, with our trustees, with ourselves—about the forces that create, maintain, and perpetuate many of our social ills.  As Wittgenstein famously said, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence.”

If we can’t expect grantmakers like me to be especially good at catalyzing significant social change, might we be expected to have some clarity about why we so often fail at the attempt?

Philanthropy à la Sauce Béchamel: Predictions for 2013 and Beyond

There’s nothing like a perch plucked from the depths of Lake Como, poached by a master chef, and arranged in pastry shells covered with a well-seasoned sauce béchamel, yolk of one egg, and knob of butter to inspire new thinking about the economic insecurity of American workers.  I’ve not yet been invited to Bellagio or Davos, but I know it’s only a matter of time.

Scores of colleagues have made these pilgrimages, worrying about the state of the world as they take in the mountain air. My turn will come. I notice, however, that these colleagues tend not to insult their hosts by implicating them in petty shortcomings. Nor do they dwell on the spectacular failures of our field. Rather they conduct research and predict trends that are challenging and upbeat, enabling their patrons to strut, au courant, in front of restive board members. I am in their debt, being generally rather slow on the uptake.

Philanthropic Capital Markets, Impact Investing, Networked Nonprofits, Big Data! Critics call them passing fads hawked to insecure CEOs like me. I call them the Keys to the Kingdom, l'oca che spende tutta la notte da barba se stessa, e ancora non è stanco (the goose that spends all night shaving herself, and still is not tired).

Lest I be accused of being yet another leach on the body of American generosity, I hope you’ll marvel at my own well-researched predictions for future trends in the foundation field, available in TED Talk, Pecha Kucha, Ignite, and 140-character formats with speaker’s fees waived and optimized for alpine vistas:

Biggest Data Ever. Genetic engineering will create miniaturized monkeys who’ll be trained to type vigorously on specially designed keyboards. Their output will be mined for interesting patterns by highly compensated experts.

Voucher Philanthropy. Instead of making grants, foundations will award grant vouchers directly to the deserving poor, snapping a towel—with market force—on the buttocks of underperforming charities.

Nano-Lending. The gap between the haves and the have-nots will increase, and the number of poor grow so large, that micro-financing will become unobtainable by most. Instead, low-income people across the world will be offered nano-loans collateralized against small pieces of plastic and other debris.

The Wearable Foundation. This all-graphene suit will insulate the most sensitive among us from too much reality and provide extra headroom for personalized liberal echo chambers. Optional micro-hydraulics will provide a confident gait while spoken words are sifted through a Universal Scrambler™.

Quantum Grantmaking. Quantum theory tells us that Schrödinger’s cat  can be alive and dead at the same time, prompting physicists to posit parallel universes in which each possibility and everything in-between is simultaneously instantiated. Taking advantage of this phenomenon, evaluation-fixated foundations will soon require not only outputs and outcomes from their grantees, but hyper-outcomes as well—benefits to parallel universe denizens affected by real-world interventions.

Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) Market Efficiencies. In the United States, it’s considered at best impolite to kill the poor. As a nation with deep religious roots, we strongly prefer that the market do it for us. To increase the efficiency of market forces, the poor, who generally lay about listlessly, will be bled daily for valuable plasma and have their unused organs harvested for deserving job creators and their pets.

Dearest Western European Conference Organizer: I offer you a heady tour of poverty parks, genetically modified program officers, and more! A world in which the apple you’re saving for lunch is networked to implants in your salivary glands—ready to signal the optimal moment of ripeness. A world in which throngs of “network weavers” and nonprofit visionaries wander through your streets cataloging and creating connections between things real and imagined. Trust me: I can make you look good!  Hey, MacArthur, are you feeling me yet?

Exiled in Philanthropy: Lit, Poli Sci, and Other Majors Welcome!

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You would think, given all the ballyhoo over the importation into philanthropy of for-profit business models, that the foundation world is crawling with MBAs.  It’s not.  Ask a roomful of philanthropoids about their academic bona fides and you’ll find that many have backgrounds in the liberal arts, in law, in the sciences, or in nothing in particular. This is a healthy thing for a field still searching for its soul.

You’ll also find that younger people in the field have hidden their undergraduate degrees in their sock drawers, haunted, perhaps, by the memory of some infelicitous essay on Plato’s Republic.

Let it go!  Let it go, I say!  Our first inklings of a world beyond that described to us by our parents have extraordinary value.  The exhilaration we felt at being invited to question authority can still save our field from grave errors.

Let’s reclaim those tens of thousands of dollars we suspect were wasted on our college educations.  Our parents still love us.  They’re proud of their son or daughter who’s now gainfully employed, doing something “having to do with irrigation, I think,” as my own mother—God rest her soul—once described it.  The nonprofit world needs fresh thinking, mired as it is in the corporatist nescience that currently passes for wisdom.

If you majored in Cultural Anthropology  …

We need you most of all. Perhaps you’ll write the first ethnography of organized philanthropy, describing its rigid hierarchies and the fabric of myths that support its delusional over-estimation of the foundation’s contributions to human progress.

If, in your quest for truth, you find yourself quailing—take heart!  You have a colleague who blazed the trail: Joel Orosz, founder of the The Grantmaking School, who published an extraordinary proto-ethnography of the foundation world titled, Effective Foundation Management: 14 Challenges of Philanthropic Leadership—And How to Outfox Them.  What made it extraordinary was Orosz’s willingness to speak with candor about the culture of a field that “lacks a salutary external discipline.”

What Dr. Orosz wrote on the subject of foundation risk-taking is especially revealing.  If foundations have the freedom to try pretty much anything to address society’s problems, he asserts, “it would be virtually impossible to open a newspaper without reading of a groundbreaking social experiment fueled by their funding.”

It’s true that foundations as a class are not very good at communicating their good work or its importance.  But according to Dr. Orosz, the appearance of ineffectiveness does not deceive us.  There is a hidden reason for the inability of many foundations to address our most pressing social problems, and that reason is embarrassment.  According to him:

Since foundations are undisciplined by the market, electorate, or funders, their only impetus for improvement comes from their (generally) self-perpetuating board of trustees. If you are a foundation leader, your imperative thus is a simple one: keep the board happy, and you will keep your job. So, what makes a board happy? The answer is easy: pride-inducing success. What makes a board unhappy? The answer is equally easy: embarrassing failure. What does this mean for the CEO? As a practical matter, the answer to this question is also very simple: since any kind of success is preferable to any kind of failure, since embarrassing the board members is to be avoided at all costs, it is critically important that every project be a success. What is the best way to ensure that every project will be a success? The key to perpetual success is to keep every project uncomplicated and modest in its ambition. Thus, inexorably, in order to keep their boards happy, in order to assure that embarrassment never darkens the trustees’ doorsteps, CEOs tend to seek the cautious and incremental success. Paradoxically, the societal organization given the most freedom to act hobbles itself; it is as if a superb French chef, capable of creating any gastronomic delight, insisted on making nothing except the blandest of oatmeal.

The problem is one of foundation culture.  It’s culture all the way down, argues Orosz.  Culture that kills strategy.  Culture that imposes a kind of omertà on grantmakers, keeping them from shouting these truths from the rooftops: “We are guilty of small ambitions!  We live in morbid fear of losing our prized sinecures!”

Only you dedicated students of anthropology can unravel this tangled ball of cultural yarn and put us on the right track.  Consider wearing muted colors and sensible shoes so you can mix freely among us natives.

If you majored in Behavioral Economics …

You know the score.  You’re hep to the homo economicus jive.  So many decision-making models imported from the world of business and finance attempting to exploit the predictability of human actors.  The ideal foundation executive, according to one prominent prototype, posits this predictability to develop highly articulated theories of change and assign Bayesian probabilities and financial payoffs to possible outcomes, transforming complex sociological problems into straightforward utility calculations.  The technical term for this, I believe, is “pure baloney.”

Dan Ariely popularized the field of behavioral economics when he wrote the book Predictably Irrational, which a New York Times reviewer described as a “far more revolutionary book than its unthreatening manner lets on.”  The book, according to this reviewer, is “a concise summary of why today’s social science increasingly treats the markets-know-best model as a fairy tale.”

Fortunately for us, you behavioral economists don’t believe in fairy tales!  You know how perfectly chaotic our species can be.  It’s time for you to insinuate yourselves into one of those three-person panels our field produces in such prodigious numbers and set the record straight.  As if to prove your point, defy audience expectations by wearing Groucho glasses and a light-up bowtie.

If you majored in Linguistic Forensics …

The tools of your trade can help elucidate the innermost workings, the nefarious tics and obsessions, of the Philanthropoid Mind!  [music sting]

An article in the July 23, 2012, issue of the New Yorker article titled “Words on Trial” recounts the story of James Fitzgerald, the retired FBI forensic linguist who brought the field to prominence by helping to solve the Unabomber case.  He cracked the case by noticing stylistic similarities between Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and the language of hundreds of documents seized by FBI agents while searching Kaczynski’s hut.

Think about the tortured diction of our field: drill down, impactful, vulnerable population, target audience.

What are we trying to hide behind that thick impasto of verbiage tinged with violence?  What insecurities are revealed by the fact that we are always “meeting around issues of diversity,” to take one example, rather than meeting simply  to discuss diversity?  There’s a story here and I suspect it isn’t pretty.

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So, my friends, proudly use your specialized knowledge to expose the piffle that currently dominates our field.  Brandish your calculators, your close readings, your foam core models like billy clubs.   As the past twenty years have demonstrated, no idea is so feeble, so absurd, or so incidental to our field that it can’t become a topic of animated water cooler discussion in the arid plain of Organized Philanthropy.  Soon, perhaps, I’ll have the Big Data to prove it.

Social Change as Cultural Change: How Stephen Colbert’s “Truthiness” Might Set Us Free

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Speaking at a discussion hosted by the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange, made this observation:

Oftentimes we miss moments to challenge the cultural conversation and we instantly go to policy.  And I think that’s where we lose.  We can’t have conversations outside of culture and where people are getting their information every day.  We have to challenge that and hold those structures accountable the same way we want to hold elected officials accountable.

Rashad is right to say that many activists see policy change as the Holy Grail of social change efforts, or that, at the very least, they tend to underplay the role played by culture in keeping low-income communities marginalized.  Activists and funders fall prey to the Systems Heresy: the belief that injustice is largely “structural,” that it’s the property of a system that regulates human behavior rather than a property of actors who are frequently all too human.

If policy change is difficult, the shifting of culture must seem impossible by comparison.  It happens so slowly, so imperceptibly.  We know from the history of large social change efforts in the United States—women’s suffrage, the ending of slavery—that shifts in cultural norms both precede and lag behind significant policy victories.  Attitudes about women and African Americans continue to evolve.  Unfortunately, the time scale for these cultural changes makes them unlikely candidates for foundation funding which is too often focused on the quick victory—or its simulacrum.  Given that a cultural shift will take its own sweet time, is it even worth the attempt to accelerate the process?

If cultural change efforts do in fact get a raw deal from grantmakers (and I have no reason to doubt those who tell me they do), is it time for the foundation world to reassess its priorities?  I’m struck by the fact that my colleagues seldom send me links to earnest reports about low-income communities.  Instead my inbox brims with clips from The Colbert Report and The Daily Show skewering the attempts of policymakers to dismantle the safety net for the poor.  Perhaps more effectively than any study of racial and economic disparities, movies such as Precious have reached millions of people capable of empathy and opened their eyes to the overwhelming challenges of living in poverty.

By contrast, so many reports on the plight of the marginalized have been dead on arrival.  Just in the past three months, in my own beloved city, we’ve been overwhelmed by the bad news.  This past June, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, alongside the Orleans Parish Place Matters team, published a report titled Place Matters for Health in Orleans Parish: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All.  Among its key findings was the fact that the average life expectancy in Orleans Parish varied by as much as 25 years depending on a person’s zip code of residence, and that those zip codes with the lowest life expectancy had a higher population of low-income and people of color. The poorest zip code in the city, with a majority population of African Americans, had an average life expectancy of 55 years while the zip code with less poverty and a mostly white population reached 80, a 25-year difference!  Another report this past June from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center analyzed new census and other survey data to find, among other things, that 48 percent of our black children in Orleans Parish—that’s one in two—live in poverty, defined as an income of about $18,000 supporting a family of two adults and a child.  A more recent report published by the Urban League found that nearly 30 percent of black students in New Orleans—that’s one in three—had been suspended or expelled from the Recovery School District, more than twice the statewide rate and over four times the national rate, due to stringent, zero-tolerance policies.  These policies have left us with 14,000 youth between the age of 16 and 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor employed.  My foundation contributed to the long string of dismal news with its own study of asset poverty in New Orleans.

And yet there’s been no outcry, no wringing of hands, no rending of garments.

We need these data to understand the magnitude of the challenges that face us.  Yet what a serious miscalculation to believe that numbers quantifying the misery of our neighbors are sufficient to move us to action.  And here, I believe, is where we can learn from the cultural geniuses among us.  They, much more than the rest of us, understand how to make lifeless numbers jump off the page; they have ideas for breathing life into depressing graphs of mostly downward trends.

One aspect of their genius is their appreciation of the complexity of culture.  Culture to them is not a bone we gnaw on together, a dented fender we attempt to hammer smooth.  It’s less like an object we bang on and more like the air we breathe, the invisible threads of meaning that connect us.

I fear that activists and funders might be stuck, unable or unwilling to embrace the key roles played by potent cultural forces such as empathy and shame-inducing satire.  How can the champions of culture help us reinvigorate our sluggish steps toward social change?  In the US context, perhaps, we’ll never acquire a culture in which public deliberation becomes a significant force.  In this new Dark Age, dominated by the new American Visigoths—the Radical Religious Right, the anti-government activists—how can culture help truth gain a foothold?

New Products for Philanthropoids!

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Introducing the ALL- New Initiativ-a-Lator®

I like this one because I often get stuck.  Millions of dollars in foundation assets pressuring me to make the world a better place and I just sit there like a dried blowfish without a thought in my head!

Imagine my delight when I inserted the AA batteries into my Initiativ-a-Lator® and, with one flick of a switch, transformed my feebleminded ideas into a $25 million, five-year program to end poverty!

There’s a special offer on orders placed before September 1, 2012: You receive the  “First Program of Its Kind” press release template that turns your ill-conceived initiative into a paragon of Strategic Grantmaking.  If your program tanks, use the optional  “Mea Maxima Culpa” template to win valuable Transparency Points® for you and your foundation.

 

The Equali-Tea Party Play Set

For the little justice warrior in all of us.  You couldn’t have missed the TV ads with the jaunty jingle:

 ♪ Go put out your best ♫
 ♪ For your multi-cultural guests ♫

What’s in the box?  A miniature  18-piece tea service and a full complement of Equali-Tea Party Dolls spanning a dizzying range of worldviews and values that frequently come into horrible, violent conflict with one another.  The set includes a 1:4 scale Eleanor Roosevelt action figure with spring-loaded Karate Chop Arm® to keep your tea party guests in line.

The Junior Flipchart Paper and Easel kit (sold separately) instantly transforms your animated tea party into a dull but earnest convening.

 

The Impact Investor Z80

What is impact investing?  I think it involves bringing people at the Bottom of the Pyramid (ancient Egyptian slaves?) into the market by selling them things they can ill-afford to buy.  This is called “stimulating consumer interest and demand.”  Whatever it is, I know I fell in love with this product the first time I saw the ad:

(Image: Impact Investor Z80 sportscar speeding up a steep mountain road lined with alpine flowers.)

Announcer: You want a machine than can help you leave all those thin and volatile operating margins behind—

(Sound of revving engine.)

Help you forget that your inventory is long on “push” commodities, erase the challenges of building your Bottom of the Pyramid value chains.

(Screeching of tires as sportscar negotiates a hairpin turn.)

From triple bottom line to front of the line: The new Impact Investor Z80 can pro-actively extend your business model to create digital, re-engineered, data-driven synergies.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds plausible.

 

The Foundation as Borderland Institution

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I.

How, short of civil war, does a nation typically work through periods of intense social polarization?  In the United States we face persistent racial and ethnic divisions as well as stark income and asset inequalities.  We’re currently experiencing these differences in the context of some very uncivil election year rhetoric and the emergence of a new kind of American class consciousness characterized by the Occupy Movement.

Given these polarizing forces, what is the glue that keeps contemporary American society from spinning apart?  Is it simple inertia, a kind of consumerist satiety?  Do we ever in fact learn to resolve our differences, or do they come into greater or lesser focus depending on the whims of our commentariat?  If we manage somehow to work through our divisions, where does this bridging work happen?

It’s not the first time in recent history that we’ve come to a perceived boiling point.  In a 1995 book titled Beyond Individualism,  Michael Piore wrote about a “social deficit” created in the 1980s and early 90s that eventually led to increased political mobilization and social instability.  A pivotal event of that era, according to Piore, was President Reagan’s crushing of the federal air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, an action that “galvanized anti-union managerial factions in a whole variety of industries and occupations where union organization had previously been unassailable.”   It was open season on organized labor.  The wealthiest Americans saw a marked increase in their standard of living while the incomes of blue collar workers declined.  The savings and loan crisis and its attendant bailout presaged our contemporary financial market meltdown and moved some commentators to dub the period between 1985 and 1995 the “Looting Decade.”

Political life also took a nasty turn.  The Bush campaign’s Willie Horton ads in 1988 alienated black Americans, while the family values rhetoric of the 1992 campaign targeted single mothers, feminists, and gays and lesbians.  Against this backdrop of political turmoil, identity groups grew in visibility and pressed their claims on American society.  According to Piore, we could not, during this fiscally lean era, opt to settle these claims through massive social spending.  All of this created an atmosphere of tension and instability, perhaps not substantially different in feeling and tone from the one we’re currently experiencing.

To address this increased polarization, Piore suggested that politicians and policymakers champion the borderlands, institutions in which “social claimants” could cross group boundaries and communicate their needs and concerns to society at large.   Through dynamic give-and-take “political conversations” in these borderland institutions, marginalized identity groups could become agents in the creation of a new national culture.  Participants in these discussions would interpret their actions to themselves and others in ways that acknowledge the effects of one community of meaning upon another.  Perhaps on occasion these discussants would even celebrate their inevitable clashes of interpretation.

II.

There’s so much that’s compelling about Piore’s vision of the borderlands, rooted, as it appears to be, in Aristotle’s view of Man as the “political animal.”  Somewhere between Wall Street and the Occupy Movement’s encampments in Zucotti Park there would be a space where both bankers and activists could plead their cases.  Ideally the 1% would get a clearer sense of the effect of their actions on people with modest means, while the 99% would better understand the economic system that for better or for worse implicates us all.

Unfortunately, in twenty years or so of nonprofit work, I’ve known only a handful of organizations* that fit the description of a borderland institution.   First, most civil society organizations are segregated by race, ethnicity, class, and the other divisions that borderland institutions are expected to bridge.  Even when these organizations are not segregated, they seldom make it their mission to champion give-and-take conversations across group boundaries.  From my own experience of participation in diversity trainings, poverty summits, and other intergroup meetings, these bridging conversations are fiendishly difficult to pull off.

Of course the mixing of people from different backgrounds happens outside the context of civil society organizations, in such venues as grocery stores, sports stadiums, parade routes, and popular music concerts.  But these are not typically places consecrated to boundary-crossing deliberation and the forging of a new civic culture.  The fact that Piore dubs his institutions “borderlands” suggests how marginal this kind of discussion has become.  Perhaps in some real or imagined past we talked through our differences in the town square or the agora.  In these nefarious times, however, we’ve pushed these conversations to the edges of civic life, we’ve made them exceptional rather than central to the political and other processes that shape our national character.

Philanthropy Like Nobody's Business

I.

Over at the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, my colleague Phil Buchanan is tilting at the windmill of “business thinking” in foundations and other not-for-profit organizations.  “You would think,” he writes, “after what we have witnessed in the past several years, that the word ‘business’ would not be used as a synonym for ‘effective.’”  Since most businesses, like most nonprofits, fall somewhere in the range between mediocre and good, he argues, charities should not be so quick to embrace the practices of the for-profit world.

Why should this argument matter to you?

There are tens of thousands of foundations in the United States controlling over half a trillion dollars in assets. One of their most extraordinary characteristics is the degree of freedom they have to pursue the Common Good.  Working within the strictures of the law, they can spend as much as they want, however they want.  In partnership with civil society organizations, they can marshal armies of volunteers.  They can pool their funds and coordinate their actions to magnify the impact of their work.  They even have license to criticize and bankroll the reform of government, and indeed change just about any aspect of our social, economic, and political lives.

And yet the headlines generated by this extraordinary sector typically look like this:

• Foundation Giving Lost Ground to Inflation in 2011, Report Finds
• Corporate Giving Up in 2011
• Arts Spending Fueled National Economy, Report Finds*

… rather than this:

• Foundation-Led Initiative Eliminates Racial Disparities in Cincinnatti
• Coalition of Organizations Convened and Funded by Foundations Ends Homelessness in Alabama
• Foundation Leaders Speak Out on Income Inequality in the United States

There’s often a big gap between foundations’ stated intentions and what they actually manage to accomplish.  It’s no wonder that those of us in the grantmaking profession—myself included—turn to “business thinking” for inspiration.  Given the modest outcomes we generally produce, just about any new kind of thinking would do.

II.

From a certain perspective, organized philanthropy is an interstitial field.  Wealth is created by individuals who, in the holiest moments of the charitable act, dedicate their good fortune to others rather than to themselves.  It’s then our job to direct this wealth to the people who will do the most good with it—not us, but the individuals in nonprofit and other civil society organizations who feed the hungry and house the homeless.

From the earliest days of organized philanthropy, those of us who work at foundations have chafed at the notion that we are mere middle men in the philanthropic enterprise.  We’ve gone so far as to pay consultants to create a kind of mythos for philanthropy in which foundations hold their own in the troika of Donor-Grantmaker-Grantee.  The standards for our field in fact require that we move beyond the transactional, the interstitial, and “add value” to the funds we steward.  We do this, for example, by using our convening power to address community problems; by sharing our knowledge; by encouraging citizens to give; and by other means that enable us to sleep with our highly compensated selves at night.  Our insistent—I would say febrile—grasping at business models partly reflects our attempts to be good stewards, to add value in the ways I’ve indicated.

But if the business world is our primary source of inspiration for the conduct of philanthropy, then, I would argue, we betray a profound misconception of the charitable enterprise.  A playwright needs to publish her plays and have them produced, and she too can benefit by importing lessons from the for-profit world.  But her primary muse must remain Melpomene rather than Sam Walton or she ceases to be a good playwright.  Is the philanthropoid more a businessman than a humanist? more a technocrat than an activist?

It’s easy to see why we look to the for-profit world for our models.  The work of philanthropy is often framed as a social mini-max problem: We are in situation X facing social problem Y.  We are given $Z to (a) solve this problem in the least amount of time, using the fewest resources; or (b) maximize the benefit to low-income communities; or perhaps (c) most fully satisfy the ego-needs of our CEO.  This framing leads us to conclude that philanthropy is essentially about spending money to create a product or service.  So we run into the arms of the nearest MBA, and while in that tender embrace are bidden to “allocate resources on a dynamic basis,” “foster partnerships,” “develop innovative approaches to evaluation,” and do other things couched in toothless bromides we tearfully accept because we have it on good authority that this splooge will finally fill the Great Gnawing Void in our professional lives.

III. 

Because we lack firm moorings in this very young and still evolving field, we’re easily distracted.  In at least one alternative interpretation of our work, philanthropy is about a higher kind of consciousness; about self-awareness; about work that implicates us in some of the deepest questions we can ask ourselves and our fellow men and women.  If it doesn’t implicate us in this way, then we’re playing a parlor game with other people’s money.  We’re not taking seriously enough the deepest yearnings that moved an individual to forego spending huge sums of cash on herself in order to better serve Humankind.

The contest between the technocratic and so-called “values approaches” to philanthropy is typically played to a draw: we need both, we are told at the end of what often reads like a shaggy dog story.  And of course we need both, but this conceals the fact, in my view, that our effectiveness is much more profoundly compromised by our disregard for the latter than for the former.  No amount of business acumen in the world can compensate for our failure to understand how deeply implicated we are in a system that keeps so many of our fellow men and women in abject misery.

There are better and worse ways of doing grantmaking and I’ve had the great privilege of working with many inspired grantmakers over the years.  What made them inspired, in my eyes, was their ability to work in creative partnership with grantees and others to get big results for the communities they served.  (The jargon du jour for this is “high impact philanthropy.”)  And yet their success had little if anything to do with the tonics prescribed in journals like the Stanford Social Innovation Review and other torch bearers of the new technocracy.  As I read these publications, I find that what’s most remarkable to me about organized philanthropy are the things that organized philanthropy finds most remarkable.

IV.

I love this field for a thousand reasons.  In the conduct of my work, I turn for inspiration not to the MBA but to the donor who feels some obligation to her fellow men, to the nonprofit or comunity leader who clings to her vision of a world re-made, and, at times, to the foundation executive or program officer whose work displays wisdom and humility.

I rue the fact that I work in a field untried by bracing debate, a field fond of trotting out old half-truths tarted up in fresh Business-Speak to persuade newcomers (and those of us with short memories) that we’re finally on to something new.  Borrowing an image from Martin Luther, we make of philanthropy a whore who sits rouged and powdered by the window, waiting to be swept up in the arms of any John who will promise her an honorary MBA, or support her habit of self-denial on matters of social change.

We’re a field searching for its subject, unaware that that subject is ultimately us.

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* Actual headlines from the Foundation Center’s Philanthropy News Digest, June 2012

“Sullivan Principles” for Progressive Funders?

Old dingoes like me who remember the 1980s campaigns to encourage disinvestment from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa might also remember the role played by the Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Baptist minister who at the time was a board member of General Motors. He developed a set of principles for companies doing business in that country which essentially required equal treatment and access to opportunity for all workers regardless of their race.

The Sullivan Principles, as they came to be known, were adopted by over a hundred companies that had operations in South Africa, and they were used effectively by many advocates for divestment.

What’s most striking about these principles is that (1) they were voluntary: there was no regulatory body that required compliance; (2) they helped coordinate activity across a broad range of stakeholders; (3) they united activists in common cause with the business community; and (4) they contributed to a great social good: the end of apartheid in South Africa.

What if progressive funders were to develop and voluntarily adopt a set of principles that governed the way they worked with one another, that strengthened their collective efforts? What would such a set of principles look like?

Here are some I would introduce for discussion:

1. The “Do ‘With’ Rather Than ‘To’ Principle”: This principle would be suitably elaborated for different kinds of actors. It would govern how grantmakers treat their grantees, and how each of these treats the communities they serve. A national funder operating under this principle, for example, would never dream of parachuting into a given geography without first meaningfully engaging local partners in the analysis, choice of strategies, selection of tactics, and overall program design for his intervention. This principle is intimately related to …
2. The Maximization of Coordination Principle: It would be a natural part of the planning work of the aforementioned national funder to gather together colleagues—both national and local—who were working in the same geography (or issue area) to map each of their proposed contributions, understand their theories of change and strategies, and explore ways to support one another’s work. Local funders would be expected to do the same with their colleagues. The “Do ‘With’ Rather Than ‘To’ Principle” alluded to earlier would help ensure that grantees and other stakeholders were included in these conversations. Another aspect of this principle that would need elaboration is the coordination of advocacy and community organizing activities—coordination horizontally, so local (or national advocates) know what their colleagues are doing, and vertically, so that national advocacy efforts connect in meaningful ways to local advocacy efforts, avoiding the “random advocacy walks” we so often see.
3. The Drop Everything Else You’re Doing Principle: To repeat what I’ve written elsewhere, 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 else 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, and we should encourage our partners to do so. Progressives got clobbered 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, many more activists ignored 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 Principle. Imagine if the voices in the pews, in the schools, in the neighborhood centers had been able to shout down the opposition. This is related to ...
4. The Get The Money Out Of Politics Principle: One of the main problems with American democracy is how to acquire it. With only 535 senators and representatives, it’s small wonder that progressives can’t afford to buy one. The amount of money spent on getting elected is obscene, and in contemporary congressional races, the biggest spender has almost always won.¹ The issue of money in politics cuts across all areas of progressive work and often puts a full stop to our best advocacy efforts. We should all be devoting attention and resources to this issue.
5. The Everything is Connected Principle: While LGBTIQ advocates, for example, clearly have specific agendas (e.g., equal rights, anti-bullying legislation, etc.), they, like all progressives, need to understand the broader context in which their particular struggles take place. This is one gay man’s opinion: we can disconnect the struggle for LGBTIQ rights from other civil rights issues, but in doing so we evince a profound misunderstanding of what it is that gives power to our calls for justice.
6. The Empowerment Principle: We should always be striving to yield power to our grantees and to the communities they serve. When doing capacity building work, for example, rather than inflict a consultant on a grantee, we should make a grant to that organization so it can hire its own consultant.
7. The Globalization Principle: We often work in our little part of the world, on our own small set of issues, and we lose sight of the emerging World Order that affects our work in ways seen and unseen. The Globalization Principle would help ensure that it’s part of our collective efforts to understand how globalization increasingly affects us and our colleagues overseas.

Please feel free to suggest your own principles or elaborate on those listed above. I see the development of these principles as much more than another idle flipchart exercise, and hope there’s enough interest in continuing the discussion.

Progressives in the US context are consistently outflanked and outspent. These principles constitute one suggestion for how to give our efforts some conherence and some teeth. How would you go about it?

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¹ If you consider all congressional elections with at least two general election candidates during the last six election cycles, the candidate with the largest war chest won 8 out of 10 Senate races, 9 out of 10 races in the House. These figures do not reflect the very high cost of being able to run in the first place, much less successfully. It’s no accident that 47 percent of congressmen (250 members) are millionaires. The influence of the new Super PACs is yet to be determined. But the plain old vanilla political action committees follow a familiar pattern. Of the top ten PACs (measured by total giving in the 2012 election cycle), 8 represent corporate interests, 2 represent labor. The data are consistent and overwhelming.

Steve Jobs, The Meaning of a Nonprofit, and The Moral Imagination

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I.

I remember my sense of anticipation some 18 years ago when I landed my first foundation job. None of my friends or colleagues had any inkling what happened inside these black boxes that consistently swallowed our proposals and issued polite rejections.

I had heard that foundations were about social change, that they were about marshaling private capital for the public good. I was excited by the idea of working with colleagues who had the time to think deeply about our community’s greatest challenges, who were not constantly passing the hat to pay the light bill.

My first day on the job, I met former activists who knew what it was like to grow up black and poor; I admired the view from my 28th story window of the city I loved. On my second day, I chided myself for my overly romantic idealizations of foundation work. Of course sexism, careerism, and other isms could exist here as elsewhere. But still, foundations were anointed institutions, set apart to serve as the conscience of the community. On my third day I was wondering what I had gotten myself into.

If my idealizations were so far off the mark, what then was a foundation supposed to be about?

One reader of a recent post commented thoughtfully about the purpose and identity of community foundations:

… [S]hould philanthropy uphold or challenge the status quo? I've always seen the role and purpose of [community foundations] as being one of brokerage between the two positions. We stand of necessity with a foot in both camps, and it is our specific function to interpret each side to the other and make them intelligible. A [community foundation] that plants itself squarely on one side or the other will betray its mission.  …  We serve mutually incompatible constituencies—proponents of social change vs upholders of the status quo. All over the world, I suspect, people in [community foundations] are deliberately muddying waters in order to satisfy both at once. It’s what we’re good at, and if we leaned too far in either direction we’d stop being [community foundations] and become something else.

So beautifully expressed. I immediately begin to wonder about the apparent cold-bloodedness of our hypothetical translator. Was he supposed to have no feelings one way or the other about what he was asked to interpret, and if so, why did he bother? Did he interpret ultimately for the sake of a paycheck or for the sake of justice? And did it matter?

It’s not only community foundations that struggle to keep one foot in two camps, to broker between the lived experience of poverty, say, and the privileged world of trustees.  Small and large private foundations struggle with this as well, as does every nonprofit intent on survival.  Can an organization interpret the world to everything and everyone except itself?

Perhaps a community foundation ceases to be a community foundation not when it sides with justice, but when it fails to understand what living in community requires of us.  Perhaps any foundation or charity betrays its purpose, its identity, when corporate thinking completely replaces moral imagination.

II.

I expect many observers of the nonprofit field have grown tired of arguments that pit values like efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability against more liberal values like adaptability, empathy, and justice. Organizations that embody the latter need a nonprofit chiropractor to straighten their spines, the argument goes; their stiff-necked corporatist cousins need to work on their flexibility. Those who make these arguments typically come to the triumphant conclusion that we need both kinds of thinking in our field.

Some go further and remind us that the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit, while still relevant to the Internal Revenue Service, has lost its meaning for a new generation of social entrepreneurs who have learned to think outside the IRS’s checkboxes. They argue that there’s a growing sector agnosticism in our field, and that it’s only a matter of time before the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit goes the way of the 8-track tape. They point to the jobs made possible by for-profit companies, to the services they provide and the products they create, and they ask, “Is this not also a kind of social value?”

In our headlong rush to let everything be everything, to embrace blended corporations and the like, it’s important to call to mind some values that cannot be so easily “blended.” Consider one of the stories currently in circulation about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple.

The Big Uneasy: New Data on Community Foundations and Social Justice

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A community foundation is an odd institution.  Unlike a private foundation such as Ford or Rockefeller, it’s a public charity, meaning, that among other things, it must raise money each year from the general public to satisfy what the IRS calls the “public support test.”  Community foundations typically serve a specific geography—a metropolitan area or an entire state, say—and they combine grantmaking with other programs to address the needs of a broad constituency.

You will rarely find a community foundation that fully embraces the analyses, strategies, tactics, and values of social justice grantmaking, which I define here simply as grantmaking that addresses the root and/or structural causes of social, economic, or political injustice.  A recent survey of community foundations suggests why this might be the case.

My colleague Barry Knight, director of CENTRIS, and I invited community foundation staff members to respond to a five-question survey on matters relating to social justice philanthropy. We received a little over 50 responses.

We found that 57 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “Many CEOs or trustees of community foundations resist social justice philanthropy because they fear alienating donors,” while only 17 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. 

Rather than guess at why social justice philanthropy might alienate donors, we included a question that would probe the roots of people’s unease with the notion.  There were two factors that stood out: (1) the term “social justice” sounds too radical for some, and (2) the aims of social justice philanthropy seem too vague or too broad for others.

On the one hand, the radical connotations of social justice philanthropy are a bit surprising given that a quest for social justice is central to various mainstream Jewish, Christian, and other faith traditions.  On the other hand, many people still associate calls for social justice with the politically charged language of the 1960s.

More troubling to practitioners should be the claim that the aims of social justice philanthropy are too vague or too broad.  Is the goal fairness and equal access to opportunity?  If so, how can this be sharpened?  Or is the goal a fairer distribution of society’s benefits and harms, something that might indeed cause a flutter in many a donor’s heart?

Not too surprisingly, our survey uncovered a significant difference of opinion between the corner office and program staff members: 62 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that “Program staff at community foundations are generally more supportive of social justice philanthropy than CEOs or trustees,” as compared with 15 percent who disagreed or strongly disagreed.

When we asked survey-takers to define social justice philanthropy, we saw a broad array of responses, the most popular involving, in some way, the attainment of “equity.”  Some respondents described equity as a leveling of the playing field; others as providing equal access to opportunity.  None, apparently, thought of it as a post-earnings redistribution of wealth.  If, as 11 of our respondents suggested, social justice philanthropy is simply a matter of helping those who are least well off, then the category suffers meaning inflation and comes to include just about every grantmaker in the United States and abroad.

As I ponder these survey results, I’m hopeful that community foundations will be able find the language— “fairness,” “equality of opportunity”—that resonates with their donors and other stakeholders.  I also believe it’s possible to clarify the aims of social justice to everyone’s satisfaction.

The persistent racial and other disparities in our communities highlight, in my view, the shortcomings of philanthropy-as-usual and prompt us to look for a new kind of giving. To make the same kinds of grants year after year to the same communities, to see the same disparities persist and even widen, and not to question one’s approach to grantmaking is, in my view, to do philanthropy in bad faith.

Social justice philanthropy offers us a way of recommitting ourselves to philanthropy’s great aims. In practicing it we acknowledge that what’s good enough for us might not be good enough for the communities we purport to serve.

Download CF_survey

 For more on the definition of social justice philanthropy, click here. 

Ford and Rockefeller Should Right-Size Their Philanthropy by Funding Vans

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Yet another attack  on Philanthropy That Might Actually Succeed in Changing the World in Some Significant Way.  This one from my colleague Bill Schambra, who, perhaps sensing the untenability of the view that social phenomena have no causes, is now urging foundations to think small.

Mr. Schambra’s model for thinking small comes to us by way of the Elizabeth Brinn Foundation whose grant outcomes are “refreshingly concrete and specific.”  According to Schambra, “Brinn can point to buildings they helped improve, vans they helped purchase, playgrounds they helped clean up.”

Nothing lackluster about that, we can all agree.  A community’s need for buildings, vans, and clean playgrounds is indisputable.

By contrast, the examples of world-changing philanthropy typically paraded by its defenders—the Green Revolution, the crusade against hookworm—elicit a big yawn from Mr. Schambra who asks, What else have you got?

If these have gone stale, I would suggest exploring philanthropy’s contributions to bringing peace to Northern Ireland; providing an all-tuition-paid college education to every high school graduate in Louisiana with a GPA of 2.5 or better (a program now adopted by 21 other states); and ending the military’s discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

One of the great ironies here is that the Hudson Institute is itself nothing like those gritty community-based organizations that Mr. Schambra loves to champion (and which I’ve often championed on these pages).  Hudson’s modest mission—generously supported by big-thinking philanthropists—is to promote global security, prosperity, and freedom.  Haven’t the Institute’s funders gotten Bill’s memo?

One can only speculate about what’s behind Hudson’s eight-year-long campaign against big philanthropy.  There are hints about the root causes of Mr. Schambra’s discomfort in his other writings.  Because foundations often fill the gaps left by retreating sources of public support, they’re sanctioned by government and given fairly wide latitude in their operations.  But if they go too far—if, as Schambra writes, they begin to “undermin[e] traditional sources of authority”—then it’s these sources of authority that must mobilize to curtail their power.  We see this in Schambra’s warning, near the end of his op-ed, that the forces of law and good order “may not be so complaisant about philanthropy’s license” if it “drift[s] carelessly and inadvertently into … a revolutionary undertaking.”

You tell me: What’s a “revolutionary undertaking” from the perspective of a conservative think tank?  Whatever it is, it’s clearly something very different from the purchase of the aforementioned vans.  Perhaps big-thinking philanthropy might succeed in winning a stream of tax dollars for frontline work in low-income communities, a more consistent source of support than the grants from a foundation which, although lionized by Schambra, has already spent itself out of existence.