Posted at 06:46 AM in Foundations, Humor, Money in Politics, Philanthropy | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: philanthropy, plutocracy
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
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.
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.
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.
Posted at 04:46 PM in Class, Foundations, Nonprofits, Philanthropy, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (4)
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
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.
Posted at 11:13 AM in Boards, Communities of Color, Foundation Culture, Foundations, New Orleans, Philanthropy, Race | Permalink | Comments (2)
Tags: Katrina, philanthropy
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
Posted at 07:46 PM in Foundations, Humor, Nonprofits, Philanthropy | Permalink | Comments (1)
Tags: Apraxina, Countess Apraxina, emergent, foundation, foundations, philanthropy, Putin, strategic philanthropy, Vladimir Putin
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
This post was conceived as a companion piece to an earlier post on theories of change, titled How to Cause Things in Philanthropy.
1. Engineering without the math. A colleague of mine once pointed out, to my great satisfaction, that as grantmakers we are in fact social engineers. I still feel the glow of this flattering assessment. A PRI here, a dab of cash there, and soon the social machinery is purring contentedly, ending homelessness in Cincinnati or reversing global warming.
That’s the ideal picture, of course. The machines whose wheels we grease invariably have human constituents. These humans snag on one another or break down altogether. Sometimes the entire machine just gets up and walks away.
2. Building a better social intervention. At times like these we might cast a wistful eye at the board game Mousetrap which has delighted children and adults since it was first introduced in 1963.
During the course of this game, players take turns building an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine whose sole purpose is to trap little plastic mice. What a joy to set the mousetrap in motion and watch it work! You turn a crank that rotates a gear that rotates another gear that causes a plastic boot to swing up and kick over a bucket containing a small metal ball that then rolls down a set of stairs and into a chute where it’s channeled to a contraption that dislodges another ball from its high perch whence it rolls into a bathtub and falls through the drain hole onto one end of a teeter board causing a little plastic man at the other end of the board to fly backwards and into a barrel that triggers the descent of the mouse cage.
Those of us who struggle to get our grantmaking interventions to function properly can’t help but marvel at this beautifully choreographed march of causes and effects.
The game also has, I believe, some important lessons for grantmakers and others who work in the Third Sector.
The spectacular predictability of this elaborate mousetrap depends on the fact that interactions between inanimate objects—gears, balls, chutes, and the like—are governed by well-known laws. These laws express in mathematical language the regularities that physicists and others observe in the behavior of matter.
Laws governing human interactions, by contrast, are fiendishly difficult to come by. Unlike the creators of the Mousetrap game, we don’t often have the luxury of encasing our human subjects in plastic and flinging them off the ends of teeter boards or causing them to fall against one another like dominoes.
How then, as good social engineers, can we get our humans to behave in predictable ways? Fortunately, there are regularities of human behavior—stunning regularities—that grantmakers can learn to exploit.
3. The inner-life of cocktail-tropic fauna. In a previous post I considered how causal chains can become ridiculously complicated as they lead from our grantmaking intervention to our hoped-for outcomes. This thwarts our attempts to develop meaningful theories of change for our work.
Causal chains can also become rather brittle: all the stars may be in alignment for moving from some cause to a given effect, from one link of the chain to the next; all the felicity conditions might be satisfied; and yet, if the movement from cause to effect depends on the vicissitudes of human actors, we might be wise to put long odds on the outcome.
One of the challenging aspects of human actions is that they’re mediated by representations of the world. What does this mean? Shine a light near an amoeba and, without thinking, this phototropic creature will ooze its way towards the glow. Light up the sign for a bar and a cocktail-tropic human might move towards the entrance, but there’s no inevitability about it. If he does, he’s likely to pause at the threshold considering whether or not he likes the bartender, weighing his chances of meeting the man or woman of his dreams, estimating the likelihood that the lounge’s one television screen will be tuned to his favorite channel. He’ll consider his options for the evening. He’ll remember an article about beer not being as fattening as wine. In short, his beliefs and desires will interact in complicated ways to shape his resolve and ultimately bring him to a bar stool—or not.
In the case of the amoeba, the shining light activates various biochemical processes that produce the animal’s phototropic behavior. Biochemistry is also very much at work in the cocktail-tropic human, but it doesn’t determine human action without first creating or recreating various representations of the world inside the head of our subject. These representations—beliefs, desires, aversions, fears, memories—will either put a spring in the lounge-lizard’s steps or stop him in his tracks.
Most social interventions depend on linking and coordinating the activities of many human actors, each with his or her repertoire of beliefs and desires, each introducing some uncertainty into the unfolding path of events. Rather than act according to plans—our plans—these actors will be observing, remembering, desiring, resenting, and yes, perhaps even assessing whether or not they’ll cut off their own noses just to spite us.
4. You often get what you pay for. There are many cases in which desired outcomes do in fact arrive at the distal ends of long chains of coordinated human activity. Consider, for example, the writing and delivery of a letter, or the flying of 200 passengers from New York to Paris. These extraordinary accomplishments require the precise sequencing of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of human actions. But there are important differences that set these examples apart from those we typically encounter in nonprofit work where sought-after goals often elude us.
Put aside for a moment the fact that mail delivery and air travel can fail in spectacular ways. Flying 200 passengers from New York to Paris is no doubt a complicated affair, but each step of the process, from the design and construction of the airplane to the training of the aircrew, operates according to principles that are well understood. By contrast, creating the political will to address climate change might be one of those “wicked problems” that will forever resist a comprehensive solution.
Then there’s the issue of buyer incentive, and here we need to face an uncomfortable truth: there are important social goods that nobody really wants to pay for. If you’re selling a product like an iPhone or a flight to Paris, you’ll find many willing investors and customers. If you’re raising venture capital to end racism in Mississippi you’ll likely need to go begging. When you do, you’ll find that what grantmakers and other donors drop into your hat will never come close to covering the cost of what it will take to accomplish your mission.
There’s a reason so many charities are incorporated as not-for-profits. The nonprofit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of entrepreneurial imagination or of will, but rather a clear-headed assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely. Lack of buyer interest means no working capital; it also means a social entrepreneur has little with which to incentivize her staff, cover program costs, or grow the capacity of her organization.
5. Small carrots, big sticks. The issue of an appropriate reward structure for humans whose actions we’re attempting to motivate is a vexing one—especially outside the sphere of well capitalized for-profit enterprises. How do you get complicated, extraordinary things to happen without paying people huge sums of money?
Certainly no catalog of the various ways to motivate human action would be complete without a consideration of intimidation and terror. We see that in North Korea, for example, they host an annual spectacle in which tens of thousands of citizens hold up colored placards at just the right time to create the likeness of Kim Jong-un, or of a missile pointed at San Francisco, or of some other great socialist achievement. These mass displays provide a striking model of coordinated human activity.
How does it work?
If you are one of the performers and you do well, you get an extra carrot in your annual ration of vegetables; if you don’t, the authorities stick you and your family in the North Korean gulag. This, I believe, is what’s known as the “carrot and stick” approach to human motivation.
These tough love tactics are clearly too radical for most nonprofit work. The ostentatious tableaux, however, might come in handy for foundation CEOs who, in lieu of publishing inspiring monographs of their pensées, can opt instead to communicate their key philanthropic insights with colorful, football-field-sized displays.
6. Greasy cheeseburger with a side of salad. And then there’s reason. We can’t bang our human subjects together like billiard balls; and it would be challenging to pay our way to good social outcomes in many key areas of nonprofit work. Fear and intimidation are out. Why not try an appeal to reason? In this domain at least we often observe arresting regularities. If forced to choose, more than nine times out of ten a person will strike his head with a kiwi fruit rather than with a hammer. This unprecedented degree of predictability provides strong evidence that we are in the presence of a rational actor.**
Without even thinking about it, we presume that the agents up and down our causal chains will be reasonable. This could be the Holy Grail we’re looking for. It could, that is, if human rationality were robust enough to overcome all the other stuff going on inside our heads, stuff that frequently messes up the calculus of homo rationalis.
Consider these glosses on the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, renowned for their studies of deviations from rationality:*
The set-up | What a rational actor would do | What actually happened |
“[S]ubjects were given brief personality descriptions of several individuals and asked to assess, for each description, the likelihood that it referred to an engineer or a lawyer. In one experimental condition, subjects were told that the descriptions were sampled randomly from a group of 70 engineers and 30 lawyers, and in a second experimental condition the proportion of the two professions was reversed.” | “A rational assessment of probabilities, … would involve some combination of prior probabilities (based on the relative percentage of engineers and lawyers) and current information (based on the description), leading to different probability estimates in the two experimental conditions because of differences in prior probabilities.” | “Subjects’ estimated probabilities were nearly identical, however, demonstrating the tendency to … neglect prior probabilities or base rates. Similar patterns have been identified in countless other experiments.” |
“[R]esearchers gave subjects the following description: ‘Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.’ Subjects were asked to assess the likelihood that various statements about Linda were true, among them being that ‘Linda is a bank teller’ and ‘Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.’” | “Given two events A and B, the probability of the conjunction … of A and B cannot exceed the individual probability of either A or B.” | “Over 85% of subjects believed it was more likely that Linda was both a bank teller and a feminist rather than just a bank teller, contrary to the laws of probability.” |
[People facing decisions over medical treatments are told in some cases that a particular treatment has a 90% survival rate; in similar cases they’re told that the same treatment has a 10% mortality rate.] | [The two options are logically equivalent so they should elicit the same response.] | “People … respond differently to a 90% survival rate than they do to a 10% mortality rate, although the two are logically equivalent. These framing effects are difficult to reconcile with rational choice ....” |
I remember another example from my graduate school days in which subjects were presented pairs of photographs, each depicting a possible meal, and asked to assess which of the two had the lower number of calories. In one set-up, picture A showed a greasy cheeseburger; picture B showed the same cheeseburger together with a side of salad. I leave it to the reader to guess the outcome of this particular experiment.
These are refined studies, but the evidence for our persistent irrationality is often in plain sight. Ten years after 9/11, 41 percent of Americans still believed that “Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks,” and according to a recent Pew study, 33 percent of all Americans reject evolution saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” Some of us still avoid stepping on cracks or walking under ladders.
Other cases elicit more pity than derision. Nonprofit staffers who work with people in crisis, for example, know that these individuals may not always make rational choices; they will not consistently desire more rather than less good for themselves. Unfortunately, there are powerful forces that mess with our ability to make wise decisions for ourselves and our families. Even when we’re not in crisis, reason will often yield to more pressing demands on our psychic machinery.
Finally, we need to consider that we can have perfectly rational actors operating in a flawed scheme to address some social challenge. The scheme might be flawed because our analysis is unsound, or because our strategies and tactics are defective, or simply because perfectly rational actors might have reasonable grounds for refusing to cooperate with our boneheaded plans.
7. The paranoid madman. What do we do in the face of these challenges? Dear reader, if you’re a grantmaker, have you ever had a brutally honest conversation with a disaffected grantee, with one of those nonprofit leaders you’ve appropriated into your strategy for making the world a better place? If you have, then you probably have some inkling of why it’s so difficult to do things with humans. People don’t like to be played. They don’t like to be managed. They prefer to be the authors of their lives and the work they undertake.
And yet so many exemplars of “strategic philanthropy” are top-down affairs. We grantmakers, myself included, act as arrogant elites, drawing arrows and triangles on the whiteboards of our well-appointed conference rooms with no one around to challenge our flawed thinking. We strut about like giant roosters puffing out our breast feathers and clucking incoherently about “disruption” and “theories of change.” We look foolish to everyone except ourselves and those even more foolish than we are.
What’s missing here is a certain kind of sensibility rooted in the imperative that we treat people as ends not as means. This sensibility has as one of its fruits the goodwill people feel towards those who approach them in humility, asking for help rather than offering to save them from themselves. With this sensibility it becomes immediately possible for us to do things with humans rather to humans. Our causal chains become less brittle. A sense of commonality sustains our social change efforts through their rough patches.
Beyond this sensibility, what’s needed most, in my view, is a profound distrust of those who would straightjacket the work of civil society, imposing on it the apparatus of technocracy, framing human behavior as a problem that requires management by social technicians. “What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment?” asks Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man. “What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile?” To admit these as possibilities is to forge our causal chains one tentative link at a time, in solidarity with others, quickly reaching the point where we’re left staring into the dark of an unseen future, rejoicing in our anticipation of what’s possible rather than dreading what we cannot foresee and manage.
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* All of this material is excerpted from “Daniel Kahneman: Judgment, Decision, and Rationality” by Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University, available for download here. I’ve arranged excerpts from his text into table form.
** The rational actors of some economic and social theories figure prominently in the work of grantmakers who promote consideration of the “triple bottom line,” the economic, social, and ecological benefits produced by for-profit enterprises. I’ve been informed by private communication that researchers at the University of Schmerz am Überhogen are very close to developing the quadruple bottom line. In a landmark paper appearing in the Mathematikerzeitungsbringengelächterjournal, Alfred Stüber has proven that n-tuple bottom lines are impossible for any prime number n greater than or equal to 95,651.
Posted at 03:30 PM in Humor, Philanthropy, Social Change, Social Entrepreneurship, Strategy, The New Philanthropy, Theory | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: foundations, grantmaking, logic model, logic models, philanthropy, philanthropy, rational choice, rational choice theory, rationality, reason, social engineering, social science, social sciences, strategic philanthropy, technocracy, technocrat, theories of change, theory of change
Max Niedzwiecki, Ph.D., the principal of Daylight Consulting Group, is a social justice advocate, researcher, and fundraiser based in New Orleans.
The focus of people who work in philanthropy shifts in mysterious ways. Our attention spans are notoriously short. We might care about income inequality, for example, and see the issue come into sharp focus during the rise of the Occupy Movement. Weeks later, it’s old news. The same goes for topics such as the digital divide, social capital, collective impact – you name it. Areas of focus and styles of giving go in and out of fashion in philanthropy as quickly as couture changes on Paris runways.
All of this can leave the people who depend on foundation dollars, including social justice advocates, with a sense of powerlessness and anxiety, constantly scrambling to intuit and frame their work in the context of the next trend. And that can take a significant toll on their effectiveness.
Members of Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace (PSJP) – “a global network of philanthropy practitioners working to increase the impact of grantmaking for social justice and peace” – understand that research and communications are important tools for keeping philanthropy focused where it’s needed most. They also know that we need to learn more about what kinds of research and communications efforts make the most impact on the field.
PSJP has commissioned a study to deepen that understanding through consultation with a broad range of stakeholders including foundation staff, advocates, researchers, and beyond. The study, carried out by Daylight Consulting Group and the Center for Research and Innovation in Social Policy and Practice (CENTRIS), is gathering data through a short online survey and a series of in-depth interviews. The research questions include:
Please help advance the causes of social justice and peace by taking a few minutes to complete a brief survey, which can be accessed here, and contact the researchers at [email protected] if you have additional input to share.
Posted at 09:07 PM in Philanthropy | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: foundations, peace philanthropy, philanthropy for peace, social justice, social justice philanthropy
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
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.
Posted at 06:00 AM in Foundations, Philanthropy, Strategy, Theory | Permalink | Comments (2)
Tags: causal nexus, causality, cause, cause-effect, Davidson, Donald Davidson, effect, feedback, feedback loop, fishbone, foundations, grantmaking, logic model, philanthropy, system dynamics, theory of change
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
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.
Posted at 01:50 PM in Charity, Civil Society, Foundations, Philanthropy, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (2)
Tags: deserving poor, foundations, philanthropy, poor, poor laws, poverty, undeserving poor
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
Peter Singer’s op ed on the distinction between good and bad charity is a provocation. It’s a provocation because he makes a strong assertion—that his brand of Utilitarian ethics can help philanthropy “make the biggest possible impact in the world,” and because he supports this assertion with the barest hint of an argument. He presents what are typical Utilitarian-style dilemmas and invites the reader to resolve them—e.g., should you use a $100,000 gift to help build a new museum wing or to save 1,000 people from blindness?—but these thought experiments fall far short of establishing his thesis, and they suffer from a number of hair-raising leaps in logic that are, in my experience, typical of academic moral theory.* More troubling, perhaps, Singer takes great care to narrowly frame the choices faced by the average donor, magically reducing the breadth and complexity of these choices to a bare Utilitarian disjunction.
To understand Professor Singer’s point of view, it helps to know something about the theory of Utility developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and elaborated upon by scores of moral philosophers ever since. In a nutshell, Mill argues that when making a choice between two actions, we should choose the action that maximizes the overall “utility,” or, equivalently, that produces the most good. For Mill the greatest good, the summum bonum, was happiness, which he further defined as pleasure and the absence of suffering.
Note that this is not a theory about how people do in fact make moral choices; it’s a prescription for how we should make these choices. It’s intended to regulate rather than describe behavior. And it appears to lead us to right action in a wide variety of cases we encounter daily.
I will spare the reader the dizzying number of arguments made for and against Mill’s views; the creative variations (Rule Utilitarianism, Preference Utilitarianism, etc.); the head-spinning alternatives to Utilitarian-style theories. I will, however, sketch some of the most salient problems with the theory and invite the reader to do a little more research, weighing all these things in his or her heart:
1. The first challenge facing any prescriptive moral theory is the question of why we should accept it in the first place. There are, after all, competing formulations (e.g., the Golden Rule, the Categorical Imperative, etc.) that inspire what many of us would judge to be “moral” behavior, and that are not clearly equivalent to the Principle of Utility. Professor Singer criticizes the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) website because it asserts that there’s no objective answer to the question, ‘What is the most urgent issue that a donor might address?’ He then attempts to prove his point by sketching an argument grounded in the Principle of Utility. But since there is no deductively valid argument establishing the truth of the Principle of Utility, why should we accept his argument? I should clarify that there is no such deductively valid argument anywhere—not in Singer’s article, nor in his books, nor in anybody’s books. It’s not in these places because it doesn’t exist. Inductive arguments abound, but there is none that moral theorists universally judge to be strong. In light of this uncertainty, RPA’s assertion doesn’t seem so far off the mark.
So how do you make a case for any moral theory? At the very least you would want to show that the moral judgments generated by your theory accord best with those made by … whom? the Dalai Lama? Kim Kardashian? some other competent moral authority? If our theory doesn’t yield the judgments we expect, shouldn’t we abandon it? And here we come to a second problem with Singer’s argument …
2. The Principle of Utility appears to support some outrageous moral choices. Since Professor Singer is fond of hypothetical scenarios, here’s one of my favorites from college days. Imagine that in some post-apocalyptic world, you are a denizen of a nation of sadists. You take pleasure in watching other people experience pain. One day, the only other human being on earth chances across your borders and is taken prisoner. One of your number suggests that each day at six o’clock in the evening, the unfortunate prisoner, who is by no means a masochist, be tortured and that his torture be televised throughout the country bringing pleasure to hundreds of millions of sadists. As a good Utilitarian you reason that the pain inflicted on the prisoner is far outweighed by the overwhelming amount of pleasure you produce for your fellow citizens. If the Principle of Utility requires that we torture a human being for the pleasure of others, can it really be a guide for right action?
This is but one of hundreds of counterexamples adduced throughout the years to cast doubt on Utilitarian theories in their many variations. You can find a classic thought experiment, the so-called the “Trolley Problem,” and some of its cousins described here.
3. Those readers who are already on their second or third cup of coffee will have noticed some of the lacunae in my gloss of Utilitarian theory. How do we, except in a few very narrow cases, know what action will produce the most good? How can I measure the good I produce? And who gets to determine what it is that we should try to maximize—i.e., what it is that constitutes the “greatest good”?
On this last point, you will find a great deal of shimmy-shammying in Singer’s article. Initially, he asks us where a $100,000 donation will do the most good, without telling us what he assumes the nature of that good to be. In the very next sentence, we’re asked where this donation will “lead to the bigger improvement in the lives of those affected by it.” But is this the same as producing the most good? A little further on in the article, it’s “the biggest possible positive difference to the world” that we’re after, which then shifts immediately to “the most positive impact for your time and money.” Are these all equivalent? And if so, doesn’t Professor Singer need to establish that they are? And what, in instrumental terms, does any one of them mean? These are his formulations, but might not the greatest good for some be that we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves?
* * * * * *
Here’s the kicker: Professor Singer is intimately acquainted with these and many other objections to Utilitarian-style arguments. And yet he proposes to bring into philanthropic choice-making—as part of some purported “emerging international movement”— the same apparatus that has failed to win consensus in the domain of moral theory and that moreover, in the eyes of many, leads to manifestly bad, and, in some cases, horrifying moral choices!
Professor Singer is clearly counting on the philanthropic community to engage the argument and sort these issues out in reasoned debate. This, for reasons I’ve alluded to before, is not likely to happen.
In my view, the biggest challenge to Singer’s suggestion is the problem of the philanthropic “blank slate”— what I’ve called elsewhere the “Ur Question” in philanthropy. In Professor Singer’s scenarios, the choices for the donor have already been tightly narrowed: e.g., you either prevent blindness or you help open a new museum wing. Some form of Utilitarian reasoning might help you there. But many donors, when they start out on their philanthropic journeys, do not face such stark choices. They want to do the most good they can for the world but encounter an infinite number of possibilities. Is it better to fund direct services for the poor, or to fund the changing of those social, economic, and political structures that produce poor people in such prodigious numbers? It might be true that all lives have equal value, but do I or do I not have a greater responsibility to those in my own country? Shouldn’t I get my own house in order first?
These pressing questions are not addressed by Singer’s suggestion that, “In general, where human welfare is concerned, we will achieve more if we help those in extreme poverty in developing countries, as our dollars go much further there.” Nor is there the slightest hint in Singer’s article that we might maximize the Good by addressing the causes of extreme poverty in these countries. Once we start contemplating these and other options as donors, the space of possibilities becomes rather more crowded and the dream of a hedonistic calculus governing right behavior in philanthropy becomes that much more distant.
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* I had the opportunity to study moral theory as a graduate student and later taught it, both as a teaching fellow for Michael Sandel at Harvard University and as an assistant professor of philosophy at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. The strangest argument in Singer’s article is the one that proceeds as follows:
Suppose you have a choice between visiting the art museum, including its new wing, or going to see the museum without visiting the new wing. Naturally, you would prefer to see it with the new wing. But now imagine that an evil demon declares that out of every 100 people who see the new wing, he will choose one, at random, and inflict 15 years of blindness on that person. Would you still visit the new wing? You’d have to be nuts. Even if the evil demon blinded only one person in every 1,000, in my judgment, and I bet in yours, seeing the new wing still would not be worth the risk.
If you agree, then you are saying, in effect, that the harm of one person’s becoming blind outweighs the benefits received by 1,000 people visiting the new wing.
This last conclusion doesn’t follow at all from Singers’ premises. There are countless reasons why we might avoid the new wing without our being forced to accept the conclusion that “the harm of one person’s becoming blind outweighs the benefits received by 1,000 people visiting the new wing.” We might forego a visit, for example, because we know that there’s another equally good museum down the road that has no record of blinding its patrons through the effect of shadowy “demons.” We are not, in other words, forced to make the choice Professor Singer believes we must make.
Posted at 05:03 PM in Ethics, Philanthropy, Theory, Torture | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Bentham, charity, ethics, Greatest Happiness Principle, John Stuart Mill, Mill, morality, Peter Singer, philanthropy, Principle of Utility, Utilitarianism
Posted at 03:18 PM in Humor, Philanthropy, The New Philanthropy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: foundations, philanthropy
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.
Posted at 12:49 PM in Citizen Activism, Civil Rights, Culture Wars, Foundation Culture, Foundations, Human Rights, LGBT issues, Philanthropy, Social Change | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: a single man, bisexual, civil rights, DOMA, foundation, foundations, gay, human rights, isherwood, lesbian, lgbt, philanthropy, queer, Stonewall, Stonewall riots, transgender
The following article will appear in a special issue of the National Civic Review titled Philanthropy & Resident Engagement: The Promise for Democracy, available October 2013. It will feature case studies, reports, and essays on the resident engagement experiences of public and private foundations. This article was co-authored by Barry Knight, Director of CENTRIS-UK, and Albert Ruesga, President & CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
It goes by many names: citizen participation; community or resident engagement; “bottom-up” grantmaking; grassroots philanthropy. For some community foundations in the US, it’s a pro-forma exercise; for others, a source of power and pride. For a significant number it’s still little more than a fond dream, something wished for but somehow never attained.
When program officers and other community foundation leaders speak of stakeholder engagement, they often point to the desire to have their grantmaking interventions “informed” or “shaped” by the communities they serve. These philanthropic professionals might go a step further—at least rhetorically—and seek the “meaningful participation” of underserved communities in the design and leadership of grantmaking programs. The expression of these desires is sometimes motivated by a regard for democratic ideals or by a sincere respect for self-determination. It might spring from a deep respect for fairness or an adherence to some form of the Golden Rule. Stakeholder engagement might at times be sought to put a democratic patina on what are essentially elite decisions.
Whatever their source, calls for resident engagement have become normative in the field, as reflected, for example, in the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations publication titled Do Nothing About Me Without Me: An Action Guide for Engaging Stakeholders (Bourns, 2010). The primary argument here is one about efficacy: Foundations that engage stakeholders are “part of a growing movement in philanthropy—a movement founded on the belief that grantmakers are more effective to the extent that they meaningfully engage their grantees and other key stakeholders” (Bourns, 2010; 1, emphasis mine).
And yet, when do our efforts to make our grantmaking less “top-down” move from the token to the meaningful? Beyond the norms of professionalism, beyond the demands of our philanthropic technocracy, is there a moral dimension to the requirement that our grantmaking efforts be more citizen-informed and directed?
Fortunately for organized philanthropy, the issue of how to understand and assess resident engagement efforts is not new. In 1969, for example, Sherry Arnstein published a powerful article addressing these key issues (Arnstein, 1969). She proposed a typology, called the “ladder of citizen participation,” that has been widely used. Her typology looked like this:
Ultimately for Arnstein, citizen participation is about citizen power. The ladder reproduced in Figure 1 is designed to highlight the “critical difference between going through the empty ritual of participation and having the real power to affect the outcome of the process.” The higher up the ladder you go, the greater the degree of citizen empowerment. At rung four, for example, we invite citizen opinions but offer no assurance that these views will be heeded. At rung five, we place a token number of the “worthy” poor on advisory committees and the like, but “[i]f they are not accountable to a constituency in the community and if the traditional power elite hold the majority of seats, the have-nots can be easily outvoted and outfoxed” (Arnstein, 1969; 9). And so it goes as we climb or, in many cases, descend the ladder of engagement. For in the world of community foundations, the kind of resident engagement that Ms. Arnstein holds up as the ideal—full citizen control—is rare or perhaps nonexistent, at least in the US context.
In what follows, the authors attempt to answer three primary questions:
It’s certainly easy for community foundations to claim some form of citizen engagement. But as we shall see, there are reasons why it’s difficult to do well.
Posted at 03:00 AM in Art of Grantmaking, Citizen Activism, Civil Society, Foundation Culture, Foundations, Philanthropy, Social Change | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Arnstein, bottom-up philanthropy, community foundation, community foundations, foundations, grassroots grantmaking, philanthropy, resident engagement, Ruesga
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
One of the responsibilities of us older salts in the field of philanthropy is to ensure that we absolutely do not reproduce ourselves in the next generation.
I had the opportunity of spending an afternoon this past November with participants in the Council on Foundations’ Career Pathways Program. These were mostly younger people in the field who were preparing for the next steps in their careers. When I asked them what they wanted to be remembered for in philanthropy they produced the following list:
As I look at this list of aspirations five months later, I’m still humbled by it. Transformation, collaboration, honesty, empowerment, justice. There’s a lifetime of intense labor and, I would add, prayer, rolled into these goals. And I wonder: If we were to poll a room filled with the New Technocrats, would these be their bywords? Would the differences we observe (if any) be a matter of emphasis, or would they reveal deeper differences?
There are a number of affinity groups that focus on bringing together younger grantmakers. Their challenge, as I see it, is to avoid simply turning younger practitioners in the field into older practitioners in the field. How can these organizations most effectively encourage their members to give voice to their life-giving ideas without also causing them to lose their jobs? The unfortunate reality is that the culture of many foundations is based on a cult of personality, one in which the CEO sees himself as a kind of philanthropic auteur, characteristically limiting any inquiry, discussion, or action that might undermine his sense of institutional authorship.
Younger people in the field: take heart! We narrow-minded dinosaurs will someday go extinct! Your work will eventually help us find our soul, enabling us to lift ourselves out of the Tar Pit of Mediocrity!
Posted at 04:56 AM in Philanthropy | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Career Pathways, Council on Foundations, foundation, foundations, philanthropy, Ruesga
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
1. Human Motion, Human Action, and Causality
“One sure way to ruffle feathers at the normally staid Council on Foundations—the nation’s largest philanthropic membership organization—is to remind it of American philanthropy’s knee-deep involvement in eugenics,” writes Bill Schambra, director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. “Whenever an arrogant, insulated, wealthy elite begins to treat human beings as experimental subjects, the results are often disastrous, no matter how noble the intentions.”
Mr. Schambra goes on to argue that philanthropy’s shameful support for eugenics in the early decades of the 20th Century offers a cautionary tale about the wrongheadedness of searches for the root causes of our social ills. A proponent of eugenics would argue that one root cause of a dysfunctional society is its dysfunctional people: keep them from being born in the first place and your indicators for community health will naturally take a turn for the better.
Mr. Schambra’s attempts to get the foundation world to ‘fess up and apologize for its support of eugenics are of relatively recent vintage. By contrast, he has been waging war on so-called “root causes philanthropy” for at least a decade. I understand how a well-compensated technocrat, ensconced in his comfortable Manhattan office, might make a poor arbiter of the root causes of poverty, as Mr. Schambra argues. But social phenomena such as concentrated urban poverty, reality TV shows, and drone strikes have real causes just as much as do lightning flashes, apples falling from trees, and blocks sliding down inclined planes. These phenomena supervene on the physical world. They do not magically evade the causal nexus.
Social scientists, philosophers, and others learned long ago to distinguish between human motions (a person accidently falling off a chair, say) and human actions (a person jumping off a chair to mimic the way a diver jumps into a swimming pool). Human motions are unintentional; human actions have content and are interpretable. According to at least one school of thought,* the causes of our actions, however complex these actions might be, are often discernible by the reasons we give for them. So, for example, if we ask the person jumping off the chair about his behavior, he might say, “I jumped off the chair the way I did because I was playing with my daughter and we were pretending we were at a swimming pool.” What caused his jumping off the chair was his desire to amuse his daughter and his belief that simulating the actions of a diver would accomplish this goal.
In a similar vein, on any weekday afternoon you might hear Kai Ryssdal, host of NPR’s Marketplace program, report that “Worries about the Eurozone and jitters about North Korea sent the markets into a nosedive.” The behavior of financial markets, an extremely complicated social phenomenon, is explained, or so Mr. Ryssdal appears to claim, by these causes. And while Mr. Ryssdal’s causal attributions are pure folk psychology, they can, in principle, be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed. There is no arrogant overreaching at work here.
And so it goes with other human actions. One often hears in philanthropic circles that we cannot “attribute causality” to our grantmaking interventions. We can arguably attribute causality, and in a large number of interesting cases.
Philanthropy’s support for eugenics certainly offers a cautionary tale about the moral values and intellectual standards that drove foundation leaders in the early 20th century to embrace a pseudoscience that harmed many of their fellow citizens. But it says absolutely nothing about our ability or inability to discern the causes of even the most complicated real-world events.
2. Philanthropy as Applied Social Science?
To his credit, Mr. Schambra raises an important question about the relationship between philanthropy and the methods and aims of a wide variety of disciplines that fall under the rubric of the “social sciences,” a category that includes everything from anthropology to economics to political science and other disciplines that attempt to understand human action, either at the individual or collective level. One interesting aspect of these disciplines is that their practitioners don’t always agree on what constitutes an “understanding” or “explanation” of human behavior.
The great anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued that explaining human culture should be largely an interpretive exercise. “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” he wrote, “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”** Geertz’s views contrast with those of his more positivist peers—Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, who sought to explain human culture in terms of underlying cognitive structures that give rise to the regularities in human behavior observed by ethnographers.
I highlight this multiplicity of views on understanding or explaining human actions because, like it or not, those of us who work in the field of philanthropy are engaged in a kind of experimental social science. We make grants because we predict (or at least fervently hope) that our interventions will shift human behavior in certain hoped-for ways: individuals will swear off their drug use, community-based organizations will create affordable housing, Senator So-And-So will introduce legislation to allow convicted felons to vote in state elections. After we make our grants, we test our predictions and adjust our grantmaking accordingly.
Those of you with grantmaking experience know, however, that our interventions seldom, if ever, unfold as we predict they will. Our inability to predict human actions with a high degree of accuracy has been understood and discussed by philosophers, psychologists, social scientists and others longer than the field of organized philanthropy has been in existence. Yet those of us who work in foundations ignore these fundamental truths about the difficulties of predicting human behavior when, for example, we construct elaborate theories of change, or worse, when we inflict them on our grantees. These truths don’t absolve us of the responsibility to change or inspire human behavior, but they do place limits on our attempts to anticipate or direct the many twists and turns of the human heart.
If the idea of philanthropy as an experimental social science unnerves you as much as it does me, how would you re-conceptualize it in a way that the most “results-oriented” among us would find compelling? If the idea appeals to you, how would you suggest that philanthropy capture and teach the lessons learned long ago in allied fields, especially those lessons that might help save our grantees and the communities we serve from unnecessary suffering? As I’ve argued elsewhere, at any conference of grantmakers, a careful observer will witness how generally oblivious we are as a field to historical truths, to insights into the nature of culture and how it changes over time, to new research into the rationality of human actors. Our attention spans are short, our memories even shorter.
Is it perhaps better that we ignore these truths? We’ve already made a complete hash of the simple exercise of giving money to good people with good ideas and getting out of their way. Perhaps at this stage in our development as a field, a deeper knowledge of the many disciplines and traditions that inflect our work would only add to our dysfunction.
3. Lies, Damned Lies, and the Social Sciences
Social scientists make an easy mark for their critics. We’ve seen or heard tales of alienists whose pseudoscientific testimony landed convictions for innocent people; pointy-headed apologists for the human rights abuses of despotic governments; equally well-credentialed economists who’ve used the same data to come to opposite conclusions about the effects of quantitative easing. As a young student of physics, I was taught to mistrust any discipline compelled to append the word “science” to its name. And yet I also know that these same disciplines regularly make claims that satisfy Popper’s requirement that they be falsifiable, and that they have the tools—the application of reason, training in the scientific method, peer review—that enable them to do effective self-policing. Mr. Schambra, in his justified critique of foundation proponents of eugenics underplays the vocal minority who understood eugenics to be a pseudoscience or who simply denounced it on ethical grounds.
Social scientists certainly don’t need my defense of their work. And they can give back as good as they get. In the November 1958 edition of Political Research: Organization and Design, for example, Alfred de Grazia penned this stinging editorial:
[T]he solution of certain fundamental problems cannot be expected of foundation leaders. They cannot be asked to decide whether foundation resources might be better paid over directly to private universities. Nor can they be reproached for deficiencies of imagination and genius, inasmuch as these qualities are almost entirely lacking, or at least undiscoverable, in the greater environment that embraces foundations. …
Still, some element of criticism seems to be lacking in the atmosphere in which the free foundations work. The foundations do not know how to receive criticism and those who pay attention to foundations do not know how to give it. … There is altogether too much cringing and fawning by the actual and potential beneficiaries of foundation largesse …***
These lines of criticism are as relevant now as they were 55 years ago. I strongly suspect there are foundation leaders not yet born who will be ignoring these critiques 55 years from now.
However chummy or antagonistic the relationship between foundations and social scientists might be in the year 2068, I’m convinced that they need one another now. Without the contributions of good social science, and without philanthropy’s enhanced ability to tell good social science from bad, grantmakers will forever flail about ineffectively. There is good social science on the causes of concentrated poverty in America: we don’t need to send so-called thought leaders to Bellagio or Davos to opine on the cure for this particular social ill, at least as it manifests itself in the US context. Some foundation leaders have had the moral courage to put race, class, and power on the table. We now need the courage to address these issues with every tool available to us, including the kinds of data and rigor the social sciences bring, married to the values that animated the life of St. Vincent de Paul, who vowed in his work never to forget the face of the poor.
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* Cf. Donald Davidson’s Essays on Actions & Events
** Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures
*** Many thanks to my colleague Jeff Ubois for finding and sending this gem
Posted at 09:36 PM in Philanthropy, Theory | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Bradley Center, eugenics, foundations, Hudson Institute, human action, philanthropy, social science, social sciences, William Schambra. Schambra
P O S T E D B Y S A L L Y
Editor’s note: We publish occasional messages sent to us by the Countess Apraxina. She and former White Courtesy Telephone editor Albert Ruesga became friends after meeting at a Tolstoi Foundation reception many years ago. According to Albert, the two spent the rest of the evening drinking Champagne Martinis and pretending to share a fondness for the works of Turgenev. The Countess consistently and mistakenly refers to Albert as Alyosha ...
My Dearest Alyosha:
I am surprise to see my new assistant, Ivan, read your blonk. He tell me he is on payroll of Vikki Spruill who as you know is безумный [ed: crazy] for foundations. Poor Ivan is dangerously bored with your writing so you will stop immediately. Yesterday he dissolve 50 Ambiens in Big Gulp frozen daiquiri. But don’t worry, my little turkey waddle, he did not drink. As he hold cup to lips he say, “Inducing state of eternal nothingness would be redundant after reading White Courtesy Telephones!”
How tedious you have become, my little zaychik, and I mean this only in nicest way. As we say in old country, “Guilt is rope that wears thin quickly.” Much better to make powerful people feel good about themselves. We are the winners, Alyosha. Don’t lecture us about truth. We eat truth for breakfast with side of sausage.
You will call me on cell, please, to tell me how much you admire me and because I need your advice. Am working on new Impact Investments project for Global Philanthropy Forums. We are going to bring power to villages in rural India by passing electricity through people too hungry to move. This will stimulate activity at Bottoms of Pyramid. Villagers will then use electricity to shop on Amazon. Investors get 3 percent of every purchase over 10 Rupees.
I have foot massage at four o’clock your time but call me after. Ciao.
— Countess Apraxina
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Other messages from the Countess:
Posted at 05:31 PM in Countess Apraxina, Humor, Impact Investing, Philanthropy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Apraxina, bottom of pyramid, Countess Apraxina, Impact Investing, philanthropy
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
A version of these remarks was delivered at an event titled Is Philanthropy Killing Itself With Kindness? organized by Bill Schambra, director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. The event was based on a provocative Chronicle of Philanthropy article written by Caroline Preston.
I.
Thank you, Bill, for this invitation to continue the conversation that Caroline started in her Chronicle of Philanthropy article.
Some of us have had the good fortune of working alongside the “great souls of philanthropy,” grantmakers who are self-effacing and self-critical and who see their work as belonging to a moral tradition that stretches back thousands of years.
Others of us have had the experience of working with professionals in philanthropy whose egos suck all the oxygen out of a room, who give out pats on the head and strut about like big chickens only dimly aware of their moral disfigurement … and I mean this only in the nicest possible way! To those of you who’ve witnessed this less attractive side of philanthropy, you might justifiably marvel at the thesis that philanthropy is killing itself with kindness.
But it is, my friends, it is.
And here I need to make a distinction: By “philanthropy” I’m not referring to the generosity of individuals and families and others who’ve given of their own wealth, sometimes at great sacrifice, to help others who are less fortunate, or who’ve given to help fill our lives with music and art.
I’m referring largely to the benthic creatures, like myself, who inhabit foundations established with other people’s money.
Something strange and, frankly, something a little creepy happens when human beings gather around mountains of un-earned cash, much as we witness unwholesome transformations of character when family members gather around the casket of a wealthy great aunt who has no heirs and whose last will and testament has been pronounced. My friends, it can get ugly.
And yet in spite of this incipient creepiness, we end up killing ourselves with kindness. How is this possible?
II.
Let’s exclude the general middle class niceness that permeates the field of organized philanthropy. We see this kind of politeness in every major American institution.
The kind of niceness I’m convinced is killing philanthropy is the kind that keeps us from speaking the truth to one another—or at least, from expressing what we take to be the truth.
We learn very early on in our careers to self-edit every “no, but” into a “yes, and,” partly because it’s considered rude to directly contradict a colleague. To posit a competing point of view would require us to work out the actual truth of the matter, if there is one, by adducing facts and exercising our reason. Instead we throw every half-cocked idea that pops into our heads onto a piece of flipchart paper and call it a day.
Why do we do this? What’s the danger here of being a little less nice and a little more forthcoming?
When the interaction is peer-to-peer, there are several forces at play. First, there’s a kind of sentimentalism in the philanthropic sector that holds that every point of view is equally valuable, however benumbed or just plain false it might be. Just as in the film The Meaning of Life every sperm is sacred, in philanthropy every witless idea gets pride of place on the benighted flipchart. This is a vestige, perhaps, of the ravages of postmodern thinking on the American academy, which destroyed an entire generation of young minds and continues to fuel the relativism we see in many aspects of American culture. Second, because there’s so much mobility in the field of philanthropy, the colleague that you disgruntle today might well become the foundation executive who controls the stream of funding to your organization tomorrow.
Keep in mind the fact that there is no reward system in philanthropy (as there sometimes is in academia) for exposing or avoiding fuzzy thinking. On the contrary: foundation CEOs who feed their trustees on a steady diet of pure baloney appear to me to stand a better chance of holding onto their jobs. Nor does any kind of tenure protect the outspoken. Instead, it’s often the case that the squeaky wheel gets the grief. And because in philanthropy we are accountable to no one but God and the law, we don’t feel any great pressure to expose ourselves to the “salutary qualities of an external discipline,” as one of my colleagues once described it.
Things get especially dicey when a program officer, for example, expresses his unedited opinion to a powerful foundation CEO. This, in the parlance of my field, is a “career-limiting move.” I have on many occasions heard one of these powerful CEOs deliver 15 minutes of uninterrupted piffle from the conference dais only to see him surrounded by fawning admirers assuring the speaker that his talk was the crowning experience of their lives. Unfortunately, the truth bends around the powerful people in our field the way light bends around massive objects in space.
And so in this and other ways, truth often becomes the first casualty of philanthropy.
III.
How does our tendency to behave as craven colleagues or fawning lickspittles kill philanthropy? After all, don’t we see this kind of behavior in every field?
There are, I believe, many kinds of philanthropic truth that we need to own and debate and teach and insist on before we can move forward as a field, but we don’t do this to any substantial degree. I would argue—if I could find somebody to argue with, which of course I can’t, because we’re all so busy being nice to one another—I would argue that this issue, organized philanthropy’s uneasy relationship to various kinds of truth, is at the heart of numerous befuddlements in our sector.
I strongly believe, for example, that there are many practical truths about grantmaking that we need to champion. And yet I might forego expressing these truths when my colleague tries to force a merger between two organizations; when he refuses to let his grant money be used for salaries and other kinds of “overhead”; or when he wears his grantees down to stumps by convening them with excessive frequency. A hundred years of experience have taught our field that these practices—and many others like them—should be roundly condemned, that there are in fact better and worse ways of making grants. And yet I sit on my hands and “yes, and” the offender into a warm pool of self-satisfaction.
There are other kinds of truth in philanthropy that come to us not by experience, but by the work of many great thinkers who preceded us. We don’t speak these truths to one another because many of us are unaware of them; or worse, we’re aware of them but dare not offend others by insisting on them. So, for example, periodically you’ll hear the canard that we can’t “attribute causality” to the kinds of social interventions that foundations fund, when in fact we can attribute causality in large classes of cases, even in those cases where our desired outcome is some change in human behavior. The great pioneers in the field of causality in the social sciences—Georg Henrik von Wright, H. L. A. Hart, Tony Honoré, Donald Davidson—are largely unknown in philanthropy, even to the professional evaluators who serve the nonprofit sector. Some of these same truths about the nature of causality in the social sciences would, if widely debated, undermine the great faith many of us place in the construction of so-called theories of change—painful exercises we often inflict on our grantees.
At any conference of grantmakers you will hear us trample like unfeeling cattle on historical truths, on truths about the interpretation of texts, on insights into the nature of culture and how it changes over time, on new research into the rationality of human actors—without anyone, except perhaps Bill Schambra, raising his voice in protest.
We don’t speak the truth to one another because we’re afraid of exposing our assumptions, our frameworks for understanding the world, our biases, to intelligent scrutiny. These assumptions and frameworks shape the way we approach grantmaking and they should be made explicit and vigorously debated because 90 percent of the time we are simply mistaken or see only a small part of the truth. Are we or are we not living in a post-racial America? What does an equitable society look like? I doubt that in my lifetime we will publicly debate these great questions in philanthropy; we will not run the risk of offending one another; we will not derail the gravy train or in any way threaten our comfortable sinecures.
IV.
To ask about the place of truth in philanthropy is to raise, in my view, the most fundamental question about the nature of grantmaking practice: What kind of enterprise are we?
Are we a kind of applied sociology in which we’re given so many dollars to maximize a posited social good? Is that what we’re about?
Alternatively, since our practice is rooted in a moral tradition, are the truths we should most concern ourselves with moral truths?
Or are we a managerial field, a possibility lamented by my friend and colleague, Phil Cubeta, who writes in his GiftHub blog:
The wealthy through foundations and nonprofits manage social change via inputs, outputs, outcomes and petty rules and management hierarchies that denature a potentially revolutionary social movement of the disenfranchised into a well managed and non-threatening project to assist the disadvantaged upon their release from the State Penitentiary …
“Could it be,” he asks, “that philanthropy is ... the expression of a managerial tradition, of a capitalist, and technocratic, rather than moral tradition?”
If we’re not entirely a technocratic field, are we perhaps a hybrid field that can and should borrow thoughtfully from many disciplines?
I suspect we’ll never get the chance to settle this question. Our kindness will keep us burning through hundreds of millions of donor dollars, wearing our little triumphs like great badges of honor, untouched by the blinding, often unkind, light of reason.
V.
A few disclaimers before I close: Any resemblance between characters I’ve described in my talk and actual persons alive or dead is purely coincidental, as is any correspondence between what I’ve said and the actual truth of the matter. The author would especially like to exclude from any criticism, implied or otherwise, all those present at this gathering, whom I hold in the highest regard, knowing well that you and I, unlike other possible persons, cannot possibly fall into the conceptual and moral traps I’ve described, and that you constitute a body of exceptional people, filled to bursting with the highest moral intentions, and are more than worthy of the kind of praise that might in other situations be deemed excessive.
With that said, thank you for hearing me out! Really, you’ve been too kind!
Posted at 10:16 PM in Philanthropy, Theory | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Albert Ruesga, Bill Schambra, Bradley Center, foundations, Hudson Institute, 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?
Posted at 07:50 PM in Foundations, Philanthropy, Social Change | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: council on foundations, foundations, Gara Lamarche, philanthropy, philanthropy on trial, Ralph Smith, social change
Big Data is getting to be big news in philanthropy. A team of researchers at the University of Schmerz am Überhogen recently starting analyzing a large database compiled by a consortium of Bavarian foundations. They used anomaly detection and dependency modeling techniques to sift through 700 petabytes (700 x 1015 bytes) of digitized conference plenaries and flip chart notes.
In a paper recently published in the Überhogenerzeitungsgebrungensjournal, these researchers reported finding a very striking linear correlation between the age of grantee organizations and the year of their founding. They also uncovered a series of highly “cohesive” (German: kohäsiv) data patterns, one of which is displayed below:
Posted at 02:31 AM in Humor, Philanthropy, Theory | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: big data, data, data mining, foundations, philanthropy
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?
Posted at 05:07 AM in Foundation Culture, Foundations, Humor, Nonprofits, Philanthropy, The New Philanthropy, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Bellagio, big data, Bottom of Pyramid, Davos, foundation, foundations, networked, non-profit, nonprofit, philanthropy, voucher
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
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.
-----
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.
Posted at 05:30 AM in Education, Foundation Culture, Foundations, Humor, Philanthropy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: anthropology, behavioral economics, cultural anthropology, forensic linguistics, foundation, foundations, philanthropy
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