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Lessons in Strategic Philanthropy: How To Do Things With Humans

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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.

 

 

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The Philanthropic Undead and the Untimely Death of George Falconer

I.

Please, God, don’t let the stewardess see me lose it.   I turn towards the window and switch off the overhead light.  Fortunately the nice woman next to me is asleep, drooling into her lap.  I’ve just finished reading Isherwood’s A Single Man and the novel has taken me back to 1965, the year it was published, four years before the Stonewall riots.  I was a seven-year-old sissy boy then, just beginning to understand that something wasn’t right with me.  In those days, I was forgiven my soft, pre-pubescent voice.  But the way I walked, the way I sat, how I rested my head on my hands—these, I learned, would betray me in what was a man’s world through and through.

These tell-tale traits were dutifully corrected by my well-meaning mother who, I learned many years later, had always wished she had been born a boy.  I remember how once she went so far as to criticize the way I slept.  Even as a child I had to laugh out loud at this conceit.  “How can I control the way I sleep?” I protested.  But she mimicked the disposition of my arms and legs while I dozed and I had to agree that I looked damningly efeminado.  Maybe I could carry this comic image of myself into my dreams and let it shame me while I lay prone, straightening my limbs and clenching my fists.  Perhaps the next morning I could do my mother one better, stirring in a manly way and, to her great delight, roaring awake like a true hombre.

It had been a long day with many flight delays and I was weeping from exhaustion for George Falconer, the gay protagonist of Isherwood’s novel.  His death didn’t disturb me: it was quite beautiful the way the author described it, how the “long day ends at last; yields to the nighttime of the flood.” George had a lovely passing.  I was devastated instead by the misery of his life: his painful self-awareness, his continuous self-editing, his inability to share freely what he felt most deeply.  His mother, or perhaps his father, had made the appropriate adjustments to him when he was a child.  And I realized with a stab of pain that there were seven-year-old sissy boys alive today who were just beginning their journey of self-hatred; that there were seven-year-old black children being bidden by their parents to be strong so they could survive in what was a white man’s world; that all over the planet, the journey was beginning again and again, and that what power I had to keep these truths from flooding over me was already spent.

II.

I had been in Chicago with many thoughtful colleagues to discuss how we might fix philanthropy.  Not generosity—that needed no repair—but so-called “organized philanthropy.”  In the course of our deliberations the happy news arrived that DOMA had been struck down and we shared some moments of joy.  There was a long road ahead, as well as behind us, but time, we felt, was on our side.  To add to the feeling of celebration, here I was in a room strangely devoid of ego and self-promotion, in the middle of a conversation that had somehow taken a sharp turn towards the subject of humility in grantmaking.  Humility!  In the work of foundations!  In a field where so many once level-headed people had had their souls sucked from their bodies, leaving shells of self-important goo to strut about opining and intoning.

I speak with authority about these creatures because I’m one of their tribe, seeing all the less flattering aspects of my own character reflected in theirs.  We’re so unremarkable—we, the philanthropic undead; our great sin, the sin of pride, so petty in its expression.  An unattractive lack of empathy; periodic bouts of arrogance; prophetic curses cast upon the more flamboyant evil-doers.  We’re easy to spot because we often match the meanness of our wrongdoing with the meager good that we produce.

I’m reminded of this last point because there’s something in the air these days, a voice speaking to me from the past, lifted above the shouts of “Gay power!” and the choruses of We Shall Overcome still emanating from the streets in front of the Stonewall Inn.  According to one account of that time:

A scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs was escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon several times.  She escaped repeatedly and fought with four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. Described as “a typical New York butch” and “a dyke—stone butch,” she had been hit on the head by an officer with a billy club for, as one witness claimed, complaining that her handcuffs were too tight.  Bystanders recalled that the woman, whose identity remains unknown, sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at them and shouted, “Why don’t you guys do something?” After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went “berserk.”

We, the philanthropic undead, have never gone berserk over anything.  In this country, we are an informed tribe.  We know about drone strikes, racism, elections bought and sold, environmental depravity.  These barely quicken our pulse.  Going berserk is the response of a person sorely in need of a logic model.

III.

It was many years ago and I was sitting at a long table lined with academics.  One of these described the research he had just conducted on the role of philanthropy in the civil rights movement.  Turns out that foundations were circumspect and very slow on the draw.  They came round eventually, as they did with many progressive movements, when all the difficult work had already been done.  Even then they played a minor role. 

I, the self-appointed spokesman for the philanthropic undead, was indignant.  I knew personally of many instances in which foundations had taken great risks to advance the cause of social justice.  Here I had in front of me yet another uninformed foundation-basher.  But still his thesis gnawed at me for years, and the more I tried to negate it, the more clearly I saw how the exceptions proved the rule.

The Movement for Gender Equality, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring—we will let them spend their rage and bury their dead.  After that, we will convene them and fund those who know how to speak to their betters.   This is what’s called “being pragmatic,” taking care not to bite the hand that feeds you.  This is photo opp philanthropy, the kind that smiles for the camera as it places one foot on a trophy that others had the courage to bag.

IV.

So, my love, I’m coming home to you exhausted.  I’m coming home to celebrate with you the striking down of a law that should not have been passed in the first place, in a state that doesn’t recognize our union.  And poor George—do you remember him?  George is dead.  I hold Isherwood’s account of his passing in my hands.  Over him

and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean—that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars.

That consciousness that is Mother and Father Stonewall.
That consciousness that is the one struggle for justice—for the young girls murdered because they wanted to learn; for the bull dykes, the genderqueers, the sissy boys we failed.
The one consciousness that floats like a jet in the great black void of heaven.

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

The following article will appear in a special issue of the National Civic Review titled Philanthropy & Resident Engagement: The Promise for Democracy, available October 2013.  It will feature case studies, reports, and essays on the resident engagement experiences of public and private foundations.  This article was co-authored by Barry Knight, Director of CENTRIS-UK, and Albert Ruesga, President & CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

It goes by many names: citizen participation; community or resident engagement; “bottom-up” grantmaking; grassroots philanthropy.  For some community foundations in the US, it’s a pro-forma exercise; for others, a source of power and pride.  For a significant number it’s still little more than a fond dream, something wished for but somehow never attained.

When program officers and other community foundation leaders speak of stakeholder engagement, they often point to the desire to have their grantmaking interventions “informed” or “shaped” by the communities they serve.  These philanthropic professionals might go a step further—at least rhetorically—and seek the “meaningful participation” of underserved communities in the design and leadership of grantmaking programs.  The expression of these desires is sometimes motivated by a regard for democratic ideals or by a sincere respect for self-determination.  It might spring from a deep respect for fairness or an adherence to some form of the Golden Rule.  Stakeholder engagement might at times be sought to put a democratic patina on what are essentially elite decisions. 

Whatever their source, calls for resident engagement have become normative in the field, as reflected, for example, in the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations publication titled Do Nothing About Me Without Me: An Action Guide for Engaging Stakeholders (Bourns, 2010). The primary argument here is one about efficacy: Foundations that engage stakeholders are “part of a growing movement in philanthropy—a movement founded on the belief that grantmakers are more effective to the extent that they meaningfully engage their grantees and other key stakeholders” (Bourns, 2010; 1, emphasis mine).

And yet, when do our efforts to make our grantmaking less “top-down” move from the token to the meaningful?  Beyond the norms of professionalism, beyond the demands of our philanthropic technocracy, is there a moral dimension to the requirement that our grantmaking efforts be more citizen-informed and directed?

Fortunately for organized philanthropy, the issue of how to understand and assess resident engagement efforts is not new.  In 1969, for example, Sherry Arnstein published a powerful article addressing these key issues (Arnstein, 1969).  She proposed a typology, called the “ladder of citizen participation,” that has been widely used.  Her typology looked like this:

Ultimately for Arnstein, citizen participation is about citizen power.  The ladder reproduced in Figure 1 is designed to highlight the “critical difference between going through the empty ritual of participation and having the real power to affect the outcome of the process.”  The higher up the ladder you go, the greater the degree of citizen empowerment.  At rung four, for example, we invite citizen opinions but offer no assurance that these views will be heeded.  At rung five, we place a token number of the “worthy” poor on advisory committees and the like, but “[i]f they are not accountable to a constituency in the community and if the traditional power elite hold the majority of seats, the have-nots can be easily outvoted and outfoxed” (Arnstein, 1969; 9).  And so it goes as we climb or, in many cases, descend the ladder of engagement.  For in the world of community foundations, the kind of resident engagement that Ms. Arnstein holds up as the ideal—full citizen control—is rare or perhaps nonexistent, at least in the US context. 

In what follows, the authors attempt to answer three primary questions:

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

It’s certainly easy for community foundations to claim some form of citizen engagement.  But as we shall see, there are reasons why it’s difficult to do well.

Double Jeopardy for Philanthropy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sullivan Principles” for Progressive Funders?

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

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

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

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

Here are some I would introduce for discussion:

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

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

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

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

"Where Are The Bodies Coming From?" And Other Essential Questions

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I delivered the following remarks at a Hudson Institute panel titled, “What is Social Justice Philanthropy?” Fellow panelists included Christine Doby of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation; Thomasina H. Williams, formerly of the Ford Foundation; and University of Texas Professor Peter Frumkin.  Hudson Institute Senior Fellow William Schambra moderated the discussion.

I.

As one of my uncles used to say when he first came to the United States and was mastering English: I am very exciting to be here.

Thank you, Bill, for inviting me to speak today; and thank you, Kristen, for all your help in getting us here. Special thanks, of course, to the Hudson Institute for hosting us even after all the terrible things I’ve said about it.

And thank you all so much for coming out today to reflect on and discuss social justice philanthropy.

By way of a preface to my remarks, which I assure you will constitute the crowning experience of your lunch hours, if not your lives, I wanted to say a few brief words about the paper I co-authored with Deborah Puntenney, very grandly titled, “Social Justice Philanthropy: An Initial Framework for Positioning This Work.” (This is the paper that Bill recommended for your edification and is available via a link on the Bradley Center website.)

The paper was commissioned by an entity called the Working Group on Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace, which had its roots—like so many other nefarious, liberal things—at the Ford Foundation.  Christopher Harris, who was then a senior program officer at Ford, brought together a group of smart, big-hearted people and me so that we could not only grouse about liberal philanthropy-as-usual but also perhaps do something about it.

We were united then, as we are now, by two things:  One was a wide-ranging critique of mainstream liberal philanthropy, a critique that took aim at its assumptions, its analyses, its values, its strategies, its methods—the whole bowl of popcorn.

The second thing that united us was a vision of the way that liberal philanthropy could be practiced, should be practiced, in order to make a real and lasting impact on the lives of the poor and other marginalized groups.

Now I have a confession to make: We struggled mightily to define philanthropy for social justice and peace.  And it was because a number of us got so fed up with that discussion that we decided to write the article I mentioned earlier.

So you see, one of the purposes of the paper was to get people to stop arguing about the definition of social justice philanthropy and here we are with an entire panel dedicated to that purpose!

This should convince the skeptic that there is at least some kind of justice in the world.

II.

The paper essentially argues that philanthropy for social justice and peace is a whole family of grantmaking traditions.

We identified eight such traditions in the paper. We didn’t include some because we wanted, quite frankly, to help preserve the sanity of our readers. I’m a huge fan of John Rawls, for example, but you won’t find the social contract tradition mentioned anywhere in the article.

Many social justice grantmakers, though certainly not all, focus on helping the least well off in society. I’m informed by my colleague Akwasi Aidoo, who’s the director of Trust Africa, that merchants of Arab descent suffer terrible discrimination in Senegal. They are by no means the least well off in Senegalese society, but their cause is rightly the concern of grantmakers who care about social justice. 

Many of these grantmakers, but again not all, attempt to change the political, economic, and social structures that drive whole communities of people into poverty or into second-class citizenship. Some focus exclusively on empowering individuals politically so they have the means to vote their oppressors out of office. Still others believe that market forces can most effectively eliminate the causes of social disparities.  And some—because I know my colleague Bill Schambra will try to raise this point—don’t really give a flea’s nipple about the root causes of our social ills. For them, philanthropy for social justice is not the same as Bill’s benighted “root causes philanthropy” which he’s been attempting to stamp out for the past 90 years.  These grantmakers argue that you don’t have to dig around too much to find the causes of many injustices: these causes are in plain sight.

Far more interesting than the question, “What is social philanthropy?” in my view, are the questions, “How do you do it well?” and “Why is it important?”

III.

I’ll leave the question of how you do it well to our discussion this afternoon, if anyone wants to ask, but I will say this about its significance.

There are hundreds—perhaps thousands—of practitioners across the world who self-identify as social justice grantmakers.  It constitutes, I would argue, one of the largest schools of thought in contemporary philanthropy.

There is often, in much of social justice philanthropy, an implied critique of liberal philanthropy-as-usual. The image that always comes to mind is a group of grantmakers standing by a river, pulling drowned, injured, half-dead bodies out of the water, bandaging some and burying others, but never thinking to wander upstream to find out where these bodies are coming from and why.

Venturing to ask that question, “Where are the bodies coming from?” is the essence of philanthropy for peace and social justice.

Championing what I’ve called social justice philanthropy, by the way, implies no critique of charity, or checkbook philanthropy.  It does imply, in my view, that if you’re trying to end poverty, or reform public education, or make housing affordable, then you’d be a fool not to attend to the social justice dimensions of the issue you’re addressing.

In this way, philanthropy for social justice and peace is intimately connected to ongoing discussions in the field about measurable impact and strategic giving.  For a very wide range of social issues, the effectiveness of the grantmaker is profoundly compromised if he fails to consider such things as the effects of racism or sexism; the manner in which power and privilege are held and brokered in a given community; the structural arrangements that benefit one caste at the expense of another; and a host of other factors that are typically the focus of the social justice grantmaker.

IV.

Lest I be accused of attempting to skirt the question that brought us here today, I do want to admit that I have a dog in the definitional fight. I quiver like a bowl of lime Jello whenever I consider the Shared Values tradition of social justice philanthropy outlined in the paper. This tradition asserts that social justice can be most effectively promoted by appealing to universal or near-universal values. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a special genius for reminding us of values that we share, values like liberty and fairness.

Our sense of fairness is especially powerful.  There’s a long line of thinkers—John Rawls among them, by the way—stretching back thousands of years, who saw justice as a kind of fairness.

What’s most interesting to me about our sense of fairness is that it doesn’t appear to be confined to the human species.  In 2003, researchers taught a group of capuchin monkeys to exchange tokens for food.  Usually when these monkeys swapped a token, they got a piece of cucumber in return. But if one of these capuchins saw another monkey get a grape—a more desirable food—then all hell would break lose.

The offended monkey would fling poo; or decry the researchers’ liberal bias; or simply become sullen and uncooperative.

The scientists who conducted this experiment suggested that capuchins might share, to some degree, our sense of fairness.

We know from our own experience that a sense of fairness crosses party lines and international borders. In our country, there’s wide agreement that there should be no public laws, policies, or procedures that overtly or inadvertently discriminate against women, racially defined groups, groups defined by religion, and others to diminish their life chances.

Put another way, many of us agree that the playing field should be level for all.

But there is, as many of you know, strong evidence that the playing field has not been level for all, and that this unlevel playing field has undermined our human and social capital.  The evidence comes in three forms:

First, there are in fact discriminatory laws, policies, and procedures that affect whole classes of individuals.  For example, discrimination against gay and lesbian people in employment, housing, and other domains is still legal in many states.  And there are many examples of legal discrimination affecting other groups, including so-called “zero-tolerance” disciplinary policies in public schools, and laws that make it difficult for ex-offenders to find jobs and reintegrate into society once they’ve paid their dues.

Second there is strong evidence that racism and other forms of bigotry continue to affect the lives of individuals and the communities they belong to. This evidence comes not only from the lived experience of individuals who suffer sometimes daily assaults on their dignity, but also from empirical research that continues to document the effects of explicit and/or unconscious bigotry. Decades of matched pair tests and other studies, for example, have provided strong evidence of racial bias in the workplace and other domains. 

Finally, focusing just on race for the moment, the disparities in health, housing, education, employment, and other outcomes between black Americans and white Americans appear too great and too persistent to be explained solely as the historical artifacts of slavery and Jim Crow. To review some of what’s inside the chamber of horrors:

• 69 percent of black children can’t read at grade level in the 4th grade, compared with 29 percent of white children. (That 29 percent of white children can’t read at grade level in the 4th grade is itself completely barbarous.)
• One-and-a-half million black men out of a total voting population of 10.4 million have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions.
• One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is under correctional supervision or control.
• Close to half of all black children live below the federal poverty line (a bar that’s set embarrassingly low).
• The net worth of black families is $6,100; the net worth of white families is $67,000.  

Even if we disagree about the causes of these disparities, we can agree that these disparities hurt us all and require a special effort to address them.  They undermine the human and social capital we need to advance economically, and they can lead to social unrest and worse.

V.

So there we have it. 

Justice as a kind of fairness.

Social justice philanthropy as an alternative to what I sometimes call “philanthropy in bad faith.”

Social justice philanthropy as a challenge to those who, for example, want to reform public education, but haven’t the slightest clue why, at one point in our history, we let our public schools start falling down around the ears of children who are black and poor.

I realize this is a tough sell.  I’m reminded of the Italian proverb that everybody loves justice—in the affairs of another.  But I’m also inspired by Matt Groening’s observation that while the courts may not be working any more, as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, there’s still a chance that justice will be done.

Thank you!

The Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule

Until those of us who are progressive funders and advocates learn to better coordinate our efforts, we will lose consistently to the well bankrolled forces who oppose us.

Here’s the good news: we don’t have to sit through tedious convenings or master the newest social media technologies to attain this coordination.  To borrow from the language of the Wall Street occupiers, there is a no-cost “horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based” way to work together more effectively for social justice.

The idea is simple: The next time an issue—let’s say it’s immigration reform—garners sustained national public attention, all of us who are progressive funders, advocates, and community organizers should drop whatever we’re doing and get behind the issue. Even if immigration reform is not our thing, we should devote a substantial part of our organizations’ resources to helping the progressive advocates for that issue win their legislative or policy victory.

Call this the “Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule,” if you like.

Recall what happened two years ago during the national debates on health care reform.  Here was an issue that would affect the fates of people in low-income communities for years to come.  Yet while many health advocates struggled valiantly to win support for a national health care system, I saw many more activists ignore the issue because it simply wasn’t theirs.  They saw themselves as education advocates, or housing advocates, or criminal justice reform advocates, or something other than simply advocates for low-income people.

Imagine what would have happened if funders, advocates, and community organizers across the country had adopted the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule.  Imagine if the voices in the pews, in the schools, in the neighborhood centers had been able to shout down the policy-makers who had been bought by powerful interests.

Now in the advent of the Arab Spring, with the rise of multiple people-led movements in the United States, we’ll be challenged again to break out of our siloes and support Americans who are taking to the streets for economic justice.

Consider supporting the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule.  Bring it up and debate it with your friends and colleagues.  If you have other ideas for coordinating progressive action, please share them.  How do we keep progressive advocacy from becoming a random walk? 

 

What is Social Justice Philanthropy?

Editors’ note: This article will appear in the December issue of Alliance Magazine, a respected international journal on philanthropy and social investment.  Why a respectable journal  would invite WCT blogger Albert Ruesga to submit his usual screed is anybody’s guess.  The article will appear as part of a special feature on social justice philanthropy.  To find out more, visit the Alliance Magazine website.  Subscription information is available here.  We kept the British spelling and orthography because we thought it looked classy ...

Pick a hundred foundations at random and examine their grantmaking guidelines, and you’ll be struck by how many of them are committed to helping low-income and otherwise marginalized communities. Programmes to alleviate hunger and eliminate homelessness; initiatives to increase access to quality healthcare and education; efforts to help immigrants integrate into their adopted countries – all these are common. Talk with those who work in the philanthropic sector and you’ll find many who’ve dedicated their careers to helping the poor. Given this significant investment of philanthropic money and effort in addressing the needs of the indigent, one might wonder why there’s a felt need for a special kind of philanthropy, a ‘social justice philanthropy’, which purportedly aims to do more for marginalized communities than typical, run-of-the-mill grantmaking.

Is it a conceptual error to append the words ‘social justice’ to the word ‘philanthropy’? Is it a redundancy, perhaps, or some kind of provocation?

If you interview those who self-identify as ‘social justice grantmakers’, you’ll notice a significant degree of dissatisfaction with philanthropy as it’s usually practised. A programme designed to assist the poor, for example, might help a few lucky families lift themselves out of poverty, but it will not generally address the factors that drive families into poverty in the first place and then keep them there. These factors include, among others, structural racism, unfair laws and just plain bigotry. Social justice grantmakers aim to go one step beyond teaching a man to fish, to borrow an old saying. They ask why so few people in this man’s community can afford to own a fishing pole; why the county incinerator is being sited in his neighbourhood, befouling his pond rather than that of his wealthier townsmen; and why he’s being taught to fish when he’s more likely to earn a living wage as an accountant or engineer.

Beyond these critiques of philanthropy-as-usual, social justice philanthropists embrace ends, practices and values that tend to set them apart from other grantmakers. To achieve a world without injustice, they begin their work with an analysis of the forces that contribute to inequities. They attempt to understand the effects of membership in oppressed classes of people, looking at their work through the lenses of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and membership in other social categories that experience unjust treatment. Because the mechanisms of oppression sometimes appear faceless, they analyse the myriad ways in which institutional structures contribute to injustice. These structures include the policies that govern institutions, their practices, their cultures and their relationships with one another and with the communities they’re meant to serve. These grantmakers also try to understand how power in its various forms is acquired, held, and brokered in a given context. Effective social justice grantmakers work in meaningful partnership with the communities they aim to serve. They recognize that they’re ultimately accountable to these communities. In practice, this means that they will learn from them and, whenever possible, take direction from them.

 The difficulties of definition

Despite these lofty aims, and despite the fact that a number of faith traditions embrace ‘social justice’ as a value, social justice philanthropy has not been universally well received. Some see in it a kind of unsavoury radicalism, a throwback to the fist-waving days of the 1960s. Others regard its champions as malcontents in the grip of an ideology. But what is social justice philanthropy really? What are its essential characteristics?

Glenn Beck on George Soros

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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  The New World Order.  The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.  And now, Glenn Beck’s attack on George Soros as the mastermind who seeks to take over the United States by creating a shadow cabinet, gaining control of the media, destabilizing the government, manufacturing an election crisis, and, finally, encouraging duped citizens to take to the streets. 

It’s not surprising that the the mid-term elections have brought with them new intimations of elite conspiracies to control America’s minds as well as her economy.  At times such as these, Noam Chomsky continues to be one of my touchstones.  His greatest virtue as a social analyst, in my view, is his ability to explain the structure and actions of elite control without appealing to shadowy conspiracies.  In his 1987 book, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures, he sketches a simple framework for understanding U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean:

The first principle is that U.S. foreign policy is designed to create and maintain an international order in which U.S.-based business can prosper, a world of “open societies,” meaning societies that are open to profitable investment, to expansion of export markets and transfer of capital, and to exploitation of material and human resources on the part of U.S. corporations and their local affiliates. …

A second and related principle is that an ideological system must be constructed to ensure that the population remains passive, ignorant and apathetic, and that none of these matters are understood among the educated, articulate and politically active classes in the United States or, indeed, in the world in general.

What’s interesting about this ideological system is that it has no architect, there is no cabal of puppet masters writing its secret constitution and taking a blood oath to uphold it.  The system is “constructed” by human actors—sometimes acting individually, sometimes collectively—who take advantage of their power, wealth, and relationships in predictable ways to maintain their status.  No other motive force is needed.  The ideological system that Chomsky alludes to is simply an emergent property of the complex whole that’s the sum of all these actions.  As it begins to take shape, it’s reinforced by the elites who explicitly or implicitly understand its value in maintaining elite control. 

The ravings of Glenn Beck are unremarkable, coming as they do from the unofficial propagandist news organ of the conservative movement in the United States, owned by a man who has himself been accused of attempting to buy control of the American mind.  While conservatives made gains in the midterm elections, they’re still smarting from the Democratic rout in 2008.  There’s bound to be some plaintive grunting when one set of elites nudges another away from the trough.

We’re in little danger of secret societies overthrowing the United States government.  The far greater danger lies in our failing to understand that left- or right-wing conspiracies are an explanatory extravagance; that the keys to social change are simultaneously simpler and more complex than many of us realize.

Notes on R*ce

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I.

We’ve had seven generations pass since the Emancipation Proclamation, but only two since the end of Jim Crow and one since the last protest over the court-mandated desegregation of Boston’s public schools.  It’s been a little more than a year since the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York published its report on the discrimination and occupational segregation that pervade the industry.  Given the importance of the restaurant industry to so many of our local economies, the study’s findings should give us pause.

Researchers sent equally-credentialed pairs of testers—one member of each pair white, the other a person of color—to apply for server positions in 138 fine-dining Manhattan restaurants.  The study showed that:

Testers of color were only 54.5% as likely as white testers to get a job offer, and were less likely than white testers to receive a job interview in the first place. …

The work experience of white testers was twice as likely to be accepted without probing.

White testers with slight European accents were 23.1% more likely to be hired than white testers with no accent. However, testers of color with accents were treated no differently than testers of color without accents.

Researchers also used 2000 US Census data to compare the earnings of white workers and workers of color employed in front-of-the-house positions.  Even after controlling for job experience, education, and command of English, the study found that workers of color “pay a ‘race tax’ in the form of 11.6 % lower earnings than they would have if they had the same qualifications but were white.”

And this is not an isolated result.  Decades of matched pair and other studies have provided evidence of racial bias in the workplace and other domains.*

II.

The Opportunity Agenda recently released a publication titled Ten Lessons for Talking About Racial Equity in the Age of Obama.  In it the author writes:

Experience from around the country shows that discussing racial inequity and promoting racial justice are particularly challenging today.  Some Americans have long been skeptical about the continued existence of racial discrimination and unequal opportunity.  But with the historic election of an African American president, that skepticism is more widespread and more vocal than ever.

Ironically, at a time when many expected the national conversation to shift, race has become the issue that dare not speak its name.  I’ve noticed the change: a palpable reluctance of late to engage the topic in polite company, as if ignoring the elephant in the dining room will keep him from upsetting the table we’ve laid for ourselves and for our visions of a “post-racial” America; as if talking ever did that much anyway.  In my adopted city of New Orleans, brilliant young leaders of color are engaging the issue in new ways, more by doing than by talking.  We have a new mayor who understands how race has affected and continues to affect our region.  New generations are being born who are playing together, gaming together, singing the latest Hip Hop anthem together.

Is this the way out?  For one generation after another to rise up until it’s completely unremarkable that a black man should be president of the United States?   Will these demographic shifts translate finally into equitable outcomes, or will we need to press the issue until the sun goes cold?

Part of our reluctance might come from exhaustion, from decades of living with the effects of segregation and racial antipathy.  We feel powerless to eliminate a disease that has so far resisted cure.  Overt racism, implicit racial bias, white privilege, structural racism: the pathogen long ago developed new strains and underwent a kind of social metastasis.  We can change unfair policies, for example, but how do we shift attitudes and habits of mind?  The problem with the stuff inside our heads, of course, is that its ill effects don’t stay confined to that space.  The problem more generally is that both misery and good fortune are selective about whom they visit and in what neighborhoods they choose to reside.

III.

I’ve been grateful for those times in my life when the universal has triumphed over the particular, when some ray of light has penetrated the typical fog of my petty thoughts and plans.

I remember when my partner and I visited Manhattan shortly after the 9-11 attacks. Late at night, en route to Ground Zero, we stopped to spend a quiet hour in a Midtown coffee shop.  I was surprised at how readily we opened our hearts to one another and to others we met. We were buoyed at the time by an oceanic feeling of oneness with our neighbors.  Religion, race, age, gender—these seemed to melt away in the face of an overwhelming tragedy.  Outside the coffee shop and still a long way from Ground Zero, there was a smell in the air of something burning. We turned south and soon saw the devastated buildings that lined the site of the Twin Towers.  A strange light surrounded the crews who worked in the pits.  We saw the bobbing of cranes. From a distance, there was something very human about their movements, stooped as they were, feeling for life in the ground.

The saber rattling began several weeks after that.  Our divisions reasserted themselves and deepened.  It was then we realized we were in danger of losing something important: the conviction that men and women of good will needed to reach across their differences to find one another in the rubble.

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* See, for example, J. Bussey and J. Trasvina, “Racial Preferences: The Treatment of White and African American Job Applicants by Temporary Employment Agencies in California” (Berkeley, Calif.: Discrimination Research Center, December 2003); D. Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology, 108, No. 5 (2003), 937-75.

 

On Root Causes Philanthropy

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I.  Introduction

In his lovely essay, “The Evolving American Foundation,” James Allen Smith describes how the germ metaphor ignited the imaginations of many who worked in the foundation field at the turn of the last century.  This metaphor was especially seductive because it suggested we might understand and address our social ills the way we diagnose and cure disease.  According to Smith, the germ metaphor fell out of favor some time later and was supplanted by others that more accurately reflected social complexities.

But the use of the germ metaphor has stuck with us.  It’s clearly related to the metaphor of the root cause which persists in the parlance and thinking of philanthropy.  We still hear of organizations that aim, for example, to address the root causes of poverty in America.  A casual Google search on the phrase “root cause(s)” will turn up many examples.  The metaphor of the root cause has many cousins in philanthropy, among them the lever and the key (as in the “key to the puzzle”).

Nowadays we recognize, as others did long ago, that there are conceptual difficulties in identifying anything like a root cause of poverty, beyond the condition of not having any money.  The phenomenon of poverty is part of a dynamic system of many parts, interacting in complicated ways.  This complex system has no discernible root that we can yank out of the ground as we might the root of a noxious weed.

We shouldn’t let ourselves be too awed by the image of the complex system.  Physicists, economists, electrical engineers, and others have been successful in modeling very complex systems and using these models to predict the behavior of these systems over time.  Jay Forrester, for example, used one such model to analyze industrial business cycles and another to analyze the behavior of the stock market.  What’s unusual about these models is that they lack a point of origin—there’s no discernible “root.”  What you have instead are “feedback loops” and entities called “stocks” and “flows.”  These constructs enable you to predict how a system will respond when you change one of its properties.

The figure below, taken from a May 2009 Scientific American article, traces the causes of food shortages in developing states.  This model suggests that while food shortages have multiple proximate causes (e.g., loss of topsoil, spreading water shortages, and reduction in crop yield), these causes can themselves be traced back to a single root cause: population growth, which itself has multiple causes not shown in the diagram.  Assuming this analysis is correct, a funder attempting to address food shortages without addressing population growth would appear to be on a fool’s errand.

 

As foundation professionals we talk about complex systems, yet we don’t often apply the tools developed in other domains to study them.  In our weaker moments, we might even invoke the complexity of a system as an excuse for our inability to make any headway on a given problem.

Beige Philanthropy in the Crosshairs

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Think of them as two armies battling against overwhelming indifference—and frequently against one another—for the soul of philanthropy.

One camp is arrayed under such banners as “metrics” and “evaluation,” and has a distinctly business school cast.  The other champions a style of philanthropy concerned with social justice, and seeks to expose the root causes of our social ills.

These are caricatures, but they’re not entirely without foundation, so indulge me for a moment longer.

We fail to appreciate how closely united these two camps are in their rejection of philanthropy as usual—“beige philanthropy,” as I like to call it.  Most striking, perhaps, is their primary point of contact: a shared concern for effectiveness.

Here’s how it works: Those in the Metrics camp argue that few foundations make any real attempt to hold themselves accountable.  Without measuring the effectiveness of their grantmaking, they’re unable to track progress against stated goals (if they exist).  Even if these grantmakers are able to see with their own eyes the good they help produce, it’s not clear that this good significantly outweighs the cost of producing it.  Accountable to nobody but themselves, they end up shortchanging the communities they aim to serve.

Those in the Social Justice camp come to exactly the same conclusion but via a different path.  They argue that most of the giving done by mainstream foundations is based on an incomplete or flawed analysis of what it takes to achieve goals like ending poverty or ensuring that all children thrive.  These foundations content themselves with triaging society’s victims, never wondering about the causes of their victimhood, and suspecting, perhaps, that they might themselves be implicated in the crime.

It’s an easy matter to strawman mainstream philanthropy, to claim that it’s grown soft on flattery and self-congratulation.  It’s a far better strategy, in my view, for those in the Metrics and Social Justice camps to make their arguments incontrovertible—to give their speculations the heft of widely shared conviction.  There’s also a lot they can learn from one another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Have a thought to share?  Leave a comment by clicking here.

Image source: Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book

The Twelve Most Common Objections to Social Justice Philanthropy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.  The poor will always be with us.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human Rights, Human Wrongs

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I.

I’m at a philanthropy conference luncheon listening to some household names speak about social justice.  They trade friendly barbs as they describe the horrors of Guantánamo and flog the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.  At intervals they draw polite applause.

One of the speakers describes President Bush’s vetoing of a bill to outlaw waterboarding.  ‘There should have been a public outcry,’ he chides us.

I gaze into my salad of mixed greens, my head heavy with guilt.  Is there any vegetable more melancholy than kale?

II.

I had been attending these conferences for years and had never heard such strong language coming from the dais.  The speakers’ calls to conscience felt like the blows of a blunt weapon, like acts of verbal insurrection.

At the same time, there was something inescapably ironic about a plenary luncheon on human rights in which everything from our underwear to the salt shakers on our tables was made in China.  If I wanted to understand what sustained human rights abuses in China, my inner voice told me, I needed only to inspect the labels on my BVDs.

III.

This last point deserves some elaboration.

I’m attending this conference at an opulent hotel that rises like a crystal box from the banks of the Potomac.  It’s large enough to have its own zip code.  The inner space of the building is defined by a dramatic atrium soaring hundreds of feet above a fountain that periodically dances to recorded symphonic music.  A picture window the size of two football fields looks across a sparkling river to Old Town, Alexandria.

As I sit here under the newly planted figs and paper birches, I struggle with the gauzy sense that the best I can do for human rights is vote the current pols out of office.  I feel it’s me, not them, I most need to worry about.  I’m fully implicated. The purchases I make, the time I devote to scanning ads, the television channels and websites I surf—all those things I do without a moment’s reflection—sustain a system of exchange that keeps some people in chains and allows others to walk free.  My government does its part, I suppose, by hiding most of the bodies overseas.  Sitting in this place, isolated as I am from the hurly-burly of the world, I forget that the wars we most recently waged in the name of human rights have been tied to the protection of American consumption—my consumption, and that of my family and friends.

The key to ending human rights abuses is written not only on the labels to my BVDs, but also on my paycheck—the income from investments in corporations not always friendly to their workers overseas.  The key to the puzzle lies in this grand hotel that few of my poorer neighbors can afford to use.

IV.

The system is complex.  Where is my place in it, as a consumer, as a citizen who wants to do right but who over-values his creature comforts?  To what degree do I permit the demands of conscience to interrupt the flow of cheap goods?  Each time I successfully boycott some brand or some nation, don’t my fellow wage slaves lose their jobs?  The entire edifice is built stone upon stone.  Pull on one stone with enough force and it appears the whole thing threatens to come down on our heads.

At the same time, I was never one to buy the stories we tell ourselves about triple bottom lines and more efficient markets.  These, in my view, are self-serving fairy tales that enable us to sleep with ourselves inside these beautiful jeweled boxes we build on the banks of the Potomac.

Postscript

The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, touted from the stage of the luncheon mentioned earlier, is an odd document.  For starters, there’s no U.N. Declaration of Human Responsibilities to balance the publication.  One has to read through to Article 29, the second-to-last article of the Declaration, to discover that we have duties to the community “in which alone the free and full development of [our personalities] is possible.”  Twenty-eight articles detailing our rights.  One article alluding to unspecified responsibilities.

This is a striking asymmetry.  Twenty-eight articles before we reach what is for some the essence of good citizenship.  And even here our duties to the commonweal are framed in terms of the free and full development of our personalities, a hint of Aristotle in a document that tries its hardest to appeal to every man and nation.

Think Impactful. Think Turn-Key. Think Sticky C2C.

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As the new business manager for the White Courtesy Telephone, I asked my assistant Pauline to check out the company we keep in our blogroll.  She found this post from Phil Cubeta on The Role of the Holy Fool:

If we are to cure the souls of our clients, or victims, much less our leaders, we must first cure ourselves of vanity, and of fear. The first sign of wisdom is Motley.  Anyone who thinks that The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the like are enough is a Fool, and a bad one, lacking humor.  Ignorance, dogma, and complacency, bourgeois striving for measurable results denominated in inches, ounces, or dollars are virtues up to a point because they connect you to the mass market and the mass mind in a society devoted to base enjoyments.  But to cure yourself and others you must go a lonelier way.

Look at me, Phil.  Don’t slouch: What’s with all the big words, my friend?  What you write is the Old School thinking of a pre-networked age, more bricks than clicks.

Here, hop aboard the corporate torpedo.

At the White Courtesy Telephone, we believe it’s better to mesh strategically than reconfigure reactively. We know that without infomediaries like ourselves, subscriber communities will be forced to de-optimalize. Our feature set is unmatched, but our one-to-one e-commerce and non-complex incentivization are often considered a terrific achievement.

Quick, Phil: Do you have a 24/7 plan for syndicating new paradigms? I didn’t think so.

We, on the other hand, will transform the power of metrics to exploit.  It may seem realistic, but it’s compelling.

What will you offer them, Phil?  Grown men and women in motley; overcooked servings of satire and parable.  If these things really had the power to change the world, they’d be illegal.  Moral truth is what’s traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Here’s a few bucks.  Get yourself a new hat.  And here’s my card: call me if you want me to do for you what I did for Sean.

_____

Business-babble courtesy of the Corporate Gibberish Generator at AndrewDavidson.com.

Call For a General Strike on 9/11

A group of citizens has called for a general strike on 9/11.  Read about it here.

Has there ever been a successful nationwide general strike in the United States?  Thank God the organizers aren’t calling for a “turn off your TV day.”  I wouldn’t have the strength to forego the Bionic Woman fall sneak peak.  I’m only human.

Lies My T.V. Told Me: A Plea for Media Literacy

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Everything communicates.  Learning what this means is one of the keys to good citizenship and good philanthropy.

I’ll state the case more strongly: The health of our society depends critically on the ability of each citizen to read, listen, and observe deeply; to interpret thickly; and to understand the promises and beguilements of media, both old and new.  Because most of us lack these skills, or worse, fail to exercise them, we’re in danger of throwing away our democracy.  We leave ourselves at the mercy of those who can exploit our ignorance to advance narrow interests.

Recent history has shown us, in a very dramatic way, how manipulation of the media can take a powerful nation into an immoral, disastrous war against an imagined threat.

The vast majority of Americans simply sleepwalk through the news.  We consistently fail to detect propaganda, bias, and censorship in the media we consume.

Just as young people learn about the three branches of government in their civics classes, they should learn to identify lead-ins, angles, and talking points—and think critically about them.  When they see an image, they should ask, “What’s missing from it?  How was it manipulated? Why was this chosen by the editors from among all possible images?”  Instead of passively watching television, they should pay close attention to the carefully constructed juxtapositions of images and sounds; they should make note of who’s given the last word in a discussion; they should challenge the narrow frame of a debate.  And they should always make a point of asking, “Who pays for the news?”

I don’t think it’s an accident that in our hemisphere only Canada has mandated media literacy in its school curricula.  In Europe, it was the Nordic socialist democracies that led the way.

Unfortunately, staying well informed and immunizing ourselves against manipulation by the media is only one battle in the larger war of ideas currently being fought on home turf.  Once we know the truth, how will we be motivated to act?  And what are the values that will animate us or fail to animate us?

_____

Favorite media literacy links:

Center for Media Literacy

Adbusters

Action Coalition for Media Education

Media Awareness Network

Media Literacy Clearinghouse

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Source of images: Media Literacy Clearinghouse

Darfur Hunger Striker Speaks Out on Nonprofits, Spirit, and Abundant Life

We first reported on Darfur hunger striker Start Loving this past April 6th.  According to recent a post on his Dying for Heroes blog, June 10th was the 102nd day of his vigil in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington, DC.  He spends 9-12 hours a day marching back and forth along the sidewalk with posters designed to awaken the consciences of passing motorists and pedestrians.  You can read more about his vigil and his philosophy here and here .

Roving WCT reporter Albert Ruesga interviewed Start Loving this past June 11th.  We post excerpts from that interview below.

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE: What kind of responses have you gotten to your blogging?

START LOVING: Very little.  There are probably about 50 hits a day.  I’m here all week so there’s no way I can promote it.  Very few comments per se. …

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE:  Several weeks back there was a Darfur demonstration here in front of the Sudanese embassy involving Save Darfur, church groups, and other advocacy and civic organizations.  How do you feel about those efforts?

START LOVING: … [T]he Save Darfur movement has nothing to do with me, I believe, because they’re horrified by the idea of paying a big price.  This is not why people come to them.  They come to them because they want to feel good for having done something about the genocide, and maybe that’s paying two dollars for a green wrist-band, or maybe it’s sending in $100, putting a jar in their mother’s office so that people contribute.  Well, you know, a friend the other day said there’s a place for everything.  … Thanks to Save Darfur and the people who were here, close to 70 percent of the people in this country and roughly that many Muslims and Arabs around the world according to recent polls know about and are concerned about Darfur.  But they’re not ignited.  They can’t even conceive of “Hey, gee, whatever price it takes to stop the genocide.” …

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE: What would your advice be to these groups?  What would you change about the way they work?

START LOVING: … Ultimately, we can’t escape selfishness.  So, am I going to indulge myself with trivial passions, or am I going to satisfy the part of myself that wants to make a difference in the world?  I’ve chosen the latter.  Even there, am I going to do half-measures, or do I want to eliminate regrets—“By God, I did everything I could.”  So out of love for my brothers and sisters in Save Darfur or Stand Now or anyone that’s watching, you know what, think about where you’re headed right now.  When your grandchild says, “Gee, I heard about this Darfur thing—what did you do?”  “Well, I went to a rally on September 30th.”  Is that going to satisfy that grandchild?  “I understand that there were half a million people exterminated in brutal ways, Grandma, and that there were two and a half million people in camps, and you and the powerful United States–you went to a rally?  You wore green armbands?  …  This is what ‘never again’ means?”  You know, none of us are going to be happy with that.  But this is what we’re doing.  It’s madness.  It’s clinical madness.

I take no credit.  I did nothing in my teens and twenties to stop the Vietnam War or to bring civil rights.  I did nothing.  I did nothing to stop Cambodia or Rwanda, or the Balkans, although I knew about them going on.  You know, I’ve got nothing to be proud of.  I simply lost my tolerance for being that inhumane.  I just can’t do it anymore.  I don’t want those regrets.

All of us have experienced at one time or another—maybe with that silly Coke commercial, maybe at the ball game, or maybe watching the Olympics—my gosh, we’re all just one human family.  Most of us have had that experience.  I have come to the wisdom that that’s where being fully alive comes from.  It’s indulging that side of it.  We can’t indulge our whole nervous system, it’s too big.  We’ve got to pick and choose.

Based on studying King, Gandhi—a fascination with them—Jesus, Teresa, Romero, Diane Wilson, all our great literature, even our trivial movies—Star Wars—they all point to the direction of self-sacrificing for a greater good.  I finally realized, you know, they weren’t kidding, they were on to something.  This is where joy comes from.  ... You sacrifice pleasure for the common good.  But the joy that comes trumps everything I had in my privileged background.  It’s just better.  It’s why these people have done what they did.  You know, Gandhi didn’t do this because, “Oh, jeez, this life really stinks, but I’m helping others.”  No, it’s like “Jeez, I’m part of the human race!”  This is what life is like.  I mean this is what life feels like.