posted on: Sunday, April 04, 2010

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posted on: Thursday, April 01, 2010

By Niki Jagpal

Does anyone remember a time when we didn’t have an estate tax? If you don’t, you will next year – it was repealed for one year this January.

A couple of days ago, NCRP signed on to a set of principles developed by the coalition Americans for a Fair Estate Tax (AFET) that calls for permanent reinstatement of the estate tax when the issue comes back to the Hill in 2011. We were approached by United for a Fair Economy, a great organization that’s helping AFET circulate a letter in support of the principles now on the Hill.

Why did we sign on to the principles? For starters, we’ve supported AFET’s previous efforts to make the estate tax laws fairer in the past (in 2002 and 2005). NCRP believed then, as we do now, that the estate tax encourages charitable giving. The principles cite 2004 CBO analysis that supports this: it estimated that if the estate tax hadn’t existed in 2000, there would have been a significant drop in the range of $13 to $25 billion in charitable giving that year. That was nearly a decade ago – and we’re not talking small change here.

The principles state that the estate tax:

a) raises revenue that we need to invest in the American people;

b) ensures that families who have benefited the most from public goods pay their fair share to maintain them;

c) provides a check on the concentration of power in the hands of those born into great wealth;

d) corrects a feature of our tax system that would otherwise allow certain income to escape taxation entirely; and,

e) encourages charitable giving.

If you come to this blog or our site frequently, you probably know our mission and that we challenge grantmakers to strengthen our diverse communities. Our principles of exemplary philanthropy are that it serves the public good and not private interests, employs grantmaking practices that most effectively help nonprofits achieve their missions, and strengthens democracy by prioritizing those with the least wealth, opportunity and power. The similarities between the AFEET principles and ours speak for themselves.

AFET is calling for Congress and the Obama administration to exempt the first $2 million of estate assets ($4 million for married couples) and establish a tax rate that is at least 45 percent for the taxable part of estate assets. As the principles state: “A fundamental tenet of a fair tax system is those who have the greatest ability to pay should pay a larger share. Great wealth is the best indicator of ability pay. The estate tax should continue to target the very wealthy, and the largest estates should be taxed at a higher rate.”

Does your organization agree that with great wealth comes a moral obligation to give back to the community? If it does, please add your name to the list of supporting organizations and sign on to AFET’s principles by contacting Lee Farris at UFE and Richelle Friedman at the Coalition on Human Needs.


Niki Jagpal is research and policy director at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

posted on: Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Photo by Becky Gillette / The Sierra Club, original post here (added on 3/25/10)
By Melissa Hanson

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of listening in on Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy’s (EPIP) member briefing, Investing in the Community: Renewal of The Gulf Coast Region after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which was part of their Social Justice Philanthropy: Engaging the Grantee series. The teleconference focused on the Gulf Coast Fund’s insightful response to the aftermath of the devastating storms in 2005.


Here is a little re-cap of the devastation that came with the storms:

• At least 1,836 people lost their lives
• 80% of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes were underwater, some areas remaining so for weeks
• Hundreds of thousands were left unemployed
• Sparked the largest diaspora in the history of the U.S.
• The government provided no transportation out of the city despite imposing mandatory evacuation

While FEMA, the Red Cross and Blackwater were busy attempting to cover up their inadequacies, the Gulf Coast Fund, a project of the Rockefeller Foundation, was busy creating a truly grassroots approach to grantmaking in order to help communities rebuild and heal. Their mission was to make grants for effective movement building, and their approach would focus on the entire region affected by the storms, from Texas to Alabama. Their goal was to challenge the institutional racism and oppression that had greatly exacerbated the devastation of the storm and which was currently shaping how the affected areas were being rebuilt.

The fund started from one simple principle: Those who would be affected by the fund’s dollars should be in charge of them (unfortunately quite a radical idea). The fund set out to build an advisory committee of residents and movement leaders to make the major decisions about where the money would go. To date they have given a total of $2.7 million since May 2006. The fund has been quite successful, and most speakers on the panel attributed its success to the advisory committee, which is geographically as well as racially diverse.

The advisory committee meets regularly with its grantees and has created multiple new coalitions across the sector. They designed the application process to be efficient and accessible, with flexible deadlines and a simple procedure. The committee is involved in every step of the grantmaking process, and decisions are made as quickly as possible, with ample consideration and discussion.

Derrick Evans, a current member of the Advisory Committee from Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, commented that the Gulf Coast Fund was the “first initiative of any kind after Katrina that embraced the core principles of community driven, community informed, community-led” action. It is amazing that more funders do not accept this model of engagement with communities, and instead make decisions from far and away, inevitably maintaining the systems of power and racism that continually threaten our communities. If funders are interested in making real, sustainable changes in communities, it is absolutely essential to involve those communities in decision making processes and form a solid working relationship with them. Any attempt at change must directly confront the systemic and structural barriers to that change, or risk perpetuating them.

Today is the last day of the Katrina @ 5 conference in New Orleans, and I would like to urge any readers who are there to comment on what they are learning from the event and their thoughts on how to move forward.

Melissa Hanson is an intern at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

posted on: Tuesday, March 23, 2010

By Niki Jagpal

Catharine Crystal Foster, an independent consultant and seasoned advocate, and Justin Louie of Blueprint Research and Design, Inc., recently coauthored a good resource for funders and community organizers looking to evaluate organizing efforts. Grassroots Action and Learning for Social Change: Evaluating Community Organizing adds to the available resources for grantmakers that fund community organizing or those that would fund it if they could evaluate the work somehow.

Similarly, organizers can learn about the organic processes involved in evaluating their work to help them make a results-driven case to their current or prospective funders by using some of the information in this publication. Perhaps the most useful part of the publication for both grantmakers and organizers is the link it provides to a series of videos that were developed for grantees of the California Endowment, where organizers “discuss their experiences developing and conducting evaluations of their efforts.”

Incidentally, the California Endowment provided the financial support for this brief, and played a key role in NCRP’s recent Grantmaking for Community Impact Project report documenting the impacts of advocacy, organizing and civic engagement in L.A. County. Not only did the foundation provide funds for our report, but this grantmaker is exemplary in many ways, especially when it comes to supporting organizing and advocacy work for vulnerable communities and developing meaningful evaluation tools for such efforts.

So check out the latest addition to the community organizing ‘demystification box’ and kudos to Catharine and Justin on contributing to an important and ongoing discussion.

Niki Jagpal is research and policy director at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

posted on: Monday, March 22, 2010

By Niki Jagpal

As our country celebrates the House’s passage of the healthcare bill, many of us rightly welcome the first major social change program passed since the 1960’s. But even as we do so, much work remains to be done to address the myriad disparities that persist as barriers to equal life opportunities. Since 1966, the United Nations General Assembly has brought ending racial discrimination to the forefront, following the 1960 police attacks on peaceful anti-Apartheid protesters in South Africa. With the passage of Resolution 2142 in 1965, the UN General Assembly called on the international community to increase our efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination, proclaiming March 21 as the date to do so. So as the House signed the healthcare bill for the Senate’s consideration, I wonder how many of us know the extent to which racial disparities continue to impede equal access to basic healthcare.

For example, in the most recent health report issued by the Measure of America used the Human Development Index adapted to the United States found significant disparities in healthcare by race. And although our country ranks high among developed countries using this metric, we’re not doing so well when 29 countries have residents who live, on average, longer lives than we do while spending 8 times less on healthcare. We rank 39th in the world for infant mortality and the rates by race are even more disturbing (full data tables are available at the links above).

I’m privileged to be a mentee of Dr. john a. powell, and wrote about an interview I did with him on how structural barriers to equality must be addressed must be addressed and how philanthropy can contribute meaningfully to those efforts. And this is the time for grantmakers to really analyze their strategies to ensure that racial equity remains a priority in all their work. And there are some great foundations leading the way – the Woods Fund of Chicago, Funders for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Questioning Issues and the California Endowment, for example. But the time is now for more foundations to embrace the principles of justice and equality on which this country was founded. One way is to acknowledge explicitly race as a persistent barrier to social inclusion. And there are many resources for funders who wish to do so (GrantCraft and the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity produced a guide for funders and the Diversity in Philanthropy Project is another resource; there are many more resources on each of the sites above). As the healthcare bill moves to the Senate, I hope more grantmakers will consider funding work that seeks to end racial discrimination as some of their peers have.

Niki Jagpal is research and policy director at NCRP.