posted on: Monday, March 17, 2008

By Lisa Ranghelli, Senior Research Associate, NCRP

Last weekend’s Sunday New York Times Magazine (3/9/08) was devoted to philanthropy and charitable giving. I’d like to comment on two interesting articles on current philanthropic thinking about how to best measure the impact of grants and how to determine which strategies are most likely to effect desired change.

Jon Gertner’s article, “For Good, Measure,” raises some important questions about the extent to which funders should seek a ‘return on investment’ for their grants, and how much money they should spend evaluating and measuring impact. The article focused primarily on big fish in philanthropy like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. After all, they have the kind of resources purported to be needed to have an impact on entrenched problems like poverty.

Yet there are thousands of small and mid-size foundations across this country that might not have the resources to conduct major evaluations, but they should also be thinking about their impact. In fact, these funders could be making a much more significant difference—and some are—by realizing that investing in effective grassroots organizing and advocacy can help achieve long-term systemic change on issues they care about, from housing and homelessness to workforce development and education. Speaking of education…

In “How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?” Times Magazine editor Paul Tough brought together a group of ‘interested parties’--two funders, the NYC schools chancellor, a charter schools CEO, and someone from a conservative think tank-- to participate in a roundtable discussion about changes in education philanthropy. He asked the group to advise a hypothetical wealthy donor as to how he should spend $2 billion to make a difference in the field of education. Much of the discussion centered on identifying visionary chancellors and fostering competition through charter schools, with some attention to infrastructure and human resource development. Perhaps this should not be surprising, given who was having the conversation.

There were no teachers, students, parents, or other community members represented around that table. Yet these are the people most affected by schools issues and often the ones in the best position to make change happen through effective organizing and advocacy. For years foundations have used the argument that “organizing and advocacy are hard to evaluate, and it’s hard to measure their impact” as a reason (excuse?) to not fund such strategies. Yet more and more information is coming to light that challenges this claim.

A great example is the forthcoming Annenberg Institute for School Reform report commissioned by the Mott Foundation, which assesses the impact of organizing groups on education reform and student outcomes in seven cities. (Full disclosure: one of the groups studied was People Acting for Community Together in Miami, formerly run by NCRP Executive Director Aaron Dorfman.) Anyone who doubts that the impacts of organizing can be quantified, measured, and linked to specific performance indicators should plan to check out this report when it is released on March 26th here. It is notable that two of the cities included in the report are New York City and Los Angeles, two places held up for their innovations in the Times’ roundtable discussion. The Annenberg report should offer a very different perspective on ways to improve outcomes for students in those two cities, as well as the five other sites.

In fairness to the Times roundtable participants, their conversation eventually touched on issues of nonprofit capacity and the role of policy advocacy. Vanessa Kirsch, who runs a venture philanthropy firm, talked about the need to provide multi-year support to non-profits run by “social entrepreneurs,” so they have time to build their capacity and bring their innovative ideas to scale. Who are these social entrepreneurs? Low-income community leaders and organizers do not seem to be included in this group, but why not? Grassroots community organizing is about building social capital to achieve systemic change. Chris Doby, program officer at the Mott Foundation, made the case that post-Katrina organizers were in fact social entrepreneurs here.

Perhaps organizing groups need to rebrand themselves to fit in with the new lingo of philanthropy. The phrase “community organizing” causes many foundation trustees to cringe in horror, as they imagine Saul Alinsky rising from the dead and banging down their door in the middle of the night. This visceral feeling about organizing prevents trustees from supporting good work on the issues they care most about. It works against their own self interest. Would they feel better knowing that they were investing in social entrepreneurs who can offer them a quantifiable return on their investment?

To what extent do we buy into the business-oriented language sweeping across the philanthropic sector, and to what extent do we push back?