posted on: Friday, May 23, 2008

by Suzanne Donovan



Editor's Note: Numerous grassroots organizations are at the forefront of anti-poverty initiatives across the country. Many of these organizations are dependent on private and public support, including foundation grants. An example of a successful and innovative anti-poverty organization is Step Up Savannah. We asked Step Up’s Suzanne Donovan to share their unique approach to fighting poverty in the city of Savannah. Step Up is a member of NCRP.



Savannah is known for its for beauty and quintessential Southern charm. It’s also a city proud of its history that has enjoyed significant economic development and improvements in the last few decades. But peel back a layer and you find there’s not been a corresponding reduction in the city’s poverty level. In fact, a persistent, high rate of poverty has plagued Savannah for generations.

Four years ago, the City of Savannah convened an Anti-poverty Task Force inviting participants from various sectors of the city—business, government, social service agencies, neighborhood organizations and others. The group reviewed research that not only described the depth of poverty, concentrated in five census tracts, but also studies that indicated a link between poverty and economic growth. This group called for the creation of a new initiative. They called it Step Up Savannah’s Poverty Reduction Initiative.

Step Up Savannah is now a collaboration among the City of Savannah, Chatham County, the Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce, Georgia Power, the United Way of the Coastal Empire and some 70+ businesses, agencies and organizations throughout the area.

What distinguishes Step Up is its acknowledgement that reducing poverty will take a combination of personal motivation, the private sector’s commitment to poverty reduction as integral to economic development, and advocating for institutional change.

The Step Up staff team is small; it includes a director, communications director and part-time administrator. Staff serve coordinating and leadership functions, but much of the work is conducted through specialized teams with volunteers from agencies, businesses and neighborhood groups. Step Up’s Action Teams focus on seven strategic goals: Workforce Development, Education, Asset Building, Dependent Care, Transportation, Healthcare, and Affordable Housing.

Contributing to Step Up’s success has been its use of poverty simulations to engage business leaders in experiencing and understanding the issues that keep families living poverty, and to establish a common frame of reference.

This is the first time in Savannah that this breadth of participants has come together to address poverty. The results are not yet easily quantifiable but a powerful private-public partnership has emerged which is focused on setting measurable outcomes and holding themselves accountable.



Suzanne Donovan is communications director of Step Up Savannah.

posted on: Thursday, May 22, 2008

by Aaron Dorfman

Yesterday, I attended a briefing at the National Press Club announcing the “The American City Agenda,” an ambitious new initiative by Living Cities to reform policies affecting urban communities. The mayor of Cleveland, the Lieutenant Governor and the Governor of Ohio were all on hand here in Washington, D.C. to announce the initiative’s launch in Cleveland.

Nine of the nation’s largest foundations and several large banks are among the partners of Living Cities. Collectively, they have invested over $543 million in 23 urban communities since 1991 and have pledged to reach $750 million by 2011. This new initiative is part of that effort.

The press release states, “Beginning with Cleveland, The American City Agenda will consider where policy is blocking needed reform, work to overcome outmoded and siloed systems, and develop the approaches needed to solve today’s challenges.”

That sounds great to me. NCRP has long advocated that foundations should invest in efforts to change public policy if they want to have a real and lasting impact on the issues that affect lower income communities.

I do, however, have one major concern. Nowhere in the printed materials or in any of the speeches did anyone mention if or how low-income residents themselves will be involved in shaping the policy agenda that will impact them and their families. No one spoke about community organizing or about reaching out to engage grassroots leaders in this ambitious effort. Will Living Cities be investing only in top-down reform efforts, or will they be investing also in community organizing groups and other grassroots organizations as part of this great effort to influence urban policy?

Ben Hecht is the relatively new CEO of Living Cities. He seems extremely talented. I’m sure he’ll figure out that part of the investment needs to go to bottom-up reform efforts if the results are going to have lasting impact on our nation’s cities.



Aaron Dorfman is executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

by Yna Moore

The appointment of Bradford K. Smith as the Foundation Center’s new president beginning in October is welcome news (view press release here). He was strongly supportive of social justice grantmaking when he led the Ford Foundation’s Peace and Social Justice Program. There is much reason for optimism that under his leadership, the Foundation Center will continue its efforts to shed light on the amount of foundation dollars that go toward meeting the needs of the many marginalized groups in the country.

Kristina ("Yna") Moore is communications director at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

posted on: Wednesday, May 14, 2008

by Gary Snyder


In my spare time, I occasionally check out the agencies that I contribute to on the Charity Navigator website. I find the site to be extremely well organized. If I need further information, I sometimes go to the GuideStar website to delve deeply into the latest financials. Since I love financial analysis, the time goes by fast-frequently killing 3 hours.

In my exploration the other day I noticed some agencies that further the need for self-regulation or self-regulation of the charitable sector. The matter of regulation has become a hot topic recently. The Internal Revenue Service, the Congress and a few attorneys general have focused in on abhorrent practices at charities.

A few caught my eye as I scrutinized the charitable listings. The issue was fundraising expenses. There are a number of charities that spend more than 50% of their budget paying for-profit fundraising professionals to solicit.

Many of us have heard that the ‘badge’ charities use these fundraising techniques. I was surprised to see that The Committee for Missing Children headed the list of charities that overpay for fundraising. That agency spent over 86% of its income in fundraising fees. They were only able to commit 11.2% to programming. Others were only able to use small amounts for their mission: 3.7% (Junior Police Academy); 6.6% (Coalition of Police and Sheriffs) and 6.4% (American Veteran Relief Foundation) and 10% for the Children’s Charity Fund and the Foundation for Children with Cancer.

The National Children’s Leukemia Foundation spends almost 80% for fundraising and only about 15% for the children. The agency isn’t small with an annual budget of over $2.2 million. Needless to say, the National Children’s Leukemia Foundation received the Charity Navigator’s lowest rating.

The Youth Development Fund is a $3.3 million agency. Its fundraising amounts to 83% of its expenses with only 13% going to children’s education. The Youth Development Fund also received the Charity Navigator’s lowest rating.

Granted, these are just a few organizations that make it incredibly hard to defend that the charitable world that it doesn’t need some intervention. Yes, these are just a few, but as charitable donors get wind of these it only supports the notion that the nonprofit sector can’t or won’t reign in its own.



Gary R. Snyder is the author of "Nonprofits: On the Brink" and a member of NCRP's board of directors. He is a frequent lecturer and author of articles in numerous publications and blogs. His email is http://gary.r.snyder@gmail.com; website: www.garyrsnyder.com, phone: 248.324.3700.

posted on: Tuesday, May 06, 2008

by Yna Moore

There's been a good amount of talk revolving around the future of the nonprofit sector and the next generation leaders.

Rosetta Thurman interviewed NCRP's field director Melissa Johnson for her blog Perspectives from the Pipeline on issues faced by emerging leaders in the nonprofit sector.

Asked about what she'd like to see changed in the nonprofit sector, she replies:

"I would like to see the nonprofit sector define itself and behave in ways that is rooted in the values of the work that we carry out. Why are we in this sector? What is the ultimate goal of our work as a whole? While we have failed and hopefully will not succeed in trying to run our organizations like corporate America, nonprofits exist to serve the public good, to be the connector between government service delivery mandates and the race for the have not’s this creates on the ground. We are the sector that can and should represent those most in need. I think we should all keep this at the forefront
as we truck along day-to-day in this imbalanced and unfair race. We should all
recognize that we have to work together to deflect this imbalance. And, most
importantly, we should remove our personal self-interest from the equation."

You can view the complete interview here.

This week, the staff from the country's foundations and nonprofits are gathered in the DC-area for the Council on Foundation's annual conference. With this year's event titled "Philanthropy's Vision: A Leadership Summit," one can hope that the next generation leaders in philanthropy see their role in making the sector more accountable, transparent and responsive to the needs of the diverse communities it serves.

Yna Moore in the communications director at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

posted on: Friday, May 02, 2008

by Niki Jagpal

On May 1, 2008, the Council on Foundations (COF) released the first in a series of reports “looking at the interaction between philanthropy and the economy.” Foundations Support Families Hit by Economic Downturn: Results of a Survey by the Council on Foundations (available for download on the COF website) states that “the vast majority of foundations (86 percent) support grantmaking that either directly or indirectly aids families, provides human services, assists lower income populations or supports economic development.” Indeed, the Foundation Center’s 2008 edition of Foundation Giving Trends notes that “[…] for the period 2003-2006, the economically disadvantaged registered the second fastest growth rate among all the major population groups (up 28.3 percent annually)” [Foundation Center, 2008, p. 42]. Highlights of this report are available for free download here.

At first glance, this is certainly welcome news, particularly the long-term trend data provided by the Foundation Center. However, the COF report is based entirely on self-reporting by their members. Moreover, of the total 1,841 COF members, 320 responded to a web-based survey, representing a 17.38 percent response rate. Further, while community foundations comprise 27 percent of COF membership, they comprised 41 percent of survey respondents. In other words, community foundations are disproportionately overrepresented in the COF survey sample.

In its discussion of foundation support to families impacted by the subprime mortgage crisis, the COF report states that community, corporate and independent foundations were more likely than family foundations to engage in grantmaking that supports such activities (16-17 percent compared to 12 percent). Indeed, the COF report concludes that over half (51 percent) of community foundations would decrease grantmaking over the coming year; only 46 percent would sustain their current levels of grantmaking for the economically disadvantaged.

Taken together, the two reports suggest a reduction in foundation giving aimed at benefiting the economically disadvantaged. Is that reflexive of foundations supporting families hard hit by the flagging US economy? One is left to wonder, especially when considering the COF report’s own cautionary note that “… while the majority of foundations say that the downturn in the economy will have no effect on their ability to maintain their grantmaking, this situations bears watching. In addition, the impacts of the subprime mortgage crisis are not fully known.”

Niki Jagpal is the research director at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

posted on: Thursday, May 01, 2008

By Priscilla Hung

At GIFT (Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training) and the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, we focus on fundraising, the flip side of philanthropy. Even with engaged and progressive funders and donors, recipient organizations must still build relationships with them, request funds appropriately, and demonstrate the impact of their work.

But it continues to be a struggle for most grassroots groups to engage in individual donor fundraising in an empowering and sustainable way. Why is that?

In early April at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice in New York, we hosted a discussion on this issue with a mix of fundraising staff members, progressive funders, nonprofit directors, and consultants. The conversation touched on a lot of different reasons why grassroots groups struggle with building a broad base of supporters – ranging from not having a clear message or way to communicate with our communities, to not using technology in our outreach efforts, to there being too many nonprofits and not enough money to support all of them, as middle-and working-class communities struggle to stay afloat and government funding decreases.

One person said that there’s a tension between organization-building and movement-building. Organizations often feel they have to compete for dollars and attention. They feel pressured to play up successes and take full credit for them while in donor and funder meetings, even when they know their efforts are only successful if lots of other organizations are also engaged in the work. They get the sense that fundraising should be done by highly-skilled people, but it’s okay if they’re not politically active. People come away from trainings thinking that they must create major donor programs that cater to people who aren’t part of their base.

And those who are fundraising staff often feel isolated, with the stress of a lot of responsibility but little authority. They often have no involvement in the programs of the organization and don’t know what other staff are doing, resulting in missed opportunities to use fundraising to organize, and to use organizing drives to fundraise. Or on the other extreme, they may have too much authority by determining which programs get funded and which ones don’t.

This is how too many groups operate. It doesn’t have to be that way. Step by step, groups around the country and around the world are changing the way fundraising and community-building look. Capacity-builders like GIFT are democratizing and demystifying fundraising. Groups are talking together about how to resource the social justice movement.

But where to go from these isolated efforts? Where are the settings that foster big ideas and bold new strategies in fundraising that match our progressive political values? Where is the community where people work together and support each other to try new resource development ideas and take risks – and have each other’s back if they don’t work?

There are incomplete conversations happening. Conversations of fundraisers that don’t involve organizers. And conversations of organizing that may touch on fundraising but don’t involve people who identify themselves as fundraisers. Fundraising is too often left out of the conversation because it’s often seen as a skill that some staff member just needs to learn and take care of. What will it take for groups to see that fundraising is political?

And what are the consequences if we continue to fundraise in isolation – in isolation within our own organizations, in isolation from each other, and in isolation from movement-building strategies and activities? Groups always scraping by, never able to have all the money they need to do something like change national policy? A public distrustful of and disconnected from nonprofits? Groups dependent on foundations and not reaching out to their communities?

GIFT is working toward creating a space where we can bridge the gaps between movement-building conversations and fundraising ones. When GIFT first started, we were excited to have twenty people of color in the room who wanted to fundraise. A decade later, at our first Raising Change: A Social Justice Fundraising Conference in 2006, we had 420 people in a room wanting to discuss fundraising, with almost 300 hundred of them being people of color.

Join us at the next Raising Change: A Social Justice Fundraising Conference, this July 25-26 in San Francisco, CA so we can keep the conversation going.

Priscilla Hung is Co-Director of GIFT. GIFT provides fundraising training, resources, and analysis to social justice organizations nationwide. It also publishes the Grassroots Fundraising Journal and hosts Raising Change: A Social Justice Fundraising Conference. Priscilla@grassrootsfundraising.org