posted on: Tuesday, January 26, 2010

By Andrew Grant-Thomas

If you’re reading Keeping a Close Eye… you probably don’t need to be cautioned against the rosy view that Barack Obama’s election ushered in racial and social nirvana. Nevertheless, over the last year and more the counterpoints have come, fast and furious: the disparate impacts of our credit, lending and foreclosure crises; the ongoing economic recession; the debate over health care, now seemingly doomed to an unhappy ending; the hullabaloo over Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” claim, the “Birthers” phenomenon… on and on.

Just yesterday a friend sent a link to an article about a guy named Moose who wants to start a whites-only – actually, for “natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race” – basketball league in Augusta, Georgia. It’s not about racism, says Moose: “Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch? … we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction.” Ah. Thanks for the clarification.

Sadly, in this era of continued deep structural or systemic racism, of pervasive implicit biases even among folks who sincerely mean better, of the marginalization of efforts to help the marginalized, and their own marginalization even within such efforts, the Mooses of the world may be the least of our worries. Sound hopeless? It’s not But here’s the million-dollar question:

How do we proceed?

On March 11-13, 2010 in Columbus Ohio, the staff of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and some 600+ of your fellow advocates, activists, scholars, students, spoken-word artists and just-plain-folks of all stripes will engage all this and more at our conference on Transforming Race: Crisis and Opportunity in the Age of Obama. Similar to NCRP’s work under Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best and the Grantmaking for Community Impact Project (GCIP), our work is organized around three themes critical to equity and social justice work: Racial Dynamics and Systems Thinking; Race Talk; and Race, Recession, and Recovery. Click this link for more on these themes and to peek at the agenda.

Transforming Race will begin with two pre-conference training sessions for social justice workers – one on “opportunity communities” by the Kirwan Institute, and one on applying systems thinking to race. The second piece is likely familiar to readers of NCRP’s Criteria. The Values chapter, co-authored by Kirwan’s executive director, john a. powell, talks about the concept of “targeted universalism.” Targeted universalism might sound like an oxymoron; it’s not. It’s about ensuring that efforts to meet the needs of our most vulnerable populations are sensitive to the particulars of how they are situated within the web of policies. Institutions, and systems that shape opportunities for us all. Ultimately, it is about creating a more socially inclusive society in which we all fare better.

At a time when major foundations like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Wood Funds of Chicago, Funders for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Questioning Issues, and many other racial justice workers are adopting structural racism and systems thinking as an analytical framework, it is critical that we look to systems work in other arenas (business, environmentalism, engineering, medicine) to inform and deepen our own approaches.

That’s what Transforming Race is really about – taking lessons learned from all sectors to improve practice and life opportunities for the most marginalized, and to build a more just, equitable, and sustainable future for all of us. Like NCRP, of which Kirwan is a member, we see philanthropy playing a crucial role in enhancing the common good by supporting nonprofit advocacy, community organizing and civic engagement through grantmaking. These strategies have shown tremendous “return on investments” for foundations, while addressing the needs of our diverse communities.

Registration is open! We hope to see you in March!

Andrew Grant-Thomas is director of Transforming Race, and deputy director of the Kirwan Institute at The Ohio State University.

posted on: Tuesday, November 17, 2009

By Robert Espinoza

At Funders for LGBTQ Issues, a national philanthropic group that studies US foundation giving to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) communities, a flash bulb in our annual research shed light on a lingering disparity.

In 2007, our research tracked 71 foundations in the US that gave roughly $3.6 million to organizations explicitly serving LGBTQ people of color. Considering that the broader philanthropic portrait contains more than 72,000 foundations giving nearly $43 billion, support for LGBTQ people of color revealed itself as a blip, an almost invisible pixel.

Sociology teaches us that societal barriers play out through our economy, public and institutional policies, mass media and everyday interactions. They rear their heads as bigotry, stereotypes and unfair representations. They persist from generation to generation, seemingly intractable and often coded in values of individualism. “If the lone, talented public figure can make it,”—goes the myth of meritocracy—“why can’t everyone?”

And yet for decades, studies have emphasized how deeply embedded discrimination, produced across generations, has critically impacted the quality of life and self-advancement of communities of color—despite the same level of individual effort. For LGBTQ people of color, these conditions are exacerbated by attitudes and structures that treat people differently based on their sexualities and their gender identities and expressions.

As evidence, a growing body of research continues to demonstrate this "heightened vulnerability" among LGBTQ people of color—to health risks, verbal and physical violence, and institutional discrimination, among other areas. LGBTQ people of color also face the disregard of institutions; they are relatively unexplored as research topics and rarely considered as constituencies affected by public policies or in need of culturally and linguistically sensitive services.

So what happens when organizations that were set up to reverse these conditions receive little support from philanthropic sources? What becomes of a healthy civil society when its most vulnerable populations remain impoverished? Is this how philanthropy upholds its purpose?

A few weeks ago, as part of our multi-year Racial Equity Campaign to raise philanthropic support for LGBTQ communities of color, Funders for LGBTQ Issues released a landmark web site that begins portraying the realities of these diverse communities. This toolkit aims to reach grantmakers of all types, providing multiple entry points for foundations with unique interests and approaches.

The Racial Equity Online Toolkit compiles original grantmaking tools, publications and commentaries from foundation and nonprofit leaders around the country. It reminds us that inequality has a geographic footprint, that hardship changes shape across neighborhoods, towns, cities and regions. Funders in any locality can be change agents.

The stories featured in this toolkit also demonstrate the potential of working across difference, understanding the root causes of inequality and forging solutions that originate in the communities where hardship is most deeply felt. It’s a flash bulb that illuminates the nature of inequality, as well as some avenues for addressing it.

More importantly, it’s a flash bulb for funders who crave focus, an additional lens, a more complete picture.

Please visit the Racial Equity Online Toolkit at http://www.lgbtracialequity.org/.

Robert Espinoza is the director of research and communications at Funders for LGBTQ Issues.

posted on: Wednesday, October 21, 2009

By Ben MacConnell

Seize the day! That seems to have been the rally cry in community organizing circles ever since the former Chicago organizer – now president and Nobel laureate – Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries in the summer of 2008.

Having a former organizer in the White House does seem to have presented a unique opportunity for the field of community organizing. In April, the New York Times printed an article (in their fashion section no less) suggesting that President Obama has made community organizing “cool again.” College professors have reported that previously obscure classes on community organizing are now seeing record enrollments. Last year, during the Direct Action and Research Training Center's (DART) annual recruitment drive for the DART Organizers Institute, recruiters collected over 2,000 resumes and 900 applicants for only 17 available positions. So something seems to be happening.

But seizing the day can take many forms. When Sarah Palin mocked President Obama’s organizing experience at the Republican national convention, community organizers across the country launched websites, wrote blogs and printed bumper stickers to defend the profession. After the inauguration, several foundations pieced together money – even with the market crash – to encourage activities that would capitalize on this moment in history. When President Obama announced his plans to reform healthcare, some community organizations that have historically focused their efforts locally, began sending staff to the beltway to work at the national level.

Business writer, Jim Collins, is an unusual author to cite for an article about community organizing. But then again, Collins has researched how to build great companies that last, and any recipe for enduring greatness ought to be understood by disciplined organizers. Collins talks a great deal about companies that spend too much energy telling the time of the day and not enough energy building clocks. Martin Luther King, Jr. made a similar observation when describing churches during the civil rights movement. He said churches had acted more like thermometers recording the temperature of the day, rather than thermostats that set the level of heat.

These lessons seem relevant to this “seize the moment” phenomenon that’s currently all the rage. It suggests that instead of focusing on telling the time with the hottest issue campaigns, organizing technology or slogans, the field of community organizing needs to take this opportunity to build good clocks. To do this, community organizing needs to do what any industry does with a long-term interest on impacting the world – it draws in, uses and retains great talent. Notably, most applicants to the DART Organizers Institute said that their interest in organizing didn’t stem from President Obama’s past life as an organizer, but from someone they know and respect telling them about this line of work. So while President Obama’s past has raised awareness, the onus is still on organizers and their allies to do the outreach and cultivation necessary to bring talented people into this line of work.

Every year or two a survey or report is issued that highlights the severe need for more professional organizers to sustain a movement. In 1998, the Peace Development Fund reported that community organizations faced, “survival issues hampering efficiency and effectiveness, including personnel issues such as high turnover, the scarcity of trained organizers, and burnout. …” After surveying 100 local faith-based community organizers, Interfaith Funders discovered in 2001that, “The factor most consistently cited by respondents as limiting the growth of their work is the recruitment of talented organizers.” Andrew Mott, the former Director of the Center for Community Change, wrote in his 2006 report compiled for Community Catalyst, “We have invested too little in developing sufficient numbers of people with the vision, breadth of knowledge, commitment and skills needed to tackle the issues, which low-income communities and people of color face in America today.” All of these reports and others like them have drawn the same conclusion – the ability to build strong organizations committed to a shift in power and reversing injustice rests on the capacity to develop great community organizers.

For all of these reasons, we – organizers and funders alike - ought not ask how to seize the day; we ought to ask how to seize a generation.

Ben MacConnell is Director of the DART Organizers Institute, a field school for new professional community organizers that will be celebrating its tenth year in 2010. For more details, check out their latest video.

Editor’s note: In a couple of months, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy will be marking the first anniversary of Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impact of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement, a series of reports that highlights the positive impact that communities have seen through funder-supported nonprofit policy engagement. This posting by guest contributor Ben MacConnell brings home a basic resource requirement for nonprofit advocacy groups – or any organization - to have a chance at success.

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 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

posted on: Tuesday, March 04, 2008

by Steven E. Mayer, Ph.D.


Until foundations address the structural inequities that contribute significantly to human suffering, their own effectiveness will be limited. Structural inequities show up in virtually all the data as gaps or disparities in the performance of our public and private systems, chronically favoring some groups over others. They represent fault lines in our society and its institutions, including philanthropic organizations themselves. If not addressed, they will drag down the performance of the very foundations and nonprofits that otherwise intend to do good.

Why, as frequent studies show, are African Americans turned down for a mortgage or business loan at a higher rate than Whites with the same credit histories? Clearly this favoritism is driven by false assumptions, even though it hurts the lender. It might take a more diverse foundation board to understand this is a problem, or to decide to address it, but it will take influence in the bank’s inner offices to change its practice. There is a role for influential White board members to step up and do some heavy lifting to create the space for a legitimate fix to structural inequities.

Why does an achievement gap exist between African American children and White children even as they start kindergarten? Upstream of kindergarten success are parents who understand the value of education, who encourage their children to learn, who spend supportive time with their children and their teachers. African American and White moms alike face staggering challenges juggling work, transportation, child care, health care, aging family members, and their own development beyond mere survival. African American dads, far more often than White dads, are gone or locked up, having been booked on suspicion since adolescence, and booked again because they’ve been booked before. Chronically hunted down and tagged with a record assures an African American male a lifetime of disenfranchisement, with far greater challenges in finding legitimate work, breathing room, or the right to vote. This is Jim Crow at its worst, still lethal, and well-documented. As James Baldwin put it, "The wonder is not that so many Negro boys and girls are ruined … but that so many survive."

Until these systems can be turned around, beginning with the justice system, and until those rebuked and scorned are permitted to put together a generation or two of fair and steady access to the fruits of opportunity, we’re going to have parents who have kids who are not ready for school.

The Black-White divide is not the only one needing fixing; all non-White ethnic groups are treated less fairly by the typically unwritten operating rules of public systems and private markets. Among Whites, rural areas are disfavored, as are those born to poor circumstances.

One can argue it’s for government to fix all this. One can argue it’s a matter of personal responsibility. The third sector, philanthropy, has a decent record in caring for many of the victims of such flawed policies and practices, but philanthropy-as-usual has not done enough to stimulate the development of more level playing fields. There is a world of opportunity for foundations and nonprofits to promote solutions to unfair system dynamics. Philanthropy can help create the commitment, resources, and skills for fixing what’s wrong. And yes, this kind of advocacy is perfectly legal.

Imagine the applause and support awaiting those working to extend the full fruits of society’s potential bounty to all. The winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was bankrolled by an American foundation in his early work in Bangladesh, lifting thousands out of poverty and setting an example now emulated world-wide. All it took was a good idea, good leadership, and the sustained commitment of a growing base of support.

To start, a foundation can create internal study time to explore the ways in which documented racial and other group disparities hold back good outcomes in its own program areas. Next, it can identify the dynamics that produce and maintain these disparities; typically this requires looking further upstream for the problems causing the casualties. It can listen to those who know these difficulties firsthand, and to authorities perhaps previously overlooked. Then, it can prioritize its resources to create a more muscular philanthropy capable of producing more balanced outcomes throughout society.

Nonprofits must send forward proposals that put pressure on the mechanisms that maintain these gaps. Of course, they must be assured by prospective funders that such ideas are favored. Foundations, for their part, can raise to the top and approve those credible proposals that put pressure on existing gaps. This would result in a different grants list than currently prevails.

Acting through able partners on the ground, a foundation can strengthen the relationships and networks that serve as the creative seedbed and community infrastructure that springs and supports good ideas. It can strengthen individual and organizational leadership to bridge the many divides needed to move promising solutions along to implementation.

The Boards and staffs of foundations are in a position to do a world of good, even staying within their existing mission. It’s not just about the diversity of faces on the Board and staff , though a respectful regard for others’ experiences would certainly help. It’s about how well Boards focus philanthropic resources on closing the gaps and reducing the casualties. Philanthropy can and must put its collective shoulders to these wheels. Until it does, and becomes more relevant to today’s society, we will continue to see mean-spirited systems and markets that contribute to substantial human suffering, and highly mediocre levels of philanthropic organization performance.


Steven E. Mayer, Ph.D. is director of Effective Communities LLC, and principal contributor to the website www.JustPhilanthropy.org

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