posted on: Friday, March 05, 2010

By Kevin Laskowski

A gathering of more than 100 leaders in philanthropy marked the release of NCRP’s new Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement in Los Angeles County. The report documented how 15 Los Angeles-area nonprofit organizations and their allies leveraged foundation grants to secure $6.88 billion in public benefits—nearly $91 of impact for every dollar invested.

In addition to the dramatic findings of the report, participants heard from several Los Angeles grantmakers and nonprofit leaders about their experience with these strategies.

A self-described “convert” to advocacy, organizing and civic engagement strategies, Dr. Robert Ross, president of The California Endowment, discussed how the Endowment’s approach hopes to connect “grassroots and treetops,” combining capital for service provision with the resources for systemic change.

“Let’s be real,” Ross told participants. “With the possible exception of public safety, our opportunity systems are broken. Every time Sacramento or Washington don’t do their jobs, our jobs get harder.”

He acknowledged the limited resources of foundations and the difficult choices that they face in these economic times.

“Every choice we face is a Sophie’s choice,” he said. “It’s tough.”

He urged participants to “lead with results” in making the case for funding advocacy and organizing and applauded NCRP for giving grantmakers another tool to get the biggest bang for their philanthropic buck. He pointed to the importance of the popular mantra “change not charity,” also the tagline for the Liberty Hill Foundation, a noted Los Angeles-area social justice funder.

“I wish I could give you a grant big enough to steal that line,” he said, nodding to Liberty Hill staff in the audience. “Charity is good but change is better.”

Antonia Hernandez, president of the California Community Foundation, noted that her own journey in these strategies was a bit different. The former executive director of MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Hernandez is no recent convert to the importance of funding strategies that effect change.

She explained how important it was to discuss the difficult choices grantmakers face with trustees and educate others about all the options available.

As Los Angeles faced the loss of millions in Section 8 housing vouchers, the board of the community foundation could attempt to devote philanthropic resources to make up the difference.

“Or, for a $50,000 grant, we can fund an advocate to Washington,” she said.

In the same way that nonprofits use litigation, advocacy, organizing, and other strategies, Hernandez said foundations bring the limited resources they’re given to bear on the serious challenges facing Los Angeles and the country as a whole.

Is your foundation interested in learning more about how to effectively support nonprofit advocacy and community organizing? Is your community organization interested in learning more about making the case for advocacy, organizing, or civic engagement? Contact us today!

Kevin Laskowski is field associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

posted on: Tuesday, June 09, 2009

By Kevin Laskowski

This post is part of a series that takes a deeper look at the myths surrounding Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best. View other posts in the series.

In his preface to Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best, NCRP Executive Director Aaron Dorfman argued:

There’s a popular but overused saying in philanthropic circles: “If you’ve seen one foundation, you’ve seen one foundation.” People use that phrase to emphasize how different each foundation is from the next. Anyone familiar with the sector knows that there is, indeed, great variability among grantmaking institutions. But many people also use the phrase to deflect criticism, arguing that the unique nature of each foundation makes it impossible to compare one foundation to another or to hold grantmakers to any standards more rigorous than those that are within bounds of the law.

Sure enough, when Criteria was released, critics trotted out a similar charge: the criteria are “one-size-fits-all.”

Steve Gunderson, President of the Council on Foundations, contended, “[W]e cannot endorse mandates, or imposed measures that seek to promote a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Adam Meyerson, President of the Philanthropy Roundtable, used the words as he attempted to provide examples of grants that wouldn’t fit NCRP’s supposedly “narrow” definition. Unfortunately, the examples actually work against him. Andrew Carnegie’s libraries and the schools that Meyerson mentions benefitted and benefit low-income people, one of the many marginalized groups mentioned in Criteria.

Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy characterized the criteria as both “deeply flawed” and “a fine set of recommendations” in the same paragraph before warning of “the sort of effectiveness where everyone marches in lockstep.”

There are several problems with this “one-size-fits-all” criticism.

First, Criteria includes exceptions for some foundations because NCRP respects the diversity of foundation missions and intent. For instance, if your mission makes it difficult to prioritize marginalized communities at the 50-percent level we established, a lower benchmark is proposed. The criteria can’t be one-size-fits-all if the benchmarks are offered in different sizes.

Second, Dorfman also wrote, “Ultimately, it's up to the leadership of each institution to decide how it's going to operate and whether or not it makes sense to meet or exceed the benchmarks for each criterion.” It isn’t “one-size-fits-all” to leave things up to the judgment and leadership of the nation’s foundation trustees.

Finally, there are already a number of “one-size-fits-all” approaches at work in philanthropy. Regulation, which NCRP isn’t calling for, is a one-size-fits-all approach. Codes of ethics are another. Critics, however, aren’t similarly opposed to the rules against self-dealing or principles in favor of having conflict-of-interest policies, which apply to all foundation leaders equally. If “one-size-fits-all”approaches were discounted outright, our sector would have no rules at all.

Critics charge that no single set of goals could possibly do justice to the diversity of aims, methods, and people involved in philanthropy.

But is this the right issue to raise? If we have to ask whether NCRP does justice to the diversity of aims, methods and people, we should also ask whether or not the diversity of aims, methods, and people in philanthropy does justice.

Does philanthropy contribute to leveling the playing field to maximize impact? In essence, does our being different make a positive difference?

In his essay “Let’s Stop the Craziness” published in the new book Wit and Wisdom: Unleashing the Philanthropic Imagination (Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, 2009), Emmett Carson, President and CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, notes that industry trade groups consistently paint the same picture:

The Foundation Center, one of our most respected institutions, continues to report that the amount of philanthropic capital distributed by foundations to communities of color and women is miniscule. The Council on Foundations, our major trade association, has consistently documented that foundations have not recruited trustees of color and that there are only a handful of CEOs and vice presidents of color serving our institutions.

Noticing a different kind of conformity, Lucy Bernholz, founder and President of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc. resurrected the term “institutional isomorphism” in a post last month. In short, as different as foundations may seem, they’re astonishingly similar. She writes:

Yes, I know the old trope, "You've seen one foundation and you've seen one foundation." That may be true at some level, but it is also true that if you've seen one foundation you've probably seen 1/3 - 1/4 of the prevalent models. The differences will all be in the trimmings, not in the underlying structures, norms, practices, or expectations.

Stannard-Stockton rightly worries about a sector in which foundations march in lock-step. Unfortunately, that’s the foundation world consistently encountered by grant-starved advocacy, organizing, and civic engagement groups serving marginalized communities.

And where the foundation world does succeed in diversity — grant application processes come to mind — that success often comes at the expense of nonprofits who must pay grant writers and fundraisers to navigate those resource-intensive, idiosyncratic processes.

If the foundation world is so diverse that no set of benchmarks could possibly have anything to say about them, then why do statistics regarding the communities and causes that benefit from foundation grantmaking, and data on board composition and general operating support remain largely unchanged despite years of debating these issues? And why do the disparities which foundations work to address continue to widen?

Could it have something to do with the fact that seemingly diverse foundation practices are not, in fact, making a substantive difference for growing numbers of people and the nonprofits that serve them? And couldn’t a well-crafted, well-researched set of recommendations for more responsive grantmaking, regardless of one’s preferred program goals and missions, be the very thing that in Stannard-Stockton’s words, “empower[s] each person to make their own choices in the most effective manner possible”?

Insisting on the foundation world’s diversity does not change the fact that the field appears to fail at being as responsive as it can and must be to meet the growing challenges of today. NCRP and all members of the philanthropic sector rightly want to pay appropriate attention to the diversity of donor goals, means, and practices, but we can also legitimately ask whether our great American philanthropic institutions are paying appropriate attention to the diverse and most pressing needs and communities foundation grants aim to benefit. To that end, Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best offers an aspirational vision of a sector that can and must do more to remain relevant.

Kevin Laskowski is field associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

posted on: Friday, June 05, 2009

By Kevin Laskowski

This post is part of a series that takes a deeper look at the myths surrounding Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best. View other posts in the series.

You don’t have to give up your commitment to a cause or community to follow NCRP’s Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best. On the contrary, pursuing the Criteria’s benchmarks increases your chances of being more effective.

Criteria was not designed to undermine donor intent but to minimize the harmful unintended consequences of thousands of grantmakers pursuing their private visions of the public good. Currently, donors are free to pursue their unique visions of the public good and enshrine their values in trusts and foundations. That’s largely a good thing, but NCRP and others have noted the problems that can arise.

For instance, the desire of large foundations to be more strategic has led to the funding of program grants and a proliferation of reporting requirements. There’s nothing wrong with these things in and of themselves. Such things can aid effectiveness and accountability. The problems arise when nonprofits confront an array of idiosyncratic requirements that result in sector-wide duplicated and wasted efforts for grants that leave them cash-poor when rent and payroll are due. It’s for these reasons, among others, that Criteria encourages reporting requirements commensurate with grant size and multi-year and general operating support grants.

Furthermore, despite foundations engaging in activities that conceivably benefit everyone, we find that marginalized groups - low-income persons, racial and ethnic minorities, women and girls, people with HIV/AIDS, people with disabilities, senior citizens, immigrants and refugees, victims of crime and abuse, offenders and ex-offenders, single parents, and LGBTQ citizens - are consistently left behind in philanthropy. In fact, only 1 in 3 grant dollars are intended for the benefit of these communities. Even as we spend millions to improve health care and outcomes for children and families in this country, Native American women experience infant mortality rates 20 percent higher than those of other races in the U.S., and children of color living in just 10 New York neighborhoods experience 90 percent of all lead poisoning in the city. These are just a sample of the statistics the report cites in its review of how inequity affects philanthropic activity. Disparities of all kinds are widening, and the refusal to pay attention to them limits foundation effectiveness.

That’s why Criteria suggests that at least 50 percent of a foundation’s grant dollars benefit marginalized communities. If you’re concerned about health, education, the environment, or the arts, it would be wise to be aware that different communities tend to benefit disproportionately from the fruits of philanthropy. Social disparities tend to reproduce themselves in philanthropic programming. NCRP does not suggest that you should stop caring about, say, neuroscience or classical music. We simply suggest that we in the sector consider how to broaden the beneficiaries of our grantmaking. Let’s ask ourselves: "Whatever public benefit I hope to create, how can I ensure that those on the margins are not left out?"

If you’re an arts funder, you might ask how low-income people or those with disabilities get access to the concerts, exhibits, or shows you help create. If you’re an education funder, you might ask about the racial diversity of the schools that receive your funds to guarantee that you are making opportunities available to all who want to succeed. If you fund the environment, you might ask if everyone’s air, soil, and water are clean. You might be surprised to find that low-income people and minorities bear the brunt of pollution and impacts of climate change.

Think of it this way: if you fund the core institutions of a community, those on the periphery may benefit, but if you make sure the benefit reaches the periphery, the condition of everyone in the community is improved.

It’s about impact — as Peter and Jennifer Buffett's recent announcement to "empower women and girls worldwide" demonstrates:

'The Buffetts say they believe focusing on helping women and girls seems like the way to make the greatest difference in the world.

"It just was logical for us after we really thought about it," Jennifer Buffett said. "If you empower adolescent girls who are the mother of every child yet to be born - if they have more resources, better health, more empowerment, more of a role in their communities, decision making, they can delay marriage and become better educated - they have so much more to offer their sons, their daughters in that next generation."'

As the Buffetts seem to believe, when grants are targeted based on these systemic issues — in their case, the role women can and do play in their communities — the benefits can bubble up and out for generations to come.

As Janine Lee, CEO of the Southern Partners Fund, wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “We shouldn’t invest in marginalized communities because it’s politically correct or because public subsidies obligate us to do so. We should invest in disadvantaged communities because it has the greatest impact on the things we care about.”

Critics like to pretend that donor intent is at odds with Criteria. On the contrary, they’re among a donor’s best shots at ensuring that their good intentions will lead to real improvements for the causes and communities we all care about.

Kevin Laskowski is field associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

posted on: Tuesday, April 07, 2009

In Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best, NCRP makes the case that, in light of the tax exemption that foundations receive, foundation dollars should be viewed as “partially public” dollars.

One interesting response has been to point out that a 401(k) is tax-exempt and we get deductions on mortgages, but that doesn’t mean NCRP gets a say in your retirement portfolio and your wallpaper.

All of this is true. Unfortunately, critics conveniently forget the reasons behind these exemptions and deductions, at which point the argument falls apart. Foundation trustees commit to furthering some sort of charitable purpose when they create a foundation. I do no such thing when I open a 401(k) or purchase a home.

This isn’t the fringe viewpoint of some radical organization. It’s the law. From the IRS’ web site:

"To be tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, an organization must be organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3), and none of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual."

401(k) plans and mortgages are created for private benefit. The earnings of foundations, on the other hand, cannot inure to any private shareholder or individual, and we have adopted many rules and regulations over the years in order to insure that the nation’s foundations serve the public purposes for which they’re created.

For example, you don’t have to tell me how your 401(k) did this year, but you do have to tell people how your foundation did this year. Forms 990-PF are filed annually and subject to public inspection. I can’t tell you that your son can’t come back home and live in the room over the garage, but I can tell you that a family reunion can’t be paid for with family foundation dollars. There are rules against self-dealing.

Critics rightly ask, “I take tax deductions all the time. Why is this one any different?”

It’s an argument we hear often, and it’s easily answered: your 401(k) plan and your mortgage aren’t organized for public purposes; foundations are. The public has a say in how that tax exemption is used, and we all have an interest in seeing it used well for the benefit of as many as possible.

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: Thursday, March 08, 2007

NCRP’s newest report A Call to Action voices the concerns of nonprofits regarding the lack of available core operating grants and how this undermines their ability to fulfill their missions. It advocates for an increase in foundations’ core operating support giving and encourages nonprofits and their allies from philanthropic institutions to mobilize and develop a strategy to build a more responsive and effective grantmaking culture.

Do you agree or disagree with the report? Should foundations give more funding towards covering the cost of nonprofits’ general operations? If so, how do you think should we go about developing a strategy and mobilize for change? If you don’t agree with the report, why not?

Download the report for free.