It’s a depressing story: American philanthropy has been booming in recent years, but giving to under-served communities has barely budged, even as these populations have been walloped by an economic meltdown and slow recovery. Also, grantmaking that challenges inequities at a systemic level has remained anemic.
This is the bottom line of a new analysis by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, and it underscores arguments that NCRP has been making for decades. Yet while it’s hard to argue with the central point that most funders aren’t doing enough for the under-served and have zero interest in challenging current power arrangements in U.S. society, our sense is that the picture is not quite as bleak as the NCRP report suggests. Why is that? Because a closer look at the data used in this report, drawn from the Foundation Center, suggests that there’s not a full accounting here of what some of the newer top donors are doing to help poor communities, especially the large-scale grantmaking to urban charter schools and the nonprofits that support them.
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