If our love has gone cold, it’s time to light the fire - NCRP

Editor’s note: To read in this post in Spanish, please click here. Para leer este artículo en español, haz clic aquí.

We’ve gotten overwhelmed. Constant catastrophic news, from climate change to national politics, has given us thick skin: We don’t feel as much anymore. We can easily disconnect ourselves from the pain that our friends, neighbors and even family members are feeling and continue with our lives as if it’s nothing.

Yet while we put our heads under the sand, things are happening right under our nose. Raids on immigrants with and without papers have escalated, and the “Zero Tolerance” policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on April 6 further criminalizes the undocumented, ensuring that those who cross the border seeking asylum face criminal charges. These decisions are having devastating effects.

Between April 19 and June 15 almost 2,000 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. The government does not have enough places to house these children and has had to use tents for the expansion.

Although the president signed an executive order on June 20 that supposedly stops family separation, the reality is quite different. In fact, the order maintains the criminalization of immigrants and asylum seekers and seeks to detain them indefinitely. There is also no plan to reunite the children who have been kidnapped by our government with their parents.

To be a child of immigrant parents or an immigrant child in the U.S. in this political time is a tragedy. Fears, insecurities and nightmares limit the dreams and aspirations they can have.

In the first week of April, ICE agents in Tennessee broke a record by arresting 97 people at work simply for being Latino: Some of those arrested were here legally or were citizens. The next day more than 500 children didn’t arrive at school.

Many communities are facing this crisis head-on. NCRP nonprofit members including the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition, United We Dream, Define American, GALEO, Southeast Immigrant Rights Network, Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama and Inner City Muslim Action Network are fighting right now so that the vision of immigrants and their communities can be realized.

But the vast majority of the philanthropic sector has not invested in this urgent work. Between 2011 and 2015, 1 percent of all money granted by the 1000 largest U.S. foundations was intended to benefit immigrants and refugees – and only half of 1 percent was granted for strategies like civic participation that build immigrants’ and refugees’ power*.

I live in the heart of an immigrant community, and the majority are Central Americans. The uncertainty is palpable on the faces of these kids. To see them waiting for the school bus, you can see their sadness, fatigue, and disinterest in life.

I know them, and when talking with them you realize that they’re aware that their parents can be deported at any time. They can’t make plans for a future with their parents because there’s no guarantee that they’ll be together the next month.

Titu, a 7-year-old neighbor of mine, told me, “My mom already told my aunt that she would be our guardian if they deport her.”

And Carlitos, 13, already knows how to read legal documents and stay vigilant about his surroundings. He’s worried that his mother drives too fast and without a seatbelt; he makes sure that the car lights work and that they follow driving laws out of fear that he’ll lose his only family in this country – his native country.

Both of these children feel disconnected from everything this great nation can offer them: They can’t imagine a life without their mothers, nor can they imagine a life outside their country.

Children also experience intimidation and verbal abuse at school, but their parents fear reporting these problems for fear of deportation. This leaves the children feeling powerless, without anyone to watch over them. Instead of being protected, many of them stay quiet and resign themselves to endure.

These families dream of a solution, a change in laws that will permit them to stay to work and to transform their lives and the lives of their children. But politics and partisanship have prevented us from coming to a common sense agreement about how to meaningfully address the ramifications of immigration.

We are ruining our future, because the generation that can help this nation achieve new goals, discover new medicines or reach another galaxy is being destroyed.

This nation owes much to immigrants; we have always been part of the history and foundation of the U.S., and we will continue to be.

The new generation will break boundaries, creeds and barriers of race and gender. We need to give them the necessary resources to get there. They have the right to dream freely about their future.

Will we wait until we lose more souls like Claudia Patricia, Gómes González and Roxana Hernández? Will we forget to dream of a better future? Of course not! We will not give up. We’ll educate ourselves, unite forces and take action.

Foundations and donors, you have a crucial part to play:

1. Listen to immigrants, respect their stories and center their vision. Remember that we are diverse, knowledgeable and already have the skills we need to win.

2. Get money out the door quickly to immigrant leaders, particularly our youth. We are fighting for our lives! We don’t have time to jump through hoops.

3. Commit for the long haul. Long-term general operating support allows us be nimble, strategic and, yes, sane. We need and deserve the capacity to think years ahead, because the roots of this tragedy will remain with us for the foreseeable future.

4. Educate yourself through attending events by groups such as Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, which is holding a webinar about family separation at the border on Wednesday, June 27.

We are the adults. Let’s unite forces and make a future for these children. Our great-grandchildren will thank us.

Aracely Melendez is NCRP’s IT manager. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

*Based on NCRP analysis of Foundation Center data.

Si el amor se enfría, encendamos el fuego

Ya estamos saturados. Tantas noticias de calamidades, por cuestiones climáticas o por situaciones políticas, se nos han hecho la piel gruesa: Ya no sentimos.

Podemos desconectarnos tan fácilmente de todo el dolor que nuestros amigos, vecinos y hasta familiares están sintiendo y seguir así, como si nada. Aunque metamos la cabeza debajo de la arena, las cosas siguen pasando bajo nuestras narices.

Las redadas de inmigrantes con o sin papeles han escalado debido a la política de “Cero Tolerancia” la cual fue anunciada por el fiscal general Jeff Sessions el 6 de abril y que criminaliza al indocumentado haciendo que las personas que crucen la frontera enfrenten cargos criminales. Esta directriz, trajo consigo efectos devastadores.

Por esta razón, entre el 19 de abril y el 22 de junio, más de 2,000 niños fueron separados de sus padres en la frontera. El gobierno no tiene suficientes lugares donde albergar a estos niños y aún han tenido que expandir los albergues de detención a través de tiendas.

Aunque el presidente firmó una orden ejecutiva el 20 de junio que supuestamente pare la separación de familias, la realidad de lo que hace es distinta. De hecho, sigue la criminalización de los inmigrantes y refugiados, y pretende retenerlos indefinitivamente. Además, no existe ningún plan para reunificar los niños ya secuestrados por el gobierno.

Ser niño de padres inmigrantes o ser un niño inmigrante en los Estados Unidos en este tiempo político es trágico.

Miedos, inseguridades, pesadillas acorralan los sueños y aspiraciones que estos niños pudieran tener. En la primera semana de abril un operativo de ICE en Tennessee que rompió cifras históricas al arrestar a 97 personas simplemente por ser latinos, ya que algunos de los arrestados están aquí legalmente o son ciudadanos. Al siguiente día, más de 500 niños no llegaron a la escuela.

Muchas comunidades se están enfrentando a esta emergencia. De hecho, miembros de NCRP como Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition, United We Dream, Define American, GALEO, Southeast Immigrant Rights Network, Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, y Inner City Muslim Action Network luchan ahora para que los derechos humanos de los inmigrantes sean respetados.

Pero la gran mayoría del sector filantrópico no ha invertido en este trabajo urgente. Durante 2011-2015, uno por ciento del dinero concedido por las fundaciones entre las mil más grandes de los Estados Unidos, fue dirigido a beneficiar a los inmigrantes y refugiados – y sólo la mitad de uno por ciento del total se dedicó a estrategias como la participación cívica que aumentan el poder**.

Yo vivo en el corazón de un área de inmigrantes, y la mayoría son centroamericanos. La incertidumbre se palpa en las caras de estos niños. Al verlos esperar el autobús escolar, se puede ver su tristeza, cansancio y deslumbro de la vida. Yo les conozco y al conversar con ellos tu puedes darte cuenta de que están conscientes que sus padres podrían ser deportados en cualquier momento. Ellos no pueden hacer planes de un futuro en el cual sus padres estarían presentes porque no hay garantía de estar juntos el próximo mes.

“Mi mami ya le dijo a mi tía que ella sería nuestra guardiana por si a ella la deporten.” Eso me comentó Titu, una vecinita de 7 años que vive cerca de mi casa.

Carlitos, a los trece años, ya sabe cómo leer documentos legales y como estar siempre atento a lo que está sucediendo en su entorno. Él se preocupa que su madre maneje rápido y sin cinturón. Asegura que las luces del auto trabajen y que las leyes se cumplan al manejar, por miedo de perder a su única familia en este país, que es su país natal. Carlitos se siente desconectado de todo lo que esta gran nación puede otorgarle, no puede imaginarse una vida sin su madre, pero tampoco puede imaginarse una vida fuera de su país.

En la escuela local, los niños cuentan de abusos verbales e intimidación a sus padres, pero estos niños se sienten sin derechos y se han quedado sin alguien que vele por ellos porque a sus padres les da miedo ir a la escuela a preguntar o reclamar, por temor a ser deportados.

En vez de ser protegidos, muchos callan y dejan pasar abusos. Estas familias sueñan con una solución, un cambio en las leyes que permitiera quedarse a trabajar, lo cual transformaría las vidas de estas familias y de estos niños. Pero la política, y los poderes de partido han impedido a tener un acuerdo común de cómo tratar con las ramificaciones de emigración.

Esta nación está en deuda con nosotros los inmigrantes; siempre hemos formado parte de la historia y de la fundación de los Estados Unidos y lo seguiremos siendo.

La nueva generación romperá fronteras, credos, y barreras de género y de raza. Tenemos que brindarles los recursos necesarios para llegar allí. Tienen derecho a soñar libremente con un futuro.

Estamos destrozando nuestro futuro, porque la generación que pudiera llevar a esta nación a alcanzar nuevas metas, descubrir nuevas medicinas o llegar a otra galaxia, está siendo destruida.

¿Esperamos hasta que hayamos perdido más almas como Claudia Patricia, Gómes González y Roxana Hernández? ¿O nos olvidamos a un futuro mejor?

¡Claro que no! No nos daremos por vencidos. Uniremos las fuerzas, y tomaremos acción.

Fundaciones y donantes, ustedes tienen una parte crucial que jugar:

1. Escuchar a los inmigrantes, respetar sus historias, y centralizar sus visiones. Recuerde que somos diversos, conocedores y que ya tenemos las habilidades que necesitamos para ganar.

2. Otorgue disponibilidad de dinero rápidamente a líderes inmigrantes, especialmente a nuestros jóvenes. ¡Estamos luchando por nuestras vidas! No tenemos tiempo para pasar a través de obstáculos.

3. Comprometerse a largo plazo. El apoyo operativo general a largo plazo nos permite ser ágiles, estratégicos y sí, sensatos. Necesitamos y merecemos la capacidad de pensar en los próximos años, porque las raíces de esta tragedia permanecerán con nosotros en el futuro previsible.

4. Educarse asistiendo a eventos de grupos como Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, como el webinar sobre la situación de las familias separadas en la frontera que se llevará a cabo el miércoles 27 de junio.

Somos los adultos. Unamos fuerzas, marquemos un futuro para estos niños. Nuestro bis-nietos lo agradecerán.

**Analísis de NCRP basado en el data de Foundation Center.

Over two years ago, a pattern of philanthropic underinvestment in the American South prompted the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy to partner with Grantmakers for Southern Progress on a deep dive. The result, a series of five reports entitled “As the South Grows,” draws on over 150 interviews with local leaders. The driving question: Why isn’t structural change work getting funded in this critical region? And what would it take to unlock that grantmaking?

Since the project began, national politics has undergone a series of convulsions whose effects on philanthropy are still playing out. But unlike most big city progressives, Southern organizers have taken the past two years in stride. According to NCRP’s Ryan Schlegel, who co-authored the reports, “Most of the southern leaders we’ve interviewed, after the election, were more even-keeled about it than many of my social circle.”

Read the entire article in Inside Philanthropy.

While working on my forthcoming book, Decolonizing Wealth (release date Oct. 16), I have been energized by the As the South Grows series. I write about communities that have been excluded from philanthropy like those featured in the reports.

Specifically, I write about communities of color, particularly in the South, from which I originate (Go Heels!).

I’ve been inspired by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) and Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP), which have been working to drive more philanthropic resources to structural change in the South.

According to As the South Grows, between 2011 and 2015, foundations nationwide invested only 56 cents per person in the South for every dollar per person invested nationally. This is unacceptable!

The newest report, So Grows the Nation, provides three steps grantmakers must take to change this inequality, the first of which is to reckon with shared history.

Good structural change grantmaking in the South requires an understanding of the complicated history of the region and well as the region’s role in our nation’s history – a history of colonization and slavery. A history that has excluded.

In Decolonizing Wealth, I write:

In their intoxicated rush to consolidate wealth, colonizers reduced the number of religions, languages, species, cultures, social systems, media channels, political systems, etc. On all scales, global to local, this homogenizing campaign – global bleaching, you could call it – made the world not just more bland and boring, but also less innovative and less resilient. Evolution and innovation arises from difference and variation, not from sameness. These are fundamental principles of life.

Yet there’s a silver lining. Those most excluded and exploited by today’s broken economy possess exactly the perspective and wisdom needed to fix it. Ironically, the separation paradigm that locked us out and made us Others actually cultivated our resilience strategies. To survive the trauma of exploitation, we always had to believe that the dominant worldview was only one option, even when it seemed ubiquitous and inevitable. This has made us masters of alternative possibilities.

For us to have carried inside ourselves the possibility or even hope of a different world is powerful all by itself.

As the South Grows reinforces the case to “understand the past in order to help shape the future, including especially the ways in which power has been distributed in our communities and the impact the distribution has had on people’s lives.”

Understanding and grappling with history is painful. For some, it’s like yanking off a Band-Aid. There may be moments of discomfort.

I invite you to sit with it, in the understanding that things have been just as uncomfortable, if not painful, for the excluded, for a very long time.

An essential step in the process of resisting the urge to exclude in our grantmaking is decolonizing our thinking. A good place to start is hearing out respectfully and with an open heart the painful stories of those who have been exploited and excluded.

Decolonization is about a mind shift. But first we need to recognize the pain caused by the accumulation of wealth and how it was made on the backs of Indigenous people, slaves and low-wage workers, most of them people of color – many in the South.

We need to acknowledge the trauma. We need to re-open those wounds and grieve them and apologize for them.

When considering additional investment in the South, particularly in communities of color, understand that making a few trendy grants is not enough. It is simply token diversity.

We must go beyond representation to sharing ownership of philanthropy’s power with communities in the South – and making a commitment for full, long-term inclusion of system-change work in the region in our portfolios.

The work of GSP and NCRP, and the steps outlined in As the South Grows, give funders an opportunity to start walking our talk about diversity and equity, acknowledging that those most excluded and exploited by today’s broken economy possess exactly the perspective and wisdom needed to fix it.

We need to build new decision-making tables rather than setting one token place at the colonial tables as an afterthought.

Finally, we need to put our money where our values are and use money to heal where people are hurting and stop more hurt from happening.

This is not a silver bullet solution. There is no quick fix for the complexity of a history that has caused separation and excision.

The healing path to full inclusion is a process with roles for everyone involved, whether they’re rich or poor, funder or recipient, victim or perpetrator. For those of us from the South, we’ll be excluded no more.

An enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, Edgar Villanueva is the chair of the board of Native Americans in Philanthropy, a trustee of the Andrus Family Fund, and the vice president of programs and advocacy at the Schott Foundation for Public Education. Follow @VillanuevaEdgar and @DecolonizWealth on Twitter. Decolonizing Wealth is available for preorder here.

The investigations by Rep. Wright Patman, a populist Texas Democrat, resulted in major reforms of foundation law. It also spurred foundations eager to protect their reputations to fund the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which exists to serve as a watchdog to philanthropies, a subject I’ve written about for four decades.

Read the entire story on Alternet.

Warning: This blog post contains and describes an image of a lynching that may be disturbing for some readers.

Editor’s Note: This blog post is the third in a series of guest features on NCRP’s exciting new resource, Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice.

In 1884 and 1910, two lynchings took place in Dallas, Texas. The circumstances recorded for these heinous and violent acts are in keeping with many of those on record at the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Currently, you will not find a marker in the city that cites this history, though you can find an internet site called Dallas Untold that records the information through text and photographs. One photo in particular is haunting. In a crowd that surrounds a hanged man, Holland Allen Brooks, two white boys are looking directly at the camera.

I have thought a lot of that photograph since I returned from the museum and monument opening in April with my colleague Lauren Embrey, president of the Embrey Family Foundation.

Picture of a monument to the Dallas County lynchings of William Taylor and Holland Brooks, taken by Vicki Meek, an artist and long-time activist and civil rights organizer in Dallas.

Acts of racial terrorism like these against Black people have been created and sustained by white culture. Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice team have bravely offered us an invitation to reckon with our country’s sins, to face the shadow side of our historical and current demons of mass incarceration of brown and Black men and women, and to heal.

If we continue to be “blinded by our white” and don’t own what is happening now in the U.S., it will continue to fester. We have the power to do right.

I am a white woman working in a white, privileged family foundation. Though we have undertaken public leadership efforts and invested more than $2 million dollars to work on racial equity in Dallas, we know we still can push ourselves to go deeper.

We can examine what has worked and fallen short, and find new ways to offer transparency in our learning. For example, last year Lauren wrote, “We must change the narrative, the one learned as children, and the one that continues today. Each of us can be part of that solution, and it starts by understanding our biases and the words we use.”

As an overwhelmingly wealthy, white sector, I feel it is incumbent of every funder that has begun this work or is steeped in it, and even more importantly, is afraid of it, to make the pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama.

Here are some recommendations from our journey at the Embrey Family Foundation:

Picture of monuments to lynchings including those of Dallas County, taken by Vicki Meek, an artist and long-time activist and civil rights organizer in Dallas, Texas.

Don’t overplan. As stated in the NCRP Power Moves guide, this is adaptive leadership and movement building. If you try to roadmap it before you begin, you might never start.
Find ways to sit in your discomfort. Don’t expect to be thanked by communities of color. In some instances you might be discounted, outed or ignored for your efforts. Do it anyway. One simple action Gloria Steinem referenced at the opening of the museum and memorial in Montgomery was “If you are white and have power, listen twice as much as you talk.”
You will have dark nights of the soul – talk them out with other white colleagues and those that are on the same path. I did not weep at the monument. I felt I had to witness it, and intentionally sought to be present and take it in. When I got home the next day, I felt heartsick hearing the shower running. I was reliving the memory of what I perceived as the “veil of tears” wall in the monument, which is dedicated to the unnamed and unknown victims of lynching. I broke way down and let the tears flow.
Art can lead the way. Funding art as social justice has been our foundation’s way into difficult work over and over again. Find and support the artists in your community.
Get help. Find trusted resources that can guide and counsel. Many resources are listed on the Power Moves site, and the recent publication As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation outlines a sensible roadmap for entering into or enlarging our collective consciousness on engaging in equity work. This report reminded me of the museum’s archival documentation on the financial capitalization of enslavement in the South that has compounded wealth across the U.S. today.

We are sunsetting our foundation in 5-7 years, which shortens our threshold for grantmaking in Texas. It also gives us an opportunity for fresh insight on how best to give out our remaining years.

For this reason, we are participating NCRP’s new year-long advisory and peer-learning group for funders committed to working on Power Moves, an assessment guide for equity and justice. We look forward to sharing more about our journey.

In this work, you will have joy, you will feel love and you will be called to a higher ground of community – perhaps contributing to the beloved community many have waited generations to take their seat in. Even a small family foundation can make a difference. We invite you to join us.

Diane Hosey oversees philanthropic outreach for the Embrey Family Foundation based in Dallas. Follow @NCRP and @EmbreyFdn on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity.

Editor’s Note: Molly Schultz Hafid received the Neighborhood Funders Group Award for Excellence in Philanthropy during last week’s Raise Up Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. In her stirring acceptance speech, she talked about three “provocations” for funders to face Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “fierce urgency of now” – trust, power and privilege. Below is an excerpt that highlights her reflections on power.

In a recent conversation with my daughter, she shared a fun fact from her day at school, which is that the triangle is the strongest geometric shape. At the risk of repeating unverified fake news from the 2^nd grade set to all of my favorite people in philanthropy, I googled it and geometry.com confirms that “a triangular shape is the strongest one.” So, inspired by my daughter, I want to reflect on three sides of our work we need to face with what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called the fierce urgency of now: trust, power, privilege.

POWER

Molly Schultz Hafid with Dennis Quirin, Kevin Ryan and Garland Yates during last week’s Raise Up Conference in St. Louis, Missouri.

Molly Schultz Hafid with Dennis Quirin, president of NFG, Kevin Ryan, program officer at the Ford Foundation and Garland Yates, senior fellow and managing director of the Community Democracy Workshop, during last week’s Raise Up Conference in St. Louis, Missouri.

NCRP in their new Power Moves toolkit for advancing equity and justice shares a definition from Rashad Robinson of Color of Change. He says, “Power is the ability to change the rules.” When you all head home and start to think about trust and how to build it in to your work, I think a key step is recognizing and embracing the power you have to change the rules within your institutions.

Vanessa Daniels of the Groundswell Fund also recently offered thoughts on using our power by sharing an Alice Walker quote: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

To be honest, early in my career, I thought that real power was behind the doors of private suites at meetings and conferences like this where small groups sat around and made deals. I thought the key to being influential and powerful was to get invited into the rooms. After making it into a lot of these rooms, I started to feel like all we were really doing is remaking our own elites. Small groups of people with money deciding who should get it.

Regardless of where you came from before philanthropy, how big your endowment or portfolio is, and how challenging your internal institutional culture might be, we each have power.

For some of us, it is comes from our clarity of purpose built on a life of experience. For others of us, it is something we are made aware of quickly upon arrival in philanthropy. And still others of us really prefer not to think about it at all because we think it is a bad thing. We might find it deeply uncomfortable at first but eventually – after a few nice dinners, cushy conferences and quickly returned phone calls – our sense eventually becomes dulled.

However our power remains, and we do things like ask for feedback and take time to listen, while knowing deep down that we don’t really agree and are just being polite; say yes and no all day; draw the lines around our program areas; frame our strategies to our boards; decide which calls to return and which meetings to take; decide who to invite to a meeting and how to design the agenda; determine the acceptable outcomes to merit continued support; decide who on our teams has the freedom to speak for themselves and who has to get permission.

My next provocation is to think about how we can build more distributed networks of mutually accountable leadership instead of controlled campaigns of influence and alignment. In other words – leadership development and organizing.

Vanessa also reminded us that the “boldest organizing – from janitors, to farmworkers, to foundation program staff – often happens from the ground up, not the top down. And that “Any system or institution run by human beings can be organized. There is absolutely nothing exceptional about philanthropy in this regard.”

Regardless of how we feel about it we are in powerful positions, and those of us who shy away from it end up ineffective at best, and destructive at worst. In our isolated and unaccountable sector – the only ballast against abuse of power is collective and community accountability.

Being recognized this evening at NFG is an incredible honor and while we enjoy this reception, just a few miles from Ferguson, it is also a humbling reminder of MLK’s charge to us that “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

Editor’s note: Read Molly’s inspiring speech in its entirety, including her reflections on truth and privilege.

Molly Schultz Hafid is associate director at TCC Group. She is also a member of NCRP’s board of directors. Follow @Brooklynmolly, @TCCGROUP and @ncrp on Twitter. Join the conversation on building, sharing and wielding power in philanthropy using #PowerMovesEquity.

Foundations in the United States should step up their support for innovative and effective social change networks in the South, which offers fertile soil for developing solutions to national problems, a report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and Grantmakers for Southern Progress finds.

The fifth in a series, the report, As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation (32 pages, PDF), found that, between 2011 and 2015, U.S. foundations invested 56 cents per capita in Southern states for every dollar per capita invested nationally, while grantmaking in support of structural change work only amounted to 11 cents per capita in the region. The report further notes that the typical grantmaking process tends to put Southern social change organizations at a disadvantage. Because the South has often been the proving ground for the nation’s most regressive public policies and rhetoric, the report suggests that by not investing in structural change work in the region, the philanthropic sector is putting marginalized people across the country in harm’s way.

Read the entire article in Philanthropy News Digest.

For Immediate Release

New report: Philanthropy must invest in the South to have a true national impact

NCRP offers eight actions funders can take to jump-start their philanthropy in the South

Washington, D.C. (6/13/2018) – Grantmakers and donors across the country are looking for ways to improve opportunities, outcomes and wellbeing of communities of color, the poor, LGBTQIA people, the disabled and others in the margins. There’s a region that provides inspiration and a place to start meaningful philanthropic giving with national impact.

The American South has leaders and grassroots organizations that know how to fight regressive and divisive policies and practices that are marginalizing communities in the region and beyond. And yet, grantmakers have invested only 56 cents per person in the South for every $1 nationally.

“As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation,” a new report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP; www.ncrp.org) and Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP; http://www.nfg.org/as_the_south_grows) highlights why it’s important for funders – from within and outside the region – to begin or increase giving in the South and how they can do so in ways that produce lasting, positive impact in the South and nationally.

How should Southern grantmaking work?

NCRP’s researchers spent two years examining philanthropy in the South and concluded that the grantmaking process used by funders typically puts Southern organizations at a disadvantage. Foundations and other donors who want to support real change in the South must fundamentally change the way they make decisions regarding who receives a grant, what activities to support and how.

According to Ryan Schlegel and Stephanie Peng, authors of “So Grows the Nation,” grantmakers must do the following to achieve this fundamental change:

Reckon with shared history.
Weigh the stakes of the status quo and risk its privilege.
Recognize and honor Southern capacity.

They provide practical tips for funders on how to operationalize these three steps.

Re-establishing trust

Foundation staff and trustees – both national and those from the South – have a history of failing to trust Southern grassroots leadership. This is especially true when the leaders are women – particularly Black women – people of color, poor people, LGBTQ people and immigrants.

Meanwhile, Southern grassroots leaders often do not trust funders even when their intentions are pure.

“Some have been burned by foundation staff who promise the world and do not deliver; some have been frustrated for too long by foundation staff’s inability to work effectively in the region,” according to Schlegel and Peng. “Broken relationships and mistrust are left in the wake of decades of philanthropic misadventures.”

To repair these broken relationships, grantmakers need to find out what’s broken, center relationship-building in their grantmaking strategies, and shift power and resources to Southern leadership.

And by repairing these relationships, foundations and nonprofits from across the country can learn from a Southern ecosystem where it is the norm is to organize marginalized people across gender, class, race and other identities.

What can grantmakers do now?

While repairing relationships may take some time, there are still steps grantmakers and other donors can take to jump-start high-impact Southern grantmaking.

Schlegel and Peng lay out eight actions funders can do right now, including investing in grassroots civic engagement infrastructure, taking more risk and hiring Southerners.

“As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation” offers practical tips and resources that will help grantmakers and donors to have positive lasting impact on issues and communities they care about. The report, as well as the first four in the series, “On Fertile Soil,” “Strong Roots,” “Weathering the Storm” and “Bearing Fruit,” is available for free on www.ncrp.org.

About NCRP

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy amplifies the voice of nonprofits and the communities they serve in the philanthropic sector. Through research and advocacy, it works to ensure that grantmakers and donors contribute to the creation of a fair, just and equitable world.

About GSP

Grantmakers for Southern Progress is a network of southern and national funders who are committed to fostering thriving communities in the American South, characterized in part by racial and gender equity.

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Media Contacts:

Peter Haldis: (202) 328-9351 or phaldis@ncrp.org

Foundation boards are some of the least diverse spaces in our nation. Overwhelmingly white and older, most trustees don’t reflect demographically the communities they serve.

In the last few years, however, there has been a lot of conversation in philanthropy about the need for grantmakers to learn from the perspectives of those they purport to serve. However, although listening to those you serve is important, it is not enough. It’s time for funders to take the next step and begin to actually share power with lower-income communities, communities of color, people with disabilities and others who have been systemically marginalized in our society.

Read the entire article in The NonProfit Times.