The Blog Briefly Known as "Democratizing Philanthropy?"

Privacy

Autonomy

Perpetuity

These are the tenets that underlie the classic model of the charitable foundation in the U.S. Our field is structured so that the combination of these three factors is the default. Different kinds of funders have different “scores” on each of these “variables” – community foundations are less autonomous because they’re driven by the interests of many different donors, public foundations choose to sacrifice privacy in favor of transparency, and a number of private and family foundations are choosing to spend down rather than exist in perpetuity.

But an institution that is private, autonomous, and designed to exist in perpetuity is the archetype of a charitable foundation.

So where does this leave one of my two questions – namely, is philanthropy a democratizing force? Let’s take each of the factors in turn. In today’s post, I’ll tackle privacy.

Privacy has a complicated relationship to democracy. The right to individual privacy is critical to democracy, but the right to organizational privacy is not necessarily as central. Sunshine laws, reporting requirements, transparency laws – these suggest that in a democracy, public institutions have a limited sphere of organizational privacy.

So while the right to individual privacy is enhanced by having foundations able to keep their affairs private, the desire for organizational transparency, the sunshine that’s integral to democracy, is…compromised? Countervailed? Complemented?

So the privacy of the archetypal foundation model is democratizing at an individual level, but not at an organizational level. How does that related to the autonomy also central to the model? For next time….

P.S. Happy belated second blog-o-versary to me! I started two years ago on April 21st. Looking back over old posts, I’ve covered a lot of ground. On to the next one!

The song from which the title of this post, by the adorable Pearl and the Beard, is really worth checking out.

Ezra Klein had a provocative piece in the New Yorker last month about “the powerless presidential bully pulpit.” We think of the President’s main power as that of persuasion. But political scientists have found that having a President speak out on an issue may actually make it less possible for them to get legislation across on that issue, because having a President, associated with one party, take a stand means that the opposition consolidates along party lines – a Republican can’t support Obama’s stated policy preference because that cedes ground to Democrats – even if the individual Republican happens to agree with Obama on that position.

[Political scientist George] Edwards’s work suggests that Presidential persuasion isn’t effective with the public. [Political scientist Frances] Lee’s work suggests that Presidential persuasion might actually have an anti-persuasive effect on the opposing party in Congress. And, because our system of government usually requires at least some members of the opposition to work with the President if anything is to get done, that suggests that the President’s attempts at persuasion might have the perverse effect of making it harder for him to govern.

Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, takes Lee’s thesis even further. “The more high-profile the communication effort, the less likely it is to succeed,” he says. “In education reform, I think Obama has done brilliantly, largely because it’s out of the press. But on higher-profile things, like deficit reduction, he’s had a much tougher time.”

[I reversed the order of these paragraphs from the original article to make them make more sense out of context.]

Teju Cole has a great piece on the Atlantic website about “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” inspired by KONY 2012 and other international do-gooder efforts. (He’s also in tomorrow’s final of the 2012 Tournament of Books.) It’s an evocative phrase, let’s break it down.

That the saviors are white matters because of the white man’s burden, the legacy of colonialism, and unexamined white privilege.

That they frame themselves as saviors (if that’s what they’re doing) matters because that denies agency to the people who are being nominally saved.

That it’s an industrial complex matters…why? Because do-gooding should be an artisanal craft? Because it should be a monastic calling? Because it should be divine inspiration? Because…. Hmm. The original term “military-industrial complex” pointed out that two apparently unrelated areas were related that shouldn’t be related, because they concentrated too much material and political power. What power do would-be white saviors wield? And why should their professionalization be worth calling out as a danger?

Could it be because the power to call attention to an issue or problem, particularly one as previously obscure as the Lord’s Resistance Army, turns out to matter after all? And that the innocence and disintermediation that were the public face of KONY 2012 supporters somehow confirm our prejudices about what do-gooding should look like – non-industrialized, organic, idealistic?

The truth is, white saviors have a pittance of the Pentagon’s budget. Not much of an industrial complex – more like a set of competing and fractious medieval guilds. So it shouldn’t be surprising that they try to leverage the hell out of soft power.

There are many kinds of complex that white saviors could be ascribed: superiority, inferiority, Cassandra – but industrial? Nah. They wish.

Trayvon. Trayvon. Trayvon Trayvon Trayvon. Trayvon.

What the hell, people. What the EFFING EFF.

In good news, Leah Hunt-Hendrix is awesome. I can’t wait to read her book on the “genealogy of solidarity.” And she’s stirring things up within philanthropy among individual and institutional donors. Go Leah!

Can’t stop thinking about #Kony2012, I’m surprised not to see more about it in the philanthropy blogosphere. Anyway, a few pieces have cleared things up for me. Somewhat.

Communicopia educated me about the work that Invisible Children has been doing over the past eight years to build their constituency that made the video go so viral. Though they appear to have come out of nowhere, IC have actually been slogging in the trenches for years. This article is pure gold, the insight-to-length ratio is off the charts. Go read it.

You’re back? Good. Now, this puts it all into perspective. Girls 13-24 are the ones sending around the video because they’re the ones that IC has been targeting and seeking to empower.

Ethan Zuckerman brought me up to speed on the most thoughtful critiques of IC’s strategy, and they are many and persuasive. Go read that one, too, but wait a minute, because it’ll take a while, and you should especially read the comments, which are bubbling with vitriol. Drama!

Which brings us to Dan Pallotta, who in typical pugnacious style, comes out swinging. A friend pointed out that Jason Russell of IC was going to be on Lawrence O’Donnell, so I DVR’d it. OMG – So. Smarmy. I had a viscerally negative stylistic reaction. I do it myself sometimes, but male upspeak is not a great look for anyone. Again, maybe he’s speaking the language, literally, of the people he works with, but it grated with me. But Pallotta takes it to another level, accusing – particularly in the comments on his post – critics of being jealous of IC’s success. “The criticism is largely based in envy at Invisible Children’s success.” Yeah, that’s gotta be there, but “largely based in envy”? Come on now.

And this gets to one of the things I found troubling in both sets of comments section (Ethan’s and Pallotta’s): the *extreme* thin-skinnedness of IC supporters. Any critique is to be not only repudiated but denounced as mean-spirited, unfair, or futile. “Go fix things in Uganda if you’re so smart” is the essence of one refrain in the comments. Really? The message is that delicate that it needs to be protected from any negativity? It’s one thing to pulsate with the energy of youth, it’s another to quaver with its fragility and, well, insecurity.

But then I watched the actual Kony2012 video. (Except the parts where he explains Kony to his 5-year-old. I find that nauseatingly manipulative, and skipped over those few minutes.) The first several minutes aren’t even about Uganda, or Kony. They’re about this moment in time, about what can be achieved by the many coming together on Facebook. He explicitly talks about this being an experiment, to see if something huge can be achieved. God love ‘em, there’s even a visual depiction of a theory of change that’s as clear and simple as I’ve ever seen. (That’s the kind of thing I do all day at work, and I have to say, pace Dan Pallotta, that my emotion on watching it was excitement – there’s a way to do what I do better! Awesome! Let me learn how!)

I for one am really excited to see the first Kony2012 copycats that actually have success. Because that’ll be one of the true measures of impact, is if this does prove a successful experiment, and shows a different way of doing things.

A final note: I also learned from a website I hadn’t heard of before called Talk2Action that Invisible Children is funded by a number of evangelical Christian organizations. Knowing this, seeing the part of the Kony2012 video where the student activists are chanting IC slogans in unison made perfect sense, and also sent a little shiver up my spine. Perhaps it also explains the fervor of some IC defenders in the comments section? (Yes, that was upspeak.) I don’t really know how to parse the intersection of evangelical Christian missionary impulses, social-media wizardry, youthquake mobilization, and working on the front lines of international human rights work. Yet another reason this is fascinating and worth watching as it evolves.

There’s so much going on with #StopKony I barely know where to start.

I spoke with a funder once whose range of investments included support for private security forces seeking out a war criminal. Philanthropy is institutional but it’s strangely chained to the raging id. You have the money, you have the autonomy – let’s see what you can do. Most wouldn’t do go that far, but some small number do. In some cases, no one knows, you like it that way, you keep it that way. In the case of Invisible Children, an NGO that raises money, you decide after years toiling in the shadows (well, relatively speaking, they’re actually fairly known on the international NGO scene) that it’s time to go viral. The theory of change is that you need political will to keep U.S. military advisers in country to keep the hunt for Kony on, so you tap your skills in video/media production and create a video designed to go viral.

And the cycle of backlash is just so fast. One of the people on my blogroll, Chris Blattman, has come out against the campaign, as have others. (Nice compilation here.) Invisible Children seems to have done an exhaustive job of responding to critiques, worth a read. Any opportunity to give a wider audience more nuance about how to think about NGO effectiveness is a positive in my book. For example, IC talks about how they get a two-star rating from Charity Navigator on transparency because they don’t have at least five independent board members. They have four, and say they’re interviewing for a fifth. It’s like buying a car, people, do your homework. But look beyond the rating systems, dig into the assumptions, learn some of the lingo. If you can spend 29 minutes watching the video….

Then again, as the caption says on a slide on my corkboard at work, “There is no such thing as boring information; there is only boring presentation.” Maybe someday someone’ll find a way to sex up the nuance of NGO accountability ratings. Until that day, put on your green accountants’ visor and start clicking. And if you have questions, I’m always here; this is what I do for a living….

Interesting post from Rich Tafel on the SSIR Opinion blog about the Komen/Planned Parenthood clusterfrak. His argument is that the social sector is becoming as polarized as politics. “Until social change leaders really understand the depth of ideological diversity and the hold it has on our culture, our causes will rise and fall on the political wins or losses of those with whom we agree.” Hmmm.

Makes me think about the old idea of civil society as an “independent sector”. I usually tend to think of it in terms of independent from government or business. But there’s something to the notion that it’s about independent from politics. This is countercyclical to the trend of philanthropy being an extension of rich people’s social-change portfolios – a foundation alongside a c4 alongside contributions to candidates alongside impact investing. Perhaps a truly independent sector can’t be about efforts that are subsidiary to someone’s overall agenda. Rather it should be about mass movements, and not always organized through professional nonprofit organization.

Reminds of the meme going around this week on Facebook about X job – what I think I do, what my mom thinks I do, what I really do. The “Occupy Wall Street” has what I do, what the right thinks I do, what the left thinks I do, what liberals think I do, and what I really do – the last of which is an image of the earth with hands and arms linked together around it. I honestly have no idea what that means, but it seems like an image that resonates broadly. And the way the author think of OWS in opposition to right, left, and liberals – talk about independent!

I’ve written previously about locavorism as a potentially bipartisan issue. There’s something exciting about the possibility of brand-new political cleavages (the polisci term for issues around which people organize and argue). And to Albert Ruesga’s point about the “meaning of a nonprofit,” there may be something to the idea of the nonprofit sector as independent from politics.

To be continued….

The Komen/Planned Parenthood thing is an omen of further struggles to come within philanthropy. Private foundation decision-making is notoriously opaque; a frequent complaint of grantseekers is that it’s not clear why they’re denied, and they don’t usually get feedback about why. (All too often, they don’t even ask.) This was somewhat tenable when private foundations stayed safely on the margins of social and political discourse.

Now, more and more private foundations are seeking attention, publicity, interaction. But their practices around decision-making are not well-suited for this new reality. As Phil Cubeta at GiftHub points out, Karen Handel from Komen, the exec at the heart of the Planned Parenthood controversy, used all the “right” technocratic phrases. But the baldly political nature of the decision-making created an uproar precisely because Komen has been so successful at branding. Foundation governance and decision-making have a long way to go, in other words, to catch up with new ambitions for, I guess you could call it, belovedness.

Be careful what you wish for, because loyalty cuts both ways. In our strangely entitled consumer economy (Louis C.K. has a good bit about this, H/T avclub.com), where we expect gratification that’s not just instant but predictive (it knows what you want before you do), those brands that do pass the loyalty bar inspire such devotion that when they “wrong” us, we lash out at them. Just ask Netflix.

Decision-making and governance are the soft underbelly of the foundation world, and as the Komen thing demonstrates, when you poke it, the results aren’t pretty. Time for some sit-ups….

I’m back. The past few months have been a blender work-wise, but I’m back to blogging.

And thank you Albert Ruesga for inspiring my return. Your most recent post on White Courtesy Telephone, “Steve Jobs, the Meaning of a Nonprofit, and Moral Imagination,” crystallized a lot of the things that have been troubling me about sector agnosticism. As arbitrary as the tax code is on some level, the designation “not-for-profit” captures something essential about certain forms of collective action.

As much as the lines between sectors are blurring, I predict that non-profits won’t go away entirely. There’ll always be a sphere of action that is fundamentally opposed to commercial motives – as much as contemporary life in These United States is geared to make us think of “democratic capitalism” as the state of nature, unearthed and made real.

I mused last time about a progressive theory of wealth accumulation. I’ve also complained about the paucity of our theories of human behavior. At the Venn-diagram intersection of these two is a progressive theory of human frailty, of fallibility. Novelists get at this, screenwriters too – but in the political sphere, conservatives have staked out this territory as their own. In one prominent right-wing worldview, progressives believe in the perfectibility of man, that the application of reason can lift humanity out of the benightedness of religion and into a land of rational justice – while conservatives, grounded in Judeo-Christian teachings, see man as fallen, as having original sin, and therefore never being perfectible. On this view, social engineering, attempts to order society to perfect man, are not only doomed to fail but fundamentally misguided due to the fallen nature of humankind. Better to preserve traditions that have emerged organically. (Hello, antebellum South.)

But I believe there has to be a progressive theory of human frailty that is not about fallenness but about compassion and empathy. Such a theory doesn’t have to have the particular elective affinity I’m about to describe, but for me it dovetails with atheism: this is all there is, so dammit if we hadn’t better treat each other right. ‘Cause we’re all we’ve got.

Anyway. To me this is the soil from which a democratic philanthropy grows. Visions of wealth accumulation and human frailty, reclaimed from partisan clutches, put in service of human flourishing in the here and now.

So thank you, Albert, for stirring my (slumbering?) moral imagination.

I had a friend in college whom I met again while about to enter grad school. He’s one of the book-smartest people I’ve ever met, just brilliant at making connections among all sorts of diverse intellectual traditions and disciplines: computer science, philosophy, literary theory, evolutionary biology – it was all one big playground for his mind. And he said the darnedest thing to me when I described my nascent career in philanthropy. This was more than ten years ago, so I have to paraphrase, but the gist was, “I thought about being a professional do-gooder, but then I realized, much better to get rich and then direct the funding to what I think is important.” Of course, that imperative to donor-directed giving is all the range now, but what struck me was the sequencing: smart, progressive people should get rich, and then use that power to do good.

I think about that conversation often, because it’s becoming clear in the current 99%/1% discussion that progressives have a real ambivalence about getting rich. Not being rich, getting rich. Put another way, what is the progressive theory of wealth accumulation? (Separate discussion needed about tech wealth and the cult of Steve Jobs.)

The libertarian economist Tyler Cowen responds to progressive blogger Matt Yglesias’s post on this topic, and the comments on Cowen’s post are well worth browsing – much more light than heat than is usually the case in comments sections.

For me, what it’s about is this: under the current, rigged set of rules, those who succeed the most are rewarded inordinately, all out of proportion to their level of achievement. It didn’t always used to be this way: the ratio of pay between CEO and worker didn’t used to be so absurdly high. (There was a very interesting piece in New York magazine a few weeks back about how Mitt Romney is to a degree behind this change, from his management consulting days.) But these days, if you hit the jackpot, the multiplier effect is astronomical. That’s wealth that could have been distributed differently, more broadly. And it used to be, under good old red-blooded American capitalism. But the game is rigged in a way that rewards the 1%, kind of whether they want it or not. Don’t hate the player, hate the game? I dunno.

To me, this starts to get at the heart of the discussion, and opens up some space to think about the role of philanthropy in helping to promote certain framings and certain incentives. Not sure what that looks like yet, but I picture a small flame in a room full of gusts of hot air, and the need to cup your hand around it so it doesn’t get snuffed out. What does a positive, progressive theory of wealth accumulation look like, and where does philanthropy fit in the picture?