The Blog Briefly Known as "Democratizing Philanthropy?"

I met up with the brilliant, genuine, and always engaging Trista Harris on a trip to Minneapolis earlier this week. I love our conversations because she’s so smart about philanthropy and so savvy about how to make it more responsive to communities.

We talked about authentic engagement with stakeholders, the astonishing racial achievement gaps in the Twin Cities, “Minnesota nice,” how to leverage modest grantmaking budgets through targeted advocacy, and many other topics. I walked away inspired. One idea we cooked up is that foundations should be like app makers: put a lot of behind-the-scene effort into creating a “technology” (literal or metaphorical) that enables connections between actors and information, or actors and each other, that the actors can control themselves and that make their lives better. And then get the hell out of the way, and let the magic happen. Sometimes this is as simple as a convening in which groups that don’t talk to each other but should get a chance to connect.

Sometimes it can be more literal. We talked about disaster grantmaking, and how it shapes people’s perceptions of the nonprofit sector. She shared an experience working on response to the highway bridge collapse in the Twin Cities a few years back, and how people’s wonderful generosity in donating goods and toys was at a complete disconnect with people’s actual needs. And the thing is, it’s cash that people need most in a situation like that. But people often want to make it most personal.

So our idea for an app was, you’re a ninth grader in Iowa who reads about the bridge collapse (or Sandy, or Katrina, or what have you) and you want to help. The app lets you choose a good to donate – a teddy bear, some clothes, canned goods – that you can personalize as much as possible; that good gets donated to a local shelter; and the equivalent amount of cash gets donated to people directly in the disaster situation of your choosing. You get the feel-good; the local person gets the good; and the far-away person gets the cash they can use most.

All right, someone go make that happen! Mazel tov and God bless.

The always thoughtful Starita Boyce had an update on LinkedIn that got me thinking:

Not everyone can give a five-figure cash gift to the endowment fund. But, everyone can gift a life insurance policy.

I put this alongside the fact that Latino and African-American average household wealth is shockingly, shockingly, shockingly low compared to white and Asian average household wealth. Under $7,500 vs. ~$70,000 and up. I mean, what??

I think of Chris Rock’s line, “Shaq is rich. The guy who owns the Lakers is wealthy!”

I think of the story a couple of years ago of entrepreneurs offering a share of their future life income in exchange for an investment in their business.

And of course, there’s the fact that as a percentage of income, those lower on the income ladder give the most.

And it gets me thinking about what I’d call a “personal leverage factor.” What resources can you mobilize through your very existence, your very person?

What Starita is calling on people to recognize is that their personal leverage factor extends beyond income. A middle-class family saving to send two kids to college without much discretionary income for annual gifts to nonprofits (seems like a low personal leverage factor in terms of philanthropy) can have a decent-sized life insurance policy that can be part of a bequest (higher personal leverage factor). It’s a way of saying, how does society value your life? Depressing to think that one can be reduced to a number – or to that number among several others, but what Starita points us to is understanding the full extent of our personal leverage factor.

The great thing about philanthropy and volunteerism is that they extend, or even multiply, your personal leverage factor. (By the way, this is part of why social media are so appealing.) Perhaps this is another measure of wealth.

(This doesn’t even get into interpersonal leverage factor. And I’m sure personal leverage factor has something to do with the relationship between philanthropy and democracy, my two questions. Material for future posts….)

Tonight I went to a panel, “In Search of the Unexpected Future of Media,” hosted by The New Republic. TNR was recently bought by Chris Hughes of Facebook fame and Jumo infamy. He seems soft-spoken, thoughtful, and enamored of old-fashioned Serious Journalism. Bully for him, bring on more like him.

The panel itself was moderately interesting, the speakers were Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times, and Richard Plepler, CEO of HBO. It was mostly about the business of new media, which, fine. “You can monetize smart” from Plepler – encouraging!

But what struck me is that both entities are thinking of themselves as 21st-century digital content generators but are shackled to 19th-century physical infrastructure: the newspaper printing press, and the cable/phone lines. In answering a question from a 20-something audience member who wants to watch Girls but doesn’t have a cable box, Plepler answered elaborately and at length. What it boils down to is that there aren’t enough “cord-cutters” yet to allow HBO to circumvent their cable and phone partners. Their business model is tied up with the physical infrastructure of cable and phone lines.

But here’s the rub: even as one might wish for the decoupling of the NYT and HBO from the physical infrastructure that seems to drag them down financially, I bet that a lot of those jobs, especially in the printing press, are good union jobs that support middle-class communities. (Cable companies probably less so.)

Makes me think of the latest episode of Downton Abbey, where (spoiler alert!) Matthew has invested in the estate to save Lord Grantham’s (and by extension his wife’s) bacon, but now is seeing that the estate is “mismanaged,” in his words. Lady Mary hints that what looks like inefficiency is a form of largesse that’s necessary for the local economy. Economic welfare at the level of the manor is sacrificed for economic welfare at the level of the village. I dunno, sounds kinda enlightened to me. I wonder to what extent old, infrastructure-dependent industries like newspapers and telephone companies function in a similar way.

In other words, when is inefficiency at the level of the firm effectiveness at the level of the community or town? Where’s the economics that helps makes sense of that? That would be genuine political economy.

Last time, I looked at how “philanthropizing” creates vertical ties where none may have existed before.

This may be due to a market failure. A necessary one. On some level, we need the insulation of institutionalized philanthropy because it’s intensely awkward to give to a stranger directly. (Giving to people you know has its own joys and complications.)

I experienced this in the Rockaways shortly after Sandy. I was volunteering at a church that was receiving and distributing donations of goods. In the late afternoon, folks started coming in to receive them. Folding tables were set up in a horseshoe in the church gymnasium. Behind them were piles of clothes, blankets, toys, canned goods, and cleaning supplies. Between the tables and the goods were volunteers.

I was on canned goods for a while. Easy enough. I noticed that it made a difference whether I offered something or asked what they wanted. I was being given the micro power to shape expectations, and I didn’t want it. But at first, fairly harmless. When a woman said, “I just want something that reminds me of Thanksgiving,” I delighted in fishing out a can of yams I had just carefully sorted into a section with other starches (yes, there’s such a thing as canned potatoes, alas).

Things got weird when I moved I over to the paper goods. How many rolls of toilet paper are enough? How many rolls of paper towels? Who the eff am I to say? We had some vague guidelines, but it was incongruous to be parroting those to people when a stream of volunteers was piling twelve-packs of paper towels atop each other behind me. I get that the guidelines were there for a reason, but it all felt so arbitrary in the moment.

Here was a vertical tie emerging, unbidden, unwanted on either end. It’s easy to think the alternative would have been a free-for-all; some structure is needed to distribute scarce goods. But I would have been glad, in that moment, for more intermediation. I had chosen this type of volunteering because I wanted to do something direct. But that particular setup and structure left a sour taste. (Delivering hot meals to homebound seniors in the Red Hook Houses felt simpler and “cleaner.”)

Market relations are corrosive when they invade every corner of life. (I’m looking forward to reading The Moral Limits of Markets, which I have waiting on my Kindle app.) Their impersonal nature erodes solidarity. But sometimes, a little distance may be helpful.

This leads me to wonder whether contemporary philanthropy needs a market framework to operate, a certain amount of structure and impersonality. That feels counter-intuitive or wrong – giving is from the heart – but that church gymnasium, with its scoreboard blankly tallying HOME and AWAY, keeps coming back to my mind’s eye.

Happy New Year! My two questions in this blog are about philanthropy and democracy: What does it mean to democratize philanthropy? Is philanthropy a democratizing force?*

Every once in a while, I come back to these and unpack them from a different angle. Today it’s about the nature of the power relationship in each. Democracy is about collective deliberation, creating a new mode of decision-making. Schattschneider said when you increase the number of people in an argument, you change the power dynamic. To democratize is to change the power dynamic by giving more people access to decision-making.

Democracy has a verb. Is there a verb for philanthropy? What does it mean to philanthropize? (Well, I talked about expressive and directional modes of philanthropy, so that’s one set of meanings.) It means to give money. I think we usually conceive of it as reinscribing (a college word I always liked the sound of, but don’t think I had the opportunity to use correctly until this sentence) an existing power relationship: the rich give to the poor. Or for their benefit. (Mostly “for their benefit” – not directly to them. If anything, we have elaborate social structures so that we can avoid having to make that transaction, that gift, directly.)

So maybe what it means to democratize philanthropy is to upend that traditional understanding and image in two ways: by making giving more an act of solidarity, rather than noblesse oblige, and by remembering and highlighting that giving has always been multidirectional. Mutual aid, tithing, zakat, alumni giving – there’s a lot of “horizontal” giving, among poor and rich.

But in addition to (I almost said “beyond,” but thought better of it) image and perception, there’s a power relationship at the heart of philanthropy. It creates a power dynamic where none existed before: one who gives voluntarily, one who receives…voluntarily? Gratefully? Grudgingly? While democratizing multiplies horizontal ties, “philanthropizing” – in some of its key forms – multiplies vertical ties. So in that sense, it’s NOT a democratizing force – just the opposite.

I’ll leave for another time whether that’s a good or a bad thing. But it’s a thing.

* After completing this post, I went back to embed the links, and saw that I originally framed the first of my two questions as, “what is the role of philanthropy in a democratic society?”, and not “is philanthropy a democratizing force?” After nearly three years, I’ll allow myself to expand a little!

It’s all Sandy all the time here on The Blog Briefly Known as “Democratizing Philanthropy?”, so the most famous cinematic Sandy had to get a shout-out in my song-title-as-blog-title shtick. This whole thing – by which I mean the Sandy relief and recovery effort – goes right to the heart of my two questions on this blog: what does it mean to democratize philanthropy, and is philanthropy as a democratizing force? This whole thing is putting those two questions into sharp relief?

What it means to democratize philanthropy is that people are streaming to the Rockaways and Staten Island and just Getting. It. Done. Check out Sandy Sucks; I had the dumb luck and great honor of getting assigned (thank you Occupy Sandy) to car in which maestra Katie Bennett and two of her friends were getting out to the Rockaways last Saturday. Her site is an invaluable resource for keeping up to speed on what’s happening on the ground in some of the hardest-hit areas.

As someone who’s dedicated their career to working in and/or building the nonprofit sector, it pains me to see brilliant, dedicated people like Katie and her friends so turned off by the way the nonprofits that are meant to be at the frontlines in disaster relief are operating, or failing to.

Let’s be real here. The more New Yorkers see up close the ridiculous, bureaucratic, political, infuriating ways in which various elements of the nonprofit infrastructure responsible for disaster response fail to coalesce, the more pressure there’s going to be on Obama’s freshly reminted coalition. You’re less inclined to argue for the role of government when you see up close the abject failure of the government to provide one of its most basic functions. Just you wait and see…. The young people who make up a big and growing part of Obama’s coalition have ZERO patience for doing things the way they’ve been done just because we need to protect the institutions that have protected us for so long. It’s hard enough to defend teachers’ unions when they’re the object of systematized propaganda campaigns (cough, Rahm-Emanuel-tip-of-the-iceberg, cough). But to defend the role of FEMA when you see with you’re own eyes that FEMA’s just not there, or not there nearly fast enough – well, that’s a yard too far.

I’ve long been of the opinion (see here) that progressives ignore at their peril the incredibly mediocre everyday experience of government “service” that’s no farther than the local DMV or Post Office. You can’t defend government’s role without looking squarely at the inefficiencies of government. Now let’s be clear, these get exaggerated, and/or there are reasons, political or otherwise, for these inefficiencies. (That’s a post for another time; I am a political scientist after all, this is what I was trained to analyze.) But Sandy is a clear case of the rubber hitting the road. The people meant to help aren’t there to help.

—

There’s another side to this, and frankly, I don’t know how to reconcile it. Check out this list from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy about how nonprofits are responding to Sandy. This sounds like a lot! Maybe the way to reconcile it with the Sandy Sucks experience is that these are local organizations that were already there (like Red Hook Initiative), and the problem is the national ones that need to come from outside. But I don’t know. I see a disconnect, and it troubles me. The government-charitable disaster-relief infrastructure is taking a HUGE credibility hit in the wake of Sandy, in the heart of an area that should be a bastion of its support. I worry about the long-term impact on nonprofits…but I’m hopeful that it’ll lead to greater efficiencies, greater accountability, and ultimately, faster response to the hardest-hit.

Is philanthropy a democratizing force? Sometimes, when it’s done in the spirit of self-provisioning and mutual aid, maybe it can be.

Not actually a song title, but a line from a New Order song called “Regret.” Which hopefully is not apposite.

When we got back home to the Upper West Side on Friday night, it was like nothing had happened. We went to dinner, and the bistro offered a “Limited Post-Sandy Wine List.” As in, they didn’t have quite the usual selection of French wines because of the hurricane, for some reason. (Distributor ran out of gas?) We walked around on Saturday, and it was like nothing had happened. After a week of anxiously watching the news and social media from California where we were delayed four days getting home, we got back, and it was like nothing had happened where we live.

What. The. Eff.

Sunday, I couldn’t take it anymore. Even though subway service was only partly back and it took me two and a half hours on public transport to get there, I went to Red Hook to volunteer, because Jesus, how could I not.

I’ve done a lot of volunteer stuff, but it’s almost always been related to the industry in which I work, nonprofits and philanthropy. I did a summer at ConnPIRG in college, where I was the world’s worst canvasser. In a week of knocking on doors, I got one donation – of stamps. I tried hard and clearly cared, so they took pity on me and let me work in the office the rest of the summer. I mean, what else did I have to do.

So yesterday was really one of my first experiences going door-to-door in a looong time.

—

When I was in grad school, I was involved in a study of associational strategies in Latin America in the post-labor politics era, which eventually turned into this book. I was involved the first couple of years (out of 10) and helped out with getting the surveys done in Chile. The gist was that in most of the 20th century, working-class folks in Latin America had two main venues for getting problems taken care of: labor unions and leftist parties, which were closely allied. There was an associational structure that ran through labor-based parties that helped people in times of need. (Like after a disaster – you see where this is going.) With neoliberal economic reform (Reaganomics in Latin America, crudely) in the 80s, and for other reasons, that associational structure was swept away. People thought NGOs would fill the gap, would create a new “interest regime.” This project tried to figure out whether that actually happened.

The idea that sticks with me in the wake of Sandy is “self-provisioning.” In the field research, we were trying to understand how working-class people solved problems in contemporary Latin American cities (we looked at Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, and Caracas). If they didn’t have labor-based parties to help them get connections to networks and get things done, were they using NGOs, or were they organizing things themselves (“self-provisioning”)?

—

Occupy Wall Street is self-provisioning. Or rather, Occupy-organized Sandy relief is self-provisioning, built on a structure of particular kinds of NGOs. In the research project, we distinguished between grassroots, community-based groups and professional NGOs. There was a world of difference, at least in Chile. It pretty much applies in the US as well, which I see from working with professional NGOs in my day job. What Occupy Sandy has done, from what I understand and observed in Red Hook, is to layer an Occupy infrastructure, particularly an online platform for attracting young professionals and hipsters, with grassroots, community-based groups. I signed up through a recovers.org site dedicated to Red Hook, which was labeled as having been put up in part by folks from Occupy Wall Street. Through that, I connected with Red Hook Recovery, which was operating out of Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation. Later in the day, I went over to Red Hook Initiative. The two groups were coordinating and seemed to be dividing up labor between them pretty well.

There were so. goddamn many. white people lined up to volunteer. Well, that’s not entirely true, there was racial/ethnic diversity in the group, but I don’t know how much economic diversity there was. It was a ton of people from outside the neighborhood coming in to help, because like me, they couldn’t not. And I mean literally lined up to volunteer; by the time I switched over to Red Hook Initiative, there was a line around the block at Red Hook Recovery of people waiting for volunteer assignments.

Over at Red Hook Initiative, everything was well-organized, but in an accessible, friendly, kind of chill way. Getting it done, but without any airs. (Type A-minus?) They’re in what looked to me like a former firehouse or garage – I picture a big roll-up door that was now closed. It’s on a corner, and there are two entrances, one to receive meals and get your volunteer assignments, and another to drop off donations and for residents to pick them up. I learned about RHI during my canvassing rounds in the morning with Red Hook Recovery, where we went door to door and asked people what their needs were. (One building had no electricity or hot water, and no one had come by the whole time.) Our team walked by it and it was thronged with people picking up donations. This seemed to be where a different kind of action was.

I asked about volunteering there, and had been told to come back at 4pm, that we would begin delivering meals. I got there around 3:45, and a group of people started gathering. By around 4:20 we were on our way. They said they needed around 50 to 60 volunteers, and they made that easily. We were briefed about what we needed to do, we broke ourselves up into teams, and each got a canvassing sheet. We were delivering dinner to homebound seniors, most of them in public housing. The sheet listed their name, address, how many meals they needed, and had space for us to note the answers to some questions we were to ask, like whether they needed their next dinner delivered (some didn’t), whether they needed medical attention (thankfully no one did), and whether they needed supplies (several did). A charming Irish dude briefed us on the task and how to do it, and off we went.

—

I’d only ever been to Red Hook a number of years back when the Red Hook Ball Fields food-truck spot was in its early-ish incarnation. They used to just be able to set up in stands around a soccer field, but eventually the city made them set up in more formal trucks/carts for sanitation reasons. We haven’t been back.

This is Red Hook, in the southwestern part of Brooklyn, not far from schmancy Park Slope and basically schmancy Carroll Gardens. It’s an industrial, waterfront/port area, and incongruously, the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal is there.

As you can see, it’s right on the water, so it got hit HARD by Sandy. On some blocks of single family houses, half a dozen of them had the waterlogged contents of their basements out on the sidewalk. Families and their friends were going through their possessions methodically, salvaging what could be salvaged and organizing the rest for disposal. We passed by one open basement door, and looking down, the water looked to still be at waist level.

Red Hook is home to the Red Hook Houses, what someone on site claimed are the largest public-housing projects in NYC. Looks like they may be the largest at least in Brooklyn – 30 buildings with around 8,000 residents, the majority of Red Hook’s population. More than half of the buildings were without power on Sunday evening. Thank heaven for the Flashlight app on the iPhone; I sure needed it as our team trooped up and down the stairs. Most deliveries were on low floors, but the first one was on the 12th floor. Good thing I took up jogging again recently! I won’t soon forget the trek up and down the darkened stairway – nor the man who held a door for us, or another heading downstairs who stepped out of the way as we were headed upstairs.

It actually reminded me of working on the survey in Santiago all those years ago. We did two surveys, one of individuals, for which we hired a local firm, and one of associations, for which we organized a team of undergrads to administer them. My colleague and I did the test surveys ourselves. We chose specific neighborhoods in the city, got to know them a little bit, and went out to grassroots organizations to do interviews. Some of them were in current or former “shantytowns”, places where people had self-provisioned and…wait for it…occupied land and just started living there. They pirated electricity and water at first, and some eventually got it installed officially. The feel of the streets around Red Hook Initiative and at the place itself reminded me a bit of the feel of some of the more well-established community groups in the more lower-middle-class (as opposed to working class, though notions of class are different in Latin America) neighborhoods in which we did the surveys. (Lest it be weird that I compare Brooklyn to a “third world” county, when I was in Chile again this spring, I heard on the news that next year Chile’s median income will officially reach that of a “developed country”. The news was reported as no big deal.)

—

So, we got our meals delivered (to those who were home) in a couple of hours, and went back to RHI to report in. We kept running across other teams on the way in. Lots of activity at RHI as folks who were ambulatory had come in for their evening meal. When we handed in our filled-out canvas sheet, we were sent to talk to a data person before leaving. (This warmed the evaluator cockles of my heart.) We deciphered the hieroglyphics for the nice lady at the computer, and were done. I walked back through Red Hook Houses, which by that point I had crisscrossed possibly a dozen times over the course of the day, and caught the bus to the subway station. A decent number of buildings had lights, and I heard the whirr of generators in a couple of places. One stretch of buildings a member of our team had noticed had white discoloration on the brick walls about a foot or so above ground level. We realized it was probably from salt water, where the level of the floodwater had gotten. And there was always one door where the water could get in to the basement. I thought about a woman we’d visited who had the place like a sauna, because she had been boiling water for a long time to heat the apartment, which smelled strongly of gas. She had said she was about to turn the gas off. I sure hope so. I zipped my coat up against the chill and hopped on the bus.

—

What I like about this form of self-provisioning is that it built on existing infrastructure. In the middle part of the day, I wandered around kind of aimlessly, looking for something to do between canvassing and food delivery shifts. I had come all that way, I was going to stick it out. In a park between the two organizations, there was a staging area for a FEMA delivery truck. Volunteers (I kept missing the chance to do this part) most likely drawn there through social media by Occupy-connected groups, coordinated by people from the Mayor’s office in orange caps, offloaded water and blankets and staffed tables to distribute them to residents, who lined up under the direction of NYPD and dudes in combat fatigues (National Guard? Army Reserve?) who went with the two camo humvees parked nearby. I also saw one guy in a Red Cross T-shirt. I did some research on disaster relief for a client a few years ago, and this sounds like what it should look like. Coordination, different groups knowing their roles and playing them and getting stuff out to people quickly. I kept missing the chance to help out because the trucks had been offloaded, the lines had moved through, and people had gotten their water and blankets.

Occupy was only a small part of the story at that park, from what I saw, but they clearly helped to get a lot of people out to Red Hook Recovery and Red Hook Initiative to help out. And those folks did stuff that FEMA wasn’t going to do, and that the Red Cross didn’t need to do (they focus on sheltering, generally, anyway).

So NGOs in Latin America may be a different sort of interest regime, emerged in the wake of labor-based parties. Occupy Sandy seems to be a different sort of…kindness regime? Do-gooding regime? Community engagement regime? Whatever the label, I saw it working – not on its own, but tapping a clear audience and turning it out in large numbers to an area that needed the help. I was honored to have done my part.

Now go vote. Electoral politics still matter, whatever the merits of self-provisioning.

One of my more recent vinyl acquisitions is Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits. That is two quality sides of music, I tell you what. “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies….”

I’m reminded of that line as I barrel through the homestretch of the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. He’s just assumed the Presidency in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, and is consolidating power. Caro talks about how he used the cultivation of an image and “all the political arts” to secure his new position at a time of great uncertainty.

That got me thinking – what are the political arts, and which of them can and should foundations use (more)?

• Cultivating an image
• Building consensus
• Building a coalition
• Articulating a message
• Counting and securing votes
• Winning passage of a policy
• Winning an election

Seems like a lot of these foundations are free to do, the restriction on lobbying aside. Why use the political arts? To wield power. To secure it, and to wield it in pursuit of…well….

The interesting thing about the Johnson biography so far is how Caro deals with the motivation behind Johnson’s leadership on civil rights. When he was “Master of the Senate,” as the previous volume (which I haven’t read) is titled, Johnson in 1957 secured passage of the first civil-rights legislation since Reconstruction – nearly 100 years later. It took someone from the South, skilled in all of the political arts, to make that happen. What were his motives? Why risk that much? Because he genuinely believed it, or for the ego boost of doing the impossible?

It’s sort of both. But what it took was someone that looked and talked and acted like those he was trying to persuade to make it happen. And yes, protests on the outside. But that inside player is key.

And that’s where foundations can play more of a role in applying the “softer” political arts, the ones not tied to specific policies or elections. The invaluable Albert Ruesga is getting at this in a recent post about doing cultural work, beyond policy papers.

Because foundations are not generally seen as actors on the public stage, when they emerge, they can do so in a nonpartisan way (if they choose), and have the potential to help persuade those, like Harry Byrd, the head of the Congressional committee who was blocking (in effect) Johnson’s 1964 civil rights bill, who need someone that looks and talks and acts like them to apply all of the political arts to get them to see the light.

When the definitive account of how Obama secured the Affordable Care Act eventually gets written (and it’ll need to be once it’s implemented), I’ll be interested to lay it alongside Caro’s account of how Johnson secured civil-rights acts in 1957 and 1964. And yes, he didn’t do it alone, but there’s a piece that he did uniquely, applying his genius in the political arts.

Foundation CEOs don’t all need to be Lyndon Johnson (and given what’s bound to happen in the eventual fifth volume of the biography, where it all goes to hell with Vietnam, we wouldn’t want them to be), but they could learn something from that garrulous Texan about the full range of tools potentially at their disposal.

Does anyone in charge of a major institution know what they’re doing?

Obama misunderestimated the Republican Congress’ willingness to go all the way with monolithic obstructionism

The Solicitor General (i.e., the government’s attorney) flubbed both the health-care and Arizona arguments

Jamie Dimon looked the other way while $2 billion flew out the door

Seems like only John Roberts seems to have a clue anymore how to get things done. (And what a cost!)

Phil Buchanan is making a valuable set of arguments on the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog against blind importing of “business thinking” into philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, which Albert Ruesga has picked up and elaborated on in his inimitable way.

I’ve spent a decent amount of time working with foundation CEOs, and even aspire to join their ranks one day. It’s sobering to contemplate the challenges of leadership in a globalized, politicized, post-recession world. What’s that William Goldman famously said about Hollywood?

“Nobody knows anything.”

I was in a work-related conflict once that centered on control and who had it. A mentor advised me, “you should feel for that person, because the truth is, nobody’s in control.”

And this may be the most important reason the superstitious application of business thinking is dangerous: because business ethics are…what, an oxymoron? I’m with Albert and Phil Cubeta, our work has to have a grounding in some sort of moral tradition. There has to be a way to do that without falling into the trap of moralizing, of wanting to impose one’s vision of the good life on others.

And maybe that’s the challenge of leadership in a world where nobody knows anything and nobody’s in control. To find a clear patch of ground and stand on it, even as the winds buffet you. Let it blow.

Privacy

Autonomy

Perpetuity

As I started talking about last time, these are the tenets of the archetypal charitable foundation in the U.S.

Autonomy means that no one other than their own board of trustees tells them what to do. They’re not beholden to shareholders, the government, the public – they have the ability to make up their own minds.

At modest asset sizes, this doesn’t seem too problematic at first glance – you want to have your own idiosyncratic agenda, hey, more power to you.

But when we’re talking billions of dollars, that’s when people start getting suspicious. Arundhati Roy’s recent piece about the pernicious role of US foundations abroad (which, interestingly enough, is an argument being echoed, in a different key, at the Hudson Institute next week) targets certain large and familiar names like Ford, Rockefeller, and Gates. To a degree, these folks are setting themselves up for such scrutiny by promoting their own brands more aggressively (see Alison Bernstein’s reflections on how Ford’s branding has changed over the years). (H/T GiftHub for these three links.)

But let’s not forget, even with all their billions, these groups are a drop in the bucket of the economies of social problems. As Sandy Vargas of the Minneapolis Foundation pointed out at the EPIP conference last year, her budget when she ran a county administration in the Twin Cities metro area was $2 billion. One county, in one state! OK, a big county, but still – in government terms, foundations are a drop in the bucket. Always healthy to remember that.

But I think the real issue arises when autonomy is exercised by big fishes in small ponds. This goes back to the idea of funding ecosystems – funders need to be aware of how they’re situated in their individual fields, and what are the impacts of the choices they make on the health of the ecosystem. When everyone gets too focused and no one supports the broad-based, bread-and-butter groups…the ecosystem suffers.

Autonomy becomes a challenge when funders operate in fields with few other actors, where their decisions have outsize consequences. Even if in the aggregate, foundation dollars are a drop in the bucket, at the micro level, or even field level, they can have an outsize influence. All the more important then to adopt the Spider-man model as a default: “with great power comes great responsibility.”

When you combine this kind of autonomy with privacy, it can be difficult for actors in the field to figure out how to relate to “their” funders. If the default setting is for funders to keep things internally oriented, then information may not flow freely enough to enable the ongoing health of the ecosystem. If water plays a critical role in biological ecosystems, then information is the water of funding ecosystems. Privacy and autonomy throw up dams that need to be acknowledged, understood, and managed. And sometimes replaced….

Next, I’ll look at how the goal of perpetuity interacts with privacy and autonomy.