Taking a 'Marathons' View in Human-Rights Grant Making

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May 05, 2008

Taking a 'Marathons' View in Human-Rights Grant Making

Foundation leaders who don’t consider the human-rights and policy contexts of their work will fail to produce lasting change, speakers said during a lunch session on human rights at the Council on Foundations meeting.

“The question for foundations is whether you want to make investments that have short-term results without the possibility of being sustainable in the future,” said Kumi Naidoo, secretary general of CIVICUS: Worldwide Alliance for Citizen Participation. “If we’re serious about making philanthropic investments to ensure they’re sustainable over the long term we cannot ignore the human rights environment.”

Mr. Naidoo said that foundation staff members are often handicapped by pressure to demonstrate immediate results. “The struggle for justice, human rights, to end global poverty — these are all marathons,” he said. “If we treat them in philanthropic terms as quick sprints, we fool ourselves and the people in whose names we work and who we seek to serve.”

Anthony Romero, who leads the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the promotion of human rights and civil liberties in the United States can’t simply be considered the province of the Democratic Party.

He described how he hired Bob Barr, a former Republican Congressman from Georgia, to work on behalf of his organization as a way to build broader political support for human rights.

“This isn’t a liberal left agenda,” he said. “This is an agenda that people with common values across the world can make an impact on.”

But Mr. Romero stressed his concern that the Bush administration’s poor record on human rights threatened to undermine the United States’ reputation as a promoter of rights abroad.

“I fear it may take us a long time to capture what has always been seen as good about America,” he said.

— Caroline Preston

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