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Conference Notebook
May 2008
May 07, 2008
The Grant Maker's Guilt
The exhibit-hall booths have been dismantled and most of the 3,200 foundation leaders who attended this week’s Council on Foundations annual meeting are heading home.
Some grant makers say they are leaving the meeting energized and eager to tackle social issues with a renewed vigor.
But at least one conference attendee says the lavishness of the event at the new Gaylord National Harbor conference center has left him with mixed feelings.
Albert Ruesga, vice president at the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, in Washington, writes on his blog, White Courtesy Telephone, of the uneasy emotions that he felt as he listened to speakers talk about addressing human-rights abuses in an opulent hotel he says is “large enough to have its own zip code.”
“Sitting in this place, isolated as I am from the hurly-burly of the world, I’m in a fog,” Mr. Ruesga writes. “I forget that the wars we wage most vigorously in the name of human rights are tied intimately to the protection of American consumption—my consumption, and that of my family and friends.”
Debating Diversity
Speakers at a plenary session on diversity — the first on that topic ever held at a Council on Foundations conference — sparred over legislation in California that would require big foundations to publish information about the race and gender of grantees, staff members, and board members.
Foundations must do more to improve their track records on diversity, but legislative solutions are “fraught with sandbags and land mines,” said Robert K. Ross, president of the California Endowment, in Los Angeles. He noted that the California bill, adopted by the California Assembly in January, ran into trouble because it was amended to require foundations to provide data about sexual orientation, which then drew complaints about violating privacy rights.
“There is no model definition of diversity,” said Mr. Ross, who also heads the Diversity in Philanthropy Project, a group of about 40 foundation leaders who are pushing for more diversity in the field.
But Ann Wiener, a trustee at the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, in New York, said after some tough discussion her board voted overwhelmingly to endorse the California legislation. She said the foundation world had not come very far on a voluntary basis and “legislation may be the only way to do it.”
The council presented data showing that 87 percent of foundation boards, and 94 percent of chief executives, were white in 2006, compared with 66 percent of the general population.
Rep. Xavier Becerra, a Democratic member of Congress from California, said foundations might invite federal scrutiny if they do not step up their giving to projects that benefit minorities, saying they have an obligation to earn their tax subsidies by working for the public good.
Mr. Becerra called the tax deductions that people claim for charitable donations a “$32-billion earmark” and noted that Congress is seeking ways to rein in spending. “Right now earmarks are under a big microscope, and $32-billion is a lot of money, so do well.”
Adam Meyerson, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a group of mostly conservative grant makers, said he rejects any effort to tell foundations how to make up their staffs, boards, or giving. He said there’s no reason to assume a white-dominated board won’t care about helping low-income or minority people.
“There’s a tremendous yearning among current and especially among prospective new donors to make a difference in the lives of low income children and families,” he said. “Let’s not drive away the new philanthropic capital by taking away from donors the freedom to decide how and where to give away their money.”
I. King Jordan, a deaf member of the board of the Theodore R. & Vivian M. Johnson Scholarship Foundation, in West Palm Beach, Fla., urged the grant makers to pay more attention to physical disabilities when they discuss diversity.
“We have to be inclusive in our definition of diversity. I feel like I’m standing out like a sore thumb at this conference,” he said. “I’m the only deaf person in the whole conference.”
Different Approaches Needed for Poorer Communities
Foundations that want to help the poor need to abandon short-term thinking and be much more flexible when they analyze grant applications.
That message was delivered repeatedly at a session here led by foundation officials who specialize in grant making in low-income communities.
“We have to be willing to take some risks,” said Kafi D. Blumenfield, chief executive of the Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles. “This is a risky area of grant making. Not all of the seeds are going to sprout.”
The risky nature of working with small organizations in poor communities prompts many foundations to pour their grant making into more established charities.
But Ms. Blumenfield says foundations that take the time to get to know the people who work in those neighborhoods make smart investments and produce meaningful improvements.
The Liberty Hill Foundation, for example, has created boards of people in Los Angeles’ most downtrodden neighborhoods to help advise its program officers and board members on which charities are most worthy of support.
The foundation has also decided to take steps such as accepting grant applications in Spanish to help it reach out to organizations that otherwise do not receive attention from foundations.
But its biggest investment, by far, is time.
“The key is investing and waiting to take the time for change to happen,” she said.
May 06, 2008
Who Can Name a Foundation?
Even with all the attention the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has received — especially after Warren Buffett pledged most of his fortune to the philanthropy — even some of the best-informed Americans cannot summon to mind the name of a single foundation.
A poll of community leaders discussed at a session here found that 56 percent of community leaders cannot name a foundation on their first try, and only 15 percent can cite examples of a foundation’s impact on their city or town.
But even though community leaders can’t cite specifics about foundations, they have favorable views of philanthropy. Slightly more than half of the community leaders surveyed as part of the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative — an effort supported by several big foundations to make influential Americans aware of how foundations work — said it would be a significant loss to their community if foundations no longer existed.
That is a good sign, Kevin Klose, president of National Public Radio, told grant makers at the meeting.
“There is a wealth of good feeling about nonprofits and about public service in this country, regardless of what the exact identities are.”
How Foundations Can Best Help the Poor
Newt Gingrich, the former U. S. Speaker of the House, said he was against trying to get philanthropy to find the “perfect planning model” and “dubious” of efforts in the U. S. Senate and elsewhere endeavoring to “fine tune” philanthropy.”
He said he did not see a “single best path” for philanthropy or nonprofit activities, but that that just about everything charities do should be based on information technology.
He also advised foundations to spend 10 percent of their time thinking beyond five years, 20 percent of their time thinking beyond two years, and the rest thinking about the present.
He said that philanthropy needed to support “full-blown experiments” in poor neighborhoods to help people become productive citizens. Excessive bureaucracy, he said, stymied federal efforts at intensive and novel anti-poverty approaches.
Rey Ramsey, chief executive of One Economy Corporation, a charity that helps low-income communities gain access to information technology, shared the stage with Mr. Gingrich and objected to his use of the word “experiment.”
“Don’t experiment with me, meet me halfway,” he said, suggesting that philanthropy should listen to what people in troubled communities say they need.
More Than Money: How Foundations Can Help After a Disaster
In the aftermath of a disaster, foundations can bring to bear more than just their grant dollars as they help communities rebuild, James A. Joseph, chairman of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, in Baton Rouge, told participants at the Council on Foundations annual meeting. Mr. Joseph served as the council’s chief executive from 1982-95.
Grant makers can help local nonprofit groups in affected areas gain access to experts, data, and information about what has worked elsewhere, and foundations can use their own reputations to advance the work of those organizations, said Mr. Joseph.
“Foundations can use their social capital as a kind of collateral for those whose formal credentials and written proposals understate their potential and reliability,” he said. “A grant is a Good Housekeeping seal of approval that says to the larger community that this foundation has done due diligence and we find this organization credible, accountable, and effective.”
Foundations, said Mr. Joseph, are in a position to use their networks of contacts to encourage greater collaboration.
“Building coalitions will require that we work with, rather than simply on behalf of, those who suffer most in the crisis – mainly the poor and those who are marginalized because of color or culture,” he said.
With more than $500-billion in assets, foundations in the United States have more power – and more responsibility – than the amount of money they distribute in grants each year suggests, said Mr. Joseph. He encouraged foundation officials to think about how they use the other 95 percent of their endowments.
“Some thoughtful people in the field are beginning to ask: Should a private foundation be more than a private investment company that uses some of its excess cash flow for charitable purposes?” he said. “I am delighted that more and more foundations are beginning to put a larger share of their assets in the service of their mission.”
Brace for Tough Times, Grant Makers Warned
Robert Rubin, the United States Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration, told grant makers at the meeting that the nation’s economy was facing “the most complex set of circumstances” in his lifetime.
Mr. Rubin, director of the executive committee of Citigroup, the financial-services firm in New York said the abnormally long period of economic growth preceding the current downturn was atypical of the usual cycles in the economy. He also warned that development of new “complex financial instruments” during the boom years and disruptions in the credit markets created a potential “perfect storm” of economic instability.
Foundations, he said, therefore may end up earning less on their endowment investments over the next one to three years when compared with the investment growth achieved in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, he predicted that that foundations could end up facing “tremendous fiscal pressure” as the need for their services increase and government resources are reduced.
“What do to in the face of this is a philosophical judgment,” he said.
Michael Rubinger, chief executive of the Local Initiatives Corporation, the community development grant maker in New York, shared the stage with Mr. Rubin, and said in the face of a protracted downturn “it might be time for foundations to dip into their endowments.”
Mr. Rubin also said he was “skeptical” of program related investments—foundation investments made in support of charitable causes designed to bring a financial return. He said foundations’ missions are better served by achieving the maximum earnings they can safely achieve from their investments with the goal of increasing their grant-making ability.
Mr. Rubinger responded by saying he didn’t necessarily see a trade-off between program related investments and grant making.
A Project to Create More Hillary Clintons
Despite Sen. Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the presidency, women are greatly underrepresented in the U.S. political system – -a scenario the White House Project is attempting to change.
Marie Wilson, the group’s president, told a conference session about her group’s efforts to train women across the country to run for political office, calling it an example of nonpartisan political activity that is permitted under the tax code governing charities.
The United States ranks 71st in the world in the percentage of women serving in parliament (here, the House of Representatives). “It is not really a representative democracy,” said Ms. Wilson.
Ms. Wilson, who headed the Ms. Foundation for almost two decades before starting the White House Project in 1998, said many of the women who received grants from the foundation were creating innovative social programs that focused on HIV/AIDS, health care, small loans, and promoting a “living wage.”
“That’s the government in exile,” she thought, and wanted to find a way to give them more power. The White House Project, in New York, has trained 1,700 women over the past three years in the mechanics of running for office, touching on campaigning, communications, and fund raising, Ms. Wilson said.
But it has found the most effective way to persuade them to become candidates is to give them examples of other women who have made that leap — for example, by showing a documentary about Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Many women are reluctant to step forward because they see so few other politicians who look like them, she said.
In that sense, she said, Senator Clinton has inspired more women to want to try politics, showing “you can get to the highest level.”
After a Disaster: Advice for Grant Makers
Several reports that offer advice and lessons learned about grant making after a disaster commanded attention during session’s at this week’s conference. Among them:
- Best Practices in Disaster Grantmaking: Lessons Learned from the Gulf Coast, published by the New York Association of Grantmakers, offers advice on what foundations should do after a disaster. For instance, it urges grant makers to reach out to charities in the affected area, rather than waiting for requests for assistance and recommends practices to avoid, such as taking up a great deal of a local nonprofit leader’s time and then not making a grant to the organization.
- The Survivors’ Fund Process for Disaster Recovery, published by the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, in Washington, describes how the foundation provided financial support and case management to more than 1,000 people in the seven years after the September 11 attack on the Pentagon. The report is designed to make it possible for other foundations to copy the approach quickly without starting from scratch. An accompanying report tells the stories of some of the people who received assistance from the fund.
Philanthropy and 'Quiet Diplomacy'
What role can foundations play in helping to protect people from nuclear warfare, genocide, and other conflict? Speakers discussed that question at a session here entitled, “Philanthropy and Conflict: Quiet Diplomacy, Public Advocacy.”
Grant makers can help build coalitions of activists to call for the creation of new tools to deter violence, said William Pace, executive director of the World Federalist Movement, in New York. He described how grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and Ford Foundations, among others, had helped his organization build grass-roots and political support to open the International Criminal Court, an institution based in the Hague that prosecutes people for genocide and crimes against humanity.
“The reality used to be that if you killed one or two people, you were almost always brought to justice, but if you killed 1,000 or 100,000 people, you almost never were,” he said. “Now we’ve replaced the culture of impunity with a new paradigm.”
John Lewis, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said his decades-long efforts to engage in discussions with North Korean officials have relied heavily on the support of grant makers.
He described an “explosion” of efforts to engage in unofficial discussions by nongovernmental groups hoping to improve relations between the United States and countries such as Iran and North Korea.
Foundations can also build political and public support for new approaches to ensuring security, said Don Steinberg, a vice president at the International Crisis Group, which is based in Brussels.
Mr. Steinberg described how world leaders had agreed in 2005, for the first time, that governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens from mass violence and that international organizations must take action if governments are failing to live up to that responsibility.
The MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Institute, Ford, and other grant makers had recently helped create a center in New York to promote concrete policies that would enable governments to protect citizens.
Mr. Steinberg said he’d been heartened by the quick response of international organizations to recent post-election violence in Kenya.
“Would we have had a Rwandan-style genocide in Kenya?” he said. “Fortunately, we’ll never know and that’s because the international community did buy into the notion that we are responsible for preventing a genocide. And I, for one, am delighted to live with that uncertainty.”
'Flipping the Funnel' With New Online Tools
At the Council on Foundation’s conference session on “philanthropy 2.0,” speakers delved into ways organizations can use social networking sites and other interactive online features to reshape activism and fund raising.
Rupa Modi, East Coast development manager for Kiva, in San Francisco, spoke of her organization’s rapid success as the first person-to-person micro-lending Web site. Kiva — which seeks to create an “addictive” experience by replicating aspects of sites like Amazon and Facebook — has enabled more than $25-million to be lent to needy borrowers in its three years of existence.
Ms. Modi says the appeal of the site comes from user profiles of both lenders and borrowers (who are first vetted by partnering microfinance groups). The sites feature photos and short biographies, frequently updated news stories, and other interactive features. Kiva also uses a technique known as “crowdsourcing,” drawing newcomers through Evites, parties, and Facebook.
Joe Green, founder of Facebook Causes, says members of the social networking site can create a profile of a cause or group they support and then invite their friends to donate to it or get involved in its activities. Mr. Green said that he sees this technology as a way to “bring back peer-to-peer fund raising.”
With over 100,000 causes created in under a year by Facebook users, 12 million participants use the Causes application and have raised $2.5-million.
Michael D. Smith, director of social investment at the Case Foundation, says that one of the great things about these online tools is that they invert the normal top-down mode of philanthropy, “flipping the funnel” and “giving grantees and stakeholders a chance to drive the machine.”
May 05, 2008
Preparing for a Wave of Older Americans
The growing number of older people in America can benefit society immensely, said Rep. John P. Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, at a Council on Foundations meeting. He likened the demographic shift to a wave: “If we’re ready for it, it can really lift us up.”
But he and others at the session, entitled “Multi-Generational Challenges for the Future,” stressed the need for appropriate systems in place to reap these benefits and “absorb the energy and excitement” of older Americans.
The panel, moderated by Bill Moyers, focused on the importance of continued civic engagement by older people, including in the arts, education, and the environment. It also explored the health-care and financial challenges that affect older people.
Carol Moseley Braun, a former Democratic Senator from Illinois and founder of the nonprofit group Good Food Organics, stressed that the poorest elderly are single women, and that only 15 percent of black women and 10 percent of Hispanic women have pension coverage.
“That speaks ill of us as a community,” she said. “How we treat them, as well as how we treat our children, will define our generation.”
Panel members had many ideas for linking engaged older people and children.
“One of the places we’re seeing most success in engaging seniors in volunteer work is with schools,” said Mr. Sarbanes. He’d like to see older adults volunteer alongside children on environmental issues, for example, as a way to increase children’s time and experiences outdoors.
Dana Gioia, poet and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, urged conference participants to take the lead on finding ways to engage the older population. “You need to create partnership and investments in bold new ideas,” he said.
All speakers agreed on the need for a fundamental shift in how our society views the elderly.
“We’ve got to get out of this mental box where we think seniors are old and retiring,” said Mr. Sarbanes. “Seniors are young and what I like to think of as graduating” to a career serving the public.
Foundations Urged to Drop Jitters Over Public-Policy Work
Foundations should work more with government at all levels on issues they care about—and get over their reluctance to advocate for public-policy changes, speakers at a conference session said.
Foundation boards are far too timid about trying to influence lawmakers, mistakenly fearing it would jeopardize their tax-exempt status, said Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, in Washington, and a former Democratic U.S. senator.
“The IRS encourages philanthropy to be engaged in public-policy issues,” he said. Foundations should collaborate with government bodies, both to tap into their budgets and to have a greater impact, he said. A small change in public policy often has a huge “multiplier” effect, he said.
Jean Case, chief executive of the Case Foundation, in Washington, said her organization gives preference to projects that involve government collaboration because they are “more likely to go further faster.”
She cited her position as co-chair of the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership, a group set up by the U.S. State Department to attract private money for projects to improve the economy in the Palestinian territories.
The Case Foundation also persuaded the U.S. Agency for International Development to jointly support a project to provide “PlayPumps”—children’s merry-go-rounds that are attached to water pumps—to South Africa, she said.
Foundations should gear up to influence the transition team that will be preparing policy for the next president after the November election, said John Bridgeland, president of Civic Enterprises, a public-policy consulting firm in Washington.
Mr. Bridgeland, who served on the transition team for President George W. Bush, said it was “flooded” with proposals from philanthropic bodies and was able to take action on many of them.
Fighting Global Warming
“This is not a time for business as usual,” said Stephen B. Heintz, president of Rockefeller Brothers Fund in New York, moderating a session on the role of philanthropy in dealing with global climate change.
Mr. Heintz said that global climate change should not be considered solely an environmental issue and that grant makers focused on causes as diverse as the arts and human rights should take steps to deal with global warming. “It’s time for every foundation to find their path to helping solving this global destruction,” Mr. Heintz said.
Betsy Taylor, founder and chairman of 1Sky, a charity in Takoma Park, Md. dedicated to raising public and political awareness of climate change and some possible solutions, said her organization has attracted 47 youth groups, including some evangelical groups that are pressuring Republican lawmakers to pass legislation to curb climate change.
Some change in the climate is already causing damage, and will continue to do so regardless of longterm steps people take, so foundations should also support efforts to figure out how to adapt to the damage.
In response to a question from an audience member about the possible hypocrisy of foundations fighting global warming while some of their endowments might be invested in industries thought to contribute to the problems, Mr. Heintz stressed the importance of active shareholders. He noted that two members of the Rockefeller family that sit on the board of the foundation have introduced stockholder resolutions on global warming at Exxon’s stockholder meeting.
“This is a hugely important event,” he said, noting that the Rockefeller family helped found what became Exxon Corporation.
Taking a Long View of Foundation Investments
Proponents of socially responsible investing told participants at the Council on Foundations meeting that factoring social and environmental issues into their funds’ investment decisions doesn’t have to mean lower financial returns — but will require a new mind-set.
The fight for socially responsible investing is a fight against the prevailing emphasis on short-term financial results, said Peter S. Knight, president of Generation Investment Management US, in Washington.
When Generation Investment Management analyzes businesses to invest in, it looks at traditional financial factors, such as market position and competitive advantage, but also at social and environmental factors. The investment-management company believes that over time businesses whose operations are socially and environmentally responsible have a competitive edge.
But for that kind of approach to become more widespread will require a different time line on the part of many investors, said Mr. Knight.
“If you pay an investment manager to manage to the quarter, guess what, they’ll do it,” he said. “But if you give them a three-year, four-year, five-year time horizon in which they’ll be compensated on their performance, then that’s what they’re going to do.”
The business climate is changing quickly, and companies are going to have to start taking responsibility for the environmental impacts of their operations, said Thomas W. Van Dyck, a senior vice president at RBC Dain Rauscher, an investment-management company in Minneapolis.
“Carbon’s not going to be free anymore,” he said.
Given the wide range of investment opportunities available today, said Mr. Van Dyck, foundations don’t need to sacrifice their ideals for financial returns.
“There’s so many different ways to make money,” he said, “you don’t necessarily need to go in those areas that you don’t believe in.”
IRS Says No Plan Yet to Overhaul Private-Foundation Tax Form
While the Form 990-PF — which private foundations file with the Internal Revenue Service each year — could use a makeover, don’t expect one any time soon, Ronald J. Schultz, an IRS senior adviser told participants at the Council on Foundations meeting.
Mr. Schultz said many of the changes made on the new Form 990 — which charities must file starting with their 2008 tax year — could also be beneficial for the foundation form. In particular, he could envision creating a summary page at the beginning of the form to help the public better understand a foundation’s finances and mission. And he would also consider revising questions about compensation and adding new questions about governance practices.
But getting the money to pay for an overhaul of the Form 990-PF could prove difficult, particularly because relatively few organizations use it, he said. Mr. Schultz said only 75,000 or so groups file a 990-PF each year, compared with roughly 550,000 charities that file a Form 990 or Form 990-EZ.
He said if foundations want to see the form redesigned, they will have to “identify a compelling need” for it.
Marc Owens, a Washington lawyer who previously headed the IRS division that oversees nonprofit groups, said he knows of one part of the Form 990-PF he’d like to see eliminated: the list of investment transactions. He said the list provides heft to many foundations’ filings, yet does little to improve transparency or government oversight.
The Power of 'Viral Movements'
Nonprofit groups, the media, and businesses need to rethink the traditional model of charity and begin to collaborate more, said presenters at a panel discussion called Viable and Viral Solutions for Social Change.
With traditional charity, “there’s a person who gives and a person who gets, as opposed to all of us being a part of the same story,” said Eve Ensler, who wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which led her to create the V-Day Foundation, which campaigns against violence against women.
Ms. Ensler’s play started a viral movement, growing from one performance in 1998 to more than 4,000 this year. Over the past 10 years, celebrities such as Glenn Close, Oprah Winfrey, Rosie Perez, and many others have performed the monologues, bringing star power to the issue. Typically, colleges and other community organizations perform the play on Valentine’s Day, and donate the proceeds to anti-violence groups of their choosing. Overhead costs are low, and participation is high. Ms. Ensler said that in addition to raising funds, the play transforms how the actors, audiences, and the public think about misogyny and women’s issues.
“In order to shift the culture, you have to shift the mindset,” she said. “It’s why I believe so much in art.”
Another presenter, Tonja Brown, director of strategic integration at CNN, said that the network’s involvement in philanthropy began as she noticed the trend of celebrities becoming more involved with various causes. She also noticed viewers were contacting CNN and asking how they could help with various causes.
“We would be missing out on opportunities if we didn’t go in that direction,” she said. “It’s expanding our brand because the world is expanding and changing.”
CNN’s Web site offers ways that viewers can donate to a variety of charities, vetted by Charity Navigator, that are linked with current news events. For example, donors are directed currently to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Programme, which are assisting victims from the cyclone in Myanmar.
“Every single day there’s an opportunity for people to something,” she said. “Why not build it into their lifestyle?”
Caren Yanis, executive director of the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, said that even without a lot of media attention, social-change movements can spread virally. She pointed to the “O Ambassadors” program, which she said has been “under the radar” of media outlets, and has not yet been highlighted on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The program consists of student clubs in schools across the United States. Students learn about and raise money for worldwide issues of hunger, poverty, and limited access to education. There are now 1,200 such clubs and Ms. Yanis said word is spreading via educators and participants.
At the closing of the session, Ms. Brown issued a challenge to each attendee: “Partner with someone you haven’t partnered with before. Before you leave, make sure you reach out to someone you traditionally wouldn’t reach out to and create a movement.”
Charities Urged to Measure Their Impact
Nonprofit groups that work on campaigns to change policy or get people to vote must learn how to measure whether they are accomplishing their goals, Eli Il Yong Lee, executive director of the Center for Civil Policy, in Albuquerque, told a conference session.
“We have to focus like a laser on external metrics,” said Mr. Lee, whose center puts together coalitions to promote liberal causes and increase voter participation. For example, a coalition might declare success if 9,000 out of the 10,000 people it targeted in a get-out-the-vote effort showed up at the polls. However, he said, “there’s no way to say what we did caused the turnout.”
He said his organization works with local professors to design “treatment and control” tests to determine whether its activities have produced the desired results. Such tests compare the behavior of a group of people who have been targeted by a particular campaign with a control group of people who have not.
One discovery the center made this way, he said: Sending postcards to remind people where to vote was not effective in turning out voters.
Mr. Lee, a former political-campaign consultant, said his center also encourages coalitions to bring donors into their strategy sessions from Day 1. “In nonprofits, we have this weird culture where we have this wall between donors and groups,” he said, adding that is not true in other areas such as politics.
Coalitions should also assign their members to do the jobs they are best at, not necessarily those they want to do, and learn to respond quickly to changing events, “without going to 20 people to make a decision.”
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.
Back to the Future
In a session titled “What Issues Lie In Our Future?” a group of philanthropy experts discussed where philanthropy might be going as the 21st century progresses.
For Akwasi Aidoo, executive director of Trust Africa, a foundation in Dakar, Senegal, the country to keep an eye on in the future is actually not on his continent.
“Unless you have been in Africa in the past few years you cannot understand that China is in Africa in the biggest way possible,” Mr. Aidoo said.
Grantmakers and charities working in Africa would be well advised to learn about the influence, power, and priorities China is increasingly bringing to Africa, he said.
Susan Raymond, senior managing director of Changing Our World., a consulting firm in New York sketched out some of striking demographic and technological changes under way.
Nano technology—basically very small machines that she said could one day “allow a shirt to change into a raincoat at the first drop of water” is just one such gee-whiz marvel that may be coming.
She advised grant makers to not be daunted by the pace of change but to make at least 10 percent of their grants for risky efforts, which she defined as “problems that nobody really understands.”
She said that in “pushing the edges of understanding” you could expect at least 50 percent of the efforts to fail. But, she said, efforts that succeed have the potential to be transformational.
Partnerships Picked as Top Priority for Nonprofit World
Partnership and collaboration were the buzzwords at the electronic town hall plenary on philanthropic leadership held at the Council on Foundations annual conference. The presentation, led by AmericaSpeaks and sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Microsoft, and the McCormick Tribune Foundation, gave participants a chance to discuss and prioritize how they, as representatives of the nonprofit world, might take collective action to improve society and influence the next president.
Carol Lukensmeyer, founder and president of AmericaSpeaks, led the discussion, as participants keyed in their responses from their tables.
In response to a question for how foundations could have the most impact, the top answer from those gathered in the room was to “create strategic partnerships, collaborate across sectors, and get egos out of the way.” Participants also said nonprofit groups should find ways to impact public policy; take risks, be bold, and invite innovation; and share knowledge and ideas across organizations.
The second discussion question dealt with how the next president could use the strength, capacity, and leadership of the philanthropic sector. Some foundation leaders felt that governments do not clearly understand their work or goals, and that philanthropy needs more representation in government.
“We need a seat at the table,” said Lauren Williams, donor-relations director at the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, in Gulfport, Miss.
Pushing the Boundaries of Diversity
When foundations set out to diversify their board composition or grant-making efforts, they often focus on race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
But they often do not make those definitions based on geography. As a result, they limit their ability to become more equitable, Robert Ross. chief executive of the California Endowment, said in a session this morning at the Council on Foundations annual conference.
Dr. Ross, who oversees a foundation that has received national recognition for its work in helping close ethnic and racial gaps in health care, said the California Endowment has realized that it needs to expand its focus to also include largely white rural communities that have high poverty rates.
“There are a number of pockets of white rural poverty in California. Their face needs to be included in the photograph,” Dr. Ross said. “Poor rural white folks, they do exist. They have the same complaints as inner city Los Angeles in terms of the inaccessibility of foundations.”
He added that his foundation is also looking to broaden its efforts to promote diversity in other parts of its operations, such as contractors and consultants that are hired by the foundation.
That effort is sparking some intense debate on the California Endowment board, he said, particularly when the board discusses the diversity of its investment managers.
Dr. Ross will take questions from Chronicle readers this Tuesday at noon Eastern time during an online discussion on foundations and diversity.
The discussion, which will feature questions from Web site visitors world wide, will take place at the Chronicle’s booth at the Council on Foundations annual meeting. Joining Dr. Ross will be Mark Rosenman, director of Caring to Change, a project of the Union Institute & University, which has its headquarters in Cincinnati.
(Read opinion articles published in The Chronicle by Dr. Ross and Mr. Rosenman.)
Foundations Step Up Efforts to Deal With Housing Crisis
The philanthropic response in recent months to the nation’s home foreclosure crisis is a cause for optimism, said George McCarthy, senior program officer at the Ford Foundation, in New York.
Speaking at a session here called, “What Can I Do About the Mortgage Crisis?,” Mr. McCarthy acknowledged that foundations’ early support for additional housing counselors had been largely insufficient.
These counselors, who help people facing foreclosure consider their range of financial options, currently have limited financial tools available to them to help people save their homes. As a result, some of the counselors are getting so depressed by their inability to help people that counseling charities have had to hire trauma experts.
The Consumers Credit Counseling Services of Greater Atlanta, a nonprofit group largely financed by the lending industry, is a pilot site for a new program that provides housing counselors with the same software lenders use so credit counselors themselves can see if they can fashion a loan modification,. Mr. McCarthy said
Early indications show that such new capabilities have enabled housing counselors to help a third to one half of all callers keep their homes. And these figures should rise as the approach is put into use more frequently, he said.
Several foundations will be announcing plans to pay for expanding this system to other locations later this month, Mr. McCarthy told the session sponsored by the Neighborhood Funders Group, a network of grant makers focused on improving neighborhoods dominated by needy people.
Wendy Jackson, program officer at the Kresge Foundation in Detroit, told the session that to combat the city’s massive foreclosure problem, several oundations, including her own, provided $1.3-million to create the Detroit Office of Foreclosure Intervention and Response.
“It’s central home for helping Detroit think through what’s going to be its A-game strategy to address foreclosures,” Ms. Jackson said. “It’s not just about putting money on the table – - the philanthropic response can involve really serving as a broker or solutions leader in their community.”
May 04, 2008
'Fat Cows' in Tough Times
Foundations need to find better ways to explain to government officials, citizens, and others why they deserve their tax-exempt status and freedom to operate independently, Lance Lindblom, president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, told a meeting of foundation chief executives and trustees Sunday.
Grant makers need to realize that “we are fat cows in a resource-scarce environment,” he said, and that, as a result, government officials will be tempted to offer more suggestions about how foundations use their money.
He noted, for example, that Michigan’s attorney general, had “raised questions”:
“We need to justify the freedom we have — and explain why we deserving that freedom by saying more than we are good intentioned people doing good things,” he said.
Alan J. Abramson, a professor of nonprofit studies at George Mason University, said that foundations also need to press government officials to do more to enforce the laws that govern foundations.
“If government doesn’t get the proper financing, some foundations will play fast and loose with the rules and there will be a general crackdown on all foundations,” he said. While some grant makers have shown support for greater enforcement, Mr. Abramson said “when push comes to shove, better enforcement gets lip service from foundations.”
A Global Philanthropy Movement
Steve Gunderson, president of the Council on Foundations, welcomed more than 3,000 people from 39 countries to the council’s big philanthropy conference on Sunday night by urging grant makers to think of themselves as part of a global movement.
“We have tended to see what divides us rather than what unites us, leaving us with a world of philanthropy composed of its separate parts,” he told the opening plenary session.
Mr. Gunderson has been planning the “leadership summit” for more than two years as a way to get all varieties of foundations to look beyond their particular giving structure and work with each other to strengthen philanthropy.
“The common citizen in most of the nations represented here this evening does not know us at all,” he said. “Nor have we done all that well at even knowing ourselves.” As philanthropy grows and attracts more scrutiny, philanthropists must “collectively define” their work or let detractors mischaracterize them, he said.
(Listen to an audio interview with Mr. Gunderson about his goals for the conference.)
Tackling crises in areas like AIDS, Darfur, Tibet, or American schools—or how to operate more effectively and openly — are common challenges for foundations regardless of their legal structure or geographic location, he added.
Explaining the global nature of the conference, Mr. Gunderson said the 21st century is marked by a “new era of individual and corporate resources and wealth” in regions including China, India, Latin America, Russia, and southern Africa.
“Market economies are best when combined with a strong philanthropic sector,” he said.
Writers, Writers Everywhere
This year’s conference marks the second year that the Council on Foundations has opened its doors to bloggers.
In 2007, the organization broke with tradition and offered bloggers such as Tactical Philanthropy’s Sean Stannard-Stockton and Susan Herr at Philanthromedia the opportunity to cover the meeting on their Web sites.
This year, that coverage will probably explode.
Mr. Stannard-Stockton reports he has 18 writers who have who have volunteered to write dispatches from this week’s conference.
The blog Epiphanies is also posting items during the conference — as is Lucy Bernholz on Philanthropy 2173.
Are these blogs generating a more open conversation about foundations and philanthropy? Post a comment to share your thoughts.
The Power of Philanthropy
Philanthropy around the world has the advantage of “unprecedented resources” and an “unprecedented pool of knowledge, “ Geoff Mulgan, director of the Young Foundation, in London, told a group of foundation chief executives and trustees gathered at a meeting for foundation presidents and trustees held Sunday morning before the official start of the council meeting.
“If you want to fix something in San Francisco or Cleveland, you can get ideas from Finland or Brazil about what works,” he said, noting that it is only in the past decade or so that information could so easily be shared.
Even with more money and information available, the challenges facing donors are daunting, he acknowledged — but he said that should not intimidate grant makers.
“It is the difficulty of the challenge that gives us the edge, the reason for being,” he said.
Grant makers seeking to make a difference should focus on pressing needs, he said, and take a long view in seeking change, not just financing programs that will produce quick results.
“You do not have to worry about polls or quarterly results, as politicians and business do,” said Mr. Mulgan, who previously worked as a top aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Collaboration is also key to success, he said, but he warned that American foundations need to be careful to use their power with as sense of humility.
Adapting the words of William Shakespeare, he noted that “it is marvelous to have a giant’s strength, but not to use it like a giant.”
He noted that concerns have already been raised about the size of America’s foundations — especially the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which combines the fortune of Warren Buffett with that of the founder of Microsoft — and said “we need to be careful that partnerships not become too big and squeeze out space for competition and innovation.”
But, he said, in general, foundations in Britain and elsewhere “would love to see more American foundations collaborate with organizations around the world.”
Taking a pause, he added, “just as we would like to see your government collaborate more.” That last exhortation received the biggest round of applause from the assembled crowd.
Helping Mexican Children Who Cross the Border
Hispanics in Philanthropy, a nonprofit group in San Francisco, and Fundemex, an alliance of businesses devoted to eradicating poverty in Mexico, have formed a partnership to promote the rights of children who cross the Mexican border alone in search of their families. Many of these children face human trafficking, detention, and long separations from relatives.
“A child isn’t concerned with national borders; a child simply wants to live with his family,” said Margarita Zavala, the first lady of Mexico, in announcing the partnership at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Hispanics in Philanthropy. “We must be true to our humanity by helping these children reunite with their families.”
More than 44,000 children are deported from the United States to Mexico every year, roughly half of whom are unaccompanied by parents or other adults. Children who are detained in juvenile detention centers before being deported are sometimes subjected to food deprivation, physical punishment, and solitary confinement, according to reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
The partnership will focus first on bringing together charity leaders, scholars, and government officials to conduct research and develop policy proposals on the problem of unaccompanied migrant children.
Diana Campoamor, president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, said her group is beginning a fund-raising campaign to attract money from other donors and nonprofit groups for the effort. More foundations, she said, need to consider supporting transnational issues through their giving.
A New Survey on Foundation Leadership and American Indians
Of 38 foundations that provide the most grants to American Indian causes, only nine said they had any permanent American Indian staff members, according to a new survey presented today at the Council on Foundations conference.
Two of the foundations hired American Indian consultants, interns, or volunteers, and four said they did not collect racial or ethnic data on their employees, according to a draft report on the survey. Eight said they had at least one American Indian on their board.
The survey was conducted by Native Americans in Philanthropy, in Minneapolis, as part of a study on the impact of leadership by American Indians on the level of giving to Indian causes. The group, which works to promote such giving, discussed the draft report at its annual meeting at the council conference.
The survey sought information from the 100 foundations that give the most to causes that benefit American Indians, and got responses from 38. The draft report says the initial findings are too limited to be conclusive, but provide “solid motive for the continuation of this study.”
“There seems to be a loose correlation between each foundation’s level of grant making to native [people] and its level of native representation,” it says.
Racial Equity and Grant Making to Gay Causes
While foundations that support gay causes have significantly increased their giving to charities led by minorities over the last five years, not all such grant makers make racial equity a priority in their giving, according to a new report by Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues.
The report, which was released today at the annual meeting of the Council on Foundations, showed that giving to minority-led charities by 19 foundations supportive of gay causes jumped from $173,000 in 2002 to $2.9-million in 2006.
But only nine of the 19 foundations surveyed had made a grant to help communities of color in 2006, according to the report, LGBTQ Grantmakers 2008 Card on Racial Equity.
“The responsibility is not being shared among foundations,” said Robert Espinoza, director of research and communications with Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues, a New York group that seeks to increase donor support for gay causes.
The report also examined how foundations supportive of gay causes incorporated gender and racial diversity into their own organizations.
Forty-three percent of staff members employed by the foundations surveyed were members of minority groups, while 30 percent of board members were people of color. Eighty percent of board chairs or co-chairs, meanwhile, were white men.
“Many foundations didn’t have policies and practices in place to recruit people of color,” said Mr. Espinoza.
Transgender people accounted for only 8 of the foundations’ 231 staff and board members.
“There’s a real opportunity for foundations to consider how to include transgender people in our organizations,” said Mr. Espinoza.
Sports Philanthropy Gets More Sophisticated
Professional sports foundations are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they approach their giving, said speakers at the annual Council on Foundations meeting.
“I see it being seen as part of their business model for the first time ever,” said Greg Johnson, executive director of the Sports Philanthropy Project, in Bethesda, Md.
Mr. Johnson said that sports foundations are no longer looking at their philanthropy simply as an exercise in improving community relations, but as a means to making a lasting and strategic impact on the communities where they work.
Jane Rodgers, director of strategic initiatives at the Cal Ripken, Sr., Foundation, in Baltimore, described how the charity developed a curriculum in 2005 to promote leadership skills and healthy lifestyles among inner-city youths.
The organization relies on the former Baltimore Orioles player Cal Ripken, Jr., to help raise private donations to match a government grant the charity received. The group now reaches 80,000 children across the United States, said Ms. Rodgers.
“We’re trying to make an impact on as many children possible, in a strategic way, and looking for partners, not simply throwing money out there and hoping it sticks,” she said.
Kenneth Abrams, director of community relations with the Baltimore Ravens, said his foundation had limited the number of charities it works with in order to make a bigger impact. It also uses its players to help promote the groups it supports.
“It’s easy for anyone to write a check but when you put a player or several players and our logo to that it can really help that organization to braoden their profile,” he said.
Getting Out of the Ivory Tower
The leaders of the Skillman Foundation in Detroit recognized an important obstacle in the foundation’s efforts to help needy children in its home city.
The children whom it sought to serve lived in some of the Motor City’s most hardscrabble neighborhoods.
But the foundation’s offices were housed in a high-rise office building in the city’s more prosperous business district.
As a result, it was physically disconnected from the problems it was working to solve — and it was not as effective as it could have been in fulfilling its mission.
In recasting the foundation’s efforts, one of its first early steps was to move out of the downtown digs — and set up a much more humble office, said Stephen Ewing, the Skillman Foundation’s chairman, during a session here.
Live at the Council on Foundations
Welcome to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s coverage of the Council on Foundations annual meeting, which kicks off tonight just outside of Washington.
Our reporters and editors will be posting updates from the meeting throughout the next few days on this blog.
We will also be playing host to a live online discussion focusing on foundations and diversity this Tuesday at noon.
If you are at the meeting, please feel free to stop by the Chronicle’s booth, No. 703. in the exhibit hall. And if you have any suggestions or questions, please send an e-mail message to our Web editor, Peter Panepento.
Copyright © 2008 The Chronicle of Philanthropy