PhilanTopic

Weekend Link Roundup (February 25-26, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector...

Communications/Marketing

Future Fundraising Now blogger Jeff Brooks explains why it might be time to think about retiring your nonprofit CEO as organizational spokesperson. According to the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer, for-profit chief executives were trusted by only 50 percent of survey respondents in 2011, and that figure declined by 12 points to 38 percent in 2012. "I don't think nonprofit CEOs have done as much to squander their collective reputation as corporate CEOs have," writes Brooks. "But maybe some of the dirt has rubbed off on our leaders...."

Environment

On the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy blog, NCRP executive director Aaron Dorfman announces the release of a new report, Cultivating the Grassroots: A Winning Approach for Environment and Climate Funders (52 pages, PDF), which suggests that foundations "can be more effective and secure more environmental wins by investing heavily in grassroots communities that are disproportionately impacted by environment and climate harms...."

Health

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a nice Q&A with veteran Major League Baseball pitcher Jamie Moyer and his wife, Karin, whose Moyer Foundation works to help children and teens struggling with the death of someone close or who live with an addicted or co-dependent family member.

Nonprofit Management

In a piece for the Washington Post, Nonprofit Finance Fund CEO Antony Bugg-Levine argues that many nonprofits, particularly frontline agencies such as homeless service providers, health clinics, and domestic violence shelters that provide essential services to the most vulnerable communities, are facing an "existential crisis." And it's not a short-term crisis resulting from cyclical cuts. "Even if the economy recovers," writes Bugg-Levine,

structural demands on public coffers driven by inexorable demographic trends and the inevitable diversion of public resources to pay off deficits will reduce governments’ capacity to fund essential social services for the next few decades at least....

Once we accept this fact, the typical responses -- blaming the government for its stinginess or blaming service providers for their inefficiency -- will be revealed as increasingly inadequate explanations.

Instead of these default responses, we need to consider a fundamental question: "How will we secure a just and vibrant society now that our old models of sustaining essential organizations are disintegrating?"...

In the wake of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood debacle, Albert Ruesga offers some advice to charities on his White Courtesy Telephone blog. The "time for charities to do their soul-searching is now," writes Ruesga. "Once a campaign against your organization goes viral, it's time for you to step up to the microphones and tell the world who you are and where you stand. Faced with the question, What are you about?, in the wake of an unpopular decision, do you have a clear idea what you would say?"

To help nonprofits still waiting for economic recovery to knock on their door, Social Velocity president Nell Edgington offers a list of things nonprofit leaders can do to create a sustainable financial model.

Philanthropy Journal's Todd Cohen looks at how community foundations are adapting their business model to keep pace with the evolving needs of donors. For example, the recent merger of the Boston Foundation and the Philanthropic Initiative, writes Cohen, has created a hybrid model for community foundations that focuses on generating new funds and providing training and resources for donors. TPI president and CEO Ellen Remmer told Cohen that this type of structure "can help ease a natural tension [TPI] identified in the old model in a study ten years ago...."

Philanthropy

After sharing findings from a recent Blackbaud report on online giving which found that "when large International Affairs organizations are removed from the analysis," online giving increased 13 percent in 2011, Allison Fine says the data confirms what many have known for years: "[O]nline giving is here to stay, most online giving happens when speed is important (year end and natural disasters), building relationships online (e.g. alumni) is a [key] to increasing giving."

Transparency

On the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog, Jacob Harold, philanthropy program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, says that transparency, measurement of multiple bottom lines, proactive engagement with stakeholders, and collaboration “offer a framework for foundations to be more effective while avoiding unproductive government intervention. They are not simple boxes to be checked,” adds Harold, “each is an attitude that must be embedded across foundation activities and constantly refreshed...."

That's it for this week. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org!

-- The Editors

Geena Davis Institute Asks: Where Are the Good Roles for Women?

(Laura Cronin is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her last post, she wrote about the Wikimedia Foundation's first Public Policy Initiative.)

As we get ready for the Academy Awards on Sunday, it's interesting to think about the relationship of pop and celebrity culture to social change.

The average foundation manager working to move the needle for a cause can only envy the ways in which celebrities are able to generate attention for their favorite issues. A short speech from a prominent figure on the red carpet is a surefire route to getting your cause trending on Twitter.

This year's Academy Award-nominated films are packed with issues that foundation and nonprofit people are concerned about: inequality, children and families, race, gender, sexual violence, politics. And I'm not just talking about documentaries.

Unfortunately, good roles for strong women are rare. That depressing fact turned Oscar (The Accidental Tourist) and Golden Globe (Commander in Chief) winner Geena Davis into an advocate. Watching television and movies with her young daughter a decade ago, Davis became concerned about the representation of women in most children's media. In 2004, the actress founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media and commissioned a study by Dr. Stacy Smith of the USC Annenberg School of Communications & Journalism which found a huge, 3:1 gender gap in roles for men and women. The study also concluded that even G-rated films transmit negative messages about girls -- messages which not only affect children in the U.S. but, given Hollywood's global reach, are exported to the rest of the world. The institute raises money for research, advocates for change, and develops educational materials that schools can use to help children think beyond stereotypes, including a recently piloted video learning series about gender and the workplace called Guess Who?

It also believes that pop culture is not just a mirror of our world but a driver of attitudes, and that positive gender portrayals break down stereotypes and broaden children's aspirations. According to the institute's excutive director, Madeline Di Nonno, what children see on a screen truly matters. It shapes their emotional and social development and their beliefs. The more they see female characters who are hyper-sexualized, sidelined, or not present at all, the more boys and girls will think that's the way it's supposed to be.

So whether you stay up all night with Billy Crystal to see who gets to bring home a golden statue or turn in early, the Geena Davis Institute hopes you'll spend a few minutes thinking about how women and girls are portrayed on the silver screen.

-- Laura Cronin

This Week in PubHub: Minorities and Higher Education

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she looked at four reports that examine the role of racial/ethnic disparities in wealth, health, and educational attainment and how those factors are linked and reinforce one another.)

Diverging Pathways: How Wealth Shapes Opportunity for Children (16 pages, PDF), a report from the Insight Center for Community Economic Development included in my last post, cites 2007 data showing that 69 percent of Latino and 71 percent of African-American households are income-poor, while 40 percent (for both groups) are asset-poor. The report argues that without the financial resources to pay for high-quality early childhood education or college, children in these households face a future of limited opportunity. This week in PubHub, we're featuring four reports that focus on trends in college enrollment among students of color, as well as the role of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs).

According to Hispanic College Enrollment Spikes, Narrowing Gaps With Other Groups (30 pages, PDF), a report from the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of Latino students between the ages of 18 and 24 enrolled in two- or four-year colleges jumped 24 percent in 2010. That compares favorably with modest increases of 5.2 percent and 5.4 percent for African Americans and Asian Americans, and a decline of 4 percent (due in part to demographic trends) among white students. Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the report also found that 44 percent of Latino high school graduates attended college in 2010, accounting for 15 percent of all college students in that age group, and that while college enrollment among Latinos is up significantly in recent years, completion rates remain low, at 13 percent, among 25- to 29-year-olds.

Raising college completion rates among Latino students is the focus of Roadmap for Ensuring America's Future by Increasing Latino College Completion (20 pages, PDF), a report from Excelencia in Education. Given demographic trends, the report notes, Latinos will have to earn 5.5 million college degrees to close racial/ethnic gaps and meet the nation's degree attainment goal by 2020. To that end, the report's authors recommend that communities develop partnerships between school districts and institutions of higher education to improve college readiness and participation rates; that colleges guarantee need-based aid for qualified students; and that states track data on equity and success in degree attainment. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation for Education, the report calls on the federal government to support capacity-building efforts at established and emerging Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) to strengthen educational quality as a way to boost degree attainment.

According to the reports, college enrollment among African Americans and Latinos reached record highs in 2010, with just over half of Latino undergraduates enrolled at HSIs. Indeed, Students Speak! -- Understanding the Value of HBCUs From Student Perspectives (39 pages, PDF), a report from the UNCF Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, notes that while HBCUs account for only 4 percent of all four-year institutions in the U.S., they graduate 21 percent of all African Americans with a bachelor's degree. According to the report, the decision to attend an HBCU is influenced by many factors, including the perception that they provide a welcoming, supportive environment and a measure of cultural empowerment. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the report suggests that students who feel connected to and supported by their institutions, both academically and socially, are more likely to stay in schoool, and that student-faculty interaction is a key factor in raising retention and graduates rates.

The Lumina Foundation for Education has been working with HBCUs, HSIs, tribal colleges and universities, and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions to boost degree attainment. The Role of Minority-Serving Institutions in National College Completion Goals (9 pages, PDF), a report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, describes Lumina's MSI Models of Success program, which aims to build capacity for data collection and analysis, foster a collective advocacy voice on behalf of minority-serving institutions, strengthen policy and practice related to developmental education, and raise completion rates, especially among men of color.

How do you think we should be addressing racial/ethnic disparities in educational attainment? Do you know of any promising initiatives to raise retention rates among students of color at non-MSIs, or best practices for boosting college completion rates at the community level? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

And don't forget to visit PubHub, where you can browse more than two hundred and sixty reports on topics related to minorities.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Not All New Media Is ‘New’ Any More

(Bruce Trachtenberg is executive director of the Communications Network, an organization of people who work for or on behalf of the nation's grantmakers. A version of this post appears on the Commnetwork blog.)

I'm pretty sure we didn't pop any champagne corks, do fist bumps, or high five each other, but I recall a feeling of exhilaration the first time -- probably in the 1990s -- I pressed the send button on e-mail with an attached PDF version of a report detailing findings from an initiative underwritten by a foundation where I worked. My colleagues and I -- freed from the labor and time-intensive process of distributing print publications -- thought we'd truly entered the digital age. In a blink of an eye, reports of any length could be on their way to key audiences in seconds.

Fast forward almost twenty years, and even though the PDF is still very much with us, that habit of turning reports, white papers, books, policy briefs, and the like into digital facsimiles and e-mailing and posting them online is on its way to being labeled an OLD new media practice.

In fact, just last week, the Center for Digital Information held a roundtable discussion with the title "Beyond the PDF" that showed off some impressive examples of how think tanks, foundations, and policy institutions are taking advantage of the best the new technology has to offer -- interactive graphics and visualizations, mapping tools, online databases, multimedia, and touch-interface smartphone and tablet applications -- to do what Jeff Stanger, the group's executive director, describes as more effectively "injecting” information into public policy debates and other social change discussions.

For anyone who cut his or her teeth in a world where print and print-like products were the gold standards of information dissemination, it takes a moment (sometimes longer) before you realize that a game can actually do a pretty good job of informing people about the challenges of trying to come up with a manageable federal budget or that a cartoon-like presentation can answer the question "How will the affordable health care act affect me?" at least as well, if not better, than traditional text presentations.

Those examples -- and others that detail the differing political beliefs Americans hold, the potential threat to developing countries from climate change, and how Americans cope with high energy costs -- demonstrate that by embracing the power of new digital technologies, we can turn static, often dry data into useful online engagements that hold great promise for thoughtfully informing and advancing public dialogue on topics such as health, education, the environment, the economy, national security, international affairs, and global development.

Another advantage that true digital publications offer is the ability to comprehensively measure the depth of user engagement -- from number of visitors to page views to which information garnered the most attention and interest. It’s far better knowing that people are paying attention to your materials than wondering if they're getting read at all. Still, that level of measurement is no substitute for the higher bar that any material disseminated to influence thinking or behavior must ultimately meet to be judged a success: Did anyone do any thing different as a result? Did they take action?

Ironically, whereas the now (in some quarters) scorned but still ubiquitous PDF offers great efficiency and obvious cost savings over its traditional print counterparts, these newer digitally native products come with both a higher price tag and greater time demands, not to mention the requirement for people with new skills to do the work. It's a fact that shouldn't dissuade us from turning more information products into digitally native forms.

Gabriella Fitz, co-director of IssueLab, a nonprofit that archives, distributes, and promotes the extensive and diverse body of research being produced by the nonprofit sector -- and someone who probably sees more traditional research reports than most people -- agrees that "more and more social cause research should be presented in interactive formats. The fact is that people don't have the time to read forty-page white papers."

But Fitz also worries that the research smaller foundations and nonprofits produce might get ignored "just because they don't have the budget to produce these kind of interactive pieces." And she acknowledges that "a lot of folks default to PDFs because they simply don't have the skills or creative encouragement to do it differently and don't have the money to hire those who do." Still, she's optimistic that "we can work on the skills and the creative encouragement." The money, on the other hand, will probably remain a hurdle too high for some.

On that point, Stanger says organizations doing the research need to take the lead in making the case that the cost of not embracing the new "threatens the vital informational role" of foundations, think tanks, and policy institutions. "In a society increasingly accustomed to information in digital form," he adds, "credibility, authority, and relevance are attributes that will be reserved for research organizations that successfully adopt new interactive forms that are native to digital media."

-- Bruce Trachtenberg

NPO Job Openings (January 2012)

The January job numbers seem to confirm the view of many that the U.S. economy, while still battling headwinds, is picking up steam. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 243,000 nonfarm payroll jobs were created in January, with large gains in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing.

The BLS also reported that the national unemployment rate dipped .2 percentage points, to 8.3%, the lowest level since February 2009.

(Chart courtesy CNNMoney)

Here at PND, the number of nonprofit jobs submitted to the PND job board -- our own, completely unscientific gauge of the economy's health -- seems to confirm that the economic recovery is on track and that nonprofits, in general, are feeling more confident about their situation.

Things were looking much less rosy in September, when we last checked. Back then, the federal government was smarting from the first-ever downgrade of its AAA credit rating, Congress and the White House, having danced the country to the brink of default, were elevating finger pointing to a new art form, and the debt crisis in the Eurozone was growing worse by the day. Investors responded by doing what they always do in times of uncertainty, fleeing stocks for the safety of U.S. treasuries.

Nonprofits, in contrast, took a look around and seemed to decide the situation was not as bad as the headlines would have it. On a year-over-year basis, job postings here at PND were flat in September and October, down in November, and up smartly in December and January. (And we're seeing a continuation of that trend in February.) For the year, job postings to the board were up 2 percent over 2010 and 36 percent over 2009 (though still well below the number posted in 2007).

Indeed, as we noted in a PND item last month, a recent study (18 pages, PDF) from the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University found that during the Great Recession (2007 to 2009), the nonprofit sector gained jobs at an average rate of 1.9 percent a year, while the private sector lost jobs at a rate of 3.7 percent. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that, after retail and manufacturing, the nonprofit sector in the U.S. now employs more workers than any other industry, with the vast majority of those jobs concentrated in health care (57 percent), education (15 percent), and social assistance (13 percent).

We’re not sure whether this is an entirely good thing -- that's a subject for another post -- but we are hopeful the Europeans will get their act together and that the economy here in the U.S. will continue to gain strength. We’ll check back in in a few months and let you know how things are going.

In the meantime, feel free to share your own thoughts and obesrvations with respect to the employment situation, both in and outside the nonprofit sector. How are things in your neck of the woods? Are nonprofits hiring? What about the private sector? And where do you think things will stand six months from now?

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (February 18-19, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector...

African Americans

NCRP's Lisa Ranghelli points out that only 0.58 percent of grantmakers list "African Americans/Blacks" as a field of interest, even though African Americans comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population and have a 27 percent poverty rate (compared to the overall rate of 15 percent). Many foundations give to benefit African Americans, of course, but too often one has to read between the lines to learn who they are. And when "we have to read between the lines," writes Ranghelli, do we risk perpetuating "the funding of solutions that are poorly targeted and not explicitly designed to serve those we seek to help most?"

BlackGiveBack’s Tracey Webb chats with Association of Black Foundation Executives president/CEO Susan Taylor Batten about the state of black philanthropy and what the ABFE is doing to boost the visibility of black giving circles.

Communications/Marketing

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Network for Good's Katya Andresen explains why nonprofit communications and marketing staff should pay close attention to the colors they use when putting together promotional materials.

Impact/Effectiveness

In a guest post on Joanne Fritz's About.com blog, Social Velocity president Nell Edgington discusses how philanthropic equity, "a one-time infusion of significant money that can be used to strengthen or grow a nonprofit organization," can be used to dramatically increase an organization's effectiveness.

Center for Effective Philanthropy president Phil Buchanan argues that if "we want to...inspire nonprofit leaders to use data more effectively to improve the impact of their work, we should look within the sector for examples."

In a new post on his Harvard Business Review blog, Uncharitable author Dan Pallotta argues that fundraising is the "smart investment" of the twenty-first century. "If you want to maximize the social effects of your donation," writes Pallotta, "why would you buy...$100,000 worth of great educational programming for inner city kids when the same $100,000 directed toward fundraising could generate enough money to buy $1 million worth of it?..."

Philanthropy

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Paul Brest, who will be stepping down as president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation this summer, reflects on the growing importance of strategic philanthropy and its prospects for the future.

On the Transparency Talk blog, Foundation Center vice president for research Larry McGill discusses the rather painful process of analyzing imperfect data. "[D]espite the limitations of [the center's] data," writes McGill, "we fully intend to keep publishing reports documenting and explaining the work of U.S. foundations. Even if what we produce sometimes comes back to bite us...."

Philanthropy 2173 blogger Lucy Bernholz shares the first two buzzwords of 2012: data and flash mob philanthropy.

Social Media

In a post on the Communications Network blog, PhilanthroMedia's Susan Herr chats with Nonprofit Technology Network executive director Holly Ross about the importance of strategy in social media use. In the video, Ross describes the evolution of NTEN's use of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn over the past three years and notes that having a good strategy isn't enough: an organization also needs a culture that supports and is comfortable with the give-and-take that comes with engaging people online.

Nonprofit Tech 2.0's Heather Mansfield, author of Social Media for Social Good, offers a list of ten "must-follow" nonprofit organizations on Pinterest, a social networking site that allows users to create virtual "pinboards."

And Beth Kanter has some advice for organizations looking to engage more effectively with their fans on Facebook.

That's it for this week. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org!

-- The Editors

Microfinance and the 'Smart Campaign'

After a tough year, the microfinance industry is looking to heal itself. As Elisabeth Rhyne, managing director of the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION, writes in PND:

It could be argued that, after two decades, microfinance was slow to develop a client protection consciousness. (One might say something even stronger about the mainstream financial sector in the U.S.) After all, a sector built with intent to improve the lives of the poor should have the best interests of its clients at heart. And I believe it does. But the microfinance community — and here I include myself — was naïve in thinking that its good intentions would always benefit clients. We assumed too readily that borrowers always benefited from our services and thus the more borrowers, the greater the benefit. The drive for growth caused some providers to cut corners, lose their focus on quality, or simply be blind to the possibility that some clients were experiencing substandard treatment.

It took several instances of rapid growth leading to client over-indebtedness -- particularly in Bosnia, India, Morocco, and Nicaragua -- to make it clear that a model geared toward reaching people as fast as possible needed adjustment. In addition to the Smart Campaign, the microfinance industry is working on initiatives such as Microfinance Transparency (which promotes the release of comprehensive pricing data), as well as efforts to increase credit information reporting to identify clients who may be over-indebted. In Bosnia, MFIs have worked together to create a debt counseling center.

As the Smart Campaign has delved into the actual practices of MFIs through on-site observation, we find that most MFIs implicitly have been practicing client protection, even if they have not made explicit reference to the principles. The Smart Campaign recently analyzed the results of on-site third-party assessments of more than three hundred and fifty MFIs. The overwhelming majority (88 percent) earned passing scores. This exercise was a first-ever assessment of practices, mostly by social investors carrying out pre-investment due diligence, and we expect such assessments to grow more rigorous in coming years. Meanwhile, on-site assessments of MFIs like these are helping organizations identify their weaknesses and take steps to correct them....

Read Rhyne's commentary and learn more about the Smart Campaign here....

5Qs for...Alandra Washington, Deputy Director, W.K. Kellogg Foundation

In January, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, with support from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, released a report based on the work of its Cultures of Giving program, which since 2005 has supported identity-based funds that serve groups traditionally underserved by larger philanthropic institutions. Among other things, the report, Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy by and for Communities of Color (112 pages, PDF), offers a glimpse into the strategies and lessons learned by the largest single funder of identity-based funds in the country and challenges other funders to develop new ways to collaborate with and advance identity-based philanthropy.

As the report suggests, philanthropy in the United States is becoming more diverse -- not only because there are more ways to give than ever before, but also because giving by communities of color is on the rise. And while those communities have supported leadership development and social change initiatives for decades, the growth in identity-based funds has boosted the visibility of such giving. "Communities of color are overflowing with practices of philanthropy and giving, and have been for a long time," says Alandra Washington, deputy director at the Kellogg Foundation. "But very few people in communities of color define their traditions of giving as 'philanthropy.'"

Washington, who joined the foundation in 2002 and oversees its Family Economic Security and Education and Learning programs, served for five years prior to that as CEO of the Greater East St. Louis Community Fund and before that led the New Spirit Organizing Office, also in St. Louis. PND recently spoke with her about the report.

Philanthropy News Digest: From your perspective, what has been the biggest change in philanthropy over the last twenty years?

Alandra Washington: As the report points out, how we define philanthropist and philanthropy have changed a lot over the last twenty years. Today, we're seeing members of communities that are most at-risk pool their resources to address problems in those communities. Small gifts, when combined, can be quite effective in addressing local issues. And, of course, the explosion of new technologies and platforms, things like mobile giving, has made it easier for individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum to give.

PND: How do you and your colleagues define identity-based philanthropy? What are some of the advantages of an identity-based approach for communities of color? And what are some of the challenges?

AW: At its most basic level, identity-based philanthropy is a collective investment in a community by members of that community focused on addressing problems -- across race, class, gender, or whatever else it might be -- affecting that community. One advantage of this type of giving is that it allows individuals who already are giving back to their communities to organize and pool not just their resources but also their knowledge, influence, energy, skills, and pride to build social capital.

At the same time, as with any group working to actualize social change and address specific injustices, our identity-based grantees have come up against a number of social, political, and economic challenges. Volatility in the stock market, for example, has been a challenge for identity-based funds. Even so, they have been able to work around the ongoing economic uncertainty and raise and distribute a record amount of money.

PND: Did the recession have an effect on identity-based philanthropy?

AW: The whole sector was affected by the recession. Unlike traditional donors, however, communities of color continued to give at increasing rates and levels. As the report shows, 63 percent of Latino households now make charitable donations, as do nearly two-thirds of African American households, to the tune of about $11 billion per year. While communities of color weren't immune to the economic downturn, a 2005 paper by John J. Havens and Paul G. Schervish found that aggregate charitable giving by African Americans was increasing at a faster rate than either their aggregate income or wealth. In fact, identity-based funds now raise and distribute nearly $400 million annually, which, as our report notes, is roughly the same as what a foundation with $8 billion in assets would award in grants annually.

PND: The report examines not only what worked for the Cultures of Giving program at the Kellogg Foundation, but also what didn't and why. What was the biggest surprise for you in the report? And what does the foundation hope to gain by sharing this information with the public?

AW: I was most surprised by the resiliency of these organizations and how they learned from their challenges, learned from their failures, and were willing to go back to the drawing board to figure out innovative solutions when confronted with challenges.

By sharing this information with the public, the foundation hopes to show funders and donors alike that there are resources, networks, influencers, and change strategies happening across these communities. We're hoping that others seek out and partner with identity-based groups and leverage their resources. People should walk away from the report knowing that communities of color and identity-based groups have power, influence, and resources, and that they are a great go-to partner.

PND: What advice would you give to funders looking to support identity-based funds?

AW: I would tell them to approach communities of color with a listen-and-learn attitude. It is important for them to understand that this is an emerging field and that there is a lot to learn. Yes, they should also look for ways to partner and collaborate, but first they need to learn as much as they can about the communities they are looking to fund, what's most important to them, and what their approach is to giving. Finally, I would say that funders should try to identify opportunities to leverage the human resources of these communities. All grantmakers, not just those supporting communities of color as part of their mission, should know that there's a cadre of folks in these communities who are willing, able, and ready to partner with them.

-- Regina Mahone

A 'Flip' Chat With...Sarah Durham, Principal and Founder, Big Duck

(This video was recorded as part of our 'Flip' chat series of conversations with thought leaders in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. You can check out other videos in the series here, including our previous chat with Annie E. Casey Foundation president and CEO Patrick McCarthy.)

At a recent Foundation Center event, Big Duck founder Sarah Durham explained that her book Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications was written for small nonprofits that do not have the budget to hire an outside consulting group like her New York City-based communications firm.

Yes, the principles behind effective communications are pretty basic. But because most nonprofit leaders aren't well versed in marketing/communications strategy, they often have trouble following through on them, says Durham. For that reason, Brandraising seeks to show executive directors how to raise funds and increase the visibility of their organizations using approaches developed by some of the most successful fundraisers in the country.

Before the event got under way, I had a chance to chat with Durham about the different levels of "brandraising," the role young staff members can play in the strategic planning process, and how Big Duck measures its impact. On that last point, Durham said her colleagues set measurable goals at the start of each project and then, after implementation, sit down with the client to compare notes and see whether they were on target.

(If you're reading this in an e-mail, click here.)

 

(Running time: 4 minutes, 1 second)

What do you think? Do you agree with Durham that mobile is "the next big thing"? Has your organization started collecting cell phone numbers? Feel free to share you brandraising success stories in the comments section below.

-- Regina Mahone

Weekend Link Roundup (February 11-12, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector...

Charity

Charity Navigator's Sandra Miniutti has a few suggestions for people interested in participating in Generosity Day on Tuesday, February 14. A day-long event inspired by Sasha Dichter's month-long "generosity experiment," the social media-driven campaign aims to "make Valentine's Day about more than flowers, chocolates, and romantic dinners...."

Communications/Marketing

In a guest post on the Communications Network blog, Chris Palmedo of the Northwest Health Foundation notes that his efforts "to seamlessly integrate communications with program work" goes beyond "making sure program staff 'loops us in' on their work....It's more like 'mutual challenge,' where program and communications push each other -- and the organization -- toward a common vision of social change." Communications and program staff and grantees challenge one another to write op-eds, blog entries, and letters to the editor, Palmedo writes, and to spend program dollars on videos and messaging. After all, he asks, "how can an organization be committed to social change without being fully committed to communications, media relations, and messaging your point of view everywhere it can?"

In a post on her blog, author and consultant Kivi Leroux Miller offers a few recommendations for the folks at Susan G. Komen for the Cure as the organization works to repair its badly damaged brand.

Impact/Effectiveness

In the first of a planned series of six posts, GiveWell's Holden Karnofksy and Elie Hassenfeld review the progress the organization made in 2011 and some of its key metrics.

Philanthropy

In a post here on PhilanTopic, Foundation Center president Brad Smith responds to recent concerns expressed by a number of foundation leaders about the data and methodology behind Foundation Funding for Hispanics/Latinos in the United States and Latin America, a new Foundation Center study commissioned by Hispanics in Philanthropy. The criticism, writes Smith, "speak[s] to the nature of philanthropy, its role in furthering the public good, and the growing challenge of transparency in a digital, data-driven age...."

"To my colleagues who toil in foundations across the country: There's still time for us, before the confusion and wonder of the spring, to understand, to broach the subject of inequality, to mediate, and, if we dare, to speak the truth as each of us sees it," writes GNOFpresident Albert Ruesga on the White Courtesy Telephone blog. "I know how unlikely this is to happen. But how reckless it will be for us to wait until the rage boils over and takes us past the point of honest and constructive deliberation...."

Social Entrepreneurship

Over at the Social Velocity blog, Nell Edgington chats with Goodwill Industries International president and CEO Jim Gibbons about how the century-old organization continues to push the envelop and innovate in today's competitive marketplace. "At Goodwill," says Gibbons, "we don't think of innovation as the creation of the next iPhone, but rather as the next idea that allows us to serve the communities we’re a part of in the most meaningful and impactful way...."

Social Media

Allison Fine has announced the relaunch of her Social Good podcast series, which henceforth will focus on matching "great organizations with great coaches who can help them navigate" the fast-moving world of social media. In this week's installment, Fine chats with Get Storied founder Michael Margolis and InvisblePeople.tv founder Mark Horvath about the art of storytelling.

Although it's targeted to small business owners and for-profit social media marketers, Phil Mershon's take on Susan Etlinger’s recommendations for leveraging social media is a must read for any organization interested in getting more out of its social media efforts.

Last but not least, See3 Communications and YouTube are now accepting submissions for the 2012 DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, which "recognize the creative and effective use of video to promote the work of the nonprofit sector in catalyzing social good."

That's it for this week. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org!

-- The Editors

This Week in PubHub: Race, Place, and the Wealth Gap

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she looked at four reports that addressed the topic of protecting the rights of people with disabilities.)

Research shows that racial/ethnic disparities in a variety of areas, including wealth, health, and educational attainment, have worsened over the past two decades. This week in PubHub, we highlight four reports that examine the extent of these disparities, as well as how they are linked and reinforce one another.

According to the Pew Research Center report Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics (39 pages, PDF), the median net worth of white households in 2009 was twenty times that of African-American households and eighteen times that of Latino households -- a wealth gap, in both cases, nearly double what it was in 1984, thanks in part to the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble and the recession that followed. Indeed, since 2005 Latinos and African Americans -- many of whom live in states characterized by housing market volatility and/or who derive more than half of their net worth from home equity -- saw their median household wealth fall by 66 percent and 53 percent, respectively, compared to only 16 percent among whites.

What factors other than the housing boom and bust are driving disparities in household wealth and asset accumulation? The Urban Institute report Private Transfers, Race, and Wealth (36 pages, PDF) examines the role of financial support from extended family members and friends, large gifts, and inheritances in asset accumulation and finds that African Americans and Latinos are much less likely to receive large gifts and inheritances than whites -- a fact that contributes significantly to racial and ethnic wealth gaps. Funded by the Annie E. Casey and Ford foundations, the report also found that large gifts and inheritances are a bigger factor in wealth accumulation among African Americans than among whites or Latinos, and that the disparity in private transfers of wealth accounts for an estimated 12 percent of the black-white wealth gap.

Does the wealth gap influence racial/ethnic disparities in child development, health, and economic mobility? And if so, how? According to Diverging Pathways: How Wealth Shapes Opportunity for Children (16 pages, PDF), a report from the Insight Center for Community Economic Development based on 2007 data, 32 percent of white households with young children were income-poor while 14.2 percent had no assets, compared to 69 percent of Latino and 71 percent of African-American households that were income-poor and 40 percent (for both groups) that had no assets. Lacking the financial resources to pay for high-quality early childhood education or college tuition, children in income- and asset-poor households face a future of limited economic opportunity, the report argues. Indeed, racial/ethnic disparities in child outcomes related to health status and skills development appear as early as the age of 2. The report also notes that while there is an inverse correlation between a mother's educational attainment, economic insecurity, and child outcomes, the wealth gap between households headed by white and African-American mothers with bachelor's degrees increased fivefold between 1994 and 2007. Funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research, and the National Institutes of Health, the report calls for helping economically vulnerable households of color build wealth and accumulate assets as a way to improve child well-being.

Would narrowing the wealth gap in and of itself eliminate disparities in health status and child outcomes? Any effort to mitigate the former must first address the links between location, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status as well as the physiological effects of bias and discrimination, Why Place & Race Matter (113 pages, PDF), a report from the California Endowment and PolicyLink, argues. According to the report, race/ethnicity is a greater determinant of health status than income, while structural racism continues to shape the economic, social, and physical environments of low-income communities of color -- which, in turn, affects the health status of residents of those communities. Among other things, the report argues that strategies for building healthy, thriving, sustainable communities must be race-conscious and focus on addressing both community conditions and individual interventions simultaneously.

To mitigate racial/ethnic wealth gaps, these reports suggest, policy makers and funders first need to address disparities in health, environmental justice, educational achievement, neighborhood safety, and other areas. Do you agree? And, if so, what strategies are working and deserve more attention and support? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

And don't forget to visit PubHub, where you can browse more than two hundred and sixty reports on topics related to minorities.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Building a Philanthropic Ecosystem

(Michael Edwards is a leading expert on global civil society and the author of Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World. This is the final installment in a series of four posts in which he looks at different aspects of the Bellagio Initiative, an effort funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce a new framework for philanthropic and international development collaboration in pursuit of human well-being. Click here for the first post, here for the second, and here for the third. To read/download the Bellagio paper on which these posts are based --and from which the quotation below is taken -- click here.)

"Different approaches to philanthropy are no more in competition with each other than hammers and screwdrivers in a toolkit, though we still need to know when and how to use these tools to best effect...."

If there is one lesson from the post-war development experience that outweighs all others it's probably this: One size does not fit all. It is, of course, an admonition to avoid seeing development as a singular process or to impose the same set of policy prescriptions across radically different contexts.

The reality is that different countries pursue different paths to development, though those paths may share some elements in common. Following this logic, one of those elements has been the belief that foreign aid works best when it supports different approaches and interventions appropriate to the circumstances. Some donors have been happy to support the problem-solving capacities of local institutions, while others have focused on achieving pre-determined outcomes in areas like public health, distributing retroviral drugs to those with HIV, for example, as well as developing national systems that can deal with different heath needs as they arise.

Some of these things pay off quite quickly, while others require a generation or more to make their presence felt. Some can be easily measured, while others are too complex to capture in a set of numbers. Some are amenable to technology and market forces, while others are embedded in politics and social struggle. All of them are valuable, however, and each requires a particular kind of financial support. It makes little sense to fund social movements with investments that demand short-term measurable returns, for example, or to finance social enterprises with revenue streams that are subject to bureaucratic decision-making instead of market mechanisms of accountability.

This may sound like an obvious conclusion, but in philanthropy a great deal of energy is expended in futile attempts to prove that one of these approaches is more effective and/or strategic than the rest. Hence, the "new" philanthropy is better than the "old"; markets are more efficient in allocating resources for social change than governments or civil society institutions; and grants are less effective than investments in promoting sustainable success. To which I say, "It depends."

No doubt some will continue the struggle to prove the supremacy of their favorite approaches. For the rest of us, there's a more constructive alternative, and that is to build an ecosystem of complementary funding styles matched to the needs and issues at hand. In such an approach, the priority is not to prove that you are the smartest person in the room, but to identify the gaps and disconnects in the system that need to be addressed. By fostering a learning community around the costs and benefits of different approaches, it should be possible to create a "social science of philanthropy" from which everyone can gain.

If we have learned anything from sixty years of development work, it is that human progress is a journey, not a destination. While we can and should help each other along the way, it is not "our" money or ideas or influence that really makes a difference. That's good news. None of us is in a position to control progress or mold it in our own image, so let's relax and enjoy the ride together. By all means we should strive to be as useful as we can to those at the sharp end of transformation. But in the hurly-burly of rapid change, we can't replace their energy or accountability for failure or success. As the experience of developing countries from Brazil to Vietnam shows, it is not the resources of outsiders that underpin success.

It would be the ultimate irony if the quest for greater effectiveness were to lead to less impact on the drivers of social change. But as philanthropy becomes more focused on its own importance as expressed through a narrow range of approaches and techniques, that possibility becomes more likely. As I hope I have shown in my posts here on PhilanTopic, there is much we can learn from the world of international development -- and plenty of things we should try to avoid. Many of the latter have been grounded in a sense of hubris and overreach by donors who think they "know best." Let's not repeat the same mistakes in philanthropy.

-- Michael Edwards

Philanthropy’s Unanswerable Question(s)?

(Bradford K. Smith is the president of the Foundation Center. In his last post, he wrote about Occupy Wall Street and the Giving Pledge.)

Q: Exactly how much do America's foundations spend each year to benefit Hispanic and Latino populations?

A: We don't really know.

As president of the Foundation Center, I should have a better answer, especially for an institution that just published a study entitled Foundation Funding for Hispanics/Latinos in the United States and Latin America. That study concluded that over the past decade U.S. foundation funding explicitly designated to benefit Latinos has remained relatively steady as a share of total foundation giving, averaging 1.3 percent. It also showed that foundations maintained those levels of support despite the 2008-09 recession during which their overall giving declined by 12 percent. These findings came with a strong disclaimer about the limitations of the data and the methodology: "However, these data do not capture all giving by sampled foundation that may benefit Hispanics/Latinos."

That study was commissioned by Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP), a transnational network of more than six hundred grantmakers whose mission is "to strengthen Latino communities by increasing resources for the Latino and Latin American civil sector." The report's headlines are being used by advocates to encourage philanthropy to do more on behalf of Hispanic and Latino populations. That advocates advocate and tend to downplay the disclaimers should come as no surprise.

But a number of foundation leaders have expressed their concerns about the study, and their critiques speak to the nature of philanthropy, its role in furthering the public good, and the growing challenge of transparency in a digital, data-driven age. The study's foundation critics fall roughly into two camps. There are the friendly critics that strongly embrace diversity and explicitly communicate that their funding helps Hispanics/Latinos, African-Americans, and other ethnic or racial minorities. They want more credit for this than the study gave them and feel the Foundation Center did not capture all their giving.

The second group of foundation critics tends to see their funding, often because of donor intent, as benefitting the population at large or the poor or disadvantaged without any stated priority for particular ethnic or racial groups. These foundations feel that such a study does them a tremendous disservice by creating the impression that they do not care about Hispanics and Latinos when, in fact, many of their grants (for example to public schools or food banks) do benefit those populations. The individual foundations know this. Their grantees know this. But the wider public, researchers, or anyone else interested in philanthropy may not be aware.

A brief word about methodology. The Foundation Center gathers its data on foundation funding from diverse sources but still relies heavily on the 990-PF tax returns filed by foundations, which include -- for every grant made -- the name of the recipient organization, a description (hopefully) of the purpose, and the amount. Some seven hundred foundations now send their grants data to the Foundation Center electronically according to a standard that comprises twenty-three fields of information, one of which is "population served" -- though it and "geographic area served" are fields for which specific information is least likely to be provided by foundations. To "count" a grant as specifically designated to benefit Hispanic/Latino populations, we look for whatever relevant coding a foundation might have provided with its grant information, evidence within the grant description itself, and at the mission and activities of the grantee organization.

This is a very conservative methodology that has been consistently applied by the Foundation Center for more than a decade. Additional studies in states such as California and Oregon have supplemented this methodology with other techniques to reveal greater levels of foundation giving for communities of color. For example, the Philanthropic Collaborative, working with Foundation Center data, concluded that "68% of health grant dollars in 2005 to 2007 benefited minorities, the economically disadvantaged, and other underserved groups."

But beyond the limitations of data and methodology, the biggest challenge to answering the question at the top of this post is inherent to the nature of American philanthropy itself: a sprawling industry made up of more than 76,000 endowed institutions, each with its own mission, goals, and program priorities. It can be difficult enough to understand what individual foundations do -- only 26 percent have Web sites -- and far more difficult to grasp their contribution in the aggregate. But as foundations continue to multiply and seek greater impact, people understandably are becoming more curious about their work. Foundations are private institutions, but like other private institutions producing social benefit, they find themselves increasingly subject to public scrutiny.

The Foundation Center listens to its critics and is building enhancements into its databases that will improve our ability to address this question and others like it. Still, the most important source of information will continue to be foundations themselves. The questions will not go away because they are difficult or uncomfortable to answer. By providing better and faster data, foundations can help insure that the answers do their work justice.

Determining who benefits from foundation dollars and how is fraught with the kinds of methodological challenges that give researchers sleepless nights. But if we truly value what makes America's foundations unique -- their freedom to experiment, take risks, and innovate in the service of the public good -- then we must try. An informed, data-driven debate led by foundations themselves is the best way to protect that freedom. Ultimately, it will help to improve the overall quality of information about philanthropy and promote better understanding of the many contributions of American foundations to building a better world.

-- Brad Smith

Valuing What We Can Measure or Measuring What We Value?

(Michael Edwards is a leading expert on global civil society and the author of Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World. This is the third in a series of posts in which he looks at different aspects of the Bellagio Initiative, an effort funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce a new framework for philanthropic and international development collaboration in pursuit of human well-being. Click here to read the first post and here to read the second. To read/download the Bellagio paper on which these posts are based --and from which the quotation below is taken -- click here.)

"There are no data or moral arguments to prove that one of these approaches is better than the others, so when interrogating the effectiveness of foundations the key question is always effective in doing what -- by what criteria, over which timescale, and who decides?..."

It is often said that we value what we can measure, but it might be more accurate to say that we measure what we value, and different people value very different things, an insight that is central to debates about the meaning of development and the need for broader indicators such as well-being. What, how and when we measure, how we use and interpret the results, and who decides these things are crucial questions in development -- and serve to highlight not just the methods, but the politics and power relations involved.

Do we measure long-term systems change as well as the numbers of lives saved and jobs created in a two- or three-year project cycle? Is democracy calculated as a cost or a benefit when we want to fix problems quickly and "get things done"? Should education be evaluated using test scores or the skills we need to live well together? As Robert Chambers, a modern icon of development research, puts it, "Whose reality counts?" Outside the science laboratory, all measurement means negotiation between different views and voices.

In the development sector, this debate has been accepted as legitimate for many years (though it remains to be resolved) -- perhaps because the exploitation of poor countries, their experience of colonialism, and/or their greater reliance on outside assistance from donor agencies have placed power at the heart of any meaningful analysis of what to do. It's a conversation that has generated whole new philosophies of knowledge and methods of participatory research to explore alongside randomized control trials and other quantitative techniques. Some have called this a shift from "using data" to "cultivating wisdom," by which they mean the ability to use information of different kinds to foster collective action and analysis, and to "co-produce" a vision of what matters most with those who are being "developed" at the center of that vision.

In philanthropy, by contrast, those who challenge the assumptions embedded in measurement and data-driven change are often labeled as idiots or reactionaries, guilty of the "hubris that measurement is the technocratic tool of the devil," as Fay Twersky from the Hewlett Foundation puts it in a recent op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. No one I know actually holds this view, and attacks like these do little except distract us from the need to ask tough questions about the influence of measurement over the kinds of work we prioritize for support.

The lesson to be learned from development is that opening ourselves to these questions is the best way to find a reasonable path forward -- a path that shifts the conversation away from the belief that measurement will tell us which are the "best" organizations or projects to support. That's a subjective evaluation at the best of times and empirically unsound, given that most of the data we collect are not strong enough to determine either causality or attribution. First and foremost, measurement is a contribution to learning and to sharing -- one input among many into well-informed but imperfect decision-making processes that continue to rely on human judgment.

In fact, arguments over measurement are not really about measurement at all. What separates enthusiasts and skeptics is not that one group wants more impact or believes in evaluation while the other group does not -- in my experience we all value those things -- but that we have substantive differences in how we approach these questions and which aspects of social change we are prepared to fight for and defend. That's why this debate generates so much heat -- and why it would be a much healthier conversation if we worked from that premise and were honest with each other about the dilemmas it creates.

Counting and measuring are only one part of a process of continuous, collective learning and communication that should be driven by the diverse needs and beliefs of all those who are working for and funding development and social change. There is no "best" approach or model or organization to be revealed by "the data," outside of a particular set of criteria and circumstances that are themselves contested.

Therefore, what we really need, as I'll explore in my fourth and final post, is an "ecosystem" of funders and funding styles and not a monoculture that uses measurement to drive resources to the causes which it, and it alone, finds of value.

-- Michael Edwards

Weekend Link Roundup (February 4-5, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector...

African Americans

BlackGivesBack's Tracey Webb gives a shout out to The Root, which earlier this week unveiled its 2012 list of Young Futurists -- African Americans under the age of 22 who are "not only achievers but also innovators in the worlds of green innovation, science and technology, arts and culture, social activism, and business enterprise."

Civil Society

"[Is there] a textbook definition of the common good?" asks Steven Fajon, a Case Foundation intern, in a guest post on the Social Citizens blog. The question occurred to Fajon after panelist Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, in an Independent Sector webinar titled "What the Heck Is the Common Good Anyway?" explained that the purpose of the question was to initiate a dialogue between communities in need. For his part, Fajon remains unconvinced. "[I]n the end," he writes, "the idea of the common good doesn't need to be an exact science –- it simply has to strike up a debate, just like it did in my mind."

Communications/Marketing

Has any public charity had a worse week, communcations-wise, than the one Komen for the Cure had this week? For a complete rundown of the missteps made by the Dallas-based organization as it tried to explain its decision to de-fund grantee Planned Parenthood, badly fumbled its response when the Internet erupted in outrage, then reversed itself a day later, see Kivi Leroux Miller's post on the "accidental rebranding" of Komen.

Global Health

On his Humanosphere blog, Tom Paulson shares a Twitter map made by Marc Smith, founder of the Social Media Research Foundation, that seems to show the global health community -- at least the portion of it "active" on Twitter -- to be fairly insular and uncommunicative. "It's mostly just an echoing of the Gates Foundation," says Smith. "There's not a lot of response, or engagement. Basically, it looks like people preaching to the choir." For his part, Paulson suggests the problem isn't so much Twitter or social media as it is "the passive...and sometimes simplistic nature of the narrative within the global health and development community itself. This is a community," Paulson adds,

devoted to -- and advertising itself as -- doing good. Humanitarians, in my experience, are exceptionally uncomfortable when forced to talk about things going bad. It also doesn't help with fund-raising, of course. But it's reality, and reality makes for better stories.

Health

In a post on the Breast Cancer Action blog, BCA executive director Karuna Jaggar writes: "The sad truth is that Komen’s willingness to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, while a victory for women who rely on those resources, will not end the epidemic....Not while Komen overemphasizes the value of mammography -- mammography will never stop cancer before it starts. Not while pinkwashing remains the status quo, and not while Komen allows companies to put pink ribbons on their carcinogenic products. Not while metastatic disease, which is what kills women, gets only 2% of research dollars in this country...."

Higher Education

The Nonprofit Quarterly's Rick Cohen takes a closer look at the tax-exempt sector's "1 percent" -- elite universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford whose endowments, on average, racked up gains of 19 percent in fiscal year 2011.

International Aid/Development

In the first two installments of a four-part series here on PhilanTopic, Demos senior fellow Michael Edwards uses the paper he wrote on the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Bellagio Initiative to explore the relevance of "well-being" as a lens in development work and some of the lessons philanthropy can learn from that work. Coming up next: the role of metrics in that conversation.

On the White Courtesy Telephone blog, Greater New Orleans Foundation president and CEO Albert Ruesga weighs in on a disturbing article in the New York Times that exposed the unsafe working conditions at an Apple supplier in China. "It's not a given that being poor means having to work extremely hard in unsafe conditions to make very little,” writes Ruesga. “Fixing this in your supply chain needs to take priority over an on-time delivery of iPhones to eager consumers....”

Nonprofit Blogosphere

Hosting this month's Nonprofit Blog Carnival, Getting Attention's Nancy Schwartz shares a selection of posts that highlight the dreams of our fellow nonprofit bloggers.

Philanthropy

In a video reposted on the Humanosphere blog, Melinda Gates explains the purpose of the Gates Foundation's new visitor center in Seattle.

In the text of a speech reprinted on the Philanthropy Daily site, William Schambra, the director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, offers a typically provocative take on the difference between liberal and conservative philanthropy. "Granted, every progressive foundation has in mind a particular social ill or injustice it seeks to remedy, whether environmental degradation or poverty or racial inequity," writes Schambra. "But what do all these add up to?

Very seldom do liberal foundations tell us explicitly what their overriding political philosophy is, or how they understand the basic character of the American political order, and what’s worth preserving and what needs changing.

Instead, if you add up the range of specific problems on the agenda of liberal philanthropy, we’re left with a pretty depressing view of America -- an America beset by a wide range of social ills and injustices that desperately require philanthropic interventions of all sorts.

By contrast, conservative philanthropy tends to see beneath the problems America may be experiencing -- many of which are of course quite serious -- [and sees] a profoundly decent and good political order.

And the vision is to understand and preserve that order, the American regime of liberal democracy, in the face of powerful intellectual forces that have pulled us away from that commitment....

Social Enterprise

Is the social enterprise bubble about to burst? In an attempt to answer that question, the folks at GOOD asked half a dozen social entrepreneurs working in Africa what they think is driving the hype, where the sector is going, and what advice they have for those just starting off.

Social Media

And in a guest post on Beth’s Blog, Levi Strauss Foundation executive director Daniel Jae-Won Lee looks at how some human rights organizations are using social media to engage underserved communities on the issues that affect them. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California developed MiACLU.org, an online Spanish-language platform that's designed to educate and engage Latinos in the region about immigration issues.

That's it for this week. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org!

-- The Editors

Can Philanthropy Put Humpty-Dumpty Back Together Again?

(Michael Edwards is a leading expert on global civil society and the author of Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World. This is the second in a series of posts in which he looks at different aspects of the Bellagio Initiative, an effort funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce a new framework for philanthropic and international development collaboration in pursuit of human well-being. Click here to read the first post in Edwards' series, "Well-Being and Philanthropy," and here to read/download the Bellagio paper from which the quotation below is taken.)

"The more one disaggregates the components of well-being into smaller and more manageable pieces...the more each piece can be measured and controlled in order to improve returns....[B]ut the same pieces can't simply be re-arranged to the same effect in different contexts...."

One of my most important career lessons was taught to me by Sithembiso Nyoni, an activist in Zimbabwe. "No country in the world has developed itself through projects," she said, reflecting on the tendency of NGOs to fund their own small bits and pieces of development and hope that they add up to something more substantial over time.

Unfortunately, because the larger structures of society evolve organically rather than in assembly line fashion, they rarely do. The long and messy processes that drive our politics, culture change, and institution-building can neither be predicted nor controlled, especially if the outcome is something as complex as well-being. In that sense, development is poetry and foreign aid is prose.

Of course, a clear sense of purpose and direction is important to success. In contrast to Zimbabwe, that was one of the things that distinguished South Korea, Taiwan, and other societies that developed quickly after World War II. But as the experience of those countries also shows, clear goals were balanced by the flexibility to pursue them in lots of different ways as circumstances changed. "Evolution is always surprising," wrote Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, "so make room for it. If you let things flourish you get a wild ride, but you also get sustainability." That's been true of all game-changing experiences in development right up to the Arab Spring.

Tension between "local ownership" and "outside intervention" has been woven through the history of development efforts for half a century or more, and it's unlikely to disappear as long as foreign aid is a tool in the foreign policy toolkit. Accountability to taxpayers, concerns about corruption, and a desire to show more "value for money" have all reinforced a project-by-project mentality that a decade ago seemed to be fading in favor of unrestricted support. Projects that are carefully planned and monitored do offer the prospect of more control, even if their influence over the deeper drivers of development is weak. On the plus side, there are many ways to leverage the impact of projects -- including through policy advocacy, capacity building, networking, and knowledge-creation -- so that they become more than small pieces in a jigsaw that can never be completed.

Nevertheless -- and here's the link to current trends in philanthropy -- the idea that successful projects can be "replicated" or "scaled-up" has, for reasons I don't entirely understand, become an article of faith. There are striking similarities between the Millennium Villages Project in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, and the Harlem Children's Zone in New York City. Both have received significant injections of resources in an effort to demonstrate that good results are possible without broader changes in the surrounding environment. The same goes for school-reform efforts and the Obama administration's Social Innovation Fund. Other schools and communities will learn from these experiences and follow a similar path, or so the theory goes.

Except that they don't, because the resources aren't there, or because the same innovation doesn't work or isn't valued when transported to another setting, or because those broader forces have a nasty habit of kicking the ladder away just when you least expect it.

If that's the case, why do pilot projects (or "policy experiments," as they are often referred to in the U.S.) continue to exercise such a powerful hold on the imagination of philanthropists? Perhaps it's because they accomplish other things that are important, like building support for their favored approaches, strengthening networks of people prepared to back them, and keeping alive the comforting thought that social progress can be removed from the influence of politics, economic restructuring, and social struggle.

Even if it could, it would be something of a pyrrhic victory, threatening to sacrifice long-term improvements in the infrastructure of problem-solving for short-term advances in services and other material indicators of success. As fifty years of trial and error in development make clear, however, investing in people's capacities to innovate is much more important than replicating any particular innovation.

But how we do measure success in that kind of scenario? And is there a way to knit all these different approaches together in a positive and constructive fashion? That's the subject of next week's posts.

-- Michael Edwards

Most Popular PhilanTopic Posts (January 2012)

These were the five most popular posts on PhilanTopic in January:

• Five Qs for...Mario Morino, Co-Founder/Chair, Venture Philanthropy Partners
• Foundation Leadership for a New Era
• 2011 Year in Review: What to Expect in 2012
• 2011 Year in Review: Foundations Bet Big on New Initiatives
• 2011 Year in Review: Microfinance Vows to Do Better

What have you been reading/watching/listening to lately that made you think? Feel free to share in the comments section....

 

'Well-Being' and Philanthropy

(Michael Edwards is a leading expert on global civil society and the author of Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World. In a series of posts over the next two weeks, he'll be looking at different aspects of the Bellagio Initiative, an effort funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce a new framework for philanthropic and international development collaboration in pursuit of human well-being.)

"Understanding the different dimensions of well-being is crucial…because it reminds us that material and non-material assets, resources and experiences are equally important to the outcomes that people seek through the processes of development and social change...."

What can philanthropy learn from international development? Usually that question is asked and answered in reverse, leading to the export of community foundations, "philanthrocapitalism," and other models and ideas from the United States to developing countries. But despite the differences in context, I would say there's much we can learn from fifty years of development work -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.

My love/hate relationship with development stretches back to 1978, when I boarded a British Caledonian 707 in Manchester and arrived in Bogota twenty-four hours later via London, Madrid and San Juan, Puerto Rico (remember the joys of "refueling"?). I spent the first twenty years of my career with Oxfam, Save the Children, and other NGOs before joining the Ford Foundation in 1999, and the lack of cross-fertilization between philanthropy and development has always struck me as a missed opportunity for learning, at least outside the small number of U.S. foundations that make grants internationally.

And then along came the Bellagio Initiative, an effort funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and organized by the Institute of Development Studies in England to take a more systematic look at the links between these two different traditions. I was lucky enough to be asked to write one of the background papers for this process, and over the next two weeks I'll be highlighting some of the key points from that paper which I think are especially relevant to the state of philanthropy today. (Ed note: You can read the full paper -- quotations from which appear at the top of each blog post in the series -- here.)

One of the most important debates in "development" concerns the different meanings of the term itself. The implications of this debate are huge because everything flows from the outcomes we seek -- grantmaking strategies and priorities, metrics and measurement, and which types of funding are best-suited to the tasks at hand. Initially development was defined in terms of economic growth and assets, then poverty reduction and human welfare, but by the 1990s it was clear that these indicators said little about the values, systems, and institutions that underpin success. They were all too narrow and did not reflect the aspirations of those who were being "developed."

Faced by this situation, many observers, most famously the Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, argued that what really matters to development are "human capabilities" and the conditions (like effective governance and land reform) required to strengthen them throughout the population, with the ultimate goal of promoting "well-being" and fulfillment, instead of just material success. The deepest challenge of well-being is "to live well together," and that's a challenge of a different order than delivering new vaccines to reduce child mortality or raising incomes through microcredit loans. It's not that these things are unimportant -- far from it -- but thinking about the broader implications of well-being forces us to give equal weight to much deeper questions about things like sustainability, patriarchy, privilege, and quality of life.

Without broader indicators of success, you end up -- how can I say this politely -- like the U.S. today or China in perhaps twenty-five years, characterized by very little absolute poverty or starvation, considerable material success for some, and large-scale social and environmental failures, including rising inequality, declining social cohesion, political gridlock, and looming ecological disaster. Unlike our current focus on enabling more people to participate in systems already in place, a focus on well-being forces us to think more rigorously about these broader challenges and how to meet them by transforming the global economy and other aspects of how we live, work, and govern our societies.

That's a huge challenge for development and for philanthropy, which spends very little money on transformative work of this kind. Part of the reason is that most of us still operate within a narrow frame of outcomes. In the U.S., there's some interest in alternatives to GDP and other indicators of national progress, but the concept of well-being isn't really part of the conversation, and that's a shame. Maybe if we spent more time arguing about a broader range of outcomes and less time debating how to measure the small number we've already selected, philanthropy would be a more creative force in society.

That's tough, because as I'll explore in my next two posts, these broader outcomes are even more difficult to influence and measure. And that makes them especially challenging for the "new" philanthropy, with its emphasis on metrics and models. If we continue to ignore them, however, we'll all be the worse for it.

-- Michael Edwards

Weekend Link Roundup (January 28-29, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Civil Society

Writing on the White Courtesy Telephone blog, Greater New Orleans Foundation president Albert Ruesga urges grantmakers to invest less money in white papers and candidates' forums this election season and more on "helping advocates introduce democracy to the United States." Writes Ruesga: "While foundations might not have the resources to shift the political discourse in this country [in] the coming year, they can at least help liberate us from the illusion of free and fair elections...."

Communications

In a post on the Communications Network blog, Commnetwork board chair Mitch Hurst suggests that grantmaking organizations need to do a better job of monitoring social networks, blogs, and the mainstream media if they hope to understand "how their issues are being influenced in online conversations."

Corporate Social Responsibility

In a post on the Harvard Business Review blog, Rosabeth Moss Kanter argues that great companies are about more than a single-minded focus on the bottom line. Truly great companies, writes Kanter,

believe that business is an intrinsic part of society, and they acknowledge that, like family, government, and religion, it has been one of society's pillars since the dawn of the industrial era. Great companies work to make money, of course, but in their choices of how to do so, they think about building enduring institutions. They invest in the future while being aware of the need to build people and society....

Education

Philanthrocapitalism authors Matthew Bishop and Michael Green argue against the idea, suggested last week by former British prime minister Gordon Brown, of a Global Fund for Education to help address education funding cuts and boost the number of young people globally who attend and graduate from high school. Unlike fighting malaria -- which, write Bishop and Green, is "a finite task that can be achieved even where governments are weak" -- "educating the children of the world will need sustained investment indefinitely...."

Fundraising

Future Fundraising Now blogger Jeff Brooks explains why it's important to "keep your eye on the ball" in fundraising -- and life in general.

Impact/Effectiveness

The Nonprofit Quarterly has published a fascinating exchange between the Hudson Institute's William Schambra and Wallace Foundation president Will Miller on the use of metrics in "the development and dispersion of knowledge" as a driver of the foundation's grantmaking. A must read for anyone who works in the sector.

Technology

On the Impatient Optimists blog, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Deborah Jacobs considers how the surge in tablet and e-book reader ownership presents "huge opportunities in an increasingly digitized society where information access plays a critical role in building knowledge and skills," as well as a challenge, in that the trend threatens "to exacerbate the digital divide that is already perpetuated across the U.S."

Transparency

On the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog, Meyer Memorial Trust communications director Marie Deatherage discusses the foundation's "road to transparency," a decade-long journey that included the early and active embrace of the Web and other online communications channels.

Volunteerism

Last but not least, CauseShift managing director Scott Henderson offers a few ideas for folks interested in changing the world one good deed at a time.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

This Week in PubHub: Protecting the Rights of People With Disabilities

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she wrote about trends in funding for social justice and advocacy efforts in support of marginalized populations.)

Throughout the month of January, we're highlighting research on various aspects of the ongoing struggle for civil and human rights around the globe. This week, we're featuring four reports that address topics related to the rights of people with disabilities.

Among the most egregious examples of human rights violations involving the disabled is the forced sterilization of women and girls with disabilities, as described in Sterilization of Women and Girls With Disabilities (4 pages, PDF), an issue brief from the Open Society Foundations in collaboration with Human Rights Watch, Women With Disabilities Australia, and the International Disability Alliance. The report points out that the practice is justified in many countries as being in the "best interests" of the women -- who are sterilized without their knowledge, despite refusing or not having the opportunity to consent, and/or after being encouraged to do so through misinformation, as a result of financial incentives, or by intimidation. In addition to being an act of violence, a form of social control, and a violation of numerous international human rights standards, forced sterilization, the paper notes, is a violation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which promotes the right of all people with disabilities to start a family and, for women, to control their fertility on an equal basis with the non-disabled.

The right to live one's life with the same choices as others is at the core of A Community for All: Implementing Article 19 (39 pages, PDF), another publication from the Open Society Foundations. Based on Article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which states that people with disabilities have the right to live independently and be counted as members of society with the same choices as others, the report calls for ending the institutionalization of people with disabilities and to create community-based alternatives and services for them that promote social inclusion. A separate checklist lists ten steps to achieving those ends, starting with "Commit to transforming the system from institutional services to community-based services" and ending with "Establish mechanisms for periodic review of the action plan and national strategy."

What is the nonprofit sector's role with respect to the issue? According to Renewing the Commitment: An ADA Compliance Guide for Nonprofits (139 pages; 15.49MB; PDF), a report from the Chicago Community Trust, about 54 million people in the United States -- nearly one in five -- have at least one disability, and the Americans with Disabilities Act requires most nonprofits to provide them with equal access to services. The guide provides a checklist, resource list, and advice on serving people with disabilities, encourages nonprofits to make sure that their facilities and communications meet the various needs of the disabled community, and highlights considerations for specific types of events, services, and programs. An action agenda in this area includes a call to collaborate with people with disabilities and the organizations that represent them in the planning and compliance process.

Many veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who return with severe injuries will require care and services, as well. Based on qualitative and quantitative assessments of services needed by Iraq/Afghanistan veterans and their families, the RAND Corporation report A Needs Assessment of New York State Veterans (102 pages, PDF) found, among other things, that veterans were frustrated with employment preference programs that do not prevent discrimination against those with disabilities, as promised. Funded by the New York State Health Foundation, the report concludes that responsibility for the health and well-being of veterans extend well beyond the VA to other clinical and social service delivery systems, and calls for better coordination of care, better outreach to veterans seeking assistance, and more accessible, sustainable, and higher-quality mental health care.

What do you think needs to be done to protect the rights of and enhance the lives of people with disabilities? Are there specific unmet needs that foundations and nonprofits should be addressing? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

And be sure to check out PubHub, where you can browse more than a hundred and fifty reports on topics related to civil and human rights.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Inequality

(Mark Rosenman, a nonprofit sector activist and scholar, directs Caring to Change, an effort in Washington that seeks to promote foundation grantmaking for the common good. In his last post, he challenged the notion that more nonprofit organizations necessarily translates into greater social good.)

Although the public and a few elected leaders increasingly are focused on growing economic inequality in America, the topic isn't receiving much attention from charities and nonprofits. This in spite of the fact that the sector itself is characterized by a similar inequality.

That silence is surprising for a couple of reasons. Today's yawning inequality exacerbates the problems many people face as well as their need to turn to charities for assistance. It also directly affects the help they're able to receive; as a general rule, the larger a nonprofit organization's budget, the less likely it is to provide the kind of assistance needed by low-income Americans and those falling toward poverty. Wealthier charities tend to cater to wealthier Americans, and as the rich get richer, inequality -- in society and the nonprofit world -- grows.

Let's look at some statistics about growing inequality in the country and then explore what it means for Americans and the nonprofit organizations that serve them. Since 1979, after-tax income for the top 1 percent has more than doubled, even as it fell for middle-class and lower-income Americans. The top 5 percent of households in the United States now hold more than 60 percent of the wealth. The imbalance is even greater in the nonprofit sector, where the top 2.5 percent of charities that report data to the IRS control more than 50 percent of the wealth and account for over 60 percent of annual revenues.

Three types of exempt organizations -- hospitals, primary healthcare facilities, and institutions of higher education -- make up the top tier of the sector. Compare their finances with those of human service groups, which comprise more than a third of all exempt organizations but account for only 13 percent of its annual revenues (including government funding, fees-for-service and other income, and donations) and 11 percent of its assets.

It gets worse. This is the first recession on record in which the median income of working-age people was lower as the economy "recovered" than it was before the economy tanked. The wealthy, of course, continue to do well. Much the same is true for charities, as larger, more prosperous organizations see modest growth in contributions while many smaller nonprofits struggle to survive.

Higher education is a perfect example. The recession officially ended in the summer of 2009, and giving to higher education rose about 3.5 percent in 2010. Compare that to giving to the human services sector, which declined 1.5 percent in spite of contributions for disaster relief and recovery efforts in Haiti and elsewhere.

That's a problem, in part, because giving to higher educational institutions contributes to inequality. Consider the top two hundred or so colleges, where only 15 percent of students come from the bottom half of the income-distribution pyramid and 67 percent come from the top quartile. At most institutions, moreover, financial assistance for low- and moderate-income students has failed to keep pace with increases in tuition and related costs. And this as the increasingly large salaries paid many university presidents makes them "1-percenters."

Indeed, retiring Amherst College president Anthony Marx recently observed that "we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution." While having a college degree remains important to getting, or at least holding on to, a good job with benefits and some security, it also helps to legitimate inequality by seeming to validate a college education as a sure-fire route to meritocratic success.

But is it? According to a College Board study using Department of Education data, students with high test scores from low-income families were less likely to complete college than those with low scores from affluent families. And an Education Trust study of almost twelve hundred four-year colleges found that only five institutions (that's a number, not a percentage) were doing a good job serving low-income students.

The problem isn't confined to higher education. Nonprofit hospitals -- a category that includes some of the best hospitals in the country -- often fail to adequately serve those in greatest need while handing out executive compensation packages that would make a banker blush. In 2009, two-thirds of the nonprofit hospitals in the country dedicated less than 2 percent of their total expenditures for "charity care" -- i.e., medical care for the poor and indigent -- while only 7 percent directed more than 5 percent to such care. And this during a severe economic downturn in which health-related crises put countless numbers of low- and moderate-income people at grave economic risk.

I'm not suggesting that nonprofit organizations at the top of the income pyramid completely fail to provide beneficial services to society at large. They do. But with their elite reputational status and considerable economic wherewithal, they could do much more. The same is true of foundations.

Human service groups and community-based organizations often are the most helpful to people on the short end of the inequality stick. In addition to the direct services they provide, community-based organizations frequently advocate for and organize around the plight of the downwardly mobile and financially insecure. Yet, faced with ongoing budget cuts and flat or declining contributions, they are among the organizations that are most strapped financially as we head into an even more challenging future.

Notwithstanding the recent assertions of various Republican presidential candidates, it's not "class warfare" or "the politics of envy" to acknowledge -- and want to address -- growing economic inequality. On the contrary, it's a gross disservice to the nation to downplay its existence and assert that we can fix the problem by giving more tax breaks to the wealthy or by further deregulating corporations. As my kids would say, been there, done that. Acknowledging the divide between the haves and have-nots is an important step -- we can't solve the problem unless we are willing to speak frankly.

In short, nonprofit and foundation leaders need to talk more forcefully and publicly about economic inequality in America -- and do more to address it in both their programs and their own operations. They can start by countering the myths and obfuscation that characterize too much of today's political discourse. It's time we united, as a sector, to help people understand and act on their shared interests and better serve the common good.

-- Mark Rosenman

Bill Gates' Fourth Annual Letter

As he has every year since 2009, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has put his thoughts about the scourge of extreme poverty and the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest, to improve the lives of millions around the globe into a letter and posted it to the foundation's Web site.

In addition to outlining the foundation's key priorities in 2012, this year's letter focuses on the need for continued investments in innovations -- agricultural and otherwise -- that are accelerating progress against poverty in the developing world. Or as Gates puts it in the letter's opening section:

The world faces a clear choice. If we invest relatively modest amounts, many more poor farmers will be able to feed their families. If we don't, one in seven people will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation. My annual letter this year is an argument for making the choice to keep on helping extremely poor people build self-sufficiency.

My concern is not only about farming; it applies to all the areas of global development and global health in which we work. Using the latest tools -- seeds, vaccines, AIDS drugs, and contraceptives, for example -- we have made impressive progress. However, if we don't make these success stories widely known, we won’t generate the funding commitments needed to maintain progress and save lives. At stake are the future prospects of one billion human beings....

To read or download the letter (which is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, and Spanish), click here.

Non-Financial Capital and Social Change

(Paul Shoemaker is executive director of Social Venture Partners Seattle and recently was named one of the "Top 50 Most Influential People in the Non-Profit Sector" by The NonProfit Times.)

The theme of this year's World Economic Forum gathering is The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models. A lot of people took a lot of time to write a convoluted description of what that really means. Let's boil it down to this: Because of the huge economic and social shifts taking place around the world, we don't have good models for understanding this "new norm" or for aligning stakeholders/citizens around a vision and inspiring institutions and individuals to realize those visions.

As some of you know, a few months ago I did the local TEDx about the power of human and social (not just or even primarily financial) capital to change our world in the years ahead. I think there are two parts of that message that might be relevant to WEF, and there's one I mentioned in the talk: our old ways of adding up the financial and institutional resources for community change flat out miss the power, potential, real, and often more enduring impact of human and social capital. (I give credit to SVP partner Bill Henningsgaard for articulating that.) This is starting to change, but we have to become much more intentional and specific about the role and value of non-financial capital in social change. That is a core part of our game at SVP.

This other one I didn't mention: another huge reason why human social capital is so critical is because the amount of money we can bring to bear on social issues is fixed, constrained, or even shrinking in many places. Whether we like it or not, that is not going to change anytime soon. Governments around the world are collectively tens of trillions (tr, not b) of dollars in debt. No matter your politics, that is a fact that unquestionably points to constrained public resources.

So the most plentiful, expandable assets we have are non-financial. Don't get me wrong -- money always matters. But if we want to increase the "supply" of assets for positive change, we're gonna have to do it in ways that are leveraged, creative, and expand human and social capital. How much difference can that make? I don't know for sure, but think about the "social value" that Facebook creates -- and the fact that it didn't even exist ten years ago.

What do you think? Given the challenges confronting us in 2012 and beyond, what does the social sector have to do to think -- and be thought of -- differently? How can we rapidly change the "equation for social good"?

-- Paul Shoemaker

Weekend Link Roundup (January 21-22, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Civil Society

Filming at the 20th anniversary INTRAC conference in Oxford, England, Nicetreefilms interviewed Demos senior fellow Michael Edwards, author of Just Another Emperor? The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism (2008) and Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World (2010), about the role and future of civil society via-a-vis business and the public sector.

To mark the second anniversary of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruling that said corporations have the same right as people to spend money in elections, Demos has curated a dozen or so blog posts, articles, policy briefs, and multimedia presentations that highlight the anti-democracy implications of the decision.

Disaster Relief

On the heels of the two-year anniversary of the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands in Haiti and left up to a million more homeless, the Adventure Project's Becky Straw spotlights a couple of social enterprises that are using technology to boost the Caribbean nation's economy.

Leadership

On her About.com blog, Joanne Fritz responds to Getting Attention blogger Nancy Schwartz' MLK Day-inspired call for nonprofit bloggers to write about their dreams for the sector by sharing her hopes for the charities she admires: that they do not become stuck in the past; that their fundraising appeals address the big social issues of our day; and that they work to create organizational cultures that value learning, adequately reward hard work, and treasure the people who engage with their causes.

And on her blog, Allison Fine, co-author (with Beth Kanter) of the Networked Nonprofit, says her dream "is for organizational leaders to switch from viewing the world through a lens of scarcity to one of abundance...."

Elsewhere, How to Become a Nonprofit Rockstar co-author Rosetta Thurman shares eleven tips guaranteed to make your search for a job in the nonprofit sector a successful one.

Philanthropy

Writing on the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, Paul Beaudet, associate director of the Seattle-based Wilburforce Foundation, explains why funders need to stop asking nonprofits to "do more with less."

Regulation

On his Harvard Business Review blog, Uncharitable author Dan Pallotta criticizes New York governor Andrew Cuomo for launching a nonprofit "executive pay witch hunt." "Elected officials consistently conflate smart investments in the talent, organizational strength, and long-term planning necessary to address massive social problems with fraud," writes Pallotta. "Why? Because they lack a fundamental understanding of how long-term social problems get solved and because the humanitarian sector has been too terrified to stand up to them."

Social Media

And Social Media for Social Good author Heather Mansfield explains why Pinterest, a new invitation-only social networking site that allows users to create virtual "pinboards," is worth your nonprofit organization's time.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

Foundation Leadership for a New Era

The news that Peter Hutchinson had stepped down as president of the St. Paul-based Bush Foundation after four-plus years at its helm came as a surprise to many. Hired in 2007 to lead a strategic refocusing of the 55-year-old foundation's mission and grantmaking activities, Hutchinson impressed those who worked with him as a thoughtful, energetic leader, and his decision to move on left many scratching their heads.

Hutchinson himself was rather cryptic about his reasons for leaving. As he put it in a valedictory post on the foundation's blog:

[The "change"] part of this organization's journey is now complete. While I might like to believe that I can do all things well, I know that is not true. I am great at some things but only good at others. I believe there are others who will be better than me at leading the foundation through the next phase of its journey....

For some this will seem sudden. I don't believe in long good-byes. If new leadership is going to succeed, old leadership needs to get out of the way so that people in the organization and its partners can focus on the future and not the past...."

As we noted in our year-end wrap, Hutchinson is the latest in a series of foundation executives -- Greg Chaillé, Aryeh Neier, Gara LaMarche, Thomas Aschenbrener, Karen Davis, Lance Lindblom, and Gary Yates among them -- who over the last year have either stepped down or announced that they would be stepping down. With the oldest baby boomers now reaching retirement age, they'll be joined over the next decade by tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of senior-level nonprofit and foundation executives.

This rolling wave of retirements presents the philanthropic sector with both a challenge and an opportunity -- a situation not lost on the leaders of nine progressive nonprofit organizations who earlier this month released an open letter to the trustees of the $7 billion William and Hewlett Foundation. As many of you know, the foundation's president, Paul Brest, has announced he'll be stepping down this summer to return to teaching, and the letter's authors wanted to share some thoughts with the Hewlett board. After noting that the board has "no more important role than selecting [a new] CEO," they offered four suggestions for the board to keep in mind as it conducts a search for Brest's replacement. The next president of the foundation, they wrote,

• should be someone who maintains the foundation's historic commitment to philanthropic effectiveness;
• someone who understands the role that race continues to play in determining life opportunities in America;
• someone with deep experience and passion for the highest-impact grantmaking strategies of grassroots advocacy, community organizing, and civic engagement;
• someone who understands the limits of "strategic philanthropy."

While the above list reflects the social justice concerns of the nonprofit leaders who issued the letter, it also raises a number of questions: What kind of qualities and experience should a foundation leader -- and I'm talking here about foundations with half a billion or more in assets, of which there are more than a hundred -- possess in the twenty-first century? Should he have had prior experience as a grantmaker? What about nonprofit or NGO experience? Should she have earned at least one advanced degree? Be fluent in a foreign language? Have visited at least half a dozen countries, including countries in Asia, Africa, and South America? Should he have at least one entrepreneurial failure on his resume? Know about and use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter? Be able to program, or at least know the difference between Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby?

Okay, maybe the last one isn't entirely reasonable. But you get the point. In a connected, networked world where money and knowledge flow across borders at the speed of light, where rising inequality is a global phenomenon and the threats to our survival increasingly are transnational, where the metaphor of earth-as-lifeboat has never been more appropriate, effective foundation leadership is vital.

Given the reality of the power dynamics in our sector, I don't really expect anyone to weigh in on this. But I'll ask it anyway: What will (or should) effective foundation leadership look like a decade from now? Use the comments section to share your thoughts....

-- Mitch Nauffts

Becoming a "Web 2.0 Philanthropy"

(Steve Downs is chief technology and information officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This post originally appeared on the Foundation Center's Glasspockets blog.)

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, like many philanthropies today, has embraced social media. We have a Facebook page, YouTube channels, blogs, and multiple official Twitter feeds. Our staff also participate directly: more than forty of my colleagues are regular Twitter users and many have contributed blog posts to popular sites within their fields. Our CEO, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey (@risalavizzo), sets the tone with her regular activity on Twitter.

Like many philanthropies, we're still finding our way and doing our best to learn from our collective experiences and from the experiences of others. For RWJF, engagement in social media is rooted in a context -- a context about who we are as an organization and what we seek to become.

The first part of that context comes from our history with transparency. Since RWJF's beginnings, we have emphasized independent evaluation of our programs. As David Colby (@DavidCColby) and his colleagues have detailed, RWJF chose to make public the results of those evaluations so others could learn whether the interventions had (or had not) been effective. In addition, since 2007, we have made public an annual assessment that examines a number of dimensions of our organizational performance. (You can download the reports from our Web site.)

The second part starts in 2008, when RWJF underwent a strategic planning exercise where we began by looking at the world around us. We saw innovations in philanthropy coming from newer, smaller foundations like the Steve and Jean Case Foundation and Omidyar Network that were leveraging new technologies to cast a wider net, stimulate conversation, and engage people more widely. We saw new models for the sector such as Kiva and DonorsChoose -- platforms that enabled more direct connections between donors and their impact. And we also saw the amazing, disruptive accomplishments of services like Wikipedia and craigslist that were run by organizations employing only a few dozen staff but drawing their power from vast networks of engaged users. We came away from this effort with a sense -- still impressionistic -- that we should explore what it would mean for us to become a "Web 2.0 philanthropy."

"Web 2.0" is becoming an archaic term as it is supplanted by the term "social media," but for us the distinction has meaning. Where "social media" is often associated with services like Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr, we see Web 2.0 as running deeper. It is the collection of tools that harness the collective creativity and knowledge of -- and promote interaction among -- the Web's many users. It is based on an "architecture of participation," which enables the users of a service to add value to that service. Beyond social media, it can be expressed in many ways, ranging from the user who improves on a cooking magazine's recipe by adding an unexpected spice to the protester during the Arab Spring posting a cell phone video of a beating on YouTube for the world to see. It is the seller-rating system of eBay, in which the experiences of hundreds of other buyers give a potential buyer confidence in the seller. It is about the blurring of the lines between producer and consumer, between expert and non-expert, and the aggregation of many small contributions into something of great value.

We knew that as a relatively large and middle-aged foundation (we celebrate our 40th anniversary this year) with traditions, habits and engrained practices, we would have to consciously push ourselves to evolve in this direction. We needed first to flesh out the vision, which we did through a combination of research (i.e., small "r" research like reading case studies and talking with folks at other organizations) and experiential learning. Those of us tasked with working on the vision felt we couldn't do so unless we were actively engaging in Web 2.0 experiences, so we started experimenting with Twitter and Facebook -- and experiencing their cultures and value to our day-to-day work. It wasn't long before we concluded that becoming a Web 2.0 philanthropy was not so much about adopting new social media than it was about embracing the underlying values of Web 2.0 and weaving them into our work. To that end, we homed in on three principal values:

• Openness, at one level, implies transparency -- letting others see into the organization and how it works. But in Web 2.0, openness goes beyond organizational transparency and represents humility and a willingness to learn, to be surprised, and to hear and accept criticism.
• Participation refers to a style of engagement in the professional communities of which we are a part. It requires asking questions, listening, responding, and contributing where we can add value -- whether expertise, research and other materials, or connections.
• Decentralization is a natural consequence of distributed participation and inherently requires a ceding of some control. So much information is now created and shared collaboratively, and the path and shape that such information takes cannot be controlled by any one entity or group. A tremendous upside of the emergence of Web 2.0, however, is the potential for countless unseen contributors to augment and amplify one's own contributions.

Building on these values, the research and our early experiences, we sketched out a vision of how RWJF could embrace Web 2.0. The vision included a number of elements, ranging from using social media to be better informed about our fields and the work of our grantees, to cultivating networks of people and organizations who care about our issues, to crowdsourcing expertise, to seeking feedback and criticism, to using Web 2.0 principles to design programs that work at very large scale. The vision, along with a strategy to evolve toward it, gave the organization a context and a rationale for our embrace of social media.

One might be tempted to think that with all this Web 2.0 strategy development going on, we approached social media with a deliberate, carefully planned strategy, when in fact we took a much more organic approach. Previous to our Web 2.0 work, we had done some blogging and gotten over the usual jitters about all the things that could go wrong. Later, as a few intrepid staff began testing the waters at Twitter and Facebook, we consciously took a supportive stance. We came up with social media guidelines that, while putting up some guardrails to limit the likelihood of an unfortunate event, actually encouraged staff to experiment and to develop their own individual personalities online. We wanted them to explore how they could provide value, and we wanted to learn from their experiences. The context of our overall push to become a Web 2.0 philanthropy informed the development of our social media guidelines, provided a strong incentive for staff to participate, and, by connecting their participation to a set of values, also influenced how they participated.

We're a couple of years into our journey and we reap the benefits of being more open and engaged every day. Many staff feel as if they're better engaged in their fields, learning more, and expanding their networks. At the same time, this being a journey, it hasn't always been easy. Staff wrestle with where to find the time to engage meaningfully in social media, and being open and engaged often means having to expose what you don't know, which can be uncomfortable. We're also finding that there's a long way between having a vision of how to leverage Web 2.0 to change the world and having the world work like a Wikipedia or a craigslist. Just because you ask people's opinions doesn't mean you'll get them -- sometimes the crowd keeps its wisdom to itself. (My colleague Erin Kelly will speak to some of these challenges in a future post on our social media experience.)

As we continue on this journey, we still have lots to learn -- and we'd love to hear how others are finding success or overcoming obstacles to becoming more open, more participatory, and more decentralized. Has your organization ventured down a similar path and/or embraced social media tools to work in a different fashion? Are you using them to listen or become better informed? Build networks? Service a traditional organizational or "consumer" need in a new manner? Use the comments section to share your thoughts....

-- Steve Downs

Five Qs for...Mario Morino, Co-Founder/Chair, Venture Philanthropy Partners

After a successful career as a software entrepreneur and business leader, Northeast Ohio native Mario Morino founded the Morino Institute in 1994 to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, promote a more effective philanthropy, and explore the impact of the Internet on society. Over the next few years, as the dot-com boom morphed into a bubble, Morino emerged as a forceful spokesperson for a more business-centric approach to philanthropy and in 2000 co-founded Venture Philanthropy Partners (VPP) as a vehicle to concentrate investments on improving the lives of children of low-income families in the National Capital Region.

That was also the year the dot-com boom went bust and the venture philanthropy meme lost its hold on the public imagination. Looking back on those years, Morino today says he regrets "the corporate-sounding jargon I bandied about. I spoke often of the value of being 'business-like' and the need for results. People who didn't know me saw me as a brash, arrogant interloper. I offended far too many wonderful nonprofit leaders who had dedicated their lives to making a difference for others."

In the decade that followed, VPP established itself as a leading practitioner of the "high-engagement" model of philanthropy, and Morino became more convinced than ever that nonprofits' ability to collect information about the impact of their work and use that information to drive continuous improvement in their programs and results -- what he calls "managing to outcomes" -- was a critical element in the social change equation. So convinced, in fact, that he wrote and (in 2011) published Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes In an Era of Scarcity, a monograph "intended for leaders...who know in their bones that they want and need better information in order to fulfill the mission that compelled them to dedicate their lives to serving others."

PND chatted with Morino recently about the book, performance measurement (and its costs) in a nonprofit context, and the importance of leadership in shaping a performance culture.

Philanthropy News Digest: The subtitle of your monograph is "Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity." In a world awash in information, data, processing power, and other blessings of the digital economy, what is it we don’t have enough of?

Mario Morino: That's a great question. My view is that even in a world awash in information, nonprofit leaders generally don't have the benefit of the right information. By the same token, most don't have the supporting culture or encouragement to put the right information to good use in managing their mission and operations.

To be sure, more public and private funders are demanding information from nonprofits, and nonprofits are dutifully complying. But in many cases, the data that funders demand are not all that useful to nonprofit executives for managing their performance and charting the strategic direction of their organizations. In fact, when you dig into the details of the information requirements, you see that too often the data are not even that valuable for the funders who request them, except for allowing these funders to check some "accountability" boxes.

As we said in the book, in the name of "accountability," we funders are foisting unfunded, often simplistic, self-serving mandates on our grantees -- rather than helping them define, create, and use the information they need to be disciplined managers. I strongly urge funders not to foist lots of unfunded "compliance" requirements on nonprofits. Instead, we want funders to help their grantees identify and collect the information that's most valuable for nonprofit leaders themselves for determining how well their organizations are doing and how they can keep getting better at meeting the needs of those they serve.

PND: What's driving the increased focus on outcomes measurement in the social sector? And what makes you sure the movement isn't a consultant-driven fad that will fade in popularity as the economy improves?

MM: I believe there are many forces that are distorting and, frankly, dumbing down the dialogue on outcomes. And, fortunately, there are emerging forces driving the dialogue on outcomes in positive directions. On the positive side, we're fortunate that a few foundations like Edna McConnell Clark are demonstrating that a focus on outcomes is key to achieving a real, lasting impact in their chosen issue areas. And there are some very good consultants and thought leaders in the mix, including Bridgespan, McKinsey, Monitor, Public/Private Ventures, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy. I also see some remarkable early-adopter nonprofit executives contributing in important ways to the dialogue by showing what's possible.

The increased focus on data and outcomes is not a fad. Based on my forty-plus years in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, I am absolutely convinced that organizations in any sector need good information to make good decisions. Leaders often have good intuition. But the top leaders in any sector want to augment their intentions and intuition with the best data they can get their hands on. They can't sleep at night when they don't know whether they're on course to achieve the results they seek. They're obsessed with finding ways to do better for those they serve.

Over time, the nonprofit leaders who do manage to get their hands on good data and integrate information-based inquiry into their cultures are going to achieve more for those they serve. We don't yet have data to prove this in the nonprofit sector. But there is a growing body of literature on the link between good information and good results in the for-profit sector. Eventually, I believe we'll have similar evidence for the nonprofit sector.

But there's no guarantee the adoption of outcomes-based management in the social sector will get to where it needs to be unless there is a sea change in the mindset of nonprofit leaders and the funders who support them. The shame is that if that sea change doesn't come to pass, those who will pay the price are those whom nonprofits exist to serve.

PND: You argue in the monograph that all organizations should strive to nurture a performance culture. How do you define that term, and does it mean different things depending on what sector one is talking about?

MM: My definition is really straightforward. I mean simply that the organization should have the mindset to do what it does as well as it possibly can and continually seek to do even better. And that definition is identical across sectors.

In the book, I shared a concrete example from my for-profit days that I hope is not too self-serving. Despite my shortcomings as a manager when I ran a software company, I worked very hard to nurture a performance culture. Factoring in that I might be engaging in slightly revisionist history, I believe that the people in the company really cared about what they did and how they did it. They cared about our customers and each other -- so much so that these relationships often grew into close friendships anchored in mutual respect. People worked hard not because I decreed they should but because they wanted to do their work very well; they wanted to experience the exhilaration of excellence. When we made mistakes, our openness allowed us to quickly admit and rectify them. It was inherent in the culture that we would respond this way.

I see these exact same hallmarks in several great nonprofits I have supported and visited over the past few years. In these organizations, people are highly motivated by their work. They have taken big risks and undertaken hard, painstaking work to build human and technology systems to help them get better at what they do. And they don't see "mission" and "metrics" as mutually exclusive!

PND: How important is individual leadership in the performance culture equation? And what are the most important qualities a nonprofit leader must possess in order to succeed in today's environment?

MM: It's essential! A performance culture never develops without leaders investing themselves deeply and taking big, bold risks.

In all the nonprofits that I regard as the top performers, leaders have taken on the challenge of nurturing a performance culture not because it's "important," not because it's a trend or a good marketing tool, and not because a funder or investor said they had to. They did it because they had an introspective moment when they realized that what they were doing wasn't working well enough and they needed to do more.

For example, in the early 1990s, Youth Villages CEO Pat Lawler kept hearing through the grapevine about young people who seemed to be on a good path after discharge from YV's residential treatment facilities and yet had ended up in prison or in other forms of crisis. This prompted him to start collecting more information to find out what was really happening to those kids. The results were disappointing.

Instead of hiding the bad news from stakeholders, Pat and his team openly acknowledged the shortcomings and then spent several tough years reengineering the entire program model. Today, data collection is part of the DNA of the entire organization. YV tracks its clients' outcomes six, twelve, and twenty-four months after discharge, feeding continual improvements into the program model. When you talk to Pat and his team, you see that they are not fixated on data and measurement per se. To them it's simply a precondition for knowing if their long hours are paying off for the young people they serve -- and for learning how they can keep getting better over time. Pat and his leadership team have built a true performance culture -- one that is the envy of nonprofit and for-profits alike!

As for the most important qualities leaders must possess in this environment, I would submit the following five: a passionate, unyielding desire to do the most you can for those you serve; the confidence to ask hard, even painful, questions about how your organization can do more and at a lower cost; the commitment, staying power, and talent to lead difficult change processes; the clarity and courage to get the "right people on the bus, in the right seats" -- even if that means making difficult personnel decisions; and a willingness to model -- that is, live -- the behavior you want others to practice.

PND: Who should bear the costs of an increased focus on outcomes measurement?

MM: Managing to outcomes should be a essential part of how nonprofits function and thus covered by their revenue sources, akin to how nonprofits fund their development functions or their budgetary/cost accounting.

But for this to happen, funders have to accept the necessity of providing resources to cover operational, not just project, expenses. Instead of just pushing nonprofits for "more information on results," funders should be willing to support what it takes for nonprofit leaders actually to produce those results. And that includes investing in outcomes management, a term I prefer over "outcomes measurement."

If funders really want their grantees to produce results, they must provide much more than project support and more than $5,000 or $10,000 "capacity-building" grants. Serious, results-oriented funders make multiyear investments so that nonprofit leaders can develop the talent, cultivate a performance culture, and build the human processes and technology systems for managing to outcomes. At a minimum, funders should support efforts to help nonprofits build the capacity and culture for tracking the outcomes of those served, undertake at least basic analysis of this information, and identify how they can use the information to improve their programs over time. For my money, these investments have a tremendous return on investment.

But let me also say that every nonprofit organization that has successfully made the "leap of reason" has put a lot of skin in the game. Nonprofit executives who have made the leap have invested a lot of human, relationship, and sometimes financial capital in the process. They often dip into reserves, raise special "innovation funds," and/or re-purpose existing dollars. They always invest a lot of their own time and effort. Organizational transformation like this cannot simply be outsourced or done on the cheap.

PND: What advice would you give executive directors and nonprofit board members who may have thought about adopting more of an outcome-focused mindset but just don't know how to get the ball rolling?

MM: I'm happy to answer the question, but I don't want anyone to think that managing to outcomes can be accomplished quickly with a simple, ten-step process. Managing to outcomes is a quantum leap for most organizations and involves significant culture change. It's not about implementing a cookie-cutter set of best practices.

That said, I would encourage people to look at the "Ideas Into Action" section of the book, which begins on page sixty-three and can be downloaded with the rest of the book at LeapofReason.org. That section provides a set of questions that boards and leadership teams should ask themselves to gauge their readiness and capacity for doing the hard work of making significant culture change.

In closing let me make an emphatic plea: You're not going to "get it" just by reading the book. We hope the book will give you some ideas. But, ultimately, you have to make the highly personal decision -- in some cases akin to a conversion -- that you want and need to do this. You have want to serve better, be better, and function better yourself and as an organization. Like the great leaders I've met who have done this, you have to want -- in a compelling way -- to make a more material, lasting difference for those you serve. It's a choice!

-- Mitch Nauffts

'Greed is Good' and Other Canards

Op-ed columnist Charles Blow has a piece in today's New York Times about the "politics of envy," an already tired trope that likely Republican presidential nominee and leveraged-buyout specialist Mitt Romney has been trying out this primary season.

In the piece, Blow quotes Elizabeth Warren, who chaired the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the Troubled Assets Relief Program and who is running for the Senate seat in Massachusetts that Romney unsuccessfully ran for in 1994, on the obligation we all have to "pay forward" our financial good fortune:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along....”

"Greed is good" is a great logline for a movie, but it's a terrible way to organize society. Gordon Gekko didn't "liberate" Teldar Paper, and the United States is not (as Paul Krugman reminds us) a "malfunctioning corporation"; it is, rather, an ongoing political and social experiment in which the interests of 300 million people sometimes compete but more often overlap; in which "equality of opportunity" is an ideal and not yet a reality; and in which the concept of "the public good" was, for much of the twentieth century, bound up with the equally important concept of social mobility.

Unfortunately, as new survey data from the Pew Research Center makes clear, more and more Americans believe the post-WW II social contract in the U.S. has been shredded and that tensions and conflicts between the haves and have-nots are growing.

That sense is one of the key drivers behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, it will be an important point of debate in this year's presidential contest, and it's something all of us who work in or cover philanthropy need to recognize and address.

-- Mitch Nauffts

Weekend Link Roundup (January 14-15, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Disaster Relief

On the two-year anniversary of the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left over a million Haitians homeless, the Chronicle of Philanthropy has an updated look at how sixty aid groups spent the money they raised for relief and recovery efforts. (Requires subscription.)

And Sandra Miniutti advises those who donated to relief and recovery efforts to "check back" with the organization(s) to which they gave. "Find out what the charity been able to accomplish. If you like what you hear and the charity says it has ongoing needs, then consider making a follow-up donation to support those ongoing efforts."

Education

A recent post on the Give2Asia blog profiles the Afghan Institute of Learning, a Give2Asia grantee, and its founding executive director, Dr. Sakena Yacoobi. Established surreptitiously during the early days of Taliban rule, AIL organized and operated a network of eighty underground schools that educated three thousand girls across the country. Today, Yacoobi's organization operates in the open and has touched more than 8 million Afghans through its network of schools, teacher and nurse training programs, and healthcare services.

Impact/Effectiveness

Using findings from the Ford Foundation-sponsored report Transactions, Transformations, Translations: Metrics That Matter for Building, Scaling and Funding Social Movements, Beth Kanter considers the opportunities and challenges involved in measuring the impact of social change movements and networks.

Philanthropy

The Bridgespan Group's Alison Powell reviews a recent Foundation Center report that examined the center's own grantseeking processes as a way to highlight some of the costs of capital that donors impose on all grantseekers.

On the Philanthropy Potluck blog, Naomi Pesky, director of marketing and communications at Minnesota Philanthropy Partners, shares a recent video created by the organization as part of its ongoing efforts to make its grantmaking processes more transparent.

In a post on her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz looks at at a handful of recent reports on giving, including one from the Pew Center for the Internet & American Life and Harvard's Berkman Center that looks at mobile giving in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. According to the report, the majority of people who used their cell phones to give to relief and recovery efforts made a spur-of-the-moment decision to do so and then told their family and friends to donate via text message as well. In her post, Bernholz wonders how this type of "tech-enabled" giving might change how and why philanthropic research is conducted.

About.com's Joanne Fritz shares a new infographic from Frugal Dad that highlights the impact of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates's philanthropic work.

Center for Effective Philanthropy president Phil Buchanan takes a close look at Oliver Zunz's new book Philanthropy in America and uncovers "seven examples of things [in philanthropy] that are often portrayed as new -- or not done -- despite the fact that this is not, historically, the case."

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Kevin Laskowski shares his new year’s resolution for philanthropy: increase funding for community organizing among lower-income communities and "Emerging Majority" communities. Writes Laskowski:

I’m sure you're shocked to hear this from someone here at NCRP. However, one thing we saw in 2011 and we will likely continue to see in 2012 is the robust participation of some philanthropists in important public policy debates. Bill Gates, Eli Broad and others have played a large role in shaping the discussions about education reform efforts. A number of conservative philanthropies, such as the Koch brothers and the Bradley Foundation, have had an outsized influence on national debates for some time. Some see this involvement as a pernicious force in our democracy, but my concern is not that the wealthy participate in politics. My concern is that they're increasingly the only ones who do or can....

Scince/Technology

And on the Credit Writedowns site, Rick Bookstaber looks at the role computers and technology are playing in the destruction of the middle class.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

This Week in PubHub: Funding for Social Justice

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she looked at four reports that examined specific grantmaking strategies and practices designed to maximize fundamental long-term social impact.)

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on Monday, this week in PubHub we're featuring four reports that examine trends in funding for social justice and advocacy efforts in support of the rights of marginalized populations.

Foundation support is essential if advocacy and community organizing efforts to improve the lives of marginalized populations are to succeed, a report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy argues. Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing, and Civic Engagement in the Gulf/Midsouth Region (88 pages, PDF) found that between 2005 and 2009 twenty organizations in the Gulf/Midsouth region secured more than $4.7 billion -- $114 for every dollar invested -- in benefits for marginalized communities, trained more than 31,000 local residents in civic engagement techniques, and achieved significant policy changes in the areas of environmental justice and LGBTQ and immigrant rights, with foundations providing 78 percent of the funding for said activities. Funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the report urges grantmakers to invest more in building the region's advocacy and community organizing infrastructure, make flexible investments in groups working in rural areas, and support organizations with people of color in leadership positions.

Of course, foundations that fund social justice activities saw their endowments take a hit during the post-Lehman financial crisis, as described in the Foundation Center report Diminishing Dollars: The Impact of the 2008 Financial Crisis on the Field of Social Justice Philanthropy (35 pages, PDF). While the report found that giving for social justice as a percentage of total giving by foundations in the sample varied only slightly between 2005 and 2009, in 2009 it fell below 2007 levels, with small foundations experiencing the sharpest declines in the value of their assets. Funded by the Cricket Island, Edward W. Hazen, and Ford foundations in partnership with NCRP, the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, and the Social Justice Philanthropy Collaborative, the report projects that unless the field sees five years of above-average investment returns, social justice grantmaking in 2015 will remain below 2008 levels.

The good news, according to Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy by and for Communities of Color (112 pages, PDF), is that giving within and on behalf of communities of color is increasing. Commissioned by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, with support from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the report found that, given the disproportionate need in communities of color, those communities typically have received a too-small percentage of mainstream philanthropic dollars -- a gap that was exacerbated by the Great Recession and cuts in public-sector funding. In response, the report argues, donors of color and others have begun to direct more resources to communities of color, with an eye to building advocacy skills in those communities and empowering local leaders and residents to lead short- and long-term change efforts. The report calls on mainstream funders to advance this kind of identity-based philanthropy by providing seed funding for grassroots efforts and forging stronger connections with local philanthropic leaders and other change agents.

What about trends in social justice work abroad? Mobilising for Social Justice: Migrant Rights Centre Ireland's Community Work Model (50 pages, PDF), a report from the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland that was funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies, offers case studies of MRCI's "community work practice" model on behalf of migrant workers' rights -- work that, among other things, encourages marginalized migrant groups to take part in decision-making structures through participation in discussion/action groups, empowers them through consciousness-raising and skills-building activities, and promotes advocacy and collective action.

What are your thoughts about the future of funding for social justice philanthropy? Are you aware of any new trends or developments that could energize the field or take it to the next level? Feel free to share your ideas in the comments section below.

And don't forget to check out PubHub, where you can browse more than a hundred and fifty reports on the topic of civil and human rights.

-- Kyoko Uchida