PhilanTopic

The L.A. Riots, Twenty Years Later: A PubHub Reading List

Last Sunday, April 29, was the twentieth anniversary of the start of what became known as the Los Angeles Riots -- four days of civil unrest and violence sparked by the acquittal of white LAPD officers who had been captured on video in March 1991 brutally beating Rodney King after a high-speed car chase through the San Fernando Valley. In the days that followed the verdict, Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, and a Guatemalan immigrant were brutally beaten by a mob in the South Central neighborhood, home to many of the city's low-income African Americans; buildings were torched; stores were looted; and more than fifty people lost their lives. The prevailing view at the time, as captured by New York Times reporter Don Terry, was that "the acquittal...was only a spark put to a tinderbox of anger constructed from years of deep poverty, governmental neglect, racism, charges of police abuse and high unemployment."

Twenty years later, how much has -- and has not -- changed?

According to Reparable Harm: Assessing and Addressing Disparities Faced by Boys and Men of Color in California (126 pages, PDF), a report from the RAND Corporation, African-American and Latino men and boys continue to be negatively affected by structural racism and a variety of socioeconomic, health, and education disparities. Young African-American and Latino boys are more than three times as likely, for example, to live in poverty as their white counterparts; almost seven and more than three times as likely to have HIV/AIDS; more than five and almost three times as likely to end up in prison; more than sixteen and five times as likely to be a victim of homicide; and nearly twice and almost seven times as likely to drop out of high school. Funded by the California Endowment, the report calls for a range of targeted interventions, including more effective foster care and prisoner-reentry policies; community-based zoning laws that address the social determinants of health; and mentoring and school-based programs for children traumatized by violence. The California Endowment itself has funded the National League of Cities Institute's Gang Prevention Network and the Healthy Returns Initiative.

One nonprofit that has worked with disadvantaged and at-risk youth in Los Angeles since before the riots is the PUENTE (People United to Enrich the Neighborhood Through Education) Learning Center, which offers preschool, kindergarten, tutorial, and college preparation programs as well as job and computer skills training, English as a second language, and literacy programs for adults. Of, By, and For the Community: The Story of PUENTE Learning Center (21 pages, PDF), a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, describes how the family-focused organization -- which had a thriving center in the Boyle Heights neighborhood -- was offered the site of a burned-out ARCO station by the ARCO Foundation in the wake of the riots. "The embers were still warm, and the total damage had not been tallied," recalled former ARCO Foundation president Russell Sakaguchi. "We wanted somebody to provide hope and relief to that very visible corner. We wanted an organization that wasn't going to flounder, that was sensitive to the shock in that community [and] had faith in its ability to deliver."

Starting with two trailers, PUENTE eventually built a state-of-the-art facility with ten classrooms serving a thousand students of all ages, one-third of whom are African-American and two-thirds Latino. (As of 2005, the population of South Central was 45 percent African-American, 47 percent Latino.) One of the organization's keys to success, the report notes, is its sharp focus on its educational mission, which enables it to address issues even more fundamental than racial disparities or cultural differences. "Our mission," says PUENTE vice president Luis Marquez, "is not about any particular ethnic group; it's about people. It goes way beyond ethnicity and race. It's about humanity."

Among other things, the riots highlighted the serious racial/ethnic tensions that existed between long-established African-American communities in Los Angeles and the more recently arrived Korean and Latino communities. The influx of immigrants into historically African-American neighborhoods has continued in the two decades since, and racial/ethnic tensions have become more pronounced as unemployment rates have climbed. All Together Now? African Americans, Immigrants, and California's Future (66 pages; 7.15MB; PDF), a report from the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California, examines the potential of inter-ethnic alliances to address tensions created by demographic and economic changes. But bringing the various communities together first requires a forward-looking agenda. To that end, the report notes,

• A number of community-based organizations have developed new mechanisms to both manage tensions and build toward a common ground. Leadership development is key, but the first step is creating the space for new and honest dialogue about what is shared and what is different.
• Seemingly specific issues can be effectively connected to both populations. The criminalization of black (and Latino) youth has its parallel in the excessive enforcement of a broken immigration system; the racial profiling embodied in Arizona's 2010 immigration law echoes an experience all too familiar to African Americans. If [minority groups] pursue economic opportunity and fair treatment for all residents, the [focus on] difference[s] can give way to a concert of common interest.
• A common and unifying agenda should be based on a vision of everyday social justice. "Everyday" means three things: address[ing] daily needs around education, the economy, and the social and physical environment; ensur[ing] that dialogues go beyond a more comfortable middle-class and multi-ethnic elite and reach grassroots participants; and realiz[ing] that this will require effort every day and over the long haul.

Funded by the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, James Irvine Foundation, and John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the report calls for an approach which recognizes that "African Americans have laid the groundwork for America's commitment to equality and fairness" and "that immigrant rights will be insecure as long as African Americans remain vulnerable to racial profiling and economic despair."

All three reports suggest that twenty years after the L.A. riots and almost fifty years after the Watts riots, the City of Los Angeles, the state of California, and the nation still have a long way to go in addressing the racial and socioeconomic disparities that made South Central such a tinderbox on the eve of the Rodney King verdict. At the same time, all three reports suggest that we have only begun to tap the potential of civic engagement, advocacy, and community organizing efforts to bring communities together and advance the cause of social justice. And, of course, funders have a role to play here. Funded by the California Endowment and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the NCRP report Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing, and Civic Engagement in Los Angeles notes that for every dollar invested in the advocacy, organizing, and civic engagement efforts of fifteen Los Angeles County nonprofits between 2004 and 2008, $91 in benefits were generated for marginalized communities.

To learn more about the factors contributing to enduring socioeconomic, health, and education disparities in Los Angeles (and across the country), the demographic shifts that sometimes exacerbate racial/ethnic tensions, and efforts to address these and other problems, see also:

Why Place & Race Matter
PolicyLink; California Endowment

State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation Brookings Institution

Critical Condition: Examining the Scope of Medical Services in South Los Angeles
California Endowment

Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America's Older Industrial Cities
Brookings Institution

Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions: An Agenda for Rebuilding America's Older Core Cities
PolicyLink

What do you think? Have we made as much progress, as a country, as we should have in the twenty years since the L.A. riots? And if not, what is holding us back? Use the comments section to share your thoughts....

-- Kyoko Uchida

2012 State of the Sector Survey

The U.S. economy seems to be on the mend, the stock market is on a tear, and the 2012 presidential election looks as if it'll be contested by two relatively pragmatic moderates.

Business as usual, right?

Not according to the Nonprofit Finance Fund's 2012 State of the Nonprofit Sector survey.

The survey reveals that nonprofits, especially frontline service providers, continue to face significant challenges two years into what is supposed to be an economic recovery but for millions of Americans feels like something altogether different.

Among the survey's findings:

• 85 percent of nonprofits experienced an increase in demand for services in 2011; (compared to 77 percent in 2010, 71 percent in 2009, and 73 percent in 2008);
• 88 percent expect to see an increase in demand for services in 2012;
• 87 percent don't expect their financial outlook to improve in 2012;
• 58 percent of human service organizations were unable to meet demand in 2011; 60 percent say they won’t be able to meet demand in 2012;
• 56 percent of human service providers received federal government funding or contracts in 2011; 69 percent received state or local funding;
• 52 percent reported late payments from the federal government; 62 percent said state or local government payments were late.

Of course, if House Republicans have their way, the situation almost certainly will get worse before it gets better. As reported today by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 62 percent of the cuts in the so-called Ryan budget passed by the House last week will involve programs for low-income Americans, while 37 percent of the proposed tax cuts in the plan will benefit Americans earning more than $1 million. Translation: Less money for social programs, more Americans falling into poverty, greater demand for frontline nonprofit services.

"Nonprofits are adapting to continued economic pressure in all sorts of creative and substantive ways, but for many these are stopgap measures that won't make up for the bigger forces at play: decreasing government support, the unwillingness of some private foundations to evolve funding practices, and a lack of necessary support from some boards," said Nonprofit Finance Fund CEO Antony Bugg-Levine. "We must rethink the way we fund solutions to our most pressing problems."

How we might do that is the subject of a post I hope to have up later in the week.

In the meantime, you can do a deeper dive on the survey data with the NFF Survey Analyzer, download a summary of the results in brochure or PowerPoint form, or download the full results in an Excel spreadsheet.

-- Mitch Nauffts

Weekend Link Roundup (March 10-11, 2012)

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

Education

Social media guru Seth Godin has released "Stop Stealing Dreams: What Is School For?", a free 30,000-word manifesto and experiment in what Godin calls "firestarting." As he writes on his blog,

I'm hoping that removing friction from the sharing of this idea will help it spread. If you're interested in the topic (and I hope you are), please tweet or like the project page, download the files, post mirror copies on your own blog and if you can, email them to every teacher, parent and citizen who should be part of the discussion about what we do with our kids all day (and why). If just a fraction of this blog's readers shared it with their address book, we'd reach a lot of people....

Governance

Based on his organization's research and his own observations, Center for Effective Philanthropy president Phil Buchanan offers a sharp take on the 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Foundation Boards.

Human/Civil Rights

In a guest post on the Open Society Foundations blog, filmmaker Doug Liman calls on ordinary Americans to fight torture by participating in his current project, Reckoning With Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror". "What I'm asking people to do is both simple and profound," writes Liman. "[T]o film themselves reading one of the eleven documents that make up the script of the movie and send me the footage." The documents in question were among the 140,000 the ACLU uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act request, and to date actors, writers, a former CIA officer, a former interrogator, and the chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantanamo have been among those who participated in the project.

Impact/Effectiveness

In a new post on the GiveWell blog, Holden Karnofsky considers the case of mothers2mothers, a nongovernmental organization based in South Africa that has been criticized for publishing what Karnofsky calls erroneous figures about the number of women it serves. Writes Karnofsky:

We certainly don't think the anomalies we've found show that m2m isn't doing great work, or that its support and awards are undeserved (and we are still considering the possibility of further investigating m2m as a potential GiveWell-recommended group). Still, seeing this sort of problem from an organization that gets as much attention as m2m seems significant. It's another piece of evidence that the philanthropic world -- including many of the largest and best-resourced funders -- is not asking all of the critical questions that it could be asking....

On his Harvard Business Review blog, Uncharitable author Dan Pallotta offers a "unified theory of social change" for nonprofits and institutions seeking to "change the world." The plan, in three parts, looks like this: 1) set big, hairy, audacious goals and deadlines for each problem you want to tackle; 2) collaborate and communicate like there's no tomorrow; and 3) invest in fundraising to dramatically increase the capital available to solve those problems. "It's not rocket science," adds Pallotta. "So let's get on with it."

Philanthropy

Philanthropy 2173 blogger Lucy Bernholz has released a new toolkit for foundations and nonprofit organizations based on Philanthropy and Social Investing Blueprint 2012, her annual look at the trends shaping the philanthropic and social change landscape.

Social Media

Beth Kanter looks at the role of transparency in the incredibly viral response to -- and debate over -- the KONY 2012 video, which was posted to YouTube on Monday and quickly racked up fifty million views. Although the video quickly galvanized tens of thousands of young people to pledge to "stop" Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, whose guerrilla army filled with child soldiers terrorized Ugandan villagers for the better part of two decades, the video also generated a backlash among African journalists and others who question its accuracy and the intentions of Invisible Children, the U.S.-based NGO that produced and released it.

Women

Allison Fine celebrated International Women's Day on Thursday by reflecting on a recent development in the human rights arena: the fact that in most cases "protests were started by individuals [on social media channels], not organizations." And while there may be no "Nelson Mandalas or Lech Walesas speaking on behalf of protestors," writes Fine, "social networks aren't leaderless, as critics say, but leaderfull with individuals defining their own roles, uploading videos, [and] posting news without being asked or tasked or targeted...."

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (March 3-4, 2012)

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

African Americans

In a followup to her post last week on NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Niki Jagpal reminds of us how Black History Month came to be and, with an eye to this year's theme, asks others to share their stories "about the innumerable contributions that our African American sisters have made to our culture and society and the role that they play today in philanthropy in the continuing struggle for equity and justice."

Communications/Marketing

On her Getting Attention blog, Nancy Schwartz makes the case for marketing as the key driver of "how your organization builds and strengthens [its] relationships with the people whose help you need to move your mission forward." If your organization isn't paying attention to how it markets itself, adds Schwartz, it's "losing out on the potential to develop more and stronger relationships."

Microfinance

On his Open Book blog, David Roodman shares a couple of charts illustrating the rise and decline of Indian microfinance.

Nonprofit Management

Over at the Nonprofit Quarterly, Kate Barr and Ruth McCambridge take issue with the findings of a recent report from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University which surveyed 526 nonprofit financial managers at midsize charities -- those with revenues between $1 million and $5 million -- and concluded that many of those professionals have gaps in their financial knowledge. Write Barr and McCambridge:

The report is heralded by a press release entitled "Gaps in Financial Knowledge Challenge Mid-Size Nonprofits" but there is no information in the survey results or even in the report that supports the claim that the nonprofits represented have any particular or acute challenges that could not be explained by a bad economy. In fact, about half have more than four months of operating funds in the bank and about a quarter have more than seven months' worth....

In the Spring issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Peter Kim and Jeffrey Bradach look at a few themes that provide insight into what has shaped, and will continue to shape, the growth of a new class of super-sized, $50 million-plus nonprofits.

Social Good

Using examples from the recent Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington, Geoff Livingston, vice president of strategic partnerships at Razoo, offers sixteen tips on the Case Foundation blog for nonprofit organizations and funders looking to participate in a giving day or other online social good contest.

Elsewhere, the Acumen Fund's Sasha Dichter shares an interview at Say100 Media in which he explains why Generosity Day, a day-long event in February that sought to inspire generous acts nationwide, was a success.

Social Media

Facebook is now making its Timeline format available to organizations with a brand page. To help nonprofits get started, social media guru Beth Kanter offers a list of tips in a post on her blog.

Transparency

In a guest post on the Communications Network blog, Philanthomedia's Susan Herr shares a video in which Foundation Center president Brad Smith explains why foundations have a responsibility to communicate their role in driving social change.

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: 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 school, and that student-faculty interaction is a key factor in raising retention and graduation 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

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

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

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

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

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

'Freedom Riders': Lessons for a New Generation

(Kathryn Pyle is a frequent contributor to PhilanTopic. In October, she spoke with Orlando Bagwell, director of the Ford Foundation's recently launched JustFilms initiative. She first blogged about Freedom Riders in February of 2010.)

Writing from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival about the civil rights movement as captured in documentary films, I highlighted Freedom Riders, a documentary directed by Stanley Nelson that premiered at the festival. The film tells the story of the hundreds of courageous people, most of them young, who participated in the 1961 "freedom rides" that helped end segregation in the South.

Freedom Riders aired on PBS this past May; the film went on to earn three Emmy Awards and the New York Times, calling it "beautifully constructed," selected it as one of the ten best programs of the year. The broadcast was preceded by a ten-day reenactment of the original 1961 campaign that was organized by American Experience, the PBS program which had commissioned and broadcast the film. "Get on the Bus" brought together forty college students from around the country to reenact the rides -- from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans -- and interact along the way with some of the original freedom riders, various historians of the period, and community activists. As they made their way south, the kids shared their experience via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools.

"The re-creation campaign had high visibility and great partnerships with state humanities councils, colleges and universities, and museums around the country," says Sonya Childress, community engagement specialist at Firelight Media, the nonprofit partner of Firelight Films, Nelson's for-profit production company. The former organizes audience outreach programs -- a letter-writing campaign for Nelson's film The Murder of Emmett Till helped reopen a criminal investigation into that 1955 case -- and supports emerging documentarians through a producers' lab.

" 'Get on the Bus' was very successful," Childress adds, "but we at Firelight wanted to do something different. We saw our job as bringing the film to a different audience -- particularly youth, and including African-Americans, but people who weren't necessarily connected to the civil rights movement. In targeting youth groups, we immediately thought of the Dream Act, because the story of Freedom Riders is a story about multi-ethnic organizing. We wanted to reach people working on immigration reform who do not see the civil rights movement as part of their history or as relevant to their activism. And we wanted to help them use the film in their own campaigns."

Atlantic Philanthropies, the Open Society Foundations (through its Campaign for Black Male Achievement), and the National Black Programming Consortium were approached and ultimately funded the Firelight Media project.

"Many funders could have said the freedom ride reenactment was sufficient as an audience engagement component," notes Childress. "But these three organizations saw value in bringing the history to a new community. They understood that Firelight Films makes historical documentaries, but that we want to show that the lessons of the past can be dissected and discussed and applied to today. Also, the funders recognized that, being an independent entity, Firelight Media had the latitude to work with a wider variety of community groups than had been involved in 'Get on the Bus', and that was seen as a complement to the American Experience project."

Engaging foundations that are not "media" funders is a new strategy for many documentary filmmakers; the challenge is in helping private and corporate foundations see that film can further their grantmaking priorities, and that there are many points of entry for support beyond a film's production phase.

At the same time, as foundations become more engaged in distribution there is more concern around evaluation of the project's goals. In Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact, a new Ford Foundation-supported publication from the Center for Social Media, Jessica Clark and Barbara Abrash put it this way:

In an environment of information overload and polarized sparring, social issue documentaries provide quality content that can be used to engage members of the public as citizens rather than merely media consumers. As a result, they have gained in visibility, influence and number over the past decade.

But despite the box-office and critical success of high-profile examples such as An Inconvenient Truth or Supersize Me, the social impacts of such expensive, long- range projects have been hit-or-miss. As a result, investors and filmmakers are asking tough questions about how best to plan for and assess the impact of such films and related engagement strategies, and to create models and standards for a dynamic field....

The report proposes a systemic approach based on early and continuous community participation that combines quantitative and qualitative indicators and continuous feedback into the evaluation design. The best indicators measure "evidence of [the film's] quality, increased public awareness, meaningful partnerships, increased public engagement, and collective action."

Firelight Media's plan for Freedom Riders incorporated many of those elements, though as noted by the Center for Social Media report, each documentary project is distinct.

Firelight began by convening a small group of civic organizations to help develop ideas for a year-long project; by the time Freedom Riders was broadcast, the project was ready to go. (An agreement with American Experience required that the Firelight project not overlap with "Get on the Bus," which took place immediately before the film aired.)

Sixteen community-based organizations and student groups -- some national and some local -- were selected as formal partners. Seven of the smallest groups received stipends to carry out their activities. All agreed to screen the film and use an online guide, United in Courage (available on the Firelight Media site), to help plan events and facilitate discussions. Their experiences are being disseminated via an e-news broadcast to other partners, funders and filmmakers, and through Firelight Media’s newsletter; in effect, the partners provide ongoing feedback as a way to strengthen the project.

The groups include established organizations like the NAACP, which is bringing some of the original freedom riders to college campuses in the South for screenings and conversations. Puente Arizona has invited some of the freedom riders to discuss immigration reform strategies with members of the migrant communities with which it works. At a workshop on audience engagement earlier this fall in San Francisco, another partner, Bay Area-based Youth Speaks, described using the film at its annual Brave New Voices event, which brings young poets and youth development organizations together: five hundred spoken-word artists attended the screening and a subsequent conversation, later broadcast on Pacifica Radio, with two freedom riders. And New York City-based Brotherhood/Sister Sol showed the film in New York and Ghana and trained youth facilitators to lead post-screening talks. (A complete list of partners and their plans can be found on the "United in Courage" site.)

Recognizing that short films can be useful for community organizing and in educational settings, especially those involving children, Firelight Media produced a twenty-minute version of the film (available only to project partners) and also commissioned three ten-minute films on key issues in the current immigration policy debate. Immigration: Beyond the Headlines was supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and can be viewed on the Firelight Media site. Though apprehensive at first that the films would be seen as standalone media, Firelight staff now consider them to be useful vehicles for driving interested viewers to the longer and more comprehensive film.

Today, halfway through the year-long audience engagement effort, Firelight's independent evaluator is tracking how the full-length documentary is being used and the kind of impact it is having through pre- and post-screening interviews with various partners. The partners also submit formal reports on how they are using the film to enhance their work, in the process creating a repository of "best practices."

"Community organizations have varying levels of comfort with documentary films that are not 'advocacy' films, that are not prescriptive in terms of what to do about a particular issue," says Childress. "Freedom Riders is not a 'call to action'; it's an occasion for reflection. We're interested in knowing how community groups navigate that, how they challenge themselves and how they incorporate films into their programs. We want to know how this particular story resonates, especially within the immigrant rights movement that's looking for stories and trying to build relationships with other movements. The big question for us is: Can historical documentaries move the meter; can this content help people understand the current world?"

The anecdotal evidence is encouraging. Last month, as reported by the Montgomery Advertiser, "Two Freedom Riders who risked their lives to integrate Montgomery's bus station 50 years ago are back in the Capital City with a new cause: repealing Alabama's immigration law. The Rev. C.T. Vivian and Catherine Burks-Brooks joined a rally on the Capitol steps and a children’s march to the governor's mansion."

Some of the Firelight project's results to date are posted on its Web site in the form of testimony from the partners. We'll check back at the end of the year to see what lessons were learned and how they can inform the marriage between documentary film and community activism.

-- Kathryn Pyle

Poverty in America: A Conversation With David R. Jones, President, Community Service Society of New York

(On Thanksgiving Day, the New York Times noted in a lead editorial that "one in three Americans -- 100 million -- is either poor or perilously close to it." The editors at the Times based that assertion on an analysis of recent U.S. Census Bureau data. Two days earlier, D.C.-based Wider Opportunities for Women published an even higher figure -- 45 percent -- as the percentage of the nation's residents lacking economic security. Whatever the exact number, it's clear that millions of Americans are stranded on islands of economic desolation marked by failing schools, sub-standard housing, inadequate healthcare services, and rampant crime.)

Struggling to make ends meet has been a characteristic of life in the United States since its founding. Recent Census figures suggest, however, that the number of Americans living in poverty has reached "an historic high of 46.2 million." According to another study from the Brookings Institution, the number of Americans living in communities where poverty is "extreme" -- neighborhoods in which at least 40 percent of the population is poor -- soared by one-third between 2000 to 2009. Brookings, which based its study on 2000-2009 income data from the census, notes that the increase over the last decade erases all the economic gains of the 1990s.

Regular contributor Michael Seltzer recently spoke with David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York and one of the nation's leading advocates on behalf of the poor, about his thoughts on poverty in America and what the growing ranks of low-income New Yorkers can do to escape their predicament.

Michael Seltzer: According to a Brookings Institution study released on November 3, the number of Americans living in poverty has grown by more than a third over the past decade. In New York City alone, 1.6 million people -- approximately one in five New Yorkers -- are living below the poverty line. What are the consequences of that for New York?

David Jones: Those statistics are terrifying on a number of levels. The poverty level is the same in Manhattan as in rural Mississippi. However, the housing costs in rural Mississippi, obviously, are dramatically lower than in New York. A family of three can buy a lot more goods and services in Mississippi on $17,500 dollars a year than can a family living in Manhattan.

MS: What is the role of the Community Service Society in addressing the economic problems faced by low-income New Yorkers?

DJ: Throughout our hundred-and-seventy-year history, poverty has been our exclusive focus. Our founders perceived poverty in urban areas as a potential danger to civic order. They understood that as more and more people drift into poverty, key elements of the economy and our democracy are undermined. They believed strongly that if you didn't provide low-income people with economic opportunity, you were endangering the civic fabric. And in a multi-ethnic city like New York, keeping the civic fabric in good repair is vital. For those reasons and others, we have always taken a three-pronged approach to our work: research, service, and public education.

MS: What accomplishments can you point to to illustrate the importance of that work?

DJ: Our approach is to put forward unassailable arguments based on serious research, statistical evidence, and cost effectiveness. Through our research, we give ammunition to policy makers and elected officials who are confronted with what would otherwise be an avalanche of anecdotal information. At other times, our moral voice is a much-needed contribution to the conversation. Our intent is to shape public policies and encourage affordable interventions that promote better lives for all New Yorkers.

MS: Do we have the necessary knowledge to effectively address the problems of people living in poverty today?

DJ: Absolutely. For example, CSS focuses on employment strategies that are grounded in today's fiscal realities. Beginning in 2004, we issued a groundbreaking series of reports on black male unemployment and disconnected youth. Seven years later, we find that the problems facing both poor and working people in America are universal and affect people of all colors.

For many people, making the transition into the world of work is neither simple nor easy. This is especially true for young people or people who have been incarcerated. Many need a GED and job-preparedness training. They need help in securing an actual job that pays a living wage. Once they are working, they typically require additional support such as day care and benefits like paid sick leave. And as they establish themselves in the workforce, they need opportunities to climb a career ladder within a trade. We also believe that low-wage workers need the collective bargaining power of a union to ensure that they receive adequate health care, access to reliable credit, and other benefits that the rest of us take for granted.

MS: How important is a solid education?

DJ: It's vital. Each year, after having failed them in elementary and junior high school, we fail to graduate hundreds of thousands of young people from high school. As a result, there's an enormous cohort of young people who lack a high school credential. In New York City alone, over eight hundred thousand working-age adults lack a high school diploma. That's why we are now focusing on helping young people secure their GED.

MS: What argument do you think is most effective in galvanizing public support for pro-poor policies?

DJ: Simply this: In New York, and across the country, we are falling way behind in terms of our economic competitiveness. We are at risk of turning into a second-rate power within a generation. It is a huge cost to our economy when we fail to provide a top-notch education to all Americans. That's the case that advocates for the poor across the country should be making to their elected officials.

MS: What is your greatest hope at the moment?

DJ: My greatest hope is that our business and political leaders recognize that we cannot afford to fall any further behind other global economic powers. We need to put America back on track. Things that might provide a path out of poverty for the working poor and their children are not being addressed with the intensity that is needed to really have a measurable impact on the problem. We need to work together to create a groundswell in support of lifting the most disadvantaged among us out of poverty.

MS: Many nonprofits are fighting the good fight on behalf of the nation's poor. What message can you share with those organizations?

DJ: It's not enough anymore for human service agencies to simply provide services. They must educate the public and advocate for better policies for their constituents. Providing services alone cannot and will not make a lasting impact on the problem. We all need to draw on our own firsthand experiences to advocate forcefully for the critical interventions that we know work.

MS: Where is the funding for this kind of advocacy work going to come from when organizations already are suffering the loss of state and city contracts? One organization I visited a few weeks ago said it had to disband its advocacy efforts due to funding cutbacks. Can foundations play a role here?

DJ: Absolutely. We must make a stronger case to foundation officers that their grant dollars can drive change, real change, when earmarked for advocacy efforts.

MS: Do you see this moment as ripe for a new social movement that puts the concerns of the poor front and center in the public discourse?

DJ: Yes, I do. Its outlines aren't yet clear, but I believe it will emerge sooner rather than later. But to be successful, it will have to provide a meeting ground for people with diverse life experiences.

MS: I hear a sense of hope in your voice.

DJ: America's youth inspire in me a sense of confidence in the future of our country. When I talk to them, certainly in urban areas like New York City, I hear a yearning. They're excited by new ideas, new investments, new technology, and they want everyone to share in the bounty of this great country.

-- Michael Seltzer

Ten Years Later: A Q&A With David R. Jones, President and CEO, Community Service Society of New York

When we last spoke with David Jones, president and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York, in December 2002, the New York City economy had, in his words, come "unglued." As we noted then, the city lost 83,000 actual jobs and more than 60,000 that would have been created had the attacks not occurred, with job losses spread evenly over a range of industries, including financial services, aviation, apparel manufacturing, retailing, and tourism. Estimates of the negative impact on the city's economic output ranged from $20 billion to $39 billion. And, of course, the toll in human terms was incalculable.

Earlier this month, we reached out to Jones to get his views on whether New York City had recovered economically from 9/11, what had happened to the "gentler, kinder" New York of the immediate post-9/11 period, and whether he thought New York was still seen as a gateway to opportunity by the poor, the persecuted, and the downtrodden.

This is the third in our series of Q&As with executives and thought leaders in the field about the meaning and impact of 9/11. (Click here for the first, with Gordon J. Campbell, president/CEO, United Way of New York City, and here for the second, with Lorie Slutsky, president, New York Community Trust.) Check back over the weekend for additional 9/11 reflections.

Philanthropy News Digest: Has New York City recovered from the economic impact of 9/11?

David Jones: Perhaps we have recovered somewhat psychologically, although the tenth anniversary will inevitably bring back bad memories. Economically, it depends on who we are talking about. The poverty rate in New York City is higher today than ten years ago. There are more people working, but there are also more people living in poverty. In fact, a large portion of the poor are the working poor, those who toil in low-wage jobs with little or no job benefits. And long-term unemployment is endemic today among people of color, especially young people. A recent CSS report revealed that in the eighteen-month period from January 2009 to June 2010 a third of black men in New York City between the ages of 16 to 24 were unemployed. And over 50 percent of young black men without a high school diploma were jobless. This in a city where the rate of success on the GED was abysmal -- less than half taking the exam passed -- and little more than half of black youth graduate from our public high schools. All of this has a detrimental impact on the city's economy -- and on our quality of life.

PND: In the weeks and months after the attacks, residents of the city seemed to see their fellow New Yorkers in a new, more sympathetic light. Have we lost the connection to that kinder, gentler New York?

DJ: I think that when disaster strikes, New Yorkers pull together. We saw it when Irene threatened the city last month. After 9/11, using our portion of a special Neediest Cases drive in 2001, CSS provided about $5 million in aid to about two thousand families who lost loved ones, jobs, or homes. That may not be true in everyday life. Public officials and the media don't often focus on the problems of the city's most vulnerable populations. They talk about "shared pain" in hard times, but budgets are still balanced on the backs of the poor. This is why the annual New York Times Neediest Cases stories are so important. They give a public stage to New Yorkers who are striving to better themselves in often-desperate situations. We should be more inclusive as a society. Poor New Yorkers should not have to worry about losing their jobs or their family health insurance every time there's an economic downturn.

PND: The city has received its share of economic and psychological blows over the last decade. Yet a new study by Crain's New York finds that more people call the city home than ever and that New York is within 56,300 jobs of its 1969 employment peak. Is New York still a gateway to opportunity for the poor, the persecuted, and the downtrodden?

DJ: To a certain extent. But over the past several decades, economic mobility -- the idea that with hard work you can rise from the working poor to the middle class, a historically American ideal -- is no longer widely true. In fact, this latest recession has caused many black and Latino families who reached the middle class in terms of family income because of the boom times of the 1990s to fall back economically. It is not just a question of the number of jobs. NYC has been producing jobs lately, but they are overwhelmingly low-wage, dead-end jobs, with little or no opportunity for advancement.

PND: What can philanthropy do to help the city, and the country, live up to that ideal?

DJ: There was a time when philanthropy meant providing resources to the poor. But the tax code has been manipulated to the point where much that is called charity now goes to places and institutions that would never qualify as needy -- universities with billion-dollar endowments, museums, performing arts organizations -- places that the wealthy enjoy and support. Also, many foundations that provide philanthropic support are characterized by boards that usually consist of upper class white men who have little understanding of or connection to the real poverty that still exists in the city. Foundations have a responsibility to provide long-term support for issues like employment, wages, and poverty. That's not happening.

-- The Editors

This Week in PubHub: College Access and Success

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she looked at four reports that explore ways to strengthen teacher preparation programs.)

Much of the discussion about boosting the number of college graduates in the U.S. seems to focus on preparing students for college-level academics and expanding access to postsecondary education through community colleges. But many students who do go to college ultimately drop out without obtaining a degree -- especially those from low-income families. This week in PubHub, we're highlighting four reports that examine college access and success, with a focus on affordability, academic supports, and employment outcomes.

Instead of increasing opportunities for economically disadvantaged students, current tuition tax credits, deductions, and financial aid policies are more likely to benefit middle- and upper-income students, a new report from the Education Trust argues. Funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, the report, Priced Out: How the Wrong Financial-Aid Policies Hurt Low-Income Students (20 pages, PDF), found that as a result of regressive federal, state, and institutional policies, low-income students are often expected to pay more than their middle-income peers as a percentage of family income. Indeed, out of nearly twelve hundred four-year colleges and universities, only five enrolled low-income students at rates as high as the national average, expected those students to pay no more than middle-income students as a percentage of family income, and had a graduation rate of at least 50 percent. With only 8 percent of youth from the lowest-income quartile earning a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four (compared with 82 percent from the highest-income quartile), any reforms to financial aid policies, the authors argue, must give priority to helping low-income students, removing technical barriers to accessing financial assistance, and ensuring enough support to raise completion rates.

Cost is not the only obstacle for low-income students looking to attend and graduate from college. While nearly half of all undergraduates begin their college career at a more affordable community college, only a third of them earn a degree or certificate within six years. The MDRC report Opening Doors to Student Success: A Synthesis of Findings From an Evaluation at Six Community Colleges (12 pages, PDF) highlights lessons learned from the Opening Doors Demonstration program, which is designed to raise college completion rates through learning communities and targeted student services such as academic counseling as well as performance-based scholarships. According to the report, the scholarships helped low-income parents enroll as full-time students and earn more credits, while enhanced counseling and freshmen learning communities resulted in modest improvements in academic performance and second-term registration. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the report calls for further innovations in developmental education and financial aid reform.

Racial/ethnic disparities in college completion and transfer rates also are commonplace. According to Divided We Fail: Improving Completion and Closing Racial Gaps in California's Community Colleges (20 pages, PDF), a report from the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at CSU Sacramento, about 75 percent of African-American and 80 percent of Latino/Hispanic community college students fail to earn a certificate or degree or transfer to a four-year college or university within six years. The authors offer a model for increasing overall completion rates and reducing racial/ethnic gaps that involves analyzing and reporting student achievement data and implementing best practices based on those findings. Funded by the Campaign for College Opportunity and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the report points out that strengthening community colleges is essential to raising educational attainment among the Latino/Hispanic population, whose share of California's working-age population is projected to reach 50 percent by 2040.

The Lumina Foundation for Education report The Degree Qualifications Profile (34 pages, PDF) examines college success from the perspective of the economic and societal value of the degrees students earn. The report proposes a qualifications framework that would define degree "quality" and improve capacity throughout the postsecondary education system to ensure that students learn the things they need to know. The profile includes benchmarks for applied learning, intellectual skills, specialized knowledge, broad integrative knowledge, and civic learning at the associate, bachelor's, and master's degree levels and across all fields of specialization. Such a framework, the authors argue, would provide a common vocabulary for sharing best practices, as well as a foundation for better public understanding of institutions of higher education and more reliable measures of accountability.

Care to weigh in on efforts to expand college access and improve rates of success? Do you know of any practices or policies that are helping students from low-income families and communities of color not only gain access to higher education but also succeed in college? What aspects of the debate are missing or being overlooked? Use the comments section to share your thoughts.

And be sure to visit PubHub, where you can browse more than seven hundred reports on education-related topics.

-- Kyoko Uchida