PhilanTopic

Protecting Nature Is the Smartest Investment We Can Make

(Mark Tercek is president and CEO of the Nature Conservancy and co-author of the book Nature's Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature).

In my work for the Nature Conservancy, I think a lot about how we can do more. How can we unlock new sources of capital, enlist more people to support our cause, and develop new alliances that will enable us to conserve nature at a scale never before achieved?

In my view, the answer is in putting ourselves in others' shoes -- whether those of a sugarcane grower in Colombia, a trawl fisher in California, or the executive of a global manufacturing company -- and focusing on why nature is important and valuable to them.

A simple but elegant solution to an environmental challenge in Colombia demonstrates this approach -- an approach that is leading to exciting new ways of structuring, funding, and discussing environmental nonprofit interventions.

The Project

In October 2011 I met with a group of sugarcane growers in Bogota, Colombia. They were warm and gracious hosts, affable dinner companions, and extremely proud of their beautiful lands and their booming business. They didn't see the world exactly the same way I do and they certainly didn't think of themselves as environmentalists. But they did agree with me on a simple point -- it makes great sense to invest in nature to protect water supplies.

Over the past decade, Colombia's sugarcane growers have become increasingly concerned about water supply in the Cauca Valley, situated near the country's Pacific coast and one of the richest cane-growing regions in the world. The farmers there need abundant water to irrigate their enormous fields.

The solution we arrived at together: protect the water supply by protecting the forested watersheds that feed the Cauca River.

Through an investment strategy called a water fund, cane growers, mill owners, and other water users in the region voluntarily pay into a fund reserved for forest conservation upstream. The idea is simple. Farmers, mill operators, and other businesses save money by preempting the need for more costly water treatment activities. Water resources are kept healthy and flowing for local communities. And healthy natural systems provide habitat for wildlife.

The Takeaways

As we are learning in places like Colombia, investments in "green infrastructure" or "natural capital" can produce very attractive returns. But the benefits of the approach go far beyond individual project sites.

Conservationists have long been dependent on and grateful for the help of generous philanthropists, foundations, and individual supporters. The support of such donors remains vital -- we would be nowhere without their generosity and passion. But we need even more people and resources on our side. If we can persuade government and business leaders that investing in nature will secure important benefits, we should be able to provide a powerful new source of capital for conservation.

Second, many people today are disconnected from nature and don't understand why they should care about protecting it. But these same people do care about what they need to survive and thrive -- clean water and air, fertile soil, timber to build homes, protection from floods and other natural hazards. Natural capital can be a powerful concept for spreading the word on why everyone should care about saving nature.

Third, environmentalists -- however well-intentioned -- often lecture society on what it "should" or "shouldn't" do. As a result, we have alienated potential allies. By focusing on the value of nature, we can shift the dialogue from hectoring lecture to win-win discussion. For example, instead of telling businesses not to pollute, isn't it more effective to demonstrate a lower-cost way of obtaining the clean water that sustains their bottom line?

Finally, as we are seeing in places like Colombia, relatively small philanthropic investments in natural capital can catalyze much larger investments by the beneficiaries of a project -- in some cases, even leading to a self-sustaining flow of conservation funding. For philanthropists seeking to maximize the impact of their funding, investing in natural capital makes compelling sense.

By making the connection between nature and basic human and business needs, conservation becomes more meaningful to millions of people around the globe. Natural capital investment won't solve all our environmental challenges. But when it does, the benefits will be many -- from new sources of capital, to more widespread support and constructive dialogue, to higher returns on philanthropic donations and gifts.

-- Mark Tercek

Redefining Today’s Business Landscape: A Q&A With David Vidal, Corporate Sustainability Thought Leader

David J. Vidal, a leading expert on the role of business in society, has over the course of a forty-year career served as a senior fellow with the Conference Board Initiative on Sustainability, as vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations, as assistant vice president at Continental Insurance, and as director of public affairs for the Partnership for New York City, a CEO-led civic, housing, and education group. Vidal also is active in industry leadership activities as a member of the judge's panel of the CERES-ACCA Sustainability Reporting Awards, the Newsweek/Daily Beast Green Rankings Advisory Panel, the Giving USA Advisory Council on Methodology, and the U.S. Advisory Council of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

Recently, Michael Seltzer, distinguished lecturer at the Baruch College School of Public Affairs and a frequent contributor to PhilanTopic, spoke with Vidal about the corporate sustainability landscape.

Philanthropy News Digest: Corporate engagement in society appears to be in tremendous flux, partly as a result of greater demands for corporate accountability. From your vantage point, what's going on in CEO suites?

David Vidal: The corporate contributions function has been overtaken by the broader business social accountability movement. Forward-looking business leaders are concerned today with a growing array of stakeholders and publics. Yesterday's focus on solely producing shareholder value is no longer sufficient. If you open a corporate annual report today, you will more often see a letter from the CEO addressed to shareholders and stakeholders.

PND: Has the terminology that businesses use also changed?

DV: Definitely. When I ran a corporate contributions program, the term corporate social responsibility was just emerging. In the last twenty years, that phrase was supplanted by global corporate citizenship. Today, many corporate leaders use the word sustainability to encompass the broader array of relationships that businesses now engage in. What's needed now are new business models based on equitable and sustainable growth.

PND: How did we get to this point?

DV: In 1987, the Bruntland Commission introduced the term sustainable development into public global discourse. Three years later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first assessment report. Around the same time, we also began to see an explosion in both the numbers and scope of civil society actors. That was quite apparent at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development -- the so-called "Earth Summit" -- which was held in Rio de Janiero in 1992. Subsequently, in 1997, the World Bank held a conference dedicated to global corporate citizenship. Meanwhile, in 1992, in the United States, Business for Social Responsibility, a global network that today comprises nearly three hundred member companies, was created, and the United Nations launched its Global Compact in 1999.

Indeed, by the time Al Gore released his film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, the dialogue in regards to sustainability and its benefits for society, business, customers, and the public had moved to an entirely new level. And that conversation continues to spread and deepen. At the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals in 2010, for example, a report titled Catalyzing Transformational Partnerships Between the United Nations and Business was issued by the Global Compact at the request of UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.

PND: Can you give us an example of a corporation that has traveled down this road?

DV: Unilever is an excellent illustration of what we are talking about. Its leadership knows it can only prosper if the societies and communities in which it operates benefit from its presence. In 2012, CEO Paul Polman went so far as to indicate that the company was in business for, and I quote, "the benefit of consumers, employees, suppliers and society at large" and to create long-term value "sustainably and equitably." To that end, the company has even stopped reporting profits on a quarterly basis. It was a focus on short-termism, after all, that got many businesses into trouble in the first place.

PND: Has Unilever been able to stick to its sustainability guns and demonstrate strong growth at the same time?

DV: According to its annual report for 2011, the company reported sales growth of 6.5 percent. And its share price on the Amsterdam Exchange index was up 14 percent for the year, making it the best-performing stock on the AEX.

PND: Is Unilever an exception?

DV: Clearly, it's a leader among its peers. But it is not alone in traveling down this road. I mean, today every Bloomberg terminal has a "sustainability" tab.

PND: So what's the next big thing in corporate sustainability?

DV: More businesses are endeavoring to foster large-scale systemic changes in areas such as food production, access to health care and education, and job creation. At the same time, they are spending time and money to learn about the complexity of global systems change and the challenges inherent in trying to bring about social change. Fortunately, all three sectors -- public, private, and corporate -- seem more inclined to engage in multi-stakeholder cooperation and are moving rapidly to adopt an all-hands-on-deck approach with respect to solving society's greatest problems. That's where the sweet spot is: when all three sectors work in unison.

-- Michael Seltzer

2012 Year in Review: Underserved Communities Targeted for Larger Share of Philanthropic Pie

The amount of money flowing to nonprofit organizations serving underserved populations and communities of color, and the number of private funders backing such programs, continued to grow in 2012, even as support for those communities from other sources was declining.

Over the course of the year, a number of foundations announced multimillion-dollar commitments to programs designed to address the needs of underserved communities and communities of color. They included the Ford Foundation, which announced a commitment of $100 million over ten years to extend its Ford Fellows program to young scholars from traditionally underrepresented groups; the Lumina Foundation, which awarded $11.5 million to thirteen partnerships working to increase college graduation rates among Latino-American students; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which announced an investment of $9.5 million over three years to improve the health and success of boys of color; and the California Community Foundation, which launched a multimillion-dollar initiative to expand educational and employment opportunities for African-American teenage boys in Los Angeles.

A number of corporate grantmakers also stepped up their support for underserved populations. They included Walmart, which through its foundation awarded $3.35 million to six women's foundations working to help economically vulnerable women achieve financial and economic security; AT&T, which announced a huge, $250 million commitment over five years to improve graduation rates among at-risk youth; and the UPS Foundation, which in February awarded $6 million to nearly a hundred and twenty organizations working to promote diversity and support underserved communities across the country and in June announced grants totaling $6.9 million to support the same kind of work globally.

A number of reports on the state of giving to underserved and underrepresented communities released during the course of the year also served to highlight philanthropy's growing interest in underserved and -represented communities. In January, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation issued Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy by and for Communities of Color (112 pages, PDF), which describes how identity-based funds -- funds specifically designed to pool contributions from donors and redistribute those funds through grants to individuals or organizations working at the community level -- have become essential drivers of social change. In February, Funders for LGBTQ Issues released Forty Years of LGBTQ Philanthropy: 1970–2010 (44 pages, PDF), which found that over the past four decades nearly eight hundred foundations have invested more than $771 million in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities, with a significant portion of that funding -- some 40 percent -- awarded between 2000 and 2006. And in the spring, the D5 coalition released a report (52 pages, PDF) that found a growing number of foundations and grantmaking organizations launching efforts aimed at making philanthropy more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

An article in Louisiana Weekly found more good news, citing the success of the Open Society Foundations' Campaign for Black Male Achievement, which since 2008 has awarded $29.6 million to organizations working to increase educational opportunity for black males and strengthen African-American families; and the Kellogg Foundation's Men and Boys of Color initiative. Around the same time, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy announced that the number of signatories to its Philanthropy's Promise campaign -- an eighteen-month-old effort to encourage grantmakers to provide at least half their grant dollars for the benefit of underserved communities and at least one quarter of their grant dollars for systemic change efforts involving advocacy, community organizing and civic engagement -- had nearly doubled, to a hundred and twenty-five foundations responsible for nearly $3.4 billion in annual grantmaking.

George Soros' Open Society Foundations continues to be an important driver of these efforts, and in the fall, in partnership with the Foundation Center,  it released a report which found that philanthropic support for black men and boys has grown steadily over the last decade, from $10 million in 2003 to $29 million in 2010. Two reports released by NCRP in November echoed that finding. The first, The Philanthropic Landscape: The State of Giving to Underserved Communities (6 pages, PDF), found that the share of U.S. foundation grant dollars benefiting economically disadvantaged people, the elderly, women and girls, and other marginalized groups had increased from 33 percent between 2004 and 2006 to 40 percent between 2008 and 2010. And the second, The Philanthropic Landscape: State of Social Justice Philanthropy (6 pages, PDF), found that since 2004 more grant dollars are being classified as social justice grants and that the number of foundations saying that they provide social justice funding at a substantial level has increased.

A final sign of progress was the launch, in September, of the Leadership and Sustainability Institute for Black Male Achievement, a national membership network that aims to support the growth, sustainability, and impact of leaders and organizations across the country working to improve life outcomes and create systemic change for African-American men and boys. Sponsored by OSF, the Skillman Foundation, the California Endowment, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Heinz Endowments, the institute will work to assist advocacy and service programs focused on African-American men and boys that have experienced difficulties in sustaining their own work.

"Black men and boys are challenged by entrenched and systemic problems in need of innovative solutions," said Shawn Dove, who manages the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. "Leaders working in the field of black male achievement have always grappled with a lack of funding, capacity, and momentum. With the strong network of leaders created and sustained by the LSI, we [hope to] create the support system necessary to sustain effective programs and policies that will do much to improve the lives of black men and boys across the United States."

Related items:

UPS Foundation Awards $6 Million for Diversity Programs (2/13/12)

LGBTQ Community Received More Than $771 Million in Grants From 1970 to 2010, Report Finds (2/23/12)

AT&T Commits $250 Million to Boost Graduation Rates (3/19/12)

New Initiative Launched to Expand Opportunities for African-American Boys (5/07/12)

Foundations Working to Increase Diversity, Equity, Inclusion in Philanthropy, Report Finds (5/18/12)

Foundation Initiatives to Assist African-American Males Showing Results (6/07/12)

Number of Signatories to 'Philanthropy's Promise' Campaign Nearly Doubled (6/21/12)

UPS Foundation Awards $6.9 Million to Nonprofits Cultivating Diversity (6/21/12)

Walmart Foundation Awards Nearly $3.4 Million to Support Underserved Women (8/08/12)

Initiative Launched to Help Boys, Young Men of Color Succeed (8/21/12)

Lumina Foundation Awards $11.5 Million to Boost Latino Student Success (9/04/12)

Ford Foundation Commits $100 Million to Extend Fellows Program (9/21/12)

Leadership and Sustainability Institute for Black Male Achievement Launches (9/28/12)

Foundations Put African-American Men and Boys on the Map, Report Finds (10/01/12)

Giving to Underserved Groups, for Social Justice on the Rise, Reports Find (11/19/12)

Weekend Link Roundup (December 29-30, 2012)

To help mark the end of another eventful year, we've rounded up a dozen or so of our favorite "best of" and nonprofit trendspotting pieces. Have a list you'd like to share? Let us know in the comments section below.

Communications/Marketing

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Katya Andresen shares Trendwatching's list of consumer trends to keep an eye on and weighs in on what each could mean for nonprofits in 2013.

And in a two-part series on her Getting Attention blog (here and here), Nancy Schwartz lists the nonprofit marketing trends that are "must-dos" for your organization in 2013.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Kula CEO Gerrit McGowan looks back at some of the CSR high- and lowlights of 2012 -- and tells us what companies looking to take their CSR programs to the next level will be doing in 2013.

Innovation/Leadership

As it has it has for many years, Foreign Policy magazine closes out 2012 with an eclectic list of the top global thinkers -- a list that includes Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, novelists Haruki Murakami and Chinua Achebe, and Russian environmentalist Yevgenia Chirikova.

In addition to his appearance in the FP list, Barack Obama was honored in December by TIME magazine as its Person of the Year. "We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes," explains TIME, "and Barack Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America...."

Philanthropy

Turning to the philanthropic space, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation shares the top 2012 reads from its Impatient Optimists blog, while the Ford Foundation looks back at its major accomplishments in 2012, including the launch of Time to Succeed, a national coalition that encourages and enables communities to add more learning time to the school day and year.

On the BlackGivesBack blog, Tracey Webb names the top ten African-American celebrity philanthropists of 2012. Now in its sixth year, the list was compiled with help from the Admiral Center, an initiative of New York City-based Living Cities that helps celebrities use their time, influence, and money to develop sustainable solutions to pressing global challenges.

On its site, New York City-based Bolder Giving announces the twelve Bold Givers who in 2012 "[supported] important causes at remarkable levels of income and assets...[and embody] Bolder Giving's mission to inspire and support people to give at their full lifetime potential."

And Philanthropy 2173's Lucy Bernholz wraps up her list of the top buzzwords of 2012 -- words and terms that, in a field known for its love-hate relationship with jargon, "are becoming ever more a part of the philanthropy conversation."

Science/Technology

Like the Eye of Sauron, Google never sleeps. As the year was drawing to a close, the tech giant released Zeitgeist 2012, an online platform that highlights "the searches that defined 2012."

And on the Tech Soup blog, Jim Lynch looks at the big nonprofit technology trends of the year, including cloud computing and mobile technology.

Social Media

Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes weighs in on the social media trends to watch in 2013.

Women

And the Washington Area Women's Foundation takes us out with a list of five policies that affected women and their families in 2012.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a happy and safe New Year!

--The Editors

Demystifying Corporate Responsibility Rankings

(Emily Keller is an editorial associate in the Corporate Philanthropy department at the Foundation Center. In November, she reviewed Roger Thurow's The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change.)

Corporations have long collected data generated by and/or relevant to their operations –- everything from sales figures, to permit applications, to industry trends and customer behavior. Increasingly, however, regulatory and watchdog groups are demanding that companies provide information about the impact of their activities on society and the environment.

As the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement has gained traction, indices and lists that seek to quantify and rank company activities according to sustainability principles have proliferated. Financial analysts, media groups, and independent consultancies today produce annual assessments of everything from the amount of carbon companies put into the atmosphere to the sustainability of their supply chain management and the diversity of their boards. Those metrics, in turn, are often used by customers, investors, and prospective job candidates to determine their level of engagement with a particular company.

Earlier this year, the Foundation Center added a CSR tab to the company profiles in Foundation Directory Online that highlights nearly two dozen of these corporate sustainability ratings lists and presents basic information from them in a user-friendly format.

But in an emerging field characterized by a multiplicity of definitions and standards, even simple numbers can be hard to make sense of. Using hundreds of data points and a unique methodology, SustainAbility, an independent think tank and strategy consultancy, has taken it upon itself to "rate the raters" in order "to better understand the universe of external sustainability ratings and to influence and improve the quality and transparency of such ratings." As the firm is quick to note, many of these lists have been introduced within the last five years and there's plenty of room for improvement.

With that in mind, here are a few of the more prominent ratings lists/indices:

Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes. The Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, which are offered cooperatively by SAM Indexes and S&P Dow Jones Indices, were launched in 1999 to track the stock performance of the world's leading companies in terms of economic, environmental and social criteria. DJSI World tracks the top 10 percent of the 2,500 largest companies in the Dow Jones Global Total Stock Market Index, while DJSI North America tracks the top 20 percent of the 600 largest U.S. and Canadian companies. The evaluation process includes a survey customized for fifty-eight industry sectors covering governance, workforce diversity, disclosure of compensation, risk and crisis management, greenhouse gas emissions, waste generation, branding strategies and metrics, data privacy, talent attraction and retention, and other areas. According to the DJ Sustainability site, "The indexes serve as benchmarks for investors who integrate sustainability considerations into their portfolios, and provide an effective engagement platform for companies who want to adopt sustainable best practices."

Carbon Disclosure Project. Every year, the London-based Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers, produces a dense, chart-filled report detailing the progress of S&P 500 companies toward their greenhouse gas emission goals. Based on a detailed questionnaire (the data collection process is so complex that CDP runs a series of workshops around the world to help companies answer it), the 2012 report offers a three-tiered breakdown of GHG emissions totals by sector; a performance band from A to E assessing actions to promote climate change mitigation, adaptation, and transparency; and a disclosure score from 0 to 100 for the provision of data. Multiyear leaders in the rankings include Bank of America and Lockheed Martin in the performance category, and Cisco Systems, Gilead Sciences, and Spectra Energy in the disclosure category.

Newsweek Green Rankings. In contrast to DJSI's rankings of only the most sustainable companies, Newsweek ranks the five hundred largest publicly traded companies in the U.S. as well as the five hundred largest in the world, regardless of their sustainability record. And unlike the Carbon Disclosure Project's rankings, only 10 percent of the scores are based on disclosure, with the remainder split between environmental impact and management (a category that takes public controversies into account). The magazine (which recently was purchased by The Daily Beast site and is transitioning to an online-only format) includes more than seven hundred data elements in its survey of companies, including greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste disposal, water use, equity investment (companies are responsible for the impact of the companies they own), hazardous waste reduction, biodiversity protection, company operations, contractors and suppliers, and products and services. Based on a scale of 0 to 100, IBM (82.9) and Santander Brasil (85.7) topped the 2012 rankings.

The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity. Consulting firm and magazine publisher DiversityInc, which launched its diversity rankings in 2001, bases its ratings on the responses it receives to a 300-question survey. As the organization explains in the methodology section of its site: "Ratios between key factors in diversity management, such as demographics of managers compared with managers who received promotions and demographics of the workforce compared with people promoted into their first management positions, play a significant factor in determining point scores." Companies are rated by industry, and the rankings include thirteen different top-five and top-ten lists. Topping the list in 2012 were PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sodexo, Kaiser Permanente, AT&T, and Procter & Gamble.

Corporate Responsibility Magazine's 100 Best Corporate Citizens. Corporate Responsibility Magazine and the Corporate Responsibility Officer Association (CROA) began publishing their list, which is 100 percent based on verifiable publicly available information, in 2009. The rankings are driven by companies' performance in seven broad CSR categories -- environment, climate change, human rights, employee relations, corporate governance, philanthropy, and finance -- with some three hundred and eighteen data points tracked across those categories. Carbon Disclosure Project and Foundation Center data are incorporated into the assessments.

And that's just a sampling. Indeed, the diversity and number of CSR ratings lists now available can be overwhelming at times -- for consumers and investors, as well as for companies, which feel pressured to respond to detailed surveys and questionnaires from dozens of groups and do not always understand the reasons they are selected or omitted from a given list.

In an effort to standardize the ratings process, Ceres and the Tellus Institute, founders of the Global Reporting Institute (GRI), recently launched the Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings (GISR), which aims to establish best practices in the sustainability ratings field, with a focus on performance-based results, forward-looking indicators, relevance to market forces, integration of sustainability criteria into investment decisions, transparency of methodology, independence of raters, and an expansion in the scope of participating companies. The initiative hopes to release the initial draft of its standards in 2013.

In the meantime, the number and scope of CSR ratings lists continue to grow. Last year, the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, in partnership with the Reputation Institute, released its fourth annual list of the top fifty companies in the U.S. based on the public's perception of their corporate citizenship, governance, and workplace practices. And earlier this year, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Vestas released their third annual Global Corporate Renewable Energy Index (CREX) report, which tracks voluntary demand for renewable energy among the world's largest companies.

Other entrants in the field include the UN Global Compact, which asks companies around the globe to embrace universal principles and partner with the United Nations in the areas of human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption issues, and A Billion + Change, which seeks to mobilize billions of dollars of pro bono work and skill-based volunteerism by the end of 2013.

Is any of this work making a difference? I believe it is and, having compared some of the largest lists against our corporate FDO profiles, can see that many corporations, here in the U.S. and around the globe, are beginning to walk the CSR walk. But from climate change to human rights to corruption, we -- and they -- still have a long ways to go.

What do you think? Is CSR a movement whose time has arrived? Are CSR ratings a useful tool for consumers, investors, and advocates? And if not, how can they be improved? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

-- Emily Keller

Stemming the Droput Crisis: A Q&A With AT&T's Beth Adcock Shiroishi

Beth Adcock Shiroishi, vice president for sustainability and philanthropy at AT&T and president of the AT&T Foundation, leads AT&T Aspire, one of the nation's largest corporate commitments focused on helping more students graduate from high school ready for college and careers. The telecommunications giant launched the $100 million initiative in 2008 and expanded it earlier this year with an additional commitment of $250 million over five years, bringing its total investment in the program to $350 million.

After a rigorous and competitive process, AT&T recently selected forty-seven schools and nonprofits from among thousands nationwide to share in nearly $10 million in funding through the Aspire Local Impact request for proposal. Applicants were evaluated based on their alignment with evidence-based approaches, their accomplishments in serving students at risk of dropping out of high school, and their ability to use data to demonstrate the effectiveness of their work.

PND spoke with Shiroishi earlier this month about the initiative.

Philanthropy News Digest: Give us a sense of the scope of the dropout crisis in America?

Beth Adcock Shiroishi: One in four students -- more than one million each year -- fails to graduate with their class. And the picture is even bleaker for minority students, with the graduation rate among Hispanic, African-American, and Native-American students nearly 25 percent lower than the rate for their white and Asian American peers. Obviously, this has huge implications for our future job force, the economy as a whole, and our nation's global competiveness. But while it's a serious and urgent problem, there are signs of progress. Nationally, high school graduation rates are increasing, and we've seen huge gains in certain states and with certain programs that give us hope.

PND: AT&T launched the Aspire program in 2008. What were the goals of the program when it was launched, and have they been met?

BAS: Our original goal was to commit $100 million to fund proven programs aimed at raising the graduation rate, create one hundred thousand job shadow opportunities for students, and support one hundred community dropout summits. Thanks to the tireless work of our employees and nonprofit allies, we achieved these goals. At the same time, we impacted more than one million students in all fifty states and worked with more than one thousand community and national organizations that, like us, understand how important it is to improve graduation rates.

PND: What was behind your decision to focus much of the local impact RFP on data-driven approaches?

BAS: As a company, we understand the power of data to help make good decisions, illuminate impact, and identify and spread best practices. So it was only natural for us to want to use that same powerful tool in our charitable work, especially when the issue at hand is so important to improving lives, positioning America to be more globally competitive, and our success as a company. As you mentioned, with our recent RFP we decided to seek out programs that effectively use data in a way that enables an understanding of how "on track to graduate" students in a funded program are performing and allows us to compare them to a control group of students not in the program. Hopefully, this will help us understand more about what programs work best in certain situations and give us the ability to share learnings and best practices with others working in this space.

PND: Do you consider feedback from parents and teachers and other types of anecdotal information in your metrics?

BAS: Absolutely. As important and powerful a tool as metrics can be, in the education space metrics must be contextualized and brought to life by an understanding of the experiences of the people involved. Said another way, the metrics must be viewed together with the anecdotes to truly understand what works and what impact is being achieved.

PND: What are some of the other challenges involved in measuring student achievement?

BAS: As anyone working in education knows, this is a challenging field with lots of highly emotional issues embedded in it. So, I'll just speak to some of the challenges we as a funder of programs face. And the first one is a good problem to have! Because there are so many varied approaches to raising graduation rates, it's hard to create an assessment framework in a way that allows for an apples-to-apples comparison. Variations that create measurement obstacles include the fact that states have different requirements for student progression to the next grade level and different timeframes in which they release data. These and other issues eventually led us to realize that we needed an expert to help us. So, we've engaged a third-party evaluator to help us on this journey toward more understanding and more effective use of data.

PND: Along with its emphasis on data-driven approaches, the RFP focused on local, community-driven efforts. How are the two connected?

BAS: AT&T and the AT&T Foundation have always focused on communities where our employees live and work. Local organizations are on the frontlines of education every day, and they know better than we do what approaches work best for students in their communities. Together with our increased focus on data collection and analysis, we hope to work with these local organizations to better track the students served and shine a light on the supports and interventions that are most effective.

PND: What would be the likely consequences of not successfully addressing the dropout crisis in America?

BAS: Dropouts from the class of 2010 alone will cost the country more than $337 billion in lost wages over the course of their lifetimes. But for our company, this is about our future workforce and our future customer base. Like all American employers, we need a diverse educated workforce to power our company into the future. And we need an economy that can avail itself of the technology that will keep us a leader in innovation. We know we can make a difference by supporting programs that are having a real impact. A recent study found that every dollar invested in the model pioneered by dropout prevention organization Communities in Schools increased graduation rates and produced an average of $11.60 in economic benefit for the community. We want to support and help scale more programs like that. That's why we have broadened and deepened our commitment to AT&T Aspire with an additional $250 million investment. We know the time is now; we can't wait any longer to address the problem.

-- Emily Robbins

Corporations Pledge Support for Sandy Relief and Recovery Efforts

As officials from North Carolina to New Hampshire continue to assess the damage left by Superstorm Sandy, a number of financial institutions have announced million-dollar grants to the American Red Cross and other organizations for relief and recovery efforts.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Citi Foundation had announced a donation of $1 million to the American Red Cross for relief efforts, while TD Bank Group and the TD Charitable Foundation had pledged a total of $500,000. HSBC USA also announced a $1 million commitment for disaster recovery efforts, including $500,000 to the American Red Cross in Greater New York, and said it would match dollar-for-dollar all employee donations to relief efforts through its employee giving program and would work with community partners to provide emergency housing and financial assistance in affected communities. And the Bank of America Charitable Foundation announced its own donation of $1 million, including $500,000 to the American Red Cross Hurricanes 2012 fund. The remaining $500,000 will be directed to national, regional, and local nonprofits to support long-term recovery needs in affected communities.

Elsewhere, Wells Fargo & Company pledged $1 million for relief efforts, $250,000 of which will go to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund and $750,000 to grassroots nonprofits involved in relief and recovery efforts in affected areas. In addition, through November 13, Wells customers will be able to donate to the Red Cross at most of the bank's more than twelve thousand ATMs nationwide.

Non-financial companies making donations include energy company Phillips 66, which announced a $500,000 contribution to the Red Cross for local disaster relief operations and said it would match individual employee contributions through its matching gift program; the Kellogg Co., which, through its Corporate Citizenship Fund, announced a $250,000 cash contribution to the American Red Cross and $250,000 worth of food to Feeding America; and Chevrolet, which announced that it was donating fifty Silverado pickup trucks and Express cargo vans to the Red Cross for use in relief and recovery efforts.

As of Tuesday, the Red Cross, in a press release, said it had mobilized 1,700 disaster relief workers from across the country, served more than 25,000 meals and snacks at 250 shelters, activated 167 response vehicles, and shipped more than 230,000 ready-to-eat meals to affected areas.

Bank of America Provides Relief in Wake of Hurricane Sandy
Bank of America Press Release
10/30/12

Chevrolet Donates 50 Trucks to Red Cross for Storm Relief
Chevrolet Press Release
10/30/12

Citi and the Citi Foundation Donate $1 Million to American Red Cross
Citi Foundation Press Release
10/31/12

HSBC Supports Communities, Customers Recovering From Hurricane
HSBC Press Release
10/30/12

Kellogg Co. Donates $500K to Hurricane Relief Efforts
Battle Creek Enquirer
10/30/12

Phillips 66 Contributes to Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief
Phillips 66 Press Release
10/30/12

Red Cross Continues Large Sandy Relief Operation
American Red Cross Press Release
10/30/12

TD to Donate 500K to American Red Cross to Support Hurricane Sandy Relief Efforts
TD Bank Press Release
10/31/12

Wells Fargo to Give $1 Million to Hurricane Sandy Relief Efforts
Wells Fargo Press Release
10/30/12

Related:

American Red Cross Receives $1 Million for Disaster Training, Preparedness Efforts (9/11/12)

Housing Partnership Network Receives $2.75 Million From Citi Foundation (10/03/11)

Joplin Tornado Relief Efforts Raise $39 Million (5/31/12)

American Red Cross Receives $3 Million for Online Volunteer Management System (4/27/12)

Young Black Males and the Urgency of Now

(John H. Jackson is president and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, a grantmaking public charity that works to develop and strengthen a broad-based movement to achieve fully resourced quality public education. Before joining Schott, Jackson served as the NAACP's chief policy officer and national director of education and, during the Clinton administration, as senior policy advisor in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.)

In April 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King reminded the country that "We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now....Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity....Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, 'Too late'." Forty-five years later, after reviewing the data on graduation rates for black and Latino males and in the spirit of Dr. King’s warning, the Schott Foundation for Public Education titled the 2012 edition of its biennial fifty-state report on public education and black males The Urgency of Now.

The report indicates that nationally 52 percent of black males, 58 percent of Latino males, and 78 percent of white males graduate from high school in four years. To place this data in context, it is predicted that nearly two-thirds of all new jobs will require some college education -- yet just over half of black male students complete high school. And the graduation gap has closed only three percentage points in the last decade. At the current rate of progress, it would take nearly fifty years for black males in the United States to graduate at the same rate as their white male peers.

For decades, community leaders and policy makers have celebrated the victories of those who beat the odds while too often ignoring the fact that the odds are still overwhelmingly stacked against nearly half our nation's black males. The data in the report are not chance facts of life; they are the results, if we are totally honest, of the willful neglect of decision-makers at all levels, from governors to legislators, from mayors to boards of education.

Let me be clear. I am highlighting these sobering statistics not merely to be critical of past actions, but to draw attention to the fact that much more in the way of providing systemic supports for young black males needs to be done.

The Schott Foundation firmly believes that all students can achieve when given a fair and substantive opportunity to learn. And philanthropy can help change the trajectory for students whom the system is failing. While it should not, and does not have the capacity to, replace local, state, and federal agencies in providing every student with equal access to educational opportunity, philanthropy can and must play a leading role in investing resources in advocacy; in ensuring that public resources are appropriately leveraged and equitably distributed; and in helping to sustain grassroots organizations working to forge a public and political consensus around giving every child an opportunity to learn.

Perhaps uniquely, foundations, especially regional foundations, can convene grassroots organizers, elected officials, educators, administrators, and community members to spotlight educational disparities in their states and communities. They can support the research needed to persuade state legislatures to equalize funding across districts. And they can act to buttress the public resolve needed to end discriminatory practices in schools, in the criminal justice system, and in our tax code.

It is time for a supports-centered reform agenda focused on providing every student with equal access to the resources they need to succeed, including high-quality extended learning time, early education, and challenging personalized educational plans for every child that is performing a year or more below grade level. We also must do more to recruit and retain effective teachers, particularly in high-need classrooms; implement college and career preparatory curricula in underresourced schools; and end "push out" tactics such as the routine and discriminatory use of out-of-school suspensions, as well as the practice of "locking out" black students from selective high schools and gifted and talented and Advanced Placement programs.

The Urgency of Now calls for the adoption of "game-changer" narratives and policy proposals. Setting standards and supporting existing programs are not game-changers. For our children and nation to win the education race, all students must be able to compete on a level playing field, with access to the resources and student-centered learning approaches they need to succeed, regardless of their starting point. Philanthropy can and must do more to make that a reality. And its commitment to the issue must be sustained. As Shawn Dove, director of the Open Society Foundation's Campaign for Black Male Achievement says, "Philanthropy can't seek to solve generational problems within one grant cycle." Foundations must provide unrestricted grants that enable the organizational capacity building needed to sustain advocacy work until the problem is fixed. And we need more systems-focused work -- work like the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Grade Level Reading Campaign, the Ford Foundation's Time to Succeed Coalition, and the Lumina Foundation's Goal 2025 Campaign.

We all know that the way out of poverty runs through the schoolhouse door, but today for too many black students those doors only serve as a barrier. Here at the Schott Foundation, it is our hope that philanthropy, the media, policy makers, and advocates will not only take notice of the alarming data in The Urgency of Now, but will seek to integrate the proposals offered in the report to provide every student with the critical resources they need to succeed in school and in life. Before it's too late.

-- John Jackson

'Funding for the Arts' Month: Arts and Community Engagement

(Kyoko Uchida is features editor at Philanthropy News Digest. In her last post, she provided some background on the deteriorating situation in Syria through the lens of half a dozen foundation-sponsored publications.)

In a commentary piece on Philanthropy News Digest earlier this month, Sharon DeMark, a program officer for the arts at Minnesota Philanthropy Partners, argued for expanding the definition of arts engagement in grantmaking. While citing examples of arts institutions that are experimenting with new ways to attract younger and more diverse audiences, DeMark also noted that the lion's share of grant dollars goes to a handful of large, established organizations, and that there is ample opportunity for funders to identify and support smaller, lesser-known groups and individual artists.

One example mentioned by DeMark that elicited comment was the Walker Arts Center's recent Internet Cat Video Festival, which showcased short videos curated by an online community from among more than ten thousand submissions. "Think expansively, yes," one comment on DeMark's piece read. "Pander to the lowest common denominators and call it the arts, no." Fair enough, but if the subject hadn't been cat videos, would this kind of crowdsourcing be considered "pandering"? Whatever your view of cat videos, there are any number of contests in which the public are invited to vote for their favorite arts organization to receive funding; for example, five South Florida nonprofit arts groups currently are competing for votes via text message to win $20,000 in the first Knight Arts Challenge People's Choice Awards. While it goes without saying that online popularity contests are in many ways a flawed mechanism for awarding philanthropic support, they have been shown to engage more diverse audiences in the arts by giving them a say in directing support to less established groups and artists.

I believe in art for art's sake, but isn't support for broad participation in the arts important because it sustains us, not only as individuals but as a community? In other words, active engagement in the arts by more diverse audiences not only is a way to ensure the long-term sustainability of arts organizations, it also serves to strengthen community and social cohesion by enabling different segments of society to experience together how various cultures define, make, and enjoy art. To wit, the James Irvine Foundation's new arts funding strategy aims "to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians -- the kind that embraces and advances the diverse ways that we experience the arts, and that strengthens our ability to thrive together in a dynamic and complex social environment." Specifically, the foundation seeks to grow and deepen arts engagement among low-income and/or ethnically diverse populations that have been traditionally underserved by arts nonprofits; support new ways of creating or curating art, including via digital technology; and encourage the use of non-traditional spaces in art making.

As DeMark noted in her commentary, more grantmakers also are coming to recognize the role the arts play in economic development and community revitalization. As documented by Americans for the Arts in its Arts & Economic Prosperity series, the nonprofit arts sector generates significant revenues, both direct and indirect, for communities in which those activities take place. But it also contributes to a stronger sense of social cohesion. Indeed, according to Civic Health and Unemployment II: The Case Builds, a report from the National Conference on Citizenship, communities with a robust ecosystem of nonprofit organizations that engage directly with residents tend to have lower unemployment rates.

In exploring how a broader definition of arts engagement can help strengthen communities, we should also consider how arts participation affects educational outcomes. According to The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings From Four Longitudinal Studies, a report from the National Endowment for the Arts, socially and economically disadvantaged youth who are exposed to and involved in the arts earn better grades, graduate from college at higher rates, and are more likely to volunteer, vote, and participate in politics as adults than their peers with little exposure to the arts. Given that budgets for arts education in public schools are under pressure, support for broad participation at the community level in non-traditional venues and formats -- including inviting the public to submit art, curate the work of others, and vote for funding online -- is an essential element of philanthropic efforts to bolster community vitality and economic development.

What do you think about expanding participation in the arts as a way to strengthen broader engagement in the community? Does engagement in the arts foster economic resilience in local communities? And if it does, are private funders doing enough to make it happen? Use the comments section below to share your thoughts....

-- Kyoko Uchida

(Image: Irrigate, a partnership between the City of Saint Paul, Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and Springboard for the Arts)

 

Hunger in America: A Q&A With Julie Gehrki, Walmart Foundation

In 2010, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation launched a five-year, $2 billion effort to help end hunger in America. In partnership with Feeding America and five of the country’s largest food companies -- ConAgra Foods, General Mills, Kellogg Company, Kraft Foods, and Unilever -- Walmart has since launched a variety of initiatives to encourage its customers to join the fight against hunger. Earlier this fall, Philanthropy News Digest spoke with Walmart Foundation senior director Julie Gehrki about the company's Fighting Hunger Together campaign and what the foundation is doing to address hunger in America.

Philanthropy News Digest: What effect has the sluggish economic recovery and the drought in the Midwest had on hunger and food insecurity in the United States?

Julie Gehrki: In early September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the results of its most recent survey, which found that more than fifty million Americans are suffering from food insecurity. And a recent survey conducted by Feeding America found that 65 percent of its foodbank directors are very worried about food supply in the coming months. While we're hopeful the economy will continue to improve, we want to make sure that those who may not be benefiting from the improvement are taken care of. Feeding America foodbanks are on the frontlines of need in our communities, and Walmart wants to make sure they have the food they need to help those who need it -- particularly if food prices rise, as some are predicting, and as we head into the holiday season.

PND: What are some of the best ways for individuals to fight hunger in their communities?

JG: One of the things we're doing is called the Golden Spark campaign. Through Sunday, October 14, people can go to Walmart.com/hunger or our Facebook page and vote for a community to win $50,000 to start or expand a backpack program -- that's a program that provides meals to food-insecure children over the weekend, when they don't have access to free- or reduced-price school meals. A lot of people understand that kids get fed through school, lunches and sometimes breakfasts, during the week. But the backpack program forces people to think about what a kid does on the weekend. Studies have found that teachers have noticed that many kids are less attentive on Monday mornings, and that's because many of them have not eaten enough over the weekend. Backpack programs are largely run by volunteers. Individuals pack backpacks with food that's easy for kids to open and prepare on their own over the weekend. Walmart believes this is a local issue, something that communities and individuals in those communities have to rally around, because it's their neighbors who are feeling the pain.

PND: As a parent of two small children who have some eating issues, I know that a lot of food goes uneaten. What, if anything, are you doing to control for or take advantage of that?

JG: A lot of people are thinking about that. We're working hard with a number of nonprofits to make sure the food that's provided through the program is both healthy and appealing to kids. For example, some kids will not eat an apple unless it's in slices. We also address things like the school breakfast program by providing food in classrooms. Everyone eats together and we do everything we can to make sure there's no stigma attached to receiving food from a foodbank.

PND: Is Walmart using social media to engage its customers in the effort?

JG: The Golden Spark campaign relies on Facebook. Again, to vote for a community, visit our Facebook page or Walmart.com/hunger. You can also share the page with your friends on Facebook. The campaign is about broadening the number of people who are involved in hunger-alleviation efforts, and social media is a great way to do that. Our Facebook fans also can visit the "Live Better" section of our page to learn about our ongoing work fighting hunger across the United States and to view videos that highlight local stories of Americans making a difference in their communities.

PND: How many people do you hope to reach?

JG: This year, between the meals we donate, those donated by our suppliers, and those donated by Walmart customers, it'll be fifty-three million meals -- and that doesn't include the $2.5 million Walmart will give in cash to support hunger-alleviation efforts. When we started in 2007, we donated about nine million meals.

As you know, this is part of our $2 billion commitment to combat hunger in the United States. One of the things we know we can do as the nation's largest grocer is raise awareness of the issue. And so we're supporting our efforts through a multi-channel marketing campaign that kicked off in September, which was Hunger Action Month. It's really about using the combined resources of nonprofits, corporations, foundations, and individuals to say that this is a real issue, this is an important issue, and that together we can make a difference.

-- Matt Sinclair

Prepare Your Team for Pro Bono

(Aaron Hurst is president of the Taproot Foundation. The following post was adapted from Powered by Pro Bono: The Nonprofits Step-by-Step Guide to Scoping, Securing, Managing, and Scaling Pro Bono Resources, to be published later this month by Jossey-Bass. To read the previous post in Aaron's series, click here.)

You just returned from a meeting with one of your largest corporate partners. In the meeting, you explored the possibility of your corporate partner doing a critical pro bono project for you in a few months. They seemed like they were pretty into it. Heading back to the office, you're fired up but want to make sure your staff is ready.

Here are three tips to prepare your team to be a great client for the pro bono engagement:

1. Clearly define the connection of the project to your strategic plan and goals. Make sure you can make the case that it's a critical project for your organization.
2. Identify who will be on your internal team and tasked with working with your corporate partner. Clearly define team members' roles and think about how you will recognize their work on the project, including the skills it will help them develop.
3. Have your internal team meet and do a pre-mortem before the project kicks off.  Pre-mortems are a great way to expose team members' hopes and fears.

Much of the success of a pro bono project lies in how you prepare staff for the engagement. As with most things in life, what you get out of it is directly correlated to what you put into it.

Of course, companies also play an important role in getting their nonprofit partners ready for a pro bono engagement. If you’re a company looking for ways to get involved, check out our upcoming webinar on Nonprofit Readiness.

-- Aaron Hurst

‘Fair and Square’ and Philanthropic

The JCPenney Company, which was founded over a hundred years ago by James Cash Penney on the principle of treating customers "fair and square," recently launched a new charitable giving program called jcp cares that aims to build stronger communities across the country.

Through the program, the company plans to support a different cause or charity each month, for at least the next six months, with direct contributions and donations from customers. The first six charities selected to receive support through the program are the USO (July), 4-H and the Boys & Girls Club of America (August), Teach for America (September), the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (October), Share Our Strength (November), and the Salvation Army (December).

As someone not privy to the closed-door discussions that led to the selection of the six charities, I find myself wondering how the company came up with its list. Okay, some of the choices are obvious. This month's charity, the USO, supports military personnel and their families -- an entirely appropriate choice in a month that includes Independence Day. Similarly, Teach for America is an obvious choice for everyone's favorite back-to-school month, and what could be more appropriate than supporting the Salvation Army's Red Kettle campaign in December.

But in an era when companies, like almost everybody else, need to compete for the dollars and attention of consumers, you might expect JCPenney to be a little more creative about how it engages customers in its philanthropy. For example, what about asking customers for nominations of organizations deserving of the company's support via Facebook or Twitter? Or, taking it a step further, being more transparent about the actual selection process it did employ?

The company has said that, from July 23 to July 31, it will donate $1 -- up to $50,000 -- to its July partner, the USO, for every customer that checks in at a JCP location via foursquare. It has also launched a dedicated page on BroadCause where customers can share their personal stories and has said in its press release that it will engage charitably minded customers through the Facebook game WeTopia. I just hope the company has a long-term vision for its corporate giving that goes beyond "clicktivism."

What do you think? Am I being grumpy, or should the company be doing more to engage its customers in its new charitable giving program? Share your thoughts in the comments selection below.

-- Regina Mahone

Weekend Link Roundup (June 30 - July 1, 2012)

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

Corporate Philanthropy

On the Deep Social Impact blog, Peter Karoff identifies two different types of corporate social responsibility -- "those having to do with social impacts or what business does to society and those having to do with social problems or what business can do for society." The first one, writes Karoff, "is the first rule of life, which is to do no harm. If a business is not successful in satisfying that imperative, no amount of charitable giving, employee volunteerism, and creative ideas around social innovation is going to matter...." He adds:

Doing no harm, however, is not merely a zero-sum game if there is evidence of preventing negative consequences and producing positive societal impact. For example, if a company is an extractor of natural resources and its actions left unchecked could devastate ecology, and the company invests in and implements systems to preserve and sustain that ecology, doing no harm goes beyond being defensive. It is a proof that business and the natural world can productively co-exist.

This suggests that the most creative role for corporate social responsibility and philanthropy goes far beyond being an act of redress, correction, amendment, or atonement for a misdeed. The toughest ROI for this work, but perhaps the most important, is right in the 'heart of darkness' that every commercial venture must face one way or another. The value added for corporate philanthropy -- defined in the broadest terms -- is not as frosting on the cake of goodness, but in meeting squarely those aspects that are most troubling. To turn a negative into a positive is a very good thing indeed.

Impact/Effectiveness

On the GiveWell blog, Holden Karnofsky shares details of GiveWell's new relationship with Good Ventures, a new foundation started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his significant other, Cari Tuna. "This is a partnership, not a merger; we remain separate legal entities," writes Kranofsky.

Cari is president of Good Ventures, while Elie and I are co-executive directors of GiveWell; our authorities differ accordingly. If Good Ventures is interested in an area or activity that we aren’t interested in, it will use its resources to pursue this area or activity; likewise, if we are interested in an area or activity that Good Ventures isn’t interested in, we will use GiveWell's resources to pursue this area or activity.

Latinos/Hispanics

On the Philanthropy Potluck blog, Kaitlin Ostlie of the Minnesota Council on Foundations shares key findings from a recent Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP) report, Foundation Funding and Latino Community Priorities: Gaps and Opportunities, which identified a "mismatch" between foundation funding and the priorities of Latino communities receiving support. According to the report, the disparity stems largely from "institutional resistance from senior management in the philanthropic community, overly specific grantmaking strategies and program objectives, and the limited capacity and small size of nonprofits that serve the Latino community."

The report offers four recommendations for HIP, which has been working with grantmakers to strengthen Latino communities for nearly thirty years:

1. Continue to conduct research and develop initiatives that address needs and opportunities in Latino communities with respect to specific grantmaking areas;
2. Offer customized consulting services to help foundations develop strategies for reaching Latinos;
3. Continue to provide capacity-building support and technical assistance for high-impact grassroots Latino nonprofits;
4. Consider working with groups of funders to develop shared frameworks for tracking grantmaking data with realistic benchmarks for increasing funds benefiting Latinos over the next decade.

Social Entrepreneurship 

In a recent post on the Idealist blog, blog editor Allison Jones offers some advice to this year's college graduates from the Idealist Twitter community. When asked to complete the following sentence: "Dear Class of 2012, if you want to change the world, remember..." @aimee587 responded, "to find friends to help you out. No one can do it alone!" And @MAWGtheFROG said, "to live humbly and compassionately." Check out Jones's post for the full list of responses.

Social Innovation

Bridgespan partner Daniel Stid takes a closer look at social impact bonds, a pay-for-success approach to solving social problems that has been pioneered in the United Kingdom, and decides that it might be a little early to jump on the SIB bandwagon. "If the what-works movement is about scaling proven solutions," writes Stid,

there is considerable irony in so many of its participants calling for widespread adoption of a financial mechanism for doing so that is literally untested. I also question whether private capital will readily flow to underwrite the costs of supporting the most intensive users of our social safety net. Ultimately, though, my skepticism is grounded in the challenges that federal, state, and local government agencies have faced in trying to use performance-based contracts over the past two decades—and how social impact bonds may make several of these challenges worse....

On her blog, Allison Fine takes issue with David Bornstein's contention that "growing individual organizations can solve complex, local community problems," arguing instead that "every community has a huge number of organizations trying to meet the needs of their communities, and a huge number of individual volunteers and donors, too. The problem is that they continue to work as standalone silos rather than as networks."

Technology

On the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's blog, Daniel Latorre, VP of Digital Placemaking at the Project for Public Spaces, introduces the Tech for Engagement Manifesto, which was started at the Technology for Engagement Summit in May. It was always the intention of the folks behind the effort to invite the larger community of civic technologists to flesh out the manifesto, and in the process of doing that this is what they've learned:

• The civic technologist community has talented leaders but needs to grow the size and diversity of its leadership cadre.
• The community's problem isn't just about access, it's about a larger gap in skillful practice.
• The community is characterized by innovative partnerships but needs to increase levels of collaboration and trust.
• The community has good data but needs to increase the understanding, accessibility, and standardization of that data.
• The commmunity has designed civic tools but needs to increase community input as those tolls are iterated, designing them with, not for, the community.

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

-- The Editors

Foundation Center Adds CSR Data to Foundation Directory Online

(Andrew Grabois is manager for corporate philanthropy at the Foundation Center.)

When Deep Throat advised Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to "follow the money" in that underground garage back in the '70s, he could just as well have been dispensing advice to a corporate grantseeker. That is, until recently.

For many years, individuals and organizations looking for funding from companies or their foundations were only concerned about the availability of funds and meeting a company's grant requirements, not whether a grantmaker was a "good corporate citizen" (with the exception, perhaps, of anti-apartheid activists). And while notions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been around for decades, CSR only recently has gained traction with the general public.

According to a 2010 CSR Perception Survey conducted by Penn Schoen Berland, 55 percent of survey respondents said they would be more likely to purchase a product with an added social benefit; 70 percent said they would be willing to pay a premium for a product from a "socially responsible" company (and 28 percent said they would pay up to $10 more); and, perhaps most surprisingly, 34 percent said they would be willing to take a pay cut to work at a socially responsible firm. It would appear the CSR train is leaving the station. Indeed, in the last month alone, Morgan Stanley announced the launch of a new "impact investing" platform to "help clients align their financial goals and personal values," while Bloomberg LP, which already provides more than one hundred CSR indicators through its Bloomberg terminals at no extra cost, announced that it will publish the results of The Civic 100 survey conducted by the National Conference on Citizenship and Points of Light in the November issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.

Recognizing the importance of corporate social responsibility information to today's grantseekers, the Foundation Center has been busy collecting over forty separate CSR data points, including carbon emissions and energy usage metrics as reported to and analyzed by folks at the Carbon Disclosure Project, employee volunteer hours, workforce diversity percentages, and recognition by eleven "green" or "best practices" lists, including those compiled by Boston College, Corporate Responsibility magazine, DiversityInc, Human Rights Campaign, Newsweek, and Working Mother. We're also collecting corporate CSR pledges tracked by the Global Reporting Initiative, the United Nations Global Compact, and A Billion + Change. And, starting tomorrow, we'll be making all that data available in Foundation Directory Online. Appearing as a separate tab on individual company profiles, more than fourteen hundred companies will have at least one CSR measure that users of FDO can incorporate into their prospect research.

We think the addition of corporate social responsibility data to FDO is the most significant enhancement to our company information in years, and we know it will provide FDO users with the most complete profiles of corporate citizenship and transparency in any single database around. For today's corporate grantseeker, just following the money is no longer enough.

-- Andrew Grabois

Why LISC? It Starts With a Cold Call

(Michele Sullivan is vice president of the Caterpillar Foundation. A version of this post appears on the LISC Web site.)

Not unlike most cities in the U.S., Peoria, Illinois, and its surrounding communities have areas where existing businesses have left and economic development has ceased, housing is crumbling, crime and unemployment are high, and public transportation is inadequate or nonexistent. Yet, the residents of these areas have the same desires as everyone else. They want a safe place to live and raise their children, a job they like, local neighborhood businesses to shop in, and a neighborhood they can be proud of.

Peoria is blessed to have a strong base of nonprofit organizations to help families in blighted neighborhoods that are struggling with the problems mentioned above. While the Caterpillar Foundation supports many of these organizations, we recently found ourselves asking, Why aren't these neighborhoods thriving?

As we thought about that question, it became evident that nonprofits and stakeholders in the community were treating symptoms, not causes, and that the greater Peoria area needed an organization to help redevelop blighted neighborhoods and address challenges such as affordable housing and high crime rates. What's more, those efforts were needed not just within Peoria proper; poverty and high unemployment extend beyond the city limits. Which got us wondering: Does such an organization exist?

Be honest. Everyone rolls their eyes when a cold call comes in. Steve Sagner, head of development for LISC, came calling in February 2011. LISC was fundraising and wanted an investment from the Caterpillar Foundation. Doubt turned to curiosity. As the conversation turned to what LISC had to offer, my team and I began to think this was just what Peoria needed. With a thirty-year track record of revitalizing communities in need, LISC would take the lead in mobilizing all available resources for job training, business development, affordable housing, child care, and more. By the end of the call, LISC agreed to do an assessment of Peoria for a possible future office.

The assessment was soon completed and the news got better. LISC agreed that Peoria fit its organizational model. And while it admitted it had not worked in a metro area which required a rural and urban strategy, it was confident it could deliver results. To be honest, we weren't sure. But the day LISC program VP Anika Goss-Foster took us to visit the Auburn Gresham neighborhood in Chicago was the day all the dots got connected. When we saw that thriving neighborhood, the 'Net center full of people on computers working on resumes and reading USA Today, the new Walgreen's, the financial office for residents, and, most importantly, the pride of local residents, we knew that making an investment in bringing LISC to Peoria was the right idea at the right time.

Caterpillar, Inc. -- and by extension the Caterpillar Foundation -- promotes the health, welfare, and economic stability of communities around the world where its employees work and live. One such community is Peoria, Illinois, our hometown and global headquarters. LISC's expertise and experience, coupled with Peoria's strong nonprofit base and support from the city and county, has convinced us that the residents of the greater Peoria area have a much brighter future to look forward to.

Has your view about cold calls changed? Ours sure has.

-- Michele Sullivan