PhilanTopic

Weekend Link Roundup (May 18-19, 2013)

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

Data

We're big fans of data visualization whiz Hans Rosling, and so is Humanosphere blogger Tom Paulson. But, writes Paulson, Rosling "is strikingly upfront about the limitations of data. Sometimes, the problem is that different countries measure things -- like unemployment -- in different ways....In other cases, there are real uncertainties in the data that must be assessed: child mortality statistics are quite precise, whereas maternal mortality figures are not; global poverty measurements are infrequent and uncertain." And so on. Still, when it comes to telling stories with numbers, few can rival Rosling, as the video Paulson embeds in his short post well illustrates.

Education

In a post on the Huffington Post Impact blog, Chris Gabrieli, co-chair of the Time to Succeed Coalition and founder and chair of the National Center on Time & Learning, and Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas discuss the progress the coalition, which works to ensure that children in high-poverty neighborhoods have access to more and better learning time in school, has made since its was established a year ago.

Fundraising

On her About.com blog, Joanne Fritz gives a thumbs up to Future Fundraising Now blogger Jeff Brooks' The Fundraiser's Guide to Irresistble Communications. Among the things she liked, writes Fritz, is Brooks' admonition that "our biggest mistake in fundraising is thinking that what we like is what works. We're self-centered, rather than donor-focused. And, frankly, we are soooo off the mark."

International Affairs/Development

On the Mashable site, Casey Brown announces the creation of G-everyone, a "24-hour digital convening" that, on the eve of next month's G8 Summit in Northern Ireland, will unite local groups around the world to discuss the pressing issues addressed at the summit. According to Brown, "G-everyone will provide an open dialogue around the G8's core themes of 'Open Economies, Open Governments and Open Societies.' [And] Mashable will crowdsource the best ideas and thoughts from our community...and report back to the leaders at the [summit]."

Nonprofit Management

David La Piana draws some important lessons from a merger involving two Texas providers of adoption services that ultimately failed to save the weaker of the two organizations. The case, writes La Piana, "offers a reminder that merger is not designed to change the underlying market dynamics an organization faces. A good merger can strengthen management, improve strategic positioning, and bring needed scale, but it cannot move a marginal or declining operation into the black if demand is just insufficient or the economics of the activity don’t pencil out."

Philanthropy

On the GrantCraft blog, Rosien Herweijer takes a closer look at the newest GrantCraft guide, Foundations Moving On: Ending Programmes and Funding Relationships. As Herweijer notes:

All funders somehow have to deal with exits. Venture philanthropist and limited-life or spend-out foundations tend to be very deliberate about exits, but other grantmaking or operating foundations also change strategic priorities, leave fields, or leave countries. And on a smaller scale, project funding ends automatically or -- in rare cases -- has to be withdrawn. You cannot wait for all the complicated questions to pop-up once an exit decision looms. And once you make and communicate a decision to exit, you need a lot of answers....

Social Media

In the latest installment of her Social Good podcast, Allison Fine chats with Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good, a network of a thousand women bloggers using their influence to drive attention to a range of social causes.

Transparency

On the Keeping A Close Eye Blog, NCRP executive director Aaron Dorfman compares a three-decades-old report from his organization that ranked and scored more than two hundred foundations on their ability to meet a standard of transparency with a new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy that surveyed 138 nonprofit leaders on what they'd like to see from foundations in the way of transparency. According to Dorfman, the old NCRP report found that "60 percent of foundations in the sample did not meet an acceptable standard of transparency," while findings in the new CEP report reveal that the more things change, the more they stay the same. "I see many parallel findings between that report and CEP's...report," writes Dorfman.

A full 33 years later, nonprofits are still clamoring for more information about how foundations make funding decisions and they want clear and open communication about priorities. They want to know whether it's worth their time to cultivate a relationship and pursue funding. And despite an explosion of glossy annual reports and fancy Web sites, leaders of grantseeking organizations are still highly frustrated by the lack of clear communication about a central element of foundation activity, namely how foundations decide which organizations to fund....

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

-- The Editors

5 Questions for...Katie Everett, Executive Director, Lynch Foundation

Today, as in the past, education reform tends to be politically charged and fraught with controversy. And while the needs of students often figure prominently in the debate, the devil is always in the details.

In the Boston area, the Lynch Foundation has worked to engage administrators, educators, and parents to think outside the box about how to improve the educational experience for all. In that spirit, the foundation has begun to work with educational innovator Salman Khan and Khan Academy to provide free educational materials to schools in the metro Boston area.

Recently, PND spoke with the foundation's executive director, Katie Everett, about its partnership with Khan and how new approaches to classroom instruction are making a difference in Boston-area schools.

Philanthropy News Digest: What areas of education does the Lynch Foundation fund?

Katie Everett: We fund in all areas, from early education to higher ed. We've been around for twenty-five years and have funded everything from targeted early literacy programs to comprehensive projects at Harvard, Boston College, and the University of Pennsylvania. We fund teacher training, we fund charter schools, we fund in the Catholic school sector, we fund public schools, and we fund principal leadership programs. If there's one area in which we have stopped investing, it is job training. We found it was really hard to measure the impact of those programs.

PND: Tell us about your support for Khan Academy.

KE: We had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Sal [Khan] at a couple of events a few years ago and were open to piloting an initiative that had the potential to reduce operating costs within the Archdiocese of Boston school system. Sal had already piloted programs in a handful of charter and district schools that used technology to create cost efficiencies while maintaining academic excellence within the classroom. Not by replacing the teacher, but by leveraging his or her skills to accelerate students' progress and outcomes. We launched our pilot program with Sal and his team last year, and it's been a great success. We started with two Catholic schools just south of Boston, one in Quincy and one in Milton, and families have loved it, students have loved it, the teachers have loved it. After introducing Khan classrooms in fifth and seventh grades as planned, the schools have already spread it to the sixth and eighth grades and are looking to expand it into the lower grades. At the moment, they're working alongside the Khan team to build up assessments of what's working and where challenges remain. They're getting a lot of feedback from students and from teachers. It's a wonderful partnership.

PND: Are they identifying shortcomings in the traditional curriculum and augmenting it with Khan materials? How does it work?

KE: Basically, this approach involves "flipping the classroom." The teachers give the students the assignment, and their "homework" is to visit Khan Academy online and watch a ten- or fifteen-minute video clip that walks them through the lesson or module, and then they come to school the next day and do their homework in the classroom with the teacher. It's the complete opposite of how we were taught in school, where the teacher would assign us, say, math homework, and we would go home and struggle to figure it out on our own. This is a significant shift. Now, students learn the lesson the night before from a module at Khan, and the next day they go in and the teacher actually does the exercises with them and provides as much additional help as they need. Students do exercises online, which means that they can keep practicing until they have fully grasped the concept. Teachers track this progress and provide highly individualized attention to address exactly where students may be "stuck." Some kids may be accelerated, in which case they can dive into the next lesson. Khan gives teachers the tools they need to encourage mastery of each concept, by each student, and helps them maximize the impact of their teaching time.

PND: How do you manage the risks associated with something that’s perceived to be innovative?

KE: That's a good question. We built in what we thought would be a solution to some of the foreseeable challenges, for example, pushback from teachers. Some teachers are threatened by new technology in the classroom, seeing it as something that might end up costing them their job. So it was important from the beginning of the project to include teachers in the discussions about the project and secure their buy-in. This is a teaching resource, not a replacement, and that was an important conversation to have up-front. We even flew teams of teachers out to California to meet Sal and his team and spend a couple of days learning the approach.

We also hired a consultant whose main focus is to make sure that any problem or challenge a principal or teacher may have is sorted out. In our experience, those two things are critical when it comes to launching anything having to do with technology -- or with education reform, for that matter. You need to have buy-in from all the stakeholders from the outset, and you need a dedicated person to troubleshoot problems.

PND: It sounds like it might be a difficult thing to scale.

KE: It can be scaled, but it needs to be done thoughtfully. We're pretty ecumenical about the schools we work with. Doesn't matter if you’re red, white, blue, brown, Catholic, public, charter -- we love schools. But we won't work with school leaders who aren't excited to work and partner with us. After seeing initial success with the Khan Academy pilot, we flew a Khan team in from California and invited every middle school math teacher in the City of Boston to a day of professional development. We got over a hundred teachers to join us on a Saturday in December.

So, yes, these things can be scaled, but only if there's interest at the teacher and school administration level. It has to be bottom up, not top down.

-- Matt Sinclair

The Social Progress Index: Measuring What Counts?

The Washington, D.C.-based Social Progress Imperative made a splash at the Skoll World Forum earlier this month when it launched its Social Progress Index (SPI), an ambitious effort to inform and influence development policies around the globe.

Developed by Harvard Business School professor and competitiveness expert Michael E. Porter in collaboration with Scott Stern of MIT, the index is founded on the principle that "what we measure guides the choices we make." To that end, the index analyzes fifty-two outcome-based (as opposed to input-based) indicators in three dimensions of social progress: meeting basic human needs; establishing the foundations of well-being that enable individuals to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives; and creating opportunity for all to reach their full potential. (For a complete breakdown of indicators, click here.)

While the index and the report (154 pages, PDF) released in conjunction with the launch of the index includes only fifty countries, those countries represent three-quarters of the world's population. Here's a chart from the report that plots their aggregate SPI scores against GDP per capita (PPP):

As the chart shows, the countries included in the index and report are fairly well distributed across income levels, ranging from Switzerland at the high end with a GDP per capita of $51,262; to middle-income countries such as the Russian Federation ($21,246), South Africa ($10,960), and China ($8,400); to lower-income countries like Egypt ($6,281), India ($3,627), and Mozambique ($975).

So, what do the SPI team's findings based on an analysis of a full year of data reveal? For starters, that countries' level of overall development -- as measured by GDP per capita and/or indices of global competitiveness -- often mask striking social and environmental challenges and strengths. For example, Costa Rica, a lower-middle-income country with a PPP of $12,157, ranks twelfth overall in the index, ahead of richer countries such as Israel ($27,825) and Argentina ($17,554); nineteenth in terms of basic human needs; and eighth for opportunity -- ahead of France, Japan, and Germany, all of which rank higher in terms of overall score. In contrast, the United Arab Emirates, the third-richest country ($47,893) in the SPI sample, ranks nineteenth overall, including eleventh in terms of basic human needs, but only thirtieth for opportunity and a disappointing thirty-seventh in terms of foundations of well-being.

The index/report also seem to indicate that economic development is necessary but not sufficient for social progress; that it is possible to achieve a high level of social progress at a relatively modest income level; and that while low-income countries are clustered at the bottom of the index, there is a wide range of social progress within this group. For instance, Mozambique, the poorest country in the SPI sample, is ranked fourteenth in terms of equality and inclusion, whereas Rwanda, the third-poorest country in the sample, is ranked forty-fourth for equality and inclusion. At the same time, Rwanda tops the index in terms of ecosystem sustainability, while the United States, which has the second-highest PPP in the sample and is ranked sixth overall, ranks near the very bottom (forty-eighth) in terms of ecosystem sustainability.

If by highlighting each country's strengths and weaknesses with respect to various aspects of social progress these data get you thinking differently about development, then SPI is off to a good start. "The purpose of the Social Progress Index," the report's authors note, "is to benchmark performance and motivate improvement while providing useful insights that will help all stakeholders to make better choices, prioritize investments, and strengthen implementation capacity to improve the lives of citizens."

Looking ahead, SPI plans to refine its model based on feedback and empirical testing, eventually expanding the number of countries in the index from fifty to a hundred and twenty. It also plans to form a Social Progress Network comprising partners from research and academic institutions, think tanks, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and international development organizations "to identify the policies, institutions, legal frameworks, and financing mechanisms that can drive more effective and efficient social progress, through international benchmarking and fostering specific research projects." And it will explore the possibility of creating a Social Progress Capacity Index to measure the potential of a country's government, business, and civil society institutions to contribute to innovation in the social sector.

In the meantime, governments are paying attention, with Paraguay already having agreed to incorporate the SPI model into its national development framework. Which perhaps begs the question: How will the philanthropic sector, in the U.S. and elsewhere, respond? The index has already begun to spark discussions about impact investing and social entrepreneurship. Will foundations become more active in those conversations than they have been to date? And how, if at all, might the index change the way we approach economic development -- both overseas and here in the United States? Have thoughts you'd like to share? Use the comments section below.

-- Kyoko Uchida

A New Way to Sustain the Campaign: Foundation Center and Open Society Foundations Launch BMAFunders.org

(Shawn Dove is the campaign manager for the Open Society Foundations' Campaign for Black Male Achievement. The original version of this post appears on Philanthropy New York's Smart Assets blog.)

This June will mark the five-year anniversary of the creation of the Open Society Foundations' Campaign for Black Male Achievement, which was launched in 2008 to address the economic, political, social, and educational exclusion of black men and boys from American society. When I consider the upcoming five-year milestone I can't help but think that the campaign was originally slated to be just a three-year "initiative." But thanks to the determined and focused work of our partners in philanthropy, government, the not-for-profit community, and the private sector, our board extended the campaign's term limit and provided CBMA staff with much-needed breathing room, increased funding, and an opportunity to exhibit bold leadership on behalf of the emerging field of black male achievement.

During the past five years, the work of the campaign, along with the efforts of an evolving group of philanthropic partners and leaders from the policy, advocacy, practitioner, and research sectors, has expanded on the earlier work of funders like the Ford Foundation and the 21st Century Foundation to tackle a seemingly intractable problem. It has been fueled by a broad and diverse sector of organizations that combine a direct services and policy change approach. From the time we launched the CBMA, my daily mantra has been "sustain the campaign" in the belief that the philanthropic sector could not remedy a generational problem facing black men and boys with a short-term grant-cycle mindset.

In partnership with the Foundation Center, we have launched the Web portal BMAfunders.org to facilitate engagement, collaboration, and strategic decision making among funders, nonprofits, and policy makers working to promote positive outcomes for black men and boys in America. It could very well be the pivotal investment that enables this work to gain the sustained philanthropic commitment necessary to overcome the structural and systemic barriers that prevent too many black men and boys from realizing their full potential.

The portal will be the go-to source for data and information related to black male achievement, serving as a resource not only to funders, including affinity groups like the Association of Black Foundation Executives and Grantmakers For Children Youth & Families, but also to nonprofits, policy makers, business leaders, and anyone else interested in the field.

Features of the portal include an interactive mapping tool with funding data, a timeline of philanthropic milestones in the field, a toolkit for assessing project outcomes, a comprehensive collection of research reports, descriptive case studies of work on the ground, and multimedia content. Currently on the site are highlights of the recent Black Male Re-Imagined II, a collaborative effort by the Ford, Knight, and Open Society Foundations to examine strategies for shifting perceptions of black men and boys in America.

BMAfunders.org builds on the groundbreaking 2012 report Where Do We Go From Here? Philanthropic Support for Black Men and Boys, which examines foundation funding flows in support of black men and boys and highlights innovative philanthropic initiatives. The report highlights the deepening funding commitments of foundations such as Knight, Skillman, Robert Wood Johnson, Mitchell Kapor, and the California and Heinz Endowments in the field of black male achievement. The portal also complements the field-building efforts of the Leadership and Sustainability Institute for Black Male Achievement, which seeks to strengthen the infrastructure and sustainability of the growing field of black male achievement.

The portal magnifies the words of Open Society Foundations founder George Soros, who in the afterword of Where Do We Go From Here? states how he hopes the report (and the ensuing launch of BMAFunders.org) "will motivate other philanthropists and foundations to invest in efforts to improve achievement by African American boys and men....[T]his is a generational problem. It demands a long-term commitment."

-- Shawn Dove

Homeownership and the Racial Wealth Gap

I'm 29 and still hopeful I'll be a homeowner one day. Both my parents have owned their homes for years, and it has always been clear to me that the financial and social benefits of owning a home outweigh the benefits of paying less in rent and using the extra income for other things. Even though I know, as an African-American woman with some serious student debt living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, that the odds are stacked against me, I've started taking some steps to make homeownership a possibility in the not-too-distant future.

So you can understand my unease after reading the following in a new study from the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University about the growing wealth gap in the United States:

While homeownership has played a critical role in the development of wealth for communities of color in this country, the return on investment is far greater for white households, significantly contributing to the expanding racial wealth gap shown in [the figure below]. The paradox is that even as homeownership has been the main avenue to building wealth for African-Americans, it has also increased the wealth disparity between whites and blacks....

As the report, The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide (8 pages, PDF), notes, homes are the largest investment most American families make, and they are by far the biggest item in a family's "wealth portfolio." For African Americans, home equity represents 53 percent of household wealth, while for whites, who typically have a more diversified wealth portfolio, it accounts for just 39 percent. "Yet, for many years," the report's authors write, "redlining, discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, lack of access to credit, and lower incomes have blocked the homeownership path for African Americans while creating and reinforcing communities segregated by race. African Americans, therefore, are more recent homeowners and more likely to have high-risk mortgages, [making them] more vulnerable to foreclosure and volatile housing prices."

Home ownership is just one of five factors the report's authors identified as contributing to the racial wealth gap in the U.S. -- which, as the figure below shows, has tripled over the past twenty-five years, from $85,000 in 1984 to $236,500 in 2009. Other factors include family income, employment stability, education level, and family financial support and inheritance.

To help all Americans build wealth, the report's authors recommend that the public sector implement a number of broad policy and institutional changes, including:

• taking steps to ensure mortgage and lending policies and fair-housing policies are enforced and strengthened so that the legacy of residential segregation in the United States ceases to be a source of greater wealth opportunities for white homeowners than for African Americans;
• adopting proven policies at the national, state, and local levels to help all Americans access stable employment opportunities and retirement benefits;
• investing in affordable high-quality childcare and early childhood development programs to ensure that every child is healthy and prepared for school;
• supporting policies that help more students from low- and moderate-income families and families of color attend college and graduate;
• supporting policies that do not leave students drowning in debt or left with no option but to drop out of school because they can no longer afford the enormous price tag; and
• eliminating the preferential tax treatment for large estates.

After reading the report, I could't help but wonder what the philanthropic sector, which has grown in size as inequality in America has widened, is doing to address the growing racial wealth gap in the country? And what more can or should it be doing to expand wealth opportunities for all Americans?

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

-- Regina Mahone

5 Questions for…Cheryl Dorsey, President, Echoing Green

Social innovation and entrepreneurship are two of the most powerful tools available to those committed to black male achievement. So argued Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, a global social venture fund based in New York City, at the Innovation and Impact Forum hosted by the Open Society Foundations' Campaign for Black Male Achievement last October. In part, added Dorsey, that's because they have captured the attention of, and increasingly are being driven by, a millennial generation interested in a networked, technology-enabled model of social change.

In 2012, Echoing Green partnered with OSF to launch the Black Male Achievement Fellowships and announced the first cohort of BMA fellows in June. Earlier this month, the organization announced the 2013 semi-finalists for both the Echoing Green and Black Male Achievement Fellowships.

Recently, PND spoke with Dorsey about the BMA fellowship program, her own experience as a social entrepreneur, and the role of public policy in the field of black male achievement.

Philanthropy News Digest: What did you think of President Obama's State of the Union Address?

Cheryl Dorsey: I think the president's address presented a call for effective collaboration to solve crucial problems in our country. Many people make it their life's work to try to solve tough problems, from engineers working to create microchips that are smaller but carry more information to community bankers seeking to provide greater access to capital and teachers seeking to help more children in the classroom move ahead. President Obama's State of the Union address was a call for those who are on this path of enterprise, service, and innovation to work together.

These are the principles at the heart of the work of our fellows, who strive every day to solve some of the challenges and problems the president laid out in his speech. When the president talks about reducing the cost of solar energy, I think about 2012 Black Male Achievement Fellow Donnel Baird, who is doing important work to make clean energy accessible to all communities, especially low-income communities. When the president talks about expanding service opportunities for young people, I think about Echoing Green alums like Wendy Kopp, Alan Khazei, and Michael Brown, visionary leaders of the national service movement. The State of the Union address made me think about how Echoing Green can continue to support our fellows who are out there on the front lines in communities across the country and around the world.

PND: Last June, you announced the first cohort of Black Male Achievement Fellows. What were your hopes for the initiative? And have you been pleased with the response?

CD: Echoing Green was incredibly honored when we were approached by Shawn Dove and Rashid Shabazz, who head up the Open Society Foundations' Campaign for Black Male Achievement. After many in-depth conversations, it became increasingly clear that our twenty-five-year record of accomplishment in terms of identifying and supporting top early-stage, next-generation social innovators was a terrific complement to the campaign's comprehensive approach to the issue.

While you might say the campaign tapped Echoing Green because of our "process expertise" in social innovation and social angel investing, we were also very much aligned intellectually and emotionally with the goals of the campaign. Quite a few of our global network of five-hundred-plus social entrepreneurs over the years had worked on issues related to black male achievement, so the opportunity to bring into the social innovation pipeline a new generation of talent committed to these issues was appealing.

Needless to say, we are simply thrilled with the early response to the program. In the first two fellowship application cycles alone, we received nine hundred and fifty applications on average from across the country. For a newly minted fellowship program without any accumulated brand equity, that's quite something. And we think the response underscores the important and useful synergy between two social movements -- the deep intensity and focus of those working in the area of black male achievement married with the growing interest in and energy of the global youth social entrepreneurship movement.

PND: Did your own experience as a recipient of an Echoing Green Fellowship shape your vision for the BMA Fellowship initiative?

CD: Very much so! Receiving an Echoing Green Fellowship in 1992 to help start the Family Van, a community-based mobile health unit focused on the issue of black infant mortality in inner-city Boston, quite simply changed my life. The investment by Echoing Green in the Campaign for Black Male Achievement is not simply about funding; it's much more about opening up fledging social entrepreneurs to a network of peers, experienced mentors, and advisors who are deeply committed to the professional and personal growth of social change agents. Echoing Green recognized that we could bring our highly engaged network to bear on the Black Male Achievement Fellowship and leverage all the forms of capital -- social, financial, et cetera -- residing in the network for those committed to issues of black male achievement.

My colleague Decker Ngongang, who runs the Black Male Achievement Fellowship program for Echoing Green, recently wrote a blog post highlighting a few of our BMA Fellows. I think the post does a nice job of illustrating the kind of knowledge and wisdom -- past and present -- that lives within our network and social innovation ecosystem.

PND: While the Echoing Green Fellowships support social entrepreneurs from around the world, the BMA Fellowships are specifically focused on the male African-American population in the U.S. Is this a strategic shift for Echoing Green?

CD: For us, the Black Male Achievement Fellowship is not so much a strategic shift but rather a unique opportunity to focus our strategy where we see an opportunity to have increased impact. One of Echoing Green's mantras has always been that you must strive to scale your impact rather than your growth. We saw in the partnership with Open Society Foundations an opportunity to leverage the resources, brand, and breadth of that institution to smartly scale our own impact.

PND: In addition to being a social entrepreneur, you served as a White House Fellow and in the Labor Department during Bill Clinton's second term and on the transition team for the Innovation and Civil Society subgroup of the Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform Policy Working Group in the first Obama administration. You also continue to serve as vice chair for the President's Commission on White House Fellowships. What do you think the role of public policy should be in the field of black male achievement?

CD: Good public policy can set the stage for new programs that otherwise might not be incubated. Structural barriers to black male achievement in America are not new, but we have struggled to catalyze innovative solutions that could be game changers for black men and youth. A policy environment that brings attention to and keeps the focus on black male achievement, incentivizes the deployment of financial resources and top talent around the issue, and privileges collaboration and the replication of proven concepts is key to moving the needle. I'm excited, for example, about the work that New York City, which recently launched the Young Men's Initiative, is doing to model this kind of public policy behavior. For those who don't know, the city plans to invest more than $43 million a year over the next three years in both public and private funds to find new ways to connect with, and help, marginalized black and Latino young men. And it plans to do it through a comprehensive approach that involves education, health, employment training, and justice systems. If successful and widely replicated, it's a public-private model that has the potential to effect positive change in the lives of men and boys of color all across the country.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Closing the Achievement Gap for African-American Males: An Economic Imperative

(Angela Glover Blackwell is the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, an Oakland-based national research and action institute working to advance economic and social equity. She currently serves on the President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and is a co-author, with Stewart Kwoh and Manuel Pastor, of Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America's Future.)

In the United States, a black public school student is suspended every four seconds, while every 27 seconds a black high school student drops out of school. Black students are also 3.5 times more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled. Within this group, black male students fare the worst.

At PolicyLink, our mission is to achieve equity by "Lifting Up What Works." We find innovations and strategies that expand opportunity and, working with local partners, get what's working into policy so that effective innovations are more widely disseminated. We are particularly inspired by the strategies being employed by the Oakland Unified School District, where in 2008-09 only 49 percent of black males graduated, compared with 72 percent of white males and 61 percent district-wide, and where 18 percent of African-American males were expelled at least once, compared with 3 percent of white male students and 8 percent of students district-wide.

In response to those disturbing numbers, OUSD opened an Office of African American Male Achievement (AAMA) in 2010. With funding from Atlantic Philanthropies, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, the Stuart Foundation, the California Endowment, and Kaiser Permanente, AAMA is working to change educational outcomes for young men of color -- and in the district as a whole -- in innovative ways. For instance, many Oakland high schools and middle schools now offer Manhood Development Classes, in which African-American men from the community teach skills designed to help students navigate the conflicting value systems they experience in different areas of their lives. Family and parent summits at each school include "data walks" where parents and kids are provided with charts detailing educational outcomes at the school as well as where the gaps in access and learning occur. And those efforts are bearing fruit: in 2012 the U.S. Department of Education announced a voluntary resolution of the compliance review initiated against OUSD regarding the disproportionate harshness and frequency of disciplinary measures meted out to African-American students. The district has even been cited as a model for other districts across the country due to its intense efforts to improve in this area.

Why is an initiative in one California city important? For starters, the country is undergoing a profound demographic transformation. In 2012, for the first time, more than half of all babies born in the United States were born to people of color. As that trend continues, the very racial and ethnic groups that traditionally have been left behind will account for an ever larger share of the population, so that by 2042 the U.S. will be a "majority minority" nation. On the way to that milestone, demographers expect a majority of U.S. youth to be of color by 2018, and a majority of the young workforce to be of color by 2030.

How will that changing workforce fare in the global economy? Forty-five percent of all U.S. jobs in 2018 are projected to require at least an associate's degree, yet among today's workers only 27 percent of African Americans have achieved that level of education. Closing the wide and persistent racial gap in educational attainment is not only the right thing to do; it is an economic imperative and the key to building the kind of workforce the American economy needs to thrive in the twenty-first century.

Turning today's youth into tomorrow's skilled workers and innovators is critical to restoring America's growth and competitiveness. Given the demographic trends, political, education, business, and community leaders, together with philanthropists, must address the gaping racial disparities in educational outcomes, income, health, and employment that serve as a drag on the economy and diminish its potential. Oakland is unique in that it has acknowledged and is addressing the systemic inequities in its school system, implementing programs that directly target students most at risk.

OUSD has focused on changing the culture of its schools, training teachers to be more aware of their biases and revamping a disciplinary system that in the past has responded to behavioral issues by removing students from the classroom -- and thus from the opportunity to learn. By improving educational outcomes for young men of color, we are better positioned to leverage everyone's talents and creativity to build a twenty-first century economy that works for all.

Oakland has the right idea. It takes a sustained and collaborative effort on the part of government, business, funders, parents, and other members of the community to provide young people with a clear path to a prosperous future. Yet we too often fail to target our resources to those who need them most. Young boys and men of color can and must be co-creators of our collective economic future. We at PolicyLink believe it is imperative that funders and leaders around the country come together now to support similar efforts to address systemic inequities and close the educational attainment gap. Nothing less than our future is at stake.

-- Angela Glover Blackwell

Bill Gates' 2013 Annual Letter

Bill Gates released his annual letter -- the fifth since his first in 2009 -- earlier this week, and like the others, it's worth reading.

From its theme, "The Power of Measurement," to its assertion that "You can achieve amazing progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal," the letter is a testimonial to and endorsement of the approach known as strategic philanthropy. It's also a story about progress and the power of technology to change people's lives for the better. And it's a nice example of how Web and social media technologies can be used to transform an essentially static document into an engaging online experience.

But don't take our word for it; listen and watch what Bill himself has to say.

And after you've had a chance to read the letter, be sure to hop over to Tom Paulson's Humanosphere blog to watch data visualization whiz Hans Rosling illustrate, in beautiful and dramatic terms, the point of Gates' letter.

-- Mitch Nauffts

 

The Benefits of Multiyear Grantmaking: A Funder's Perspective

(Sandy Edwards is associate director of the Jim Joseph Foundation, which seeks to foster compelling, effective Jewish learning experiences for young Jews in the United States.)

Cultivating a collaborative funder-grantee relationship built on trust, transparency, and shared knowledge requires a concerted effort on the part of both parties. In twenty-five years of grantmaking, I've also seen how multiyear grantmaking serves as a catalyst in cultivating this type of relationship, which in turn can be a key element in helping a funder achieve its strategic priorities and in helping grantees achieve success.

When it was founded in 2006, the Jim Joseph Foundation made a deliberate decision to focus on multiyear grants. Now, there is no right or wrong way to do grantmaking, but for the foundation multiyear grantmaking seemed like the most effective way to achieve our strategic goals. It encourages a relational approach to philanthropy that defines our foundation and, we believe, is critical to our ability to leverage our financial and human capital. Today, as the foundation approaches its seventh anniversary, we can begin to assess the effectiveness of that strategy beyond anecdotal outcomes.

First, a few statistics: 92 percent of the $270 million in grants awarded by the Jim Joseph Foundation since its creation have been multiyear grants; 84 percent were awarded for a period of three years or more. Moreover, our own experience with the positive outcomes of this approach has been supported by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which in 2006 conducted a survey that documented the impact of such a strategy. Among other things, the report based on the survey suggested

that foundations ought to provide operating support grants that are larger and longer term than the vast majority of foundation grants today. Moreover, these grants must be provided by foundations -- and individual program officers -- [so as to align with] the dimensions most valued by grantees: high-quality interactions; clear communications of goals and strategy; and demonstrated expertise and external orientation.

Despite CEP's compelling analysis, multiyear grantmaking appears to be declining as a foundation strategy. A 2012 analysis by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy of Foundation Center data found that multiyear grantmaking declined some 21 percent in 2009, to $5.5 billion from its $6.9 billion peak in 2008. When the nation's largest grantmaker, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is excluded from the analysis, reported multiyear grantmaking declined by more than a third. The June 2012 Foundation Center report Foundation Growth and Giving Estimates likewise found that approximately 20 percent of the more than one thousand foundations that responded to a center survey indicated they planned to give less in multiyear grants in 2012 than in 2011.

We believe it is important to reverse this trend. At the Jim Joseph Foundation, we believe multiyear grantmaking is a critical component of grantee sustainability and is vital to achieving the ultimate objective of a grant. Indeed, we have seen the tangible benefits of this strategy:

Regular communication between funder and grantee improves implementation and performance. Cultivating a relationship between foundation program professionals and grantees that includes regularly scheduled phone calls, site visits, and communication via e-mail helps to build trust, which leads to improved project implementation and performance by all involved. If nothing else, the foundation program officer gains a deeper understanding of the project and, when a problem arises, is better positioned to recommend strategies to address the problem and/or a reallocation of resources.

The grantee's organizational capacity is bolstered by a longer grant period. JJF awarded $15 million over a five-to-six-year period to Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Yeshiva University to boost the number of highly qualified educators who work with Jewish youth and young adults. At the inception of the grant period, we invited the Parthenon Group to work with us to ensure efficient implementation of the grant and help strengthen the foundation-grantee relationship over the course of the grant period. Three years into the grant period, our grantees continue to acknowledge that the ongoing relationship with the foundation's board and staff has enabled them to work more effectively.

Ongoing grant review improves grant management by both the grantee and the foundation. Our grant awards are approved as "up to" amounts. What may seem like a detail actually is an important qualifier regarding how the grant budget and expenses are managed to achieve outcomes. As part of the review process, both the grantee and the foundation can make changes based on actual events and the learning that inevitably occurs over the course of a multiyear grant period.

Formative evaluation supports grantee success and summative evaluation of longer-term initiatives adds to learning in the field. Not only do multiyear grants allow for longer-term evaluations, they are important to our efforts to learn in that they enable ongoing conversations with evaluators and grantees. For example, the initial evaluation of a five-year grant to the Foundation for Jewish Camp to provide financial incentives for three thousand children to attend Jewish summer camp provided data on why the initiative was not achieving its enrollment benchmarks. Among other things, the evaluation found that the program only provided incentives to families willing to enroll their kids in a three-week session, whereas the targeted families were more likely to enroll their children in two-week sessions. As a result, the following summer the program extended incentives to families opting for a two-week session and exceeded its enrollment targets. This learning and its application to other FJC programs simply could not have occurred in the context of a single-year grant.

Longer grant durations provide opportunities to work with other funders to support the long-term sustainability of proven initiatives. One of our key strategies is to support our grantees' ability to secure sufficient financial resources to sustain an initiative/project, as well as to scale and/or replicate the initiative/project when appropriate. This requires identifying and cultivating other funders, which can be impractical, at a minimum, if the grant term is just a year or two. For example, the foundation awarded a five-year grant to another Foundation for Jewish Camp initiative to launch five new Jewish residential specialty camps -- camps that are well on their way to achieving financial sustainability. Because the term of the grant gave us and our grantee plenty of opportunity to inform the field of the program's emerging success, FJC was able to secure additional funding from the AVI CHAI Foundation to help fund a second cohort of specialty camps.

For the Jim Joseph Foundation, the decision to focus on multiyear grantmaking has been crucial to the evolution of our grantmaking strategy. And our grantees report that our approach enables them to respond to and overcome challenges with the assurance that they will have the time, resources, and support needed to do so. We have also learned significant lessons from our partners and have shared those lessons with the field. As we look forward to many more years of grantmaking, this knowledge will continue to inform our efforts to create effective and meaningful Jewish learning experiences that shape the lives of Jewish youth on their journey through life.

-- Sandy Edwards

Here Today, Not Gone Tomorrow

(Lisa Brooks is a co-founder of IssueLab and director of knowledge management systems at the Foundation Center. In her last post, she wrote about the importance of archiving old research.)

About a month ago, IssueLab received an e-mail from a man in Jackson, Michigan, who runs an organization focused on mentoring high-risk youth. He found a report on the IssueLab site he wanted to share at a meeting he was about to host, and he wanted to know how he could obtain twenty-five hard copies. The report, The Promise and Challenge of Mentoring High-Risk Youth: Findings From the National Faith-Based Initiative, was published in 2004 by Public/Private Ventures (P/PV). The fact that the report was published nine years ago by P/PV made his e-mail especially interesting.

As many of you know, P/PV, after thirty-five years in operation, closed its doors in the summer of 2012. About six months later, the Public Education Network (PEN), which had been doing good work for twenty-years, closed its doors. One of the last tasks both organizations completed was to partner with IssueLab to preserve their respective publications. So while neither organization is around today, anyone can browse P/PV's research reports, case studies, and evaluations or PEN's white papers, case studies, testimonies, opinion polls, and survey results through the special P/PV and PEN collections on the IssueLab site. And that's a good thing, because as our friend from Michigan can attest, these publications continue to provide data, insights, and case studies that can inform the efforts of those working in the fields of education and children, youth and families.

What would have happened to P/PV or PEN's publications had they decided not to turn over stewardship of their published collections to IssueLab?

In a recently released report from the Commonwealth Fund titled The Archives of U.S. Foundations: An Endangered Species, author John E. Craig, Jr. wrestles with exactly this question and provides the sector with a thorough accounting of why foundations need to take seriously the archiving of their own publications. Among other things, Craig argues that foundations play a key role in social change through their efforts to build "the knowledge base for social improvements and scientific advancement and, through the support of individual researchers, contributing to the nation's intellectual capital." What's more (and directly to the point of this post), Craig notes that "foundation records are also frequently one of the few sources for historical research on small, relatively short-lived organizations (and their leaders) that had significant impact in their day."

Neither PEN nor P/PV were short-lived organizations, and in this case IssueLab rather than a foundation has assumed responsibility for archiving their research and publications going forward, but Craig's point is no less valid: organizations close their doors, and it is up to other organizations and individuals to preserve their legacies and learnings. IssueLab continues to ensure that the work of P/PV and PEN will remain a part of the historic record and that their documentation of specific social problems and solutions designed to address those problems will continue to be shared.

The story of P/PV, PEN, and IssueLab is a hopeful one, and the attention that groups like the Commonwealth Fund are giving the issue of knowledge preservation is encouraging. But the question remains: How can the social sector shift from "knowledge preservation by chance" to a more sustainable approach that encompasses the complete cycle of knowledge generation, distribution, and preservation in perpetuity? At IssueLab, we're looking for answers and for thought partners. Use the comments section below to post your thoughts and ideas, and let's get this much-needed conversation started!

-- Lisa Brooks

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)

Newsmaker: Shawn Dove, Campaign Manager, Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Open Society Foundations

In October, the Open Society Foundations and the Foundation Center released a report, Where Do We Go From Here? Philanthropic Support for Black Men and Boys  (40 pages, PDF), which found, among other things, that philanthropic support for African-American men and boys has risen steadily over the past decade, from $10 million in 2003 to $29 million in 2010. At a time when nearly every major indicator of economic, social, and physical well-being shows that African-American males do not have access to the opportunities they need to thrive, the philanthropic sector is working to address this critical need on two fronts: by supporting organizations in the "black male achievement field" and by spotlighting the fact that more needs to be done to tackle racial and economic inequality in America.

In the foreward to the report, Shawn Dove, manager of the OSF-based Campaign for Black Male Achievement, noted that former Open Society board member Lani Guinier has long argued that African-American males are not unlike "canaries in the coalmine," in that their socioeconomic plight foreshadows many negative trends that eventually will affect the broader society. That explains why, for many, the well-being of African-American men and boys is not a "black issue." It is, as Dove said when we spoke to him recently, "an American issue." Moreover, he added, "[g]rantmakers should not enter th[e] field with the expectation that they can parachute in and save the day....We need to look at what's working, and to spread the word about what success looks like."

After more than twenty years working in the fields of youth development, education, and community building, including stints as a director of a Beacon School in Harlem, as creative communities director for the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, and as vice president for MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, Dove joined OSF in 2008. PND spoke with him in November, shortly after the release of the report.

Philanthropy News Digest: We've been told that America in 2012 is a post-racial society. Is it?

Shawn Dove: I guess that depends on one's definition and interpretation of "post-racial." If one's definition is a society in which there are no racial disparities when it comes to opportunity, access, and equity, I would say, "Not so much." In 2012, America aspires to be post-racial. But judging by the wealth gap, ethnic and racial disparities in access to high-quality education, and the number of people of color in the House and Senate, I'd say we still have some work to do.

PND: Countless studies and papers have outlined the many root causes of racial inequality in America. If the causes are clear, why do large portions of the African-American community continue to be adversely affected by disparities in education, health care, and employment?

SD: You know, that is the billion-dollar question. Two of our grantee partners, the American Values Institute and the Opportunity Agenda, have done extensive research on implicit bias in America, and what their research revealed was that far too many people hold unconscious racial prejudices that affect their decision making when interacting with races other than their own. So while retail sales managers, for example, will say they don't have racist attitudes or are not prejudiced, they'll also resist putting people of color, specifically African-American males, in roles that have direct contact with customers.

Americans of all ethnicities still have an exceedingly difficult time having honest conversations about race. There are a number of organizations and leaders who are organizing people to have discussions about racial disparities in our society, but a lot of work still needs to be done to change the behaviors that perpetuate inequality in this country.

In 2013, a film called American Promise will premiere and lift up the issue of black male achievement, offering all of us an opportunity to have an honest conversation about race and education in America. The film provides a rare look into the lives of two middle class black families as they navigate the ups and downs of parenting and educating their sons. With support from Open Society, the Ford Foundation, and the Fledgling Fund, as well as other partners, a national outreach campaign is being developed to empower boys, their parents, and educators to help close the black male achievement gap and deal with racial disparities.

PND: As journalist Gary Younge noted in a Nation article last year, the economic gap between black and white has grown since President Obama took office. What advice would you give the president as he prepares for his second term?

SD: We need to be clear about what the president inherited when he was elected in 2008, and how long it will actually take to turn things around, especially when the political process for moving legislation is fraught with partisan obstacles at every turn. Back then, the American economy was in free fall, and by the time Obama took office in January 2009, the economy was in a certified crisis. The president had to take certain measures to avert a full-out depression. Yet even with those steps, the country could not avoid the layoffs and high unemployment that followed -- something that affected all ethnicities and racial groups but hit African Americans the hardest.

Now that Obama has been re-elected and the economy is slowly recovering from the collapse of the housing bubble, we need a plan to lower the poverty rate and help raise low-income families into the middle class. We need policies and solutions that are systemic and sustainable and will endure past 2016. The administration also should develop more partnerships with the private sector to ensure that young people are developing employable skills, and it needs to focus on how education can help people become first-generation members of the middle class.

PND: According to Where Do We Go From Here?, foundation funding for African-American men and boys started to pick up after 2006. To what do you attribute the increase?

SD: Fearless leadership and innovation in the philanthropic sector. Data across issues that have been disaggregated by race and gender. And any number of leaders who have pushed strategies and formed coalitions around targeted solutions designed to improve the life outcomes of African-American men and boys.

PND: Have efforts like the Campaign for Black Male Achievement and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Philanthropy's Promise campaign helped to raise awareness of needs in the African-American community?

SD: The answer is a resounding yes. But, you know, even before philanthropy became more organized and coordinated around the issue, we were seeing greater investment in research and communications strategies to elevate the issue. Here at Open Society, our aim with the Campaign for Black Male Achievement was to keep the issue front and center in the public discourse, because we felt that if it dropped out of the conversation and if solutions were not identified and amplified, other things would wind up distracting us from addressing it. I think the same can be said of the Promise initiative, which in June, a year after its launch, had doubled the number of its partners to a hundred and twenty-five, representing nearly $3.4 billion in giving. These campaigns help shine a light on the needs of an underserved and underrepresented population, and how we are working to meet those needs.

PND: Tell us about the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. How did it come about? And how did you become involved?

SD: I would say an impassioned conversation inside philanthropy was ignited after an article titled "Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn" appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 2006. The article highlighted the many disparities and inequities confronting African-American men: indeed, at a time when the economy was booming and the nation's top earners were gaining significant wealth, African-American men were falling further and further behind. Well, the article ignited a conversation at OSF among staff who felt that an organization that prided itself on supporting a more democratic, fair, and just society and on empowering the most marginalized individuals in society to become agents in their own empowerment should be at the forefront of this issue. As I later learned, there was debate about whether the foundation should launch a campaign specifically targeting support for African-American men and boys, with some staff making a strong case that the foundation already was engaged in the issue through its investments in reform of the criminal justice system. But it eventually became clear to everyone that this was an opportunity to more directly address the causes of the "prison pipeline."

At the same time that discussion was happening, I was publishing a community newspaper called Proud Poppa for African-American Fathers and leading a youth ministry at my church. Prior to that, I had worked with Geoffrey Canada at the Harlem Children's Zone. After the foundation decided to launch the campaign, a number of people encouraged me to apply for the position of campaign manager. Eventually, I did, and that's how I got involved.

The campaign, which launched in 2008, was originally supposed to be a three-year initiative. But about eighteen months into it, OSF founder George Soros and the foundation's board decided to get rid of the term limits and, based on our early work, increased our budget. I think that decision helped other philanthropic institutions to better understand the severity of the problem and the foundation's deep commitment to addressing it over the long haul.

PND: Has the campaign had an impact? And how do you measure that?

SD: Well, that's the other billion-dollar question. Four years ago, when the campaign was launched, there was no clearly defined field of black male achievement -- or it wasn't acknowledged in the way it is today by researchers, policy advocates, practitioners, and funders. In that way, we have been successful beyond measure. Today there is a movement and a field of black male achievement. To achieve this in four years speaks to the commitment among organizations, individuals, and communities who are seeking to find solutions to the problems plaguing black men and boys. But while there's been a breakthrough on both the national and local level in terms of awareness and activity around the issue, the verdict is still out on how and whether the field is creating impact on a national scale. There is anecdotal evidence that it is, but that's the main reason why my colleagues and I argue that philanthropy needs a sustained commitment to this work.

Through its Boys and Young Men of Color initiative, for example, the California Endowment has helped to introduce a number of bills in California around school discipline and dropout/pushout rates; four of which have passed. The endowment also is helping to reduce the number of African-American boys engaged in the juvenile justice system. Elsewhere, the Knight Foundation re-launched an effort called Black Male Engagement that supports African-American males in their communities. The unique thing about the Knight initiative is that the foundation acknowledges -- correctly, in my view -- that the problem isn't with African-American men and boys, the problem is rooted in the system and the society in which African-American men and boys grow up. And so the initiative seeks to recognize and elevate the work of "regular" guys who are already adding value and contributing to their respective communities.

Open Society, in partnership with Echoing Green, also launched a Black Male Achievement Fellowship, to identify innovative social entrepreneurs who are focusing on ways to sustain black male achievement across a number of issue areas and a Leadership and Sustainability Institute for Black Male Achievement, a national membership organization that we believe will be the engine that sustains this work over the long haul. We've already seen a tremendous response to the institute after its official launch during our Innovation and Impact Forum for Black Male Achievement. To date, over four hundred organizations across the country have been identified and expressed a sincere commitment to join efforts designed to improve the life outcomes of black men and boys.

Ultimately, however, it is important that we acknowledge that this is a generational issue that will require a long-term commitment. The challenges that prevent black male achievement come out of decades and centuries of systemic injustices. So to expect that after four years of a campaign we would reverse these trends is reflective of the general state of philanthropy, which often will focus on a hot or popular issue of the moment but, after a few years, will move on to the next pressing issue. If we hope to truly measure impact and see change we must commit for the long term.

PND: Even as some of the biggest foundations are stepping up their support for African-American men and boys, the sector continues to wrestle with its own diversity challenges, including the relative lack of minority representation on foundation boards or in foundation leadership positions. Is that an issue of there not being enough qualified minority candidates for these positions? And if so, what can foundations do to help boost the size of the applicant pool?

SD: It's definitely not an issue of there not being enough qualified candidates for these positions. Anyone who states that is not looking hard enough -- there are fellowships, internships, more aggressive recruiting tactics, and even affinity groups out there that can help organizations find qualified people of color to fill open positions. I do think we are seeing an increase in the diversity of leadership, but we have a long way to go to get where we need to be, especially when we closely examine diversity data at the trustee and CEO level.

PND: Given President Obama's re-election, are you at all encouraged by general trends in society with respect to African Americans, particularly men and boys?

SD: Oh, yes, I'm an eternal optimist. As you know, our recent Innovation and Impact Forum brought together leaders from every sector who are focused on the issue, including folks from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's Young Men's Initiative as well as Cities United, an effort led by Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter and New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu to galvanize municipal leaders to respond to the unacceptably high number of violent deaths of African-American men in cities nationwide. The issue has definitely gained traction at the municipal level, and I feel optimistic about the pace of our progress.

But as we look more closely at how we measure impact and promote what works, I am concerned about the sustainability of our efforts. There are groups doing phenomenal work, and they need continued support. What America really needs is something like a corporation for Black Male Achievement that would allow an endowed philanthropic social enterprise to really lean into this issue and create lasting change.

PND: What would you say to your colleagues in other foundations about the importance of this issue?

SD: Well, I would say that this is not a "black issue," it is an American issue that has a negative impact on all of us. I would ask them to focus on assets and not deficits. Grantmakers should not enter this field with the expectation that they can parachute in and save the day. I truly believe that the answers to the challenges African-American men and boys are facing reside in the hearts, minds, and hands of African-American men and boys. It's this whole idea of the power of positive deviance. We need to look at what's working, and to spread the word about what success looks like.

I would encourage my colleagues who ask "Why an explicit focus on African-American men and boys?" to look at the data. Once they do, I believe they will join us and the many other foundations working to build and strengthen the African-American community. I would also challenge my colleagues to think about how we can increase public-private collaboration around this issue, and about being in this for the long haul. We're not going to create lasting change with a three- or five-year campaign, or by launching another initiative. The philanthropic community needs to give this issue the time and support it requires.

Lastly, I would share a quote from one of my colleagues, John Jackson, CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education. In a speech he delivered at a recent grantmakers for education conference in New York City, John said, "Programs are progress, and we need progress. But policy is power." And with that, I would like to encourage my colleagues to invest in advocacy and policy change, not just programs. We are dealing with systemic and structural barriers that I believe can only be addressed and solved through policy reform.

-- Regina Mahone

Collaborative Relationships Between Nonprofits and Educators

(Erin Palmer, a writer and editor for University Alliance, writes about nonprofit and public sector topics covered by master of public administration degree programs. This is her first post for PhilanTopic.)

Some of the most stunning inhabitants of the natural world -- the sea anemone, the hummingbird, the orchid -- owe their intricate and variegated beauty, at least in part, to a basic biological process: symbiosis. When human beings and the institutions we shape interact in this manner, we call it "collaboration."

Of course, no living creature exists independent of its environment, and nonprofit organizations are no different. Just as the most beautiful orchids will not bloom without pollination from an outside source, nonprofits must also cultivate collaborative relationships with community leaders, including educators, in order to achieve their full potential.

Getting Started

The first step is recognizing that an educational institution, whether a local K-12, a large research university, or a private liberal arts college, is more than just a place of learning for enrolled students; it is also the locus of a wide variety of community resources.

Perhaps the most valuable of these resources is the students themselves. Regardless of the amount of time they spend sitting in a classroom, learners, whether age 6 or 60, function as whole human beings and not as just repositories of information. Each possesses singular talents, abilities, ambitions, and skills -- all of which can benefit a nonprofit, and vice versa, once a collaborative relationship is formed.

Just as the nonprofit should see the educational institution as an assemblage of valuable resources, so should the educator recognize that a nonprofit is an engine for positive change in the community. Whether socioeconomic equity, environmental stewardship, or the pursuit of human dignity and rights, a nonprofit's primary aim almost always will prove beneficial to the educator's (and students') community.

Cultivation

As in all new relationships, communication is key. Successful collaboration between a nonprofit and an educator hinges on each partner's understanding of the other's dreams. Or, more specifically, their DREAMS: Desires, Resources, Experience, Aims, and Motivations. Each party must offer and share the following information:

• The primary aim, including specific goals around mobilizing, strengthening, and/or changing the community
• Prior experience with service/volunteer and educational collaboration, including a clear understanding of the outcomes and impact
• Reason(s) for the current interest in a collaborative relationship
• Resources (time, money, materials, etc.) available for the collaboration
• Past, current, and anticipated methodologies for achieving primary goals
• Past, current, and anticipated challenges and successes in pursuit of primary goals

As communication between the parties flourishes, a relationship is cultivated. Each party should pay particular attention to areas of overlap with the other's dreams, and together they should determine their common need(s) and goals. A clearly defined and shared public purpose, such as instilling a service ethic in elementary school students or educating college students about the nonprofit's cause, informs every collaborative relationship.

Moving Forward

For educators and nonprofits, a shared purpose can facilitate consensus on operational design and management. Strategic planning should therefore anticipate the needs and resources of the community in which both partners operate --specifically, its people, systems of governance, and key institutions and organizations.

All these elements form the context in which a collaborative relationship is most likely to thrive, as do a strong and ongoing understanding of the socioeconomic, governmental, and cultural trends that shape the community on which the partnership is focused. Both the nonprofit and the educator must remain apprised of changes to and developments within the commmunity in question.

Adaptation

Longevity of any kind -- whether in species, relationships, or people -- depends on adaptation. In a collaborative relationship, the best way to adapt is to pair frequent and open communication with an ongoing reevaluation of the partnership's shared goals and performance.

The more flexible and innovative their methodology, the more likely the educator and the nonprofit are to achieve their goals -- and to remain committed to the relationship itself. Neither the orchid nor its pollinator achieved their collaborative beauty overnight. Patience is the orchid-grower's mantra. That said, today’s gardeners have the knowledge, tools, and resources neeeded to cultivate quite easily what were once considered nature's rarest blooms. They've learned, in fact, that orchids are not only surprisingly tough but marvelously adaptable. Your next collaborative relationship can be, as well.

-- Erin Palmer

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

Most Popular PhilanTopic Posts (October 2012)

Here in Manhattan, things post-Sandy are slooowly getting back to normal. For tens of thousands of people in Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey, "normal" will never be the same. Our thoughts and prayers are with all who lost loved ones. For everyone else, these were the most popular posts on PhilanTopic in October:

• Walking the Talk: Philanthropy 'Does' Big Data (Brad Smith)
• Preparing Students for College and Careers (Jessica Pliska)
• Of Fire Trucks, Obama, Romney and Philanthropy (Brad Smith)
• On 'Networked Nonprofits' and Measurement: A 'Flip' Chat With Beth Kanter (Regina Mahone)
• Hurricane Sandy Resource Page (Mitch Nauffts)

What have you read/watched/listened to lately that you liked?