PhilanTopic

U.S. Should Follow California's Lead on Immigration

(Ira S. Hirschfield is president of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. Robert K. Ross, MD, is president and chief executive officer of the California Endowment. And Timothy P. Silard is president of the Rosenberg Foundation.)

Equality of opportunity is a fundamentally American value. Throughout our history, we have taken important steps to make our country more equal and to bring opportunity to groups that were denied it in the past.

Today, with national leaders debating plans to reform America's broken immigration system, we may soon be taking the next step in this continuing journey. Getting reform right means keeping our core values front and center, and Californians are showing the way forward.

First, more about the problem. More than 11 million immigrants in this country (including nearly three million in California alone) are living in the shadows. Their invisibility and fear of deportation makes them vulnerable to exploitation at work, reluctant to report crimes or to participate in their communities, and hesitant to get health care when they and their families need it.

This situation is not good for anyone. The American economy and our society are better and stronger when everyone has an opportunity to participate. Having a permanent underclass of aspiring Americans who do not have the same rights as everyone else, and who cannot speak up for their interests without putting themselves and their families at risk, demeans our democracy and diminishes our values.

That is why federal immigration reform is so important. As Washington continues down the path to creating a better, more humane, and more efficient immigration process, it can learn a lot from what's happening in California. In recent years, our state has made important strides in bringing the values of equality and inclusiveness into the immigration debate.

Today, a decisive majority of Californians favor inclusive immigration policies that would allow undocumented people to stay in this country and eventually earn full citizenship rights. In addition, we were one of the first states to approve a law enabling the children of undocumented parents to have the same access to higher education as other young people. The California Dream Act became a model for other states and an inspiration for President Obama's program that allows young undocumented immigrants to apply for temporary work permits and a reprieve from deportation.

California is leading the way on these issues because it is home to one in four U.S. immigrants, as well as many heroic organizations that are advancing the cause of immigrant rights. Our three foundations are excited to be working with many of these organizations. Since we began supporting the movement for federal immigration reform years ago, we have had a front-row view of how nonprofit advocates across California have come together to educate people about the need for action on this issue at all levels. In addition, we have had the opportunity to work with other funders across the state to make sure that our combined support is having the greatest possible impact on the ability of the immigrant rights movement to achieve its goals.

And now, California advocates are taking the lead in defining the values that should drive the national immigration debate. Last month, in an effort coordinated by the California Immigrant Policy Center and the National Immigration Law Center -- two organizations that our foundations support -- more than one hundred leading civil rights and immigrant rights organizations outlined a set of core principles for reform.

These principles point the way to an inclusive immigration system that lives up to American values. Among the key principles these diverse groups recommend to national policy makers are:

• Creating a road to citizenship for 11 million new Americans that does not include long waiting periods or roadblocks.
• Protecting family unity for all immigrants, regardless of country of origin, race, religion, gender, age and sexual orientation.
• Guaranteeing access to health care for all residents.
• Protecting the inherent dignity and equal rights of all people by ending unjust detentions and deportation and other unfair treatment of immigrants.

The U.S. immigration system should reflect U.S. values. Lawmakers in Washington can learn a lot from California's experience. Let's hope they pay attention to the people and organizations that are working to make sure this state -- home to so many immigrants -- can become a place where they feel welcome and safe, are able to come out of the shadows, and can continue to contribute in positive ways to the economy and society.

-- Ira S. Hirschfield, Robert K. Ross, MD, and Timothy P. Silard

[Infographic] Healthy Food and Community Change in NYC

On Thursday, the New York City-based Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund launched its Healthy Food & Community Change initiative with a commitment of $15 million over five years for healthy food programs across the city.

As the fund-created infographic below illustrates, there are vast disparities in diet-related diseases across New York City. The initiative aims to address these disparities by supporting strategies designed to increase the availability, affordability, and knowledge of healthy foods while promoting healthy food choices in high-need neighborhoods.

In everything it does, the fund tries to leverage its impact through partnerships with nonprofits and other foundations, public-sector agencies, businesses, colleges and universities, and individuals. Do you know of any efforts that have made headway against the food-desert problem and or diet-related diseases? Share them with us -- and the folks at the Illumination Fund -- in the comments section below....

-- Mitch Nauffts

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)

'Latin Side of the Docs' in Mexico City

(Kathryn Pyle recently marked her fourth anniversary as a PhilanTopic contributor. In her last post, she wrote about Reportero, a new documentary by Bernardo Ruiz about embattled investigative journalists assigned to cover the drug wars in Mexico.)

Latin Side of the Docs, an annual marketplace and producers forum for documentary filmmakers, came to Mexico City earlier this month, attracting more than two hundred and fifty filmmakers and fifty industry representatives.

Filmmakers, broadcasters, and film distributors, most of them from Latin America, converged on the Spanish Cultural Center in the historic center of the city for the event. The center, which offers a variety of programs in a modern light-filled building, is located just behind the colonial-era Metropolitan Cathedral and ruins of Aztec pyramids bordering the Zócalo, the huge open plaza at the heart of the old city built by the Spaniards.

The three-day event was organized by DocsDF, a documentary film festival founded seven years ago in Mexico City, in collaboration with Sunny Side of the Docs, a longstanding international event/forum that matches documentary filmmakers seeking funds with broadcasters and distributors seeking good films. The organizers of Sunny Side now help stage similar events in Asia and, for the past four years, in Latin America -- the first three in Buenos Aires and now this year in Mexico City. Inti Cordera, a founder and the executive director of DocsDF, and Yves Jeanneau, a French filmmaker who created Sunny Side of the Docs, share a commitment. As Cordera put it, "We believe that documentary film is important and necessary, not just in terms of cinematic quality but also for the messages delivered."

The five-day "rendezvous" included a two-day seminar for producers and three days of opportunities for filmmakers to pitch their films. Pitch sessions included three distinct opportunities: sixteen films were selected for formal presentation involving trailers of the films and a discussion afterward, with broadcasters and distributors gently pressured to at least agree to meet with the filmmakers. In addition, nine films were presented as five-minute videos to a general audience in a "silent" pitch session, while filmmakers representing sixty-two other projects were scheduled for brief private meetings with broadcasters and distributors.

Taken as a whole, the films presented a range of stories and approaches, although the issue of borders and cross-border migration and their impact on culture and families was a recurring theme. Human rights, indigenous peoples' resistance to globalization, and the political history of the region were further proof of Latin American filmmakers' strong interest in social issue documentaries.

Among the filmmakers attending were Kimberly Bautista and Raul Paz Pastrana, who have a unique connection: both had received support from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, a New York City-based fund established to honor Grace Kelly's interest in the arts. The foundation, which is supported by contributions from individuals, private foundations, and corporate gifts and celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, gives awards annually to emerging artists in film, theater, and dance.

Kimberly Bautista received a grant from the foundation in 2008 to finish Justice for My Sister, a film about a domestic violence victim in Guatemala and the sister who pursues the case against the man who killed her. The project has screened extensively in Guatemala thanks to grassroots women's groups, many of which have included the film in their anti-violence campaigns. Bautista is now fundraising to add transmedia elements to her audience engagement plan as the project gains more exposure in the United States and elsewhere via screenings at various festivals. "I'm very happy with my experience here," she said over a lunch break at the Spanish Cultural Center's terrace restaurant. "Two European distributors are interested in picking up the film, and I’ve had positive meetings with several Latin American broadcasters."

Mexican filmmaker Raúl Paz Pastrana, who selected the School of Visual Arts in New York City for graduate studies because of its Social Documentary Film program, received a Princess Grace grant in 2011 for Ome, his film about an indigenous community in Ecuador fighting to preserve its land in the face of oil industry pollution. Paz Pastrana had been a community organizer working with native groups in the region, and he's now seeking funds to finish editing the film that that work inspired. "This is my first market event," he said during the lunch with Kimberly. "I've had a dozen meetings with broadcasters and distributors, but I'm not sure how it's going. I'm competing with people with much more experience in how to present a project."

For Yves Jeanneau, the director of Sunny Side of the Docs, that's exactly why the event is important. "Through this forum and similar events, I can see that Latin American documentary filmmakers are increasing their understanding of what production is all about. And, consequently, I'm seeing better-quality documentaries being brought to the table."

When I first wrote about Latin Side of the Docs in 2010, I mentioned Night Inside Me, a film about miners in Bolivia that was represented at the event by the film's director, Sergio Estrada. It was the first such event he had attended where he was invited for brief one-on-one meetings with industry representatives, and the experience and contact with other filmmakers convinced him he needed a partner with producing skills. Estrada brought on Valeria Ponce soon after, and I met them both at the Mexico City event. "I worked as a TV producer before, but I've learned that producing an independent film is much more than that," Ponce said over café con leche. Estrada and Ponce have been attending a variety of training sessions and industry meetings since the 2010 Buenos Aires event and were optimistic about the meetings they had scheduled at this one -- not least because their project was one of nine selected for a "video pitch" and online exhibition, promising significant added exposure for the film. "We need two more weeks of filming in the mine," said Estrada. Support so far has included funding from both the Bolivian mining company and a family foundation, and the miners' organization has been a partner in making the film.

These projects all illustrate Inti Cordera's concern about the production side of documentary filmmaking, one he shares with Yves Jeanneau. "DocsDF film festival was founded with the vision of not only creating a festival but also somehow contributing to the professionalization of a new generation of Latin American documentary filmmakers," Cordera told me. "That just isn't happening anywhere else. For instance, in Mexico there are two high-quality film schools -- the CCC (Centro de Capacitacion Cinematografica), which is supported by the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE), a government agency; and CUEC (Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematograficos), the oldest film school in Latin America, which is based at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM); both are in Mexico City. Plus, there are some good communications and filmmaking programs at other schools. But none of these schools provides training in production or industry issues. Latin Side of the Docs allows us to offer that support."

Interspersed in the three-day pitch event, panels such as how to co-produce with broadcasters, featuring representatives from Once TV Mexico (Latin American's oldest public television station), Discovery Networks Latin America, and National Geographic Latin America added to knowledge the filmmakers could take home with them.

The two-day "Ibero-American Producers Forum," part of Latin Side of the Doc and preceding the pitch event, offered even more intensive theoretical and hands-on consulting to about sixty pre-selected filmmakers. Among the presenters was Paola Castillo, from Chile Doc, a networking and support organization for Chilean documentary filmmakers seeking distribution. Castillo spoke about financing and co-production schemes and provided information about the major North American and European media funders, investors, and pitching opportunities. "Doing business is not just about money," she said. "You have to build relationships and confidence." But long before the fundraising begins, she added, filmmakers should ask themselves, "Why am I making this film, and for whom?"

Castillo seems clear about the answers to those questions for herself. A recent project, 74 Square Meters, is about families living illegally on land in Valparaiso, Chile, who, as part of a social experiment, are moved into apartments in a middle-class neighborhood -- or, as Castillo puts it, is it "really possible to integrate people from different classes?" With funding from ITVS International, a screening on PBS' Global Voices earlier this year, and broad distribution via iTunes and Amazon, the film illustrates a possible future for documentaries that was nicely posited by Jeanneau: "The old production trajectory is over," he said. "It's no longer a sure path from festivals to broadcast or theatrical release. Even for films like Half the Sky, which was released recently on PBS, the real product is on the 'Net."

While the "decision makers" at Latin Side of the Doc included a number of North American and European distributors and broadcasters, Jeanneau noted that television space for documentaries is shrinking in those markets -- a result of the financial crisis and ensuing recession and increased competition from Internet platforms. He also noted that "In Europe right now, broadcasters are focusing mainly on domestic themes. The challenge is to create an audience for international issues."

In a sign of just how much the times have changed, one of the pitched films at Latin Side of the Docs, Pirate Copy, looks at film piracy in Mexico City, London, Dubai, and Senegal. Filmmaker Trisha Ziff reported that, as part of the documentary, she took Doris Dörrie, who is often referred to as "one of the most important cultural voices in Germany," to a popular pirate stand around the corner from the conference to film her encounter with a woman selling pirated copies of recent releases: three hundred a day at eighty cents each. None of Ms. Dörrie's films is available for legitimate purchase in Mexico, yet half of them were for sale on the street. In Senegal, Ziff reported, "There are no cinemas anymore, only pirates." When one of the Senegalese protagonists of her film travels from Paris to his home in Dakar, he discovers that within forty-eight hours the film he brought with him to show is being sold on the street as far away as Capetown, in South Africa. "We need to understand the phenomenon," said Ziff in closing. "What does it say about the future of film?"

What, indeed.

-- Kathryn Pyle

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

Preparing Students for College and Careers

(Jessica Pliska is the founder and executive director of The Opportunity Network, an intensive, six-year program designed to equal the playing field for high-achieving underserved high school and college students on the road to college and career success.)

The son of a mail courier and a homemaker, Eric Santiago is the first generation in his family to go to college. He grew up in a low-income family in the Fordham section of the Bronx. When his acceptance letter to Columbia University arrived, Eric made history, becoming the first student from his high school to ever gain admission to the Ivy League.

At Columbia, Eric was unprepared for the academic rigor. "I didn't even know what office hours were, let alone how to use them," he remembers. Assigned The Odyssey in freshman English, he found that many of his classmates had already read it -- in sixth grade. He learned to hold his own with students from tony prep schools who wore designer clothing to class while his blue jeans were stapled together. In his last semester, a financial aid snafu almost prevented him from registering for classes. Less resilient students drop out in the face of similar challenges.

Eric negotiated these situations, graduated in May, and recently landed his first job. But this makes him unusual -- only 10 percent of low-income students graduate college. This number is even more staggering when you consider how many more low-income students are starting college.

It's easy to blame academic unpreparedness or lack of financial resources, both critical issues. But according to a recent study by the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, "even after taking their demographic backgrounds, enrollment characteristics, and academic preparation into consideration, low-income and first-generation students are still at greater risk of failure" – an indication that "the problem is as much the result of [their] experiences during college as it is attributable to the experiences they have before they enroll." Indeed, while a student's academic or financial problems may seem trivial, the smallest of mishaps can spiral into debilitating problems, no matter how much the student wants to succeed.

That's why, in addition to academic preparation and financial aid, these students need a set of skills not taught in urban public schools, skills like problem-solving and self-advocacy. They need to build professional networks, cultivate mentors, and learn to manage the diversity of their new environments. Sounds simple, right? It isn't.

But it is only by teaching these skills that we will move beyond an episodic approach to education reform in which educators, funders, and policy makers focus sequentially on reducing high school dropout rates, then on improving college access, and finally on boosting college completion rates. Because, let's remember: College is not the final destination.

We need to prepare students with the skills they need not only for educational success but also for achieving their end goals -- including productive and rewarding careers.

That's why innovative new initiatives are working to ensure both college and career success. The Opportunity Network levels the playing field for high-achieving underserved high school and college students by creating access for them to career opportunities, professional networks, and competitive colleges. Our students have a 100 percent college graduation rate within six years, and 85 percent within four.

At the Opportunity Network, we make a six-year investment in our students' success. From the summer after a high school student's sophomore year through college graduation, Opportunity Network students receive comprehensive training in our "Career Fluency" curriculum, which includes career content, professional etiquette, college access and transition, and networks and social capital. That last piece ensures that they graduate with an extraordinary early network of influential people across a broad spectrum of industries.

To prepare for the transition to college, high school seniors go through an experiential college transition curriculum filled with problem scenarios in which they experience the frustrations and fears they are likely to encounter in college and work with their peers to find solutions to those problems. So when they feel that frustration, fear, or isolation on campus, they are able to recognize and work through it, rather than shut down and allow the problem to escalate beyond solution.

Many foundations are overhauling their strategies to figure out the best way to transition from support for college access to college and career success. Here are some approaches they should consider:

Expose students to the college environment as early as possible so they build self-confidence. Help them navigate a mock college campus. Have them learn through trial and error that a problem with their college credits is not handled at the credit union, or to ask the bursar's office for help if their registration is blocked because their government grant "hasn't come through," rather than miss three weeks of class waiting for a check to come in.

Relationships, and the social capital they create, can be game-changers. Eighty percent of job seekers find their jobs through a "hidden job market" —i.e., word of mouth. We need to help students at the high school level cultivate skills to create, sustain, and leverage personal and professional networks, and it starts with summer jobs or internships. Make no mistake: Learning how to build a network is a critical asset in college, one that students can use to find people to join a study group, pursue summer internships, or simply ask for help when they need it.

Encourage engagement and build communities on campus, both of which correlate to college success. Low-income students can feel disoriented at elite colleges and universities. They may feel uncomfortable making friends and getting involved in campus activities. We force our students to confront stereotypes of all kinds. We examine, discuss, and debate issues of race and class on campus, and the curriculum design spurs those conversations to be intense and personal, just as they will be on campus.

This approach requires educators to build the skills that young people need not only for college completion but also for career success. If funders invest in programs that teach students to solve real-world problems, build communities and social capital, and gain the confidence to advocate for themselves, many more low-income students like Eric will graduate and move on to rewarding careers.

And where is Eric today? He's the college success program assistant at the Opportunity Network, where he advises students on how to manage the transition to college.

-- Jessica Pliska

Librarians Reach Out to Spanish-Speakers on ‘Tell Me More’

(Kathryn Pyle recently marked her fourth anniversary as a PhilanTopic contributor. In her last post, she wrote about "Reportero," a documentary that tells the story of embattled investigative journalists assigned to cover the drug wars in Mexico.)

"Tell Me More," the National Public Radio news and chat program hosted by Michel Martin, had a segment this week about the Joint Conference of Librarians of Color, which met earlier this month in Kansas City. As I've periodically blogged here on PhilanTopic about a small-town library's efforts to meet the needs of a growing Latino population, the story caught my attention.

In the segment ("Librarians Reach Out to Spanish-Speakers"), guest host Celeste Headlee talked with international librarian consultant Loida Garcia-Febo about the conference and the challenges libraries face in a time of huge cultural change. As I listened to the discussion, I thought about the Adams County Library in south-central Pennsylvania and what it has figured out -- and is still trying to figure out -- in terms of serving the needs of Latino migrant workers in the area. The main takeaway for me: libraries must go beyond their traditional services to really understand who their new constituencies are, what those constituencies need, and what they can do to help meet those needs.

Consider, for instance, the fact that Latinos in the U.S. hail from many different countries, with different literary traditions. In that light, it suddenly becomes obvious that even expanding the traditional library product -- books – to these audiences is not as simple as it might seem.

"But libraries are much more than books," said Garcia-Febo. "We are also celebrating the cultures of our Latinos by presenting cultural programs and programs celebrating their music, their cuisine, and other programs that are more social. And those programs help our Spanish-speakers to understand public school systems in the United States and how to access health care."

It's a great segment, and I commend it to anyone who cares about libraries, cares about our increasingly diverse society, and cares about how information is accessed in a democratic society.

-- Kaye Pyle

Libraries and Latinos: Return to Adams County

(Kathryn Pyle recently marked her fourth anniversary as a PhilanTopic contributor. In her last post, she wrote about the Justice Matters series at Filmfest DC.)

Four years ago, in my first post for PhilanTopic, I described how the Adams County Library system in a rural part of south central Pennsylvania used a modest donation to try out some new ideas and improve its services for the growing Latino population in the area, mainly families and seasonal workers from Mexico.

Since then, thanks to PhilanTopic's broad and inclusive vision of civic life, I've written about a presidential inauguration, a "City of Trees," the first moon landing, transitional justice, a memorial park in Argentina, and -- most frequently -- social issue documentaries and the organizations that support them. Over that time, I've really enjoyed the opportunity the PND team has given me to refine my vision of the nexus of philanthropy and social justice. But today, because this is my thirtieth (!) post for PhilanTopic, I thought it would be interesting to revisit Adams County to see what, if anything, has changed.

I caught up with library director Rob Lesher on his way to the annual library book sale, which was organized by the Friends of the Library at the main branch in Gettysburg; Lesher told me they hoped to raise at least $25,000. That's a lot of used books and a big shot in the arm for any library in an era of government cuts.

"It's been a challenge financially," says Lesher. "But the big news is that this summer we've seen the highest circulation months in our history. Seventy-five thousand items circulated in July, part of a fifteen-year pattern of growth. And 2011 was a record year, with seven hundred and fifty thousand items circulated; we'll equal that this year. Despite the cutbacks, we've managed to expand our services to Latinos. The key has been experimenting with new programs and partnering with community organizations."

As described in my first post about the library, the strategy to reach Latino families included operating a bookmobile with materials in Spanish through the northern end of the county, offering a story-time in Spanish for Latino children, and the acquisition of more Spanish-language magazines. Over time, staff at the library also became aware that the skills and needs of the Latino community were changing.

"In the past, the family member with the strongest English skills, often a child, would be designated to interface with services and programs," says Lesher. "That’s changed, as there's now a whole generation of children who are native English speakers and the parents themselves are more comfortable in English situations. We're seeing more families, not just children, coming to the library to use the computers and take out books. We've discontinued the Spanish-language story-time as the Latino children began attending the English-language story-time program. We still have a small percentage of our materials budget dedicated to Spanish texts, and the bookmobile certainly is still important in reaching the Latino community. But with so many publications now online, there's not as much available and not as much demand for magazines. The library is transitioning as the community matures."

Part of the transition has been the hiring of a Latina, Marisol Rivera, as a library assistant to staff the main desk of the Harbaugh-Thomas library in the town of Biglerville, the largest branch in the northern end of the county and the center of the fruit-growing region where many of the migrant workers in the area and its fruit-processing labor force lives.

"Marisol has been a wonderful addition,” says Lesher. "Her presence has created a welcoming environment and has certainly contributed to the increase in Latino families coming into the library."

Partnerships with community-based organizations also continues to be a key to reaching the region's Latino population. This summer's "Roads to Freedom" program, a treasure hunt created around local history (the Civil War, Native Americans, local industry, quilting and other crafts) that also encourages kids to be physically active as they track clues around the county, is sponsored by Well-Span Health, a local health services corporation. So far, nearly eight hundred booklets with clues and information have been distributed through the library system.

"When we were planning Roads to Freedom," says Lesher, "we consulted with Latino community organizations about also printing the booklets in Spanish. Their recommendation was to include a bilingual welcome but keep the rest of the text in English. This is part of an evolving approach: our target now is an outcome, and to reach the goal we include the community in planning how to best achieve it, but we're finding that as the community matures the needs are different."

An example is the Harbaugh-Thomas library computer center, which I mentioned in my first post as a resource for Latinos seeking to access news from Mexico, e-mail, and other information. In a new program, the library provides the computers and Latino organizations provide the trainers and people, bringing them to the library to learn how to use a computer.

And in a change that might say as much about the community as anything, there is increased interest in bilingual publications, suggesting not only a "maturing" Latino population but also a growing willingness on the part of English speakers to engage with Spanish. "We’re moving more toward that now," says Lesher." It's what people want."

-- Kathryn Pyle

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

How Foundations and Immigrant Organizations Can Respond to Supreme Court SB 1070 Ruling

(Walter Barrientos is a program officer at the New York City-based North Star Fund.)

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the most chilling provision of the Arizona law known as SB 1070, a provision that allows police to stop anyone they believe to be undocumented and check their immigration status.

For most immigrants, including me and my family, the message from the Supreme Court is clear: the police have been appointed de-facto immigration agents. This means that any time an immigrant is the victim of a crime, he will have to ask himself, Is what just happened to me worse than being questioned about my immigration status, being detained, and possibly deported by the police?

I had to face this question myself when I was assaulted three years ago by gang members on the streets of Queens. At the time, I decided to call the police and report the crime. But when I was summoned to testify in court against the individuals who assaulted me, my knees grew weak. I knew that if my undocumented status were revealed in the course of testimony, I could find myself in deportation proceedings.

Because I had years of experience organizing immigrant communities, I was able to call an attorney friend who worked with community leaders to teach immigrants like me about our rights. From her, I learned that there's a visa for victims of violent crimes like the one I had been a victim of, and today I have that visa. But few immigrants have a trusted contact, as I did, to provide critical information.

My experience shows why it so important for us to build a robust network of immigrant organizations and leaders who can organize immigrants to protect and advocate for their rights. Thanks to the Supreme Court decision, local police departments in Arizona and at least four other states are no longer an institution immigrants can trust. Instead, immigrants must rely on their own community organizations and leaders as the first line of support and advice in critical situations, as well as to assert larger immigrant rights issues in public and policy forums.

From my vantage point as both a funder and a community organizer, there are several steps that community-based organizations and leaders need to take to build their strength and expertise in order to respond to the changing immigration landscape. Here are a few of them:

1. Community organizations need to build their capacity to reach deeper into and build stronger ties with members of immigrant communities. And they need to bolster their efforts to reach even the most marginalized members of those communities to ensure that everyone has basic information about immigration laws and that they trust the organization to be there for them in times of need.

2. Immigrant organizations need to build their capacity to respond to immigrant members who find themselves in dire situations, such as when an undocumented immigrant without a license is stopped by the police after he has gotten off work at 2:00 a.m., or when an undocumented immigrant has witnessed a crime and is afraid to report it. They need to expand their staff and train staff members to be liaisons between community members and police or immigration authorities. Staff also need to be trained and accredited by the Department of Homeland Security to represent individuals in detention. Organizations should encourage all their constituents, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, to complete the G-28 form, which allows accredited representatives to represent them in any immigration detention or matter.

3. Members of immigrant communities need to be taught how they can cooperate with the police without putting themselves at risk of deportation. This is a complex proposition but is critically important.

4. Legal groups, advocacy groups, and others need to develop and push for legislation like the California TRUST Act, which aims to rebuild much needed trust between police and California's immigrant communities. This legislation could offer a smarter alternative to punitive laws like Arizona SB 1070.

The foundation community has an opportunity in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to build on the best of our immigrant traditions by reaching out to our immigrant neighbors and the organizations that represent them and by supporting greater respect for immigrant cultures, immigrant rights, and immigrants’ sizeable contributions to our economic, social, and political life. Immigrants who pooled resources to support families back home were among the earliest American philanthropists. It's time to show them our gratitude.

-- Walter Barrientos

Movement Building and System Change

The bad old days of the '70s and '80s are a distant memory for many, but New York City in 2012 isn't without problems. The list includes a public education system that fails too many kids, a chronic shortage of affordable housing, immigrant populations that lack basic protections, and rising income inequality.

The city is home, however, to roughly ten thousand nonprofit organizations, some 70 percent of which provide direct services to constituents. A sizable percentage of these groups work at the grassroots level and many have a social justice orientation, working in and with communities and populations that are marginalized and underresourced.

How the good work of these groups can be leveraged more effectively to drive social change was the topic of an interesting panel discussion hosted by Philanthropy New York I was fortunate to attend earlier this spring.

Moderated by the Foundation Center's Lisa Philp and featuring Hugh Hogan, executive director of the North Star Fund, Ana Oliveira, president and CEO of the New York Women's Foundation, and young leaders from four grassroots nonprofit organizations, the discussion focused on strategies that funders and donors can pursue to help community-based nonprofits create a more fair, just, and compassionate New York.

Early in their respective careers, both Hogan and Oliveira realized that social justice -- a concern "for those who are the least well off politically, economically and socially" -- would shape and inform their life's work. Hogan's "a-ha" moment came in Senegal and Namibia, where he spent nearly a decade working to reverse a legacy of colonialism and apartheid. That experience eventually led him to the Open Space Equity Campaign for the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, which he served as director from 1999 to 2003. Back then, Hogan told us, eight out of ten communities affected by environmental problems in NYC were communities of color; today, seven out of ten are immigrant communities.

Oliveira worked in the health and human services field for over twenty years, developing programs for vulnerable populations in New York, and then served as the first woman and Latina director of Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the oldest and largest AIDS service organizations in the country, before joining NYWF in 2006. The organization, which is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, was established, Oliveira noted, around what many people at the time thought was "a crazy idea": that women from all walks of life and with different interests could come together to address the root causes of economic injustice. But come together they did, and the organization flourished. Today, NYWF funds women leaders and women-led organizations seeking to create positive change in the lives of women, girls, and communities in the metro New York region and works closely with its grantee partners to incorporate their "front-line" expertise into its grantmaking strategies. Or, as Oliveira put it, the organization is "intentional [about] following its grantee partners and leading its donor partners."

As impressive as Hogan and Oliveira were (and are), the real stars of the afternoon were the four young nonprofit leaders who had been invited to talk about their work: Jaron Benjamin, an organizer at VOCAL-NY, which works to organize low-income people affected by HIV/AIDS, drug use, and incarceration; Priscilla Gonzalez, executive director of Domestic Workers United, an organization of nannies, housekeepers, and elder caregivers that led the six-year campaign for the nation's first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights; Daniel Gross, co-founder and executive director of Brandworkers International NY, a nonprofit that works to protect and advance the rights of retail and food employees in the city; and Kris Hayashi, co-director of the Audre Lorde Project, an LGBTQ center for community organizing.

All had compelling personal stories to share and all were poised beyond their years. They also were quick to give at least partial credit for their effectiveness as advocates to the coaching they received through North Star's Movement Leadership Program. Launched in 2010, the program was created in response to requests for technical assistance that the fund was getting from grassroots groups. The goal in creating the program, said Hogan, was to free up the leaders of these groups to think more strategically about how to run their organizations, to give them an opportunity to learn from their peers, and to get them thinking more in terms of a movement-building framework.

In its first year, the program awarded two-year grants of $50,000 (the fund's largest grant previously had been $15,000) to five organizations: New Immigrant Community Empowerment, Brandworkers International, Families for Freedom, VOCAL-NY, and DWU. Each organization also was invited to send a three-member team (the executive director, a leader from the board, and a member leader) to a series of workshops and trainings focused on the building blocks of community organizing: base building, leadership development, campaign strategy, and strategic communications.

While movement building as a strategy in these distracted times might strike some as quixotic, it was obvious to anyone in the room on this particular afternoon that the program had succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. And indeed, earlier this year North Star decided to fund a second group of grantees through the program that includes the Child Welfare Organizing Project, which works to transform the quality of services provided to New York City families through the city's child welfare system; DAMAYAN, a grassroots group that advocates for the rights of migrant workers; FIERCE, an LGBQT youth organization; VAMOS Unidos, a Bronx-based social justice organization founded by Latina/o and immigrant street vendors; and Picture the Homeless, a grassroots advocacy organization founded and led by homeless people. All are "in the process of expanding their organizations and work to a broader scale," says North Star program officer Walter Barrientos, and that's good news for the poor, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised in New York City.

But it's a drop in the bucket. As Hogan noted toward the end of the event: "If someone comes into a room with a bad cut on his leg, most people will say, 'We've got to get you to a doctor and get that taken care of'. But if a dozen people, each with a bad cut on his or her leg, walk into the room, sooner or later you have to ask, 'What the hell is causing all those cuts?'"

Social justice work is hard and not for the faint of heart. We've made progress as a country on a lot of fronts in the fifty-plus years I've been around. But there's more to do. It's heartening to know that passionate, talented leaders like Jaron Benjamin, Priscilla Gonzalez, Daniel Gross, and Kris Hayashi are working hard every day to make ours a more just and compassionate society, and that organizations like the North Star Fund and the New York Women's Foundation are willing to try new things and take risks to help leverage their efforts.

To learn more, click here.

-- Mitch Nauffts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Place & Race Matter
PolicyLink; California Endowment

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

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

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

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

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

-- Kyoko Uchida

2012 State of the Sector Survey

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

Business as usual, right?

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

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

Among the survey's findings:

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

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

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

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

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

-- Mitch Nauffts

This Week in PubHub: Minorities and Higher Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Kyoko Uchida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Regina Mahone