Weekend Link Roundup (February 27-28, 2016)

Our weekly round up of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

African Americans

My Brother's Keeper, the White House initiative aimed at improving outcomes for young men of color -- and President Obama's "most personal project" -- just celebrated its second anniversary. But is it making a difference? The Root's Theodore R. Johnson III reports.

Climate Change

Now that Walmart, Google, Goldman Sachs and other multinational corporations have pledged to reduce their carbon footprints, how can the global community hold them to their commitments? TIME's Justin Worland reports on one UN official who has been tasked with building a system  that aims to measure corporate efforts to address climate change.

Corporate Philanthropy

On the Triple Pundit site, Abby Jarvis, a blogger, marketer, and communications coordinator for Ogiv, an online fundraising service provider, offers some easy-to-implement CSR advice for businesses who are looking to do more to help nonprofits in their communities.

Data

In a post on the Benetech blog, Jim Fruchterman, the organization's foundation, uses the example of a small anti-poverty group in Uruguay to show how even basic attempts by nonprofits and NGOs to collect data as part of their program activities can lead to bigger and better things.

In the same vein, the folks at Tech Impact share four strategies designed to help your nonprofit deal with the "data deluge."

Governance

On the BoardSource blog,  Jermaine L. Smith, development director at Educare New Orleans, has some tips for nonprofit organizations that are looking to diversify their boards but may not know how to get started.

How to Mobilize Youth in Service

Any young person can be a hero. Few embody that truism better than Hawaiian Brittany Amano, who at the age of 12 founded a nonprofit organization called the Future Isn't Hungry. But a young person shouldn't have to found an organization in order to make a difference. The good news is they don't have to.

While Brittany's entrepreneurial drive and success are unique, her passion for public service is not. According to a 2012 study by DoSomething.org, 93 percent of young people in America say they are interested in volunteering, yet only a fraction end up taking the steps needed to actually become involved. As the executive director of the Jefferson Awards Foundation, I've been privileged to meet many young people across the country who are determined to serve their communities. And along the way I’ve learned that the biggest barrier to youth participating in service is accessibility.

Based on the lessons we have learned from our three youth-oriented programs, the Jefferson Awards Foundation has established a four-step process that engages young people in service by focusing on their interests and making participation easy, fun, and accessible. The steps are:

1. Ask kids what they care about. You’d be amazed by the things young people notice — and by how deeply they think about issues that matter to them. If a kid sees a homeless veteran on the street, she's likely to wonder about the reasons behind the veteran's homelessness and how she can help. If he sees milk bottles piling up in the trash bins in his cafeteria, he's likely to wonder how he can get his school to recycle. Simply asking kids what kinds of problems they've been thinking about and their ideas to solve them can lead to an overwhelmingly constructive response that can be channeled into public service.

5 Questions for...Katherine Lorenz, President, Cynthia & George Mitchell Foundation

Not yet forty, Katherine Lorenz has been active in the social sector since her early twenties, notably as co-founder of Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, a nonprofit organization working to advance food sovereignty in rural Mexico. For most of her career, Lorenz thought of herself as a grantseeker rather than as the person who would end up heading the family foundation established by her grandfather, George Mitchell, a Texas wildcatter who amassed a fortune in the natural gas industry and pioneered the cost-effective use of hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") to extract gas from shale. However, a stint as deputy director of the Institute for Philanthropy — which later merged with the Philanthropy Workshop, where she serves as chair — convinced her that her nonprofit experience could be valuable to the Texas-based foundation. Elected president of the foundation in 2011 and named "One to Watch" by Forbes in 2012, Lorenz has become a respected speaker on topics related to environmental sustainability, NextGen philanthropy, and nonprofit leadership and has helped guide the foundation's emergence on the national stage as it waits for a final, significant infusion of funds from her grandfather's estate.

Philanthropy News Digest spoke recently with Lorenz about the difference between "good" and "responsible" donors, the foundation's strategic planning process, and its efforts to support sustainable land-use practices in Texas and the Southwest.

Philanthropy News Digest: You've carved out an interesting career in the social sector. Are you at all surprised to find yourself leading your late grandfather's foundation?

Katherine Lorenz: Yes and no. I never really envisioned that I would work on the grantmaking side. Working in the field, in rural communities in Latin America, was my first pro­fessional love. I really enjoyed the work I did with a group called Amigos de las Americas and then in founding Puente a la Salud Comunitaria and leading that organization for six years in Oaxaca, Mexico. I really believed that was my passion and that I would always stay connected to the grantseeking, imple­mentation side. A few people asked if I saw myself going on to work in the foundation at some point; my answer was always no.

But several things happened: the primary one was that I went through the Philanthropy Workshop and had an "a-ha" moment, thinking about where can I have the most impact with my time and the work I do. It became clear while I was working on the grantseeking side how good donors who are well-informed can have a much bigger impact than people who are just writing checks. There's nothing wrong with providing funding, but I learned to recognize how great it was to work with good donors and how difficult it was to work with not-as-good donors, which helped me recognize the power of being a really smart, thoughtful, informed donor.

PND: How would you distinguish a good donor from a bad donor?

KL: I hate to use the term "bad donor" because I think all donors are really driven to have an impact, and for the most part they're not doing harm. There are some cases where, completely inadvertently, good intentions lead to significant problems. Something that might seem like a simple solution could have much larger — and negative — implications. For example, disaster relief that ends up destroying local markets. Then there are donors who are difficult to work with.

I think a lot of donors feel that, to be a "responsible" donor, they need to be strict with their grantees, making sure that only a certain amount goes to overhead. Or maybe they won't fund administrative costs or salaries and will only fund direct program costs, or require some additional type of reporting that's unique to them to make sure they're getting the impact they want to see. What I've found is that by trying to be a responsible donor, you can sometimes make it more difficult for the organization receiving the grant. I told one donor that we would rather not take their money than have to do what they were asking, because what they were asking would cost more than what they were willing to give us.

One of my pet peeves is the overhead conversation. When I was applying for and receiving grants, I felt it was very clear to me, as the organization's executive director, where we needed support and where we didn't. We did everything on a shoestring. We couldn't have a computer for all our employees, or our computers were so old they didn't work, or we couldn't pay to have the right software to run the accounting systems we needed. Even office space or an additional car — really basic things — all count as overhead. But none of it was wasteful, it was necessary. We couldn't do our work in the field without those things.

One area I felt was particularly important that no one wanted to fund was strategic planning. To achieve the most impact it can, an organization needs a strategic plan. But that's investing in the institu­tion and overhead, which many of our donors were not interested in funding. So, when a donor would come to me and ask, "What do you want to do that no one will fund?" — which wasn't often — that was incredibly helpful. Whereas, a different donor might say, "In addition to tracking that annually, we want you to track this other thing over here every six months, and money should only go to programs." Both would think they were doing a good job, but the difference in dealing with those types of donors, in terms of pursuing our mission, was night and day.

5 Questions for...Gregorio Millett, Vice President and Director of Public Policy, amfAR

National Black AIDS Awareness Day, February 7, was established in 1999 in response to the HIV and AIDS epidemic in African-American communities. More than fifteen years later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that while the number of new HIV diagnoses in the general population fell 20 percent between 2005 and 2014, the prevalence of HIV among African Americans remains significantly higher than it is for other racial/ethnic groups, while the rate of new diagnoses among young black men is rising.

Earlier this month, PND spoke with Gregorio Millett, vice president and director of public policy of amfar, the Foundation for AIDS Research, about the impact of HIV/AIDS on the African-American community and ongoing efforts to address it.

Philanthropy News Digest: What is the most striking finding in the 2014 HIV Surveillance Report, as well as the finding that surprised you the least? And what do current trends in the HIV data mean for the African-American community?

Gregorio Millett: What surprised me the least was the fact that the number of new HIV diagnoses is falling among injection drug users; that's something we've known for quite some time, and it's incredibly encouraging to see that trend continue nationally. And there were two things that surprised me: The first was the 42 percent decline in HIV diagnoses among African-American women nationally between 2005 and 2014; we knew that diagnoses were decreasing, but we didn't realize they were falling that rapidly. The other interesting thing is that, in the last five years, diagnoses have remained stable, for the most part, for African-American men who have sex with men — though for the ten-year period it actually increased — while the number of diagnoses has been increasing for Latino men who have sex with men. So the fact that we really need to start focusing more on Latino MSM was interesting.

That said, the overall prevalence of HIV is greater among African Americans compared to all other racial and ethnic groups; we've had a higher prevalence in the black community since the mid-1990s. The good news is that for most African Americans, HIV rates are declining at a rapid rate. The bad news is that rates are not declining among gay and bisexual men, who comprise most of the new infections in the black community. Another issue for the African-American community is that even though HIV rates are declining, African Americans overall are still more likely to die from HIV/AIDS compared to whites or Latinos, even though we now have very effective medications that enable people with HIV to live a normal lifespan.

PND: What are the key factors behind the persistently higher rates of HIV prevalence among African Americans?

GM: There are several. The first is that HIV prevalence is just higher in black and Latino communities, particularly among gay men, and when you have more people living with HIV, it means there are more opportunities to transmit HIV, so higher prevalence begets a greater number of diagnoses. Another huge issue is healthcare access; we know that whites are more likely to have access to health care in the United States compared to Latinos or African Americans, and if you don't have access to health care and you're HIV-positive, you're less likely to be on medication or virally suppressed, and therefore you're more likely to transmit HIV to your partners.

A third issue is that, quite frankly, we haven't focused on where HIV is really hitting the black and Latino communities. When you take a look at the cumulative dollars for research, for care, for prevention, they're going primarily to heterosexual communities and injection-drug-using communities. Unfortunately, from the very earliest days of the epidemic, that's not necessarily where HIV has hit hardest. A lot of that has to do with our society not being able to talk about HIV, which has been concentrated among gay and bisexual men, honestly, because our politics didn't allow us to talk honestly about gay and bisexual men. Instead, we say that everybody is at risk for HIV, which just isn't true; some groups are at far higher risk. So, from a historical perspective, there has been less money to address HIV among Latino and black gay men, and there has been less press and attention from black and Latino leaders. And you see that in the rates of HIV infection for those groups. In the African-American community, for instance, the overall infection rate is about 2 percent; among black gay men, it's about 30 percent. In other words, one in three black gay men is living with HIV. And if you look at the campaigns and initiatives led by black leaders, members of Congress, celebrities, and so on, they're doing wonderful work but they're talking about HIV among women or babies — U.S. populations where there is actually very little HIV. What we need is a realignment of those efforts to focus on dealing with HIV where it is still a problem in the black community.

Weekend Link Roundup (February 20-21, 2016)

Our weekly round up of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Arts and Culture

In a piece for the Huffington Post, Robert Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, looks at five macro trends that nonprofit arts organizations need to watch.

Fundraising

You would think that finance and fundraising professionals at most nonprofits go out of their way to be collegial and collaborative. According to Andy Segedin, you would be wrong.

Governance

Good post by Eugene Fram on the role trustees and directors should play in overseeing nonprofit management/staff.

Higher Education

Is the traditional college education an endangered species? Of course it is, says MIT computer science professor and serial education entrepreneur Anant Agarwal. The [email protected] team reports.

Inequality

Nicky Goren, president and CEO of the D.C.-based Eugene and Agnes Meyer Foundation, suggests that "many of the barriers and challenges facing low-income communities are the product of generations of systemic inequity," and that business and nonprofit leaders need "to have an open and candid conversation about racism before we can move from treating the symptoms of inequality to tackling its causes."

What do entrepreneurs and tech visionaries in Silicon Valley understand about income inequality and the threat it poses to global prosperity? Not a whole lot, write Jess Rimington and Joanna Levitt Cea, visiting scholars at Stanford University's Global Projects Center, and Martin Kirk, head of strategy for activist website The Rules, on FastCoExist.

The practice of tipping is rooted in slavery -- and it continues to hurt American workers today. The Ford Foundation's Elizabeth Wann explains.

Fairfield County’s Community Foundation’s New Paradigm for Community Philanthropy

Historically, community foundations have worked to create change by making grants to local nonprofits, advocacy groups, and other organizations.

But a new breed of funders is showing how, by serving in a different role, community foundations can foster change that is more comprehensive, more responsive to residents' needs, and, hopefully, more enduring. This new role involves reaching into the very roots of the community and engaging and empowering the people who call it home.

That's the approach Fairfield County's Community Foundation (FCCF), based in southwestern Connecticut, is taking with its PT Partners initiative. Our goal is nothing less than to create a national model for engaging and training public housing residents to lead change in their neighborhoods.

Jointly funded by the Citi Foundation, the Low Income Investment Fund, and FCCF, PT Partners is housed at PT Barnum Apartments, a 360-unit public housing development in Bridgeport situated next to a notorious brownfield and, incongruously, not far from a yacht club. Long known for unacceptable levels of crime and poverty, PT Barnum is home to more than eleven hundred children and adults. The goal of the initiative is to make the complex a safer, healthier, and overall better place for its residents — or, as we like to say, to transform it into a community of equity and opportunity. And as part of that process, we are working to turn PT Barnum residents into majority stakeholders of the effort and hold them responsible for driving change; after all, they're the experts on the needs and hopes of their community.

But in order to have a chance to succeed, PT Barnum residents first needed two things: to understand their own power — and to learn how to use it.

The Power of ‘The List’: 4 Ways to Maximize Your Contact List

As the smoke clears from another end-of-year fundraising season, fundraisers and nonprofit leaders are starting to assess how their campaigns and strategies worked.

While there are countless assets to every fundraising campaign, today I want to discuss what in my opinion is one of the most important – "the list."

The list I’m referring to is your database of names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers – the repository of all the contact information you have on current, lapsed, and potential donors.

At the beginning of every new year, fundraisers and development professionals have a simple goal: develop a fundraising strategy that will yield more revenue for their organizations so they can fulfill their missions and scale their efforts to do more good. So, why should they worry about a list of contacts?

Take it from me. You can have the best mission, the best creative, the best design, and the best messaging in the world, but none of it will matter if your list isn't up to the job. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the "health" of your contact list is probably the single greatest factor in the success (or failure) of your next fundraising campaign.

That's right. So, don't waste another day wondering whether you need a new direct mail strategy or your messaging is off. Until you've taken these steps to strengthen your list, everything else is putting the cart before the horse:

Weekend Link Roundup (February 13-14, 2016)

Our weekly round up of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Civic Engagement

While the Latino population of the United States has quintupled over the last forty years, Latino voter registration has not kept pace. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Ryan Schlegel argues that foundations committed to long-term systemic change can do more than they have been to close the gap and shares four things they should bear in mind as they consider investing in civic and electoral participation.

Disaster Relief

Things are not looking good at the American Red Cross. ProPublica's Justin Elliott files the nonprofit news outlet's latest report on the beleaguered relief organization and its embattled CEO, Gail McGovern.

Education

As teach for America celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, Kristina Rizga, an education reporter for Mother Jones, looks at how America's "most controversial" education organization is changing its ways.

Health

Writing on Quartz, Allison Schrager notes that the future is looking increasingly scary for the world's richest countries, and that's because their success in combating the traditional causes of death among the elderly — heart disease, cancer, and strokes — means degenerative diseases that impair cognition, particularly Alzheimer's, are on the rise. Indeed, Alzheimer's, the flip side of people living longer,  "is the third most common cause of death among Americans older than 85. And it's not just heart-wrenching for its victims and their loved ones; it has consequences for the economy."

[Infographic] Questions Nonprofits Should Ask to Assess Their Risk Management Practices

If, like the majority of Americans, you have some (or most) of your retirement savings invested in stocks, the last month and a half has been disconcerting (to say the least). The same is true for nonprofit organizations, which count on grants from endowed private foundations and deep-pocketed individual donors to fund key initiatives and, in many cases, keep the lights on. As anyone who was around in 2008, 2002-03, or the early 1990s can tell you, however, when stock portfolios fall in value, foundation grantmaking and individual giving are quick to follow. And volatility in revenue streams is just one of the many organizational risks the typical nonprofit faces.

What's a nonprofit executive to do? The worst thing he or she can do is to do nothing. As Ben Franklin liked to say: "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." So, how does one prepare for risks, both known and unknown, that lie in wait for even the best-managed organization? As the infographic from our friends at accounting giant BDO's global forensics unit reminds us, ask questions. Lots of them.

[Review] Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works

Changing the world is a lot like writing a novel: many people say they want to, but only a few actually accomplish their goal, and fewer still succeed in creating something that gets noticed.

In Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works, business strategist Roger L. Martin and Sally R. Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, provide an overview of the burgeoning field of social entrepreneurship and share the stories of several social entrepreneurs who have changed — and are changing — the world for the better. And, like the entrepreneurs they highlight — nearly all of whom have been recognized by the Skoll Foundation for their efforts — Martin and Osberg mostly succeed in their objectives, providing a definitional framework for the field, explaining the joys and challenges of the work, and finding compelling examples of people who have overcome those challenges.

Martin and Osberg define social entrepreneurship as direct action aimed at transforming, rather than incrementally improving, an existing system; in the process, a new equilibrium is created. Moreover, social entrepreneurs work in "ways that do not fit neatly into the traditional modes of government and business." Whereas businesses are constrained by a need to earn profits, and government-led change efforts are designed to provide services to citizens rather than cultivate new customers, social entrepreneurs are able to "[negotiate] these constraints. The creative combination of elements from both poles...is what enables [them] to build models designed for a particular context."

Through their work at the Skoll Foundation and the Skoll World Forum, Osberg and Martin have observed that transformative change involves four key stages: first, the social entrepreneur must understand the system she is trying to change; then, she must envision a future in which that system has been changed, build a model for achieving the change, and, finally, scale a solution.

It is not enough, for example, to be repulsed by a tradition such as foot binding or female genital cutting that has been standard practice in certain societies for centuries. Rather, the social entrepreneur "sets out to make sense of the problematic equilibrium itself: how did it come to be and why does it persist?" To do that, Martin and Osberg write, the social entrepreneur must "navigate three powerful tensions" with respect to the world they wish to change: abhorrence and appreciation; expertise and apprenticeship; and experimentation and commitment.

How to Double Online Giving in Six Months

More and more of the giving to nonprofits is taking place online, which means it's critically important that your online storefront is not only open for business but is optimized.

As part of my research on this topic for my new book, Nonprofit Fundraising 101, I interviewed Roderick Campbell, CEO of nonprofit fundraising platform CommitChange, who was kind enough to share a few takeaways from his organization's efforts to maximize digital donations for Mercy House, a $3.8 million nonprofit that has provided housing and support to California's homeless population since 1989.

The changes outlined below helped Mercy House double online giving to the organization in just six months — and I believe they can do the same for your nonprofit:

1. Break it down: CommitChange helped Mercy House break the donation process down into four steps: recurring versus one-time; amount; info; and payment. Instead of asking for the information all at once, CommitChange simplified the process, which is especially helpful for donors in the habit of contributing via their mobile device. Another great example of what this looks like is charity: water, which is also profiled in the book.

Whatever your process, be sure to look closely at recurring giving, as it is the category most likely to create valuable ongoing funding for your cause and increase average gift size (people are more likely to donate $10 a month than $120 in a single go). A simple tweak here and there can yield great results: By leading with the recurring gift option, Mercy House increased the number of donors willing to sign up as a sustaining member of the organization by 400 percent!

Moving From Theory to Practice: A Synthesis of Lessons About Incentive-Based Instruments for Freshwater Management

There has been growing interest in applying incentive-based instruments such as pollution charges and tradeable permits to address the twin challenges of accessing enough freshwater to meet our needs while also preserving the well-being of freshwater ecosystems. These instruments use direct or indirect financial incentives as motivation to reallocate water or to reduce the health and environmental risks posed by an activity. But what do we know about how they have actually performed?

New York City provides an excellent illustration of the potential for incentive-based instruments. To meet new federal drinking water requirements in the late 1990s, the city was faced with the prospect of building a $4 billion to $6 billion filtration plant and spending an additional $250 million annually to operate it. Instead, city officials paid farmers and landowners in the upstream rural Catskill watershed to better manage the land, at a fraction of the cost of the proposed filtration plant. The outcome was a win-win, improving downstream water quality for people and ecosystems and boosting the rural economy.

This is just one example. To move beyond theory and better understand how these instruments perform in practice, the Rockefeller Foundation partnered with the Foundation Center and Pacific Institute on a synthesis review of existing, largely practice-based knowledge about incentive-based instruments. For the review, the foundation developed the project's scope and provided financial support, the Foundation Center and its IssueLab service were involved in project and technology development, and the Pacific Institute wrote the text.

The resulting report looks at water trading, water quality trading, and payment for ecosystem services but notes that these are but three of a much broader suite of methods available to address threats to freshwater availability and sustainability. Other methods, such as demand-side management approaches, have demonstrated considerable success in addressing such threats but were not included in the scope of the review.

Weekend Link Roundup (February 6-7, 2016)

Our weekly round up of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Arts and Culture

In The Atlantic, Andy Horwitz, founder and publisher of Culturebot, examines the recent history of funding for the arts in America and concludes that while the arts themselves aren't dead, the system by which they are funded is increasingly becoming as unequal as the country itself.

Criminal Justice

On the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy blog, Ben Barge, a field associate at the NCRP, shares highlights from a recent panel discussion, "Mass Incarceration: The Rural Perspective," featuring Lenny Foster, director of the Navajo Nations Correction Project; Nick Szuberla, executive director and co-founder of Working Narratives & Nations Inside; Kenneth Glasgow, executive director of the Ordinary People Society and co-chair of the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People's Movement; and asha bandele, director of grants, partnerships and special projects at the Drug Policy Alliance.

Giving

A new report from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy finds that "women give more than their male peers at virtually all income levels, even though women in general earn less and have less money in retirement than men." In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, Debra Mesch, Eileen Lamb O'Gara Chair in Women's Philanthropy and director of the Women's Philanthropy Institute, discusses the findings.

Health

Good post by Marc Gunther (Nonprofit Chronicles) on why this Super Bowl is likely to be the last one he ever watches.

International Affairs/Development

On Monday, the World Health organization declared the outbreak of Zika virus a global public health emergency. The New York Times' Sabrina Tavernese and Donald G. MacNeil, Jr. report.

According to UNICEF, more women and children are now migrating to and through Europe than adult males -- and many children are traveling alone. In related news, organizers of the annual Syria pledging conference are requesting a record $9 billion from the international donor community by the end of 2016. In comments to the New York Times, Jan Egeland, a former Norwegian diplomat who heads the Norwegian Refugee Council, characterized the humanitarian response to the Syrian refugee crisis as grossly inadequate and said, "What we are witnessing now is a collective failure to deliver the necessary support to the region. We are witnessing a total collapse of international solidarity with millions of war victims."

"If social scientists and policy makers have learned anything about how to help the world's poorest people, it's not to trust our intuitions or anecdotal evidence about what kinds of antipoverty programs are effective, write Dean Karlan,a professor of economics at Yale and founder of the nonprofit Innovations for Poverty Action, and Annie Duflo, the organization's executive director, in the New York Times. Rigorous randomized evaluations, on the other hand, "can show us what works and what doesn't....Hope and rhetoric are great for motivation, but not for figuring out what to do."

There was some good news on the global public health front in January. The UN Foundation's Jenni Lee has a roundup.

[Infographic] The 2016 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report

Kivi Leroux Miller, the award-winning author and trainer behind Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog and the Nonprofit Marketing Guide site, has released the sixth edition of her annual Nonprofit Communications Trends Report (33 pages, PDF). The report, which is available for free download (registration required), includes valuable information about which communications goals/channels are most important to nonprofits, how often they send send direct appeals and newsletters (both print and email), the social media sites they favor, the average size of nonprofit communications teams and the average salary for key team members, and what nonprofit communicators are most excited about as they look ahead to 2016.

For a taste of what's in it, check out the infographic below...

5 Questions for...Laurie Garduque, Director, Justice Reform, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Recent opinions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court which hold that imposing harsh sentences on juvenile offenders violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment have transformed the landscape of juvenile sentencing. In December, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which earlier in the year had announced it would be winding down its significant support for juvenile justice reform efforts as part of a refocusing of its grantmaking strategy on  a handful of "big bets," including the over-use of jails and incarceration in America, released Juvenile Justice in a Developmental Framework: A Status Report (48 pages, PDF), its summation, based on twenty years of work, of developmentally appropriate best practices in nine key juvenile justice policy areas.

Last month, PND spoke with Laurie Garduque, director of justice reform at the foundation, about the genesis of its work in the juvenile justice field, the report's findings, and the prospects for further reform as MacArthur exits the field.

Philanthropy News Digest: MacArthur entered the juvenile justice field in 1996, a decision motivated by a belief inside the foundation that juveniles are not adults and should be treated differently by the criminal justice system. What was it about the environment in the mid-1990s that brought the issue to a head for you and your colleagues?

Laurie Garduque: We'd been investing in research on child and adolescent development before 1996, and that research made it clear that children and adolescents were different, cognitively and emotionally, than adults. But the legal implications of those findings had not been considered. In the 1980s, violent crime among youths increased sharply, and fears of a generation of "super predators," a fear fanned by politicians and the press, led states across the country to move to treat young offenders as if they weren't young. States began to focus on the offense, not the offender, and moved toward harsh, punitive laws that included making it easier to try adolescents as adults. The report notes that, in the years leading up to MacArthur's decision to enter the field, forty-five states had changed their laws to try adolescents and children, some as young as ten years of age, as adults. States had also removed the kinds of due process protections you would like to see for young people – for example, determining whether or not they're competent to stand trial. And within the system itself, the emphasis was less on rehabilitation and treatment, and more on punishment. It wasn't about helping young people learn from their mistakes and getting them back on course; it was about punishing them harshly.

Knowing all that, knowing the harm that can result when you treat young people as adults, and seeing the toll these new laws were taking, dispropor­tion­ately, on young people of color and on low-income communities, the foundation started to look at ways we could use research, scientific evidence, and best practices to stem the tide and reform the system. In effect, we were looking for ways to reverse the rush toward draconian reforms and policies that was sweeping the country.

PND: One of the first things you and your col­leagues did was to create a re­search network focused on some of the important aspects of adolescent development and juvenile justice. Can you share with us some of the key findings surfaced by that initiative.

LG: You have to go back to the origins of juvenile court in the early part of the twentieth century, which was based on the recognition that children were deserving of a separate justice system from adults because they weren't as competent as adults, weren't as culp­able for their actions, and should be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their capacity to change. Those ideas were challenged in the '80s as crime rates in the United States rose. To get society to once again accept the idea that a young person is less culpable for his actions than an adult, is less compe­tent to stand trial, and has more of a capacity to change than an adult, we knew we would have to map the adolescent development research that was being done to specific legal concepts. How, for example, do you determine whether someone is competent to stand trial? Are adolescents fully responsible for and truly understand the consequences of their actions? Are they more susceptible to peer pressure? More impulsive? Given their developmental immatur­ity, both with respect to their behavior and their brain development, should the criminal justice system treat them differently? The same is true of sentencing. We tend to punish adults harshly because we don't believe they have the capacity to change, or they're not as amenable to treatment and rehabilitation, whereas young people, who haven't yet matured, either emotionally and, in many cases, psychologically, are more likely to respond to rehabilitation.

So, as I said, it became important to map what all that looked like in terms of adolescents' social, emo­tional, and cognitive develop­ment, and to try to identify what the differences between children, adolescents, and adults in those areas were. We were confident that if we could pro­vide scientific evidence which demonstrated, in effect, how the immaturity of young people argues against them being treated as adults by the justice system, it could be the basis for a new way of thinking about how to hold juvenile offenders accountable for their behavior.

As things turned out, that body of research also became important in terms of recent Supreme Court decisions and was a valuable source of guidance for state and local agencies with respect to their juvenile justice practices.