Introduction

This paper examines the role of philanthropy in supporting child advocacy organizations working to improve children's well-being in American society. It is premised on the belief that a fundamental purpose of philanthropy ought to be the support of public interest advocacy organizations and other nonprofit groups dedicated to addressing and redressing the political, social and economic marginalization of low income and other historically disenfranchised constituencies. Indeed, without the effort to organize and advance the interests of Abroad, non-commercially oriented citizen constituencies, as Tom Asher argued more than 20 years ago, Apublic needs will be neither defined nor met in a democratic fashion (Asher 1977, 1072). America's well-documented participatory inequalities and the growing influence of money on politics makes this all the more true today (Verba, Scholzman and Brady, 1995).

Despite the importance of public interest advocacy for the representation of under-represented interests, those who've studied philanthropy in American society have generally concluded that: 1) private giving either benefits the already comfortable or has no clear distributional consequences (Odendahl 1990; Margo 1992); 2) most foundations avoid public policy grantmaking (McIlney 1997); 3) organized philanthropy exhibits a strong top-down approach and professional bias, preferring to fund professionals in their service or research occupations rather than the activities or institutions that promote active citizenship (Johnson 1988; Smith 1989); and 4) exceedingly few dollars support progressive social movement organizations or advocacy activities (Jenkins 1996; Jenkins and Halcli 1998);

Quantitative and qualitative data gathered for this study support these conclusions. Based on an analysis of grants awarded in 1991 and 1996 to selected national and state-based child advocacy organizations, interviews with child advocates, and a review of the recent literature on foundation grantmaking for children, youth and families, the following conclusions have been drawn:

• Child advocacy organizations receive only a tiny fraction of the total funds that foundations spend on basic and applied research, social services, and other non-advocacy activities related to children and youth. In an era of continued reliance on state governments to finance and deliver a host of services for children, state-based child advocacy organizations remain particularly underfunded.
  
  
• When foundations do make investments in child advocacy organizations, they are far more likely to fund softer activities, such as data collection or media outreach, rather than grassroots mobilization, allowable political lobbying, membership development, coalition-building, and other strategies more explicitly aimed at building an active support base for increased public sector investment in children and youth. Foundations did, however, increase their support of leadership development, advocacy training and constituency-building between 1991 and 1996, from $795,000 to $5.9 million.
  
  
• Foundations award far more grant money to support specific projects, single-issue organizations, and advocacy around issues of a less controversial nature such the reduction of childhood tobacco use or prevention of child abuse. Although poverty itself is a major factor in determining the overall well-being of children and is closely linked to other social problems, foundations and child advocates do not appear to be attacking poverty itself in any direct, sustained and aggressive way.
  
  
• Few foundations appear willing to fund the types of advocacy activities -- like grassroots constituency-building and increased contacts with key legislative decision makers -- that scholars and practitioners both suggest are necessary if the children's movement is to develop the political strength it needs for substantially greater impact.
  
  
• Child advocates express a profound dissatisfaction over the ways in which foundations operate, seeing what they believe to be less money for advocacy and a growing trend for foundations to design and direct their own program initiatives. Rarely do they feel that foundations give them the full opportunity and freedom to craft and implement their own program strategies and initiatives.

Tracking Foundation Support of Child Advocacy: Methodological and Conceptual Issues. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine accurately how much philanthropic foundations have invested in child advocacy nationally. This is the case for several reasons. Foundations do not report on their grantmaking in a way that allows for easy identification of grants to organizations engaged in child advocacy. Indeed, although most of the larger foundations do publish annual reports, they are not required to do so, and full grants information may or may not be reported. Reporting by corporate foundations can be particularly spotty. When annual reports are published, grant awards are typically listed by broad program area, such as education or the arts, rather than by program strategies or type of activities. The same is true for the manner in which foundations report their grantmaking activities to the Internal Revenue Service. It is the rare foundation that structures and reports on its grantmaking program according to such strategic approaches as leadership development, community organizing, public policy advocacy, or media/public education.

Conceptual or definitional issues surrounding child advocacy also make it difficult to Amap the child advocacy community and therefore to assess the level of philanthropic support for it. What constitutes advocacy for children and how does (or should) it differ from family advocacy? Should advocacy organizations primarily focused on economic security issues, such as family or minimum wage legislation or low income housing development, be counted as a part of the children's advocacy community? Do nonprofits that primarily engage in the collection and analysis of data on children's well-being belong on the Amap? What about nonprofit agencies that primarily, if not exclusively, deliver social services to children, youth and families? Are professional associations such as the National Association of Children's Hospitals to be considered a part of the advocacy mix for children because they weigh in on particular policy issues that address children's needs along with those of their member institutions? Should government or government-linked entities, such as big-city school districts or the National Governors Association, be considered child advocates when they engage in public education campaigns or engage in administrative or legislative lobbying in ways that impact children? And where should community organizing groups that use issue campaigns to build power for low income families figure into the conceptual picture?

These conceptual issues are thrown further into relief when one considers the contrasting approach to advocacy adopted by many conservative think tanks and policy organizations. Indeed, conservative political activists have tended to operate in strategically different ways, engaging less in advocacy for children and more in advocacy to establish broad national policy priorities (Covington, 1997). Family issues are often invoked to advance a larger agenda that is attentive not only to advancing fiscal and economic policies based on notions of limited government, but also to establishing the structural rules of the policy game (e.g., terms limits or balanced budget amendments).

Because many of the activities that emerged under the Achild advocacy label in the late 1960s and early 1970s were catalyzed and supported by federal agencies, conservatives, in fact, reacted by forming a variety of institutions and networks to defend parents' rights, promote traditional family values and advance limited government objectives, especially but not exclusively at the federal level. [1] Organizations like Focus on the Family or the Family Research Council emerged (alongside many other conservative policy organizations) to push for government retrenchment, devolution of power to the states, the privatization of key government services, and deregulation of industry. Often, these policy approaches have been woven together into a morally-based narrative arguing that government expansion has imposed unreasonable tax burdens on hard-working American families and suppressed the problem-solving initiative of individuals, households and communities. [2] There has thus been little tradition of child advocacy among political conservatives, except as it has related to larger ideological or policy principals like privatization through school vouchers or teen pregnancy reduction through abstinence education.

Study Methodology. For purposes of this study, I have sought to identify national and state-based child advocacy organizations whose primary mission is to improve children's social and economic well-being through one or more of the following activities: government and legislative monitoring, administrative negotiation, legislative lobbying (direct and grassroots), class action litigation, public and media education, applied policy research and development, and community organizing. This definition mostly excludes nonprofit agencies that deliver social services under government funding or contracting arrangements. This is important because, as Smith and Lipsky note, when publicly-funded nonprofit organizations engage in political advocacy, they do so knowing that their fate as organizations can be affected by such activities. It is nonprofit organizations' material interests under contracting that Atends to reduce the ideological character of [their] political advocacy and shift it to technical issues relating to rates, funding levels, and regulations (1993, 187).

This definitional approach also excludes research centers -- whether university-based or independent -- that are engaged primarily in data collection and analysis. This does not mean that I hold research in disregard or think that it plays no important role in the policy process. It does mean that I question the utility of throwing every type of organization and activity, without distinction, into the advocacy bin. What is needed is greater analytical precision about the specific contributions and limitations of different types of organizations and activities and, with respect to foundations, greater understanding of which types of organizations and activities get funded and which do not. This is consistent with the view that it is political power that fundamentally determines how and for what purposes public resources are mobilized and deployed (see, for example, Majone 1988; Minkler 1999). From this vantage point, technical expertise, hard data and moral argument may be important components of political action but cannot be a substitute for it. [3]

Given this approach, I identified initially a total of 158 nonprofit organizations thought to be primarily engaged in child advocacy (see Appendix A). A multi-pronged process was used to identify these organizations, including obtaining the organizational contacts and membership lists of such national groups as the National Association of Child Advocates, the Children's Defense Fund and the Coalition for America's Children. It was supplemented by Internet searches for the organizations meeting the criteria outlined above, with organizations identified by reviewing the websites and/or membership lists of national organizations and coalitions. The Foundation Center's grants information retrieval database was also helpful in identifying organizations that were internally cross-coded both as Aalliance (e.g. advocacy) organizations and as organizations serving children and youth, with all non-repeating organizational names added to the list.

I then asked the Foundation Center, which systematically tracks and analyzes foundation grantmaking, to conduct a search through its Foundation Grants Index database for the purpose of identifying all grants awarded to these organizations at two points in time: 1991 and 1996. This search yielded a total of 792 grants awarded to 103 of the 158 child advocacy organizations originally identified. These grants were then entered into a database program for further analysis, including examination of type of grant support awarded, issue areas funded, type of activities supported, and other relevant kinds of analyses. Based on a review of grant descriptions, five organizations were subsequently removed from the list. These included Aspira, Child Trends, Child Welfare League, Urban Strategies Council, and We Can.

To supplement the grants data, telephone interviews were also conducted with selected child advocates around the country (n = 12). The interviews with child advocates touched on the following areas: 1) organizational history, mission, activities and accomplishments; 2) views on the components of effective advocacy, the intersection or overlap between child and family issues, and the strengths and weaknesses of the children's movement; and 3) perspectives on and experiences with the foundation community. A review of the relevant literature, including several recent analyses of foundation grantmaking to children and youth, was also conducted.

Limitations of the data. Beyond the decision to narrow my definition of child advocacy in the ways earlier described (e.g., exclusion of nonprofits primarily engaged in service delivery or university-based or independent applied policy research), there are certain limitations to the data that require acknowledgment. First, the analysis almost entirely excludes local child advocacy organizations because of the difficulty of developing a comprehensive list of advocacy organizations seeking to improve child well-being at the neighborhood, city-wide or county levels. While the inclusion of these organizations would certainly provide a richer and more detailed funding picture, it is likely that many of these groups function as hybrid institutions, combining service delivery with occasional or tightly focused advocacy related to their specific institutional interests and/or those of their clients. As earlier noted, service-based advocacy has certain limitations that can reduce the vigor and/or narrow the focus of advocacy efforts. [4]

Finally, private grantmaking foundations are not the only source of revenue for child advocacy organizations. Child advocates also seek and/or rely on the support of individual donors, membership fees, fund raising events, and, to a more limited extent, the public sector. [5] The grants data thus reflect only a portion of the operating budgets of the child advocacy organizations included in the study. Still, the children's movement is far more reliant on the support of philanthropic foundations than other social movements, and it is likely that child advocates will continue to require an infusion of outside resources to support their work (Richart 1997).

The remainder of this paper is divided into five sections. The first section seeks to establish a broader social, economic and political context within which to discuss philanthropy's current and potential role in improving children's status and well-being in American society. Toward that end, it briefly reviews some of the major policy trends of the past two decades and examines their impacts on children, youth and families. Section two reports and elaborates on key study findings, providing an array of specific information on grants awarded to child advocacy organizations in the years examined. It also reviews and makes comparisons to what is known about child advocacy funding in previous decades. The third section considers the historical and contemporary record of philanthropic foundations in addressing critical social issues and public needs, especially but not limited to children and youth. Section four discusses contemporary issues in child advocacy and explores the links between the perceived weaknesses in the child advocacy movement and philanthropic approaches to improvements in child welfare. Finally, the concluding section offers funding recommendations to strengthen the child advocacy field.

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[1]. In their baseline study, Kahn, Kamerman and McGowan (1972) locate the conceptual origins of child advocacy in government-sponsored efforts. They identified four institutional antecedents of the children's movement that, along with civil rights and anti-poverty activism, helped to catalyze professional and lay advocacy on behalf of children. These included the 1969 Report of the Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children, the 1969 establishment of the Office of Child Development (OCD), the 1970 White House Conference on Children and Youth, and the formation in 1971 of OCD's National Center for Child Advocacy.

[2]. In his interesting analysis of the conceptual moral underpinnings of national politics, George Lakoff writes: AConservatives know that politics is not just about policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate. They have learned that politics is about family and morality, about myth and metaphor and emotional identification (1996:19).

[3]. In his examination of the role that persuasion plays in the political process, Majone argues that there are two different modes of policy analysis. The first he calls Aanalysis-as-maximization because it focuses on how public resources can be most frequently distributed for maximum effect. This analytical mode is technocratic and considers the relative costs and benefits of particular expenditures. The central concern of the second mode -- Aanalysis-as argument -- is how to improve the quality of public discourse and public reasoning processes. Where the former draws on formal methods of proof, rational choice theories, and macroeconomics, the latter sees argument -- including the use of rhetoric, ethics, metaphors, values and evidence -- as central. Indeed, Majone rightfully argues that Ain a democracy, where almost every aspect of public policy is a legitimate topic of debate, analysts Awho stick to the task of working out unique solutions to well-defined technical problems deny themselves any significant role in the policy process (1988: xx ).

[4]. A survey conducted in the mid-1980s by the State Legislative Leaders Foundation found that of the 167 responding organizations thought to be multi-issue, nonprofit citizen-based advocacy groups with little or no public funding, only 52 percent actually reported that advocacy was their primary mission. A full twenty-six percent of respondents identified their organizations as service providers. The remaining organizations reported their mission as education, health care or data collection (State Legislative Leaders Foundation 1995).

[5]. One recent survey of state-based child advocacy organizations affiliated with the National Association of Child Advocates found that federal funding comprised 6.7 percent of all funding to these organizations (Richart, 1997).