PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY AND PUBLIC NEEDS: AN OVERVIEW
Although an increasing number of foundations are engaged in advocacy
grantmaking, the funding patterns described above are consistent with much that
has been previously observed about philanthropy's reluctant stance toward
independent, citizen-based advocacy organizations. Indeed, going back to the
late 1960s and early 1970s, critics have enumerated a long list of complaints
about the failure of foundations to respond to the nation's most critical public
needs, including but not limited to advocacy for children. In a paper prepared
for the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs (aka the Filer
Commission), Carey described foundations as Apermanent bureaucracies whose
well-paid staffs attempt to impose their ideas of what the problems are...; they
are faddist and won't stick with the tough on-going issues that plague society;
they measure progress and success by newspaper stories, sometimes creating
issues through grantees that manipulate the press and believing them solved
simply because they have become the subject of public debate (Carey 1977, 1111).
Carey also noted Athe strong academic bent of foundations, and their willingness
to make vast expenditures on new entities -- often foundation-created -- with
big boards, high overhead, well-paid staff, and designed to deal with broad,
rather ill-defined problems like the Aurban crisis or Adrug abuse without
dealing with underlying causes or political realities (p. 1112).
Since the time of the Filer Commission, a small but growing number of
scholars and public interest advocates have focused needed attention on
philanthropy's current and potential role as a catalyst for social progress and
democratic engagement. Their work has shed collective light on the general
discomfort that philanthropic foundations have had, both historically and now,
with professional advocacy and grassroots citizen action, particularly when it
involves efforts to enable and support low-income constituencies to participate
in the political process. When foundations have chosen to engage in public
policy grantmaking, however, their influence has been most often exerted by
developing an Ainfrastructure of expertise. In his historical review of
foundation's public policy impact, Smith identified four principal ways in which
foundations have sought to alter the public policy environment. They have: 1)
created and financed institutions that bring applied knowledge to bear on public
problems; 2) catalyzed changes in professional training and development; 3)
organized and supported forums for the exchange of information and ideas; and 4)
promoted the idea of the social sciences as a valuable tool for public policy
decision making (Smith 1989). [10]
When it comes to the support of progressive social movement organizations,
Jenkins (1998) and Jenkins and Halcli (1996) have shown that an expanding circle
of foundations were funding advocacy and related activities by the 1980s. Still,
relative to the number of grantmaking foundations (estimated today to exceed
42,000), the circle remains small, at 146 foundations, with only a tiny fraction
of foundation grants directed to social movement organizations.
Between 1953 and 1980, for example, Jenkins found that the highpoint of
foundation grantmaking came in 1977, when foundations awarded just .69 percent
of their grants to social movement organizations. Updating the analysis to 1990,
Jenkins and Halcli found a slight increase in foundation giving to social
movement organizations, awarding 1.1 percent ($88 million) of their 1990 grants
to support any Aorganized attempts to bring about institutional change by
organizing or representing the collective interests of some disadvantaged or
under represented group(1996: 4). More recently, the National Network of
Grantmakers conducted its own study of Asocial change grantmaking, reporting
that foundations awarded a total of $336 million, or 2.4 percent, to nonprofit
organizations in during the year studied (National Network of Grantmakers
1998).
Specifically regarding children and youth, others have suggested that
significantly more needs to be done in the realm of constituency-building and
anti-poverty initiatives. A recent paper commissioned by the Early Childhood
Funders Collaborative examined the steps that foundations might take to advance
a quality agenda in early childhood care and education. The common thread in the
authors' interview data was the need for Aa more strategic, more forceful,
better informed advocacy effort, with over half of the 70 interviewees raising
this as an important issue (Mitchell and Shore 1998). The authors also outlined
what they regarded as four key challenges that funders and child advocates must
confront in order to move an early childhood agenda forward. Among them was the
need to stimulate increased public sector investment in children through more
active constituency building efforts and to address finance issues by injecting
greater realism into public debates about the cost of quality care. Relatedly,
they found that more needs to be done to move from public awareness to public
engagement.
In another recent paper, Takanishi (1998) took foundations to task on several
counts for their approach to child poverty. First, she argued, philanthropy has
tended to ignore the structural causes of poverty. Second, philanthropy has
taken reactive stances to critical social policy trends. For example,
foundations have exhibited far greater willingness to track the effects of the
1996 welfare reform legislation rather than to support active efforts to develop
and promote needed policy alternatives. And third, foundations lack a Acoherent
vision of poverty reduction, with foundations taking Apieces of the solution --
early childhood care and education, for example, or childhood immunization --
rather than adopting a coordinated approach to child poverty and related social
issues.
Weiss and Lopez (1998) also recently examined current grantmaking for
children and youth. Based on a series of interviews with the leaders or program
officers of major foundations, they reported optimistically that foundations are
engaged in a substantial rethinking of their approaches and are developing
promising new strategies. Included among them are an increased emphasis on
Amulti-component, often place-based initiatives and the development of national
initiatives with Acomplex field-building, policy change and reform goals
designed to improve the status of children and youth (pp. 6). They also reported
a reduced emphasis on early childhood care and education (0-5), relatively few
state-level investments, and expanded interest in asset-based youth
development.
What is perhaps most interesting about their analysis, however, is the fact
that a very high percentage of the grant allocations of major national and
regional funders is awarded to grantees to implement foundation-designed
initiatives. Nine out of 18 major foundations distribute 60 percent or more of
their grant allocations via staff initiated programs or solicited proposals,
including at the high end the Annie E. Casey Foundation (95%), the Edna
McConnell Clark Foundation (95%), the Heinz Endowment (90%), the Eugene and
Marion Kauffman Foundation (98%), the Rockefeller Foundation (90%), and the
DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund (95%). Weiss and Lopez regard these new
foundation initiatives on behalf of children as a qualitatively different form
of grantmaking that moves them away from their earlier funding of multiple and
categorical services and toward the development of what they call an A
integrated infrastructure. This integrated approach combines Aservice delivery
with education and knowledge development, evaluation and continuous learning,
leadership and professional capacity development, communication and
dissemination, and public engagement (19).
Weiss and Lopez' panoramic and useful overview of current and emerging
funding strategies for children and youth does not, however, probe the
implications of foundations' decision to design and implement their own
initiatives. In many respects, the A new strategic grantmaking that Weiss and
Lopez discern has an historical analogue in the Amedical model or Ascientific
philanthropy practiced by foundations earlier in the century. That model has
been said to be a top-down, measured, deliberate, professional and technocratic
approach to social improvement, usually involving problem identification, the
establishment of objectives by which to measure progress, the design and
implementation of a plan to accomplish these objectives, and assessment of
results.
More importantly, Weiss and Lopez do not consider any of the limitations of
place-based, usually neighborhood-level, initiatives offered as solutions to the
social isolation and economic devastation of inner-city communities where so
many of the nation's poor children reside (Halpern 1995). To appreciate these
limitations, one needs only to note the strong role that federal housing, tax
and urban renewal policies played over the past 50 years in concentrating
poverty and isolating the poor. Federal highway programs destroyed community by
running highways through minority neighborhoods. Urban renewal policies led to a
net decrease in low income housing stock by destroying four low income housing
units for every one they created. And public housing programs helped to assure
the social and economic isolation of poor people by selecting sites in areas
with no jobs base and little commercial activity.
Now, under conditions of continued federal (and state) neglect, there remains
a persistent tendency to ask the most marginalized communities to solve problems
not of their own making. Indeed, as Halpern notes, place-based initiatives today
reflect many of the same premises and pitfalls of earlier decades, including the
tendency to locate the causes of urban poverty and social disadvantage Ain the
people who are experiencing them, to interpret them in terms that do not require
adjustment by those who live outside the inner-city (1995, 221). Few attempts
are currently being funded to address the political isolation of cities and the
need to build bridges between inner-city communities, working class suburbs and
middle income communities in support of broader reform agendas at the state and
national level.
END NOTES
[10]. In her
study of foundations' public policy influence, Colwell also concludes that
foundation approaches to change rest on Apervasive assumptions of democratic
elitism. Conceptually dividing the nonprofit sector into two distinct levels
(high and low), she notes that it is the Ahigh-level policy organizations and
other elite institutions that receive the bulk of foundation grants
(1993). |
