CONCLUSIONS

Although foundations have increased their grants to child advocacy organization over the 1990s, their record of support for child advocates is not strong. While the 103 grantee organizations included in this study do not represent the entire child advocacy universe, certainly they comprise its organizational core. It is this infrastructure that can and should provide national and state leadership on questions of crucial importance to children, youth and families, working to advance policies and programs capable of substantially addressing poverty and other social conditions that diminish children's lives. In 1996, the collective investment made by some of the nation's largest national, regional and local funders was only $58.4 million (a figure itself greatly inflated by the presence of a single $19.5 million grant to the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids). This amount is less than 5 percent of the roughly $1.1 billion that foundations awarded that same year to institutions serving infants, children and youth.

The grants analysis further shows that when foundations are willing to fund advocacy, they do so in ways that many suggest weakens child advocacy organizations and/or detracts from their ability to build broad-based political support for kids. In 1996, foundations directed only 8 percent of their 1996 grant awards to child advocacy organizations on a general support basis and only 6 percent to help child advocates build their organizations through strategic planning, staff development and resource development activities.

Foundations also continue to think and fund categorically, targeting a majority of their grant dollars either to single-issue, mostly national, organizations or to Asingle-issue projects of multi-issue organizations. In addition to Asingle issue approaches to funding, the data show that foundations also engaged to a very significant degree in Asingle strategy funding, awarding over $22 million to support public education and media outreach activities. While public and media outreach may prepare the ground work for, or complement, more direct constituency building and activation strategies, they cannot substitute for sustained efforts to cultivate a membership base, develop community leaders, train advocates, build alliances, and otherwise enable and involve ordinary citizens to contact and influence key legislative and other decisionmakers involved in matters of critical importance to children, youth and families. It is just these kinds of activities that so many suggest will be necessary if the children's movement is to develop the kind of political muscle it needs to reduce child poverty rates, improve child health and well-being, and rebuild impoverished inner-city and rural communities in which so many of our nation's children disproportionately reside.