The James Irvine Foundation on Wednesday said it will wind down three grant-making effort so it can work exclusively on helping the working poor gain more economic opportunities and build their advocacy clout.
Over the next five years, the San Francisco grant maker, which controls about $2 billion in assets, will help grantees in its arts, democracy, and youth and education programs deal with the shift in how the foundation makes decisions.
“We are no longer going to have program areas,” said Don Howard, who was named the foundation’s president in October 2014.
Instead, the foundation plans to work on a portfolio of efforts, perhaps 10 at a time, all geared toward helping low-income California families and young people get on better economic footing and increase their political influence.
Escaping poverty and having a voice in political decisions are “two sides of the same coin,” Mr. Howard said. “Folks are more active in the political process when they have greater economic opportunity.”
The first two efforts will be announced in March, he said, after extensive consultation and input from members of the communities being served.
A Role for the Grass Roots
Irvine’s new, overarching focus on poverty follows the Ford Foundation’s decision in June to direct all of its attention toward reducing inequality.
Taking an “integrated and holistic approach” to a single issue could help Irvine tackle a seemingly insurmountable problem, said Lisa Ranghelli, director of program assessment at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
“It’s a big, hairy, audacious goal,” she said. “When you’ve got that, breaking down silos is a good strategy.”
Erica Kohl-Arenas, a professor at the New School and author of The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty, said she hoped Irvine’s effort would produce a broad grass-roots movement. Too often, she said, foundations devise prescriptive approaches to helping the poor that don’t take risks.
“It is, of course, a good thing that foundations like Ford and Irvine want to alleviate poverty,” she said. “But what do they mean when they say that they will tackle and dismantle systems of inequality?
“Are they willing to take on real-estate developers and the tech industry that has caused rents to balloon across the Bay Area, resulting in widespread displacement and even homelessness? Are they willing to take on the agricultural industry and the enduring abuses of undocumented migrant workers?”
Mr. Howard said much of Irvine’s work will be designed by grass-roots leaders. But he said a combative approach could backfire.
“This foundation doesn’t believe we have to take on an industry in a confrontational way to address systemic barriers or address opportunity for folks,” he said.
Inviting Discussion
Exactly which systemic barriers the foundation is looking to knock down is unclear. Mr. Howard said that too often foundations conceive an approach in a “vacuum in a conference room” rather than through conversations with the people the philanthropy is hoping to support.
It’s a tactic other foundations have adopted recently. For instance, after shifting its entire focus to reducing economic and social disparities, Ford embarked on a social-media campaign this month called #InequalityIs to hear from others how inequality based on income, sex, race, and ethnicity hold people back. Julia Stasch, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has said the $100 million “big bet” her organization will undertake as part of a program overhaul will be based on ideas generated outside the foundation.
At Irvine, Mr. Howard said he’ll take a similar approach.
“We don’t start by presuming we have a lock on understanding what we’ll be focusing on going forward,” he said. “We’re hoping to design with end users in mind, where we’re relevant, responsive, and dynamic to the issues occurring in our communities, and we’re not imposing a prescribed solution from a distance.”
Shedding various program areas to focus on a single theme can make a foundation more effective, according to Paul Brest, an emeritus professor at Stanford Law School and former president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Wealth inequality has emerged as a hot issue in the presidential race, and Mr. Brest said the need to focus on poverty had never been as urgent.
But he said it is difficult to glean specifics from the Irvine announcement. He expects more clarity when the foundation announces its first two efforts in March.
“This is a signal of a new direction, not the announcement of a strategy,” Mr. Brest said.
