Foundations Join Forces to Fight Inequality

Jonathan Kolbe via William Penn Foundation

Fueled in part by the highly publicized police killings of black men in Ferguson, Mo., New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere, grant makers are acting with a new sense of urgency and unprecedented levels of coordination to send hundreds of millions of dollars to groups that fight racial and economic inequality.

The White House has played a big role in the push to steer dollars in new directions. President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper project has already collected more than $300-million in pledges for programs to expand education and job opportunities for young minority men and to improve their health.

Now it’s more likely than ever to stay high on the agenda because Mr. Obama announced in the wake of the Baltimore unrest that he would make aiding black men and boys his prime objective after he leaves Washington. He even created a nonprofit to lead a crusade that could become the kind of philanthropic powerhouse Presidents Carter and Clinton have created to focus attention on global problems.

Mr. Obama’s potential successors in the White House are also signaling that they want to keep philanthropy and public policy trained on inequality issues.

“We’re at a unique moment,” says Aaron Dorfman, president of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. “Grant makers, like politicians, are understanding that inequality is something we have to take on.”

A Turning Point

No matter how pleased minority leaders are by the new attention, they are skeptical that it will truly stick.

Cornell William Brooks, president of the NAACP, says he is encouraged by the sincerity behind major foundations’ focus on race, along with Mr. Obama’s pledge to devote his career to the cause after he leaves the White House.

But, he says, the realities are tougher: Nonprofits that rely on foundations to help them close the inequality gap have been strained in the months since Ferguson and need more support.

Perhaps even more daunting: Racial inequality defies easy cures, and foundations are not known for their long attention spans. He worries that grant makers will suffer “philanthropic fatigue” if they don’t set clear goals to achieve specific results.

“We are in the middle of what could become a movement, but for these issues you have to go the distance,” he says. “To save a generation, it may take a generation.”

California Endowment

A Joint Effort

Foundations are waging the battle against inequality on all flanks. The California Endowment, for instance, has committed $50 million over seven years to the effort and was instrumental in creating the Executives’ Alliance to Expand Opportunities for Boys and Men of Color, a consortium of 43 foundations that have committed resources to the My Brother’s Keeper effort.

The endowment is receiving “more requests for funding than we can accommodate” and is developing a similar effort for young minority women, says Robert Ross, the endowment’s president.

A big part of Mr. Ross’s strategy is to spend more on paid advertising and social-media campaigns. Doing so, he says, can help battle stereotypes some hold about undocumented immigrants and other marginalized people.

For instance, the group spent more than $5 million on a media campaign called Health4All, featuring young undocumented Californians who came to the United States as children, and helped advance a state measure to expand the availability of health insurance. Another $800,000 campaign, called Do the Math: Schools, Not Prisons, helped make the case for spending government money on education.

Open Society Foundations responded directly to the Ferguson controversy by making a $2-million grant to the Center for Policing Equity to create a national database of police behavior and support youth groups that advocate for police reform. It also put $900,000 toward the Center for Popular Democracy to support community-organizing groups in St. Louis.

And after the Baltimore death of a man in police custody, Open Society Institute-Baltimore announced it would create a Baltimore Justice Fund that will seek to improve police relations with the city’s residents, reduce incarceration rates, and improve opportunities for local, low-income minorities.

Open Society has made another move to spur more philanthropy to help black men: In January, it spun off the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, a program it created in 2008 into a separate nonprofit so it could raise large sums more easily, and gave it a parting gift of $10 million.

Bigger Issues

While some foundations explicitly focus on race in their grants, others are giving the issue more attention as part of grants for other societal concerns. For instance, in February when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced a five-year, $75 million set of competitive grants to reduce jail populations, it stressed an interest in supporting projects that seek to deal with the high rate of incarceration among minorities.

The same month, racial equality was a big factor when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation expanded its campaign to reduce childhood obesity. The $500-million effort, which over the next 10 years will double the foundation’s commitment to childhood obesity, will include a focus on minority children, who are more likely to be overweight or obese.

Perhaps just as important as the determination grant makers have shown in the battle against inequality is their willingness to work together.

For instance, Open Society, along with the Ford, John S. and James L. Knight, and Mozilla foundations, are taking the fight to the web. They are putting money into advocacy efforts to ensure the Internet is available to people regardless of their wealth or where they live.

“A tiered system of Internet access is, in effect, a separate but equal regimen,” says Alberto Ibargüen, Knight’s president.

Another collaborative effort came last summer when a coalition of 10 foundations pledged $370 million in what’s been called the grand bargain to help Detroit emerge from bankruptcy.

Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation, a coalition member, said the crisis faced by Detroit focused philanthropy’s attention on the despair felt by the city’s poor, mostly black residents.

“You can’t have a conversation in philanthropy that doesn’t touch on this question,” he says. “A consciousness has really started to take hold.”

Going Deep

Taking on challenges as big as race and inequality is a bit quixotic, Mr. Rapson admits. For a foundation to be successful, it has to pick its “entry point” carefully if it hopes to have any impact at all, he says. In Kresge’s case, that happened in 2010, when it made securing jobs and improving the lives of low-income urban residents its top grant-making priorities and stopped supporting many projects focused on other causes. A November grant of $500,000 to the Mission Economic Development Agency in San Francisco that will support financial counseling for low-income, mostly Hispanic city residents is typical of the approach.

Damon Hewitt, director of the Executive’s Alliance to Expand Opportunities for Boys and Men of Color, has been forceful in urging grant makers to focus on one or two fronts so they can be most effective.

He has been asking grant makers to pick where they might excel, such as improving education for minorities, promoting safety, getting local residents involved in advocacy, or producing data and research on solutions to inequality issues.

The result of bringing foundations together on the issue is the creation of an “echo system” that reinforces grant makers’ interest in the subject, he says, making it “safe, if not popular, to care about a population that has gotten the short end of the stick.”

One of the projects Mr. Hewitt is most excited about is Research, Integration, Strategies, and Evaluation for Boys and Men of Color, a three-year effort at the University of Pennsylvania that received $8.5 million in combined pledges from the Annie E. Casey and W.K. Kellogg foundations and Atlantic Philanthropies.

The program will attempt to create a “virtual community” of researchers, policy makers, grant makers, and journalists who can sift through a library of peer-reviewed articles on each of the subject areas of the Executives’ Alliance. The project’s goal is to identify the systemic challenges facing young black men.

It’s a deeper approach than, say, simply linking mentors with disadvantaged students, Mr. Hewitt notes.

“We can’t mentor our way out of black and brown boys being shot and killed by the police,” he says. “We have to look at what happens at the family level, at the community level, and the system level as well.”

Lon Horwedel via Kresge Foundation

‘Philanthropic Arrogance’

Despite the concerted effort, some experts doubt the ability of philanthropy to tackle racial or economic inequality.

Leslie Lenkowsky, a philanthropy expert at Indiana University and a Chronicle columnist, says foundations attempting to make systemic change are guilty of “philanthropic arrogance.”

“These problems are easy to posture about but not easy to solve,” he says. “They may be helpful on the margins, but these are deeply rooted problems.”

That was one of the lessons the Annie E. Casey Foundation offered to fellow grant makers back in 1993 in a report on its $50 million New Futures program. The effort sought to make fundamental changes in the way health and educational services were provided to needy youngsters in several midsize cities, including Dayton, Ohio; Lawrence, Mass.; and Little Rock, Ark.

The report, which the foundation titled “The Path of Most Resistance,” argued that inequality can be curbed only by making sweeping changes to institutions. But the status quo proved stubborn, with Casey stymied by what the study called “vested interests in current practice, fiscal constraints, and political risks.”

Douglas Nelson, who was Casey’s leader during the ambitious program, said he and his colleagues tried to make comprehensive changes “even though we were in over our heads” so they could develop a prototype other large foundations and state and local governments around the country might copy.

“We knew we weren’t going to level the playing field by making changes in curriculum or by supporting foster care,” says Mr. Nelson, who is now chairman of the CDC Foundation. “You need a comprehensive commitment by the whole country.”

Philanthropy’s track record in changing the lives of the poor has never been strong, says Stanley Katz, director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, because grant budgets pale in the face of broad economic challenges. Says Mr. Katz: “I don’t think foundations have ever been good at taking on big problems.”

But by working together and picking the problems they are most likely to solve, foundation leaders believe they can make a difference this time.

Philanthropic organizations should be “humble” about their ability to transform deeply embedded problems like racial inequality that have festered for generations, says Kenneth Zimmerman, director of U.S. programs at Open Society. But foundations shouldn’t shy away, either, because they can move money quickly to where it’s needed and often make longer-term commitments to problems than political leaders whose time in office may be limited.

“Philanthropy is indispensable, if not sufficient,” in the fight against inequality, Mr. Zimmerman says.

New Leaders Step Up

Several new foundation leaders are driving the push to fight inequality.

For instance, Don Howard, who was named president of the James Irvine Foundation in 2014, said that he heard a common message when he met with grantees in California after getting the job: Residents of the state’s Central Valley were sick of getting left behind.

The $2-billion foundation will still offer grants to programs throughout the state, Mr. Howard says. But in the future, he’d like to concentrate more support on early-childhood education, for example, in struggling places like Fresno and Bakersfield.

“We want to direct more of our efforts to places where the disparities are the greatest,” he says.

Laura Sparks, who took over in July as executive director of another regional grant maker, Philadelphia’s William Penn Foundation, also puts a premium on programs that reduce inequality.

Over the past two years, the foundation has worked to give the city’s children equal access to childl care, first by mapping the locations of high-quality care providers and then by following up with a $4.5 million contribution to the Fund for Quality, which supports providers working in needy neighborhoods.

This year, the William Penn Foundation plans to make about $5.5 million in grants to arts organizations through its New Audiences/New Places effort. After commissioning a study that found fewer people were going to established theaters, symphonies, and other performance spaces, the foundation decided to give more support to arts organizations that show and perform their pieces in nontraditional places that invite greater participation, especially from lower-income residents.

“Arts have great value,” she says, “but not just for the affluent.”

Changing Hearts and Minds

Even foundations with rich endowments have a limited ability to reverse the damage done by years of unequal treatment, whether it is based on race, gender, or wealth, says David Hammack, a nonprofit expert and history professor at Case Western Reserve University.

About the best they can hope to do, he says, is use their limited resources to support smaller efforts at the local level in the hope that lawmakers will steer money to similar priorities on a bigger scale. Even that is a “massive task,” he says.

But the real challenge, he adds, may be transforming Americans’ deeply held views on race, gender, and wealth distribution. “People don’t like to change the way they feel and think.”

That doesn’t dissuade Mr. Ross, the California Endowment leader, who is convinced the philanthropic response has legs.

“The issues of inequity and inequality are, by definition, uphill fights,” he adds. “Hopefully we’ve set the infrastructure for a 10- to 20-year philanthropic response and not just a flash in the pan.”

This article has been corrected from a previous version to indicate that the William Penn Foundation has worked to give Philadelphia’s children equal access to child care, not medical care. This version also clarifies that the foundation, rather than solely its leader, decided to support arts organizations that work in nontraditional venues.