Independent Sector Aims to Create the ‘SXSW for the Social Sector’

Chronicle photo by Megan O’Neil

Independent Sector, a coalition of 600 nonprofits, has attracted financing from organizations like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to start a SXSW-style approach to facilitating learning and sharing of solutions to social problems.

The announcement coincided with Independent Sector’s annual conference this week in Detroit, which drew 1,400 people, the largest conference crowd in at least two decades, according to Dan Cardinali, the association’s CEO.

“We are no longer looking at the conference as a kind of a one-and-done event, it is actually about a three-year rolling engagement,” Mr. Cardinali said, speaking with The Chronicle during an interlude between conference sessions on Thursday. “We really envision it to become, hopefully over time, a kind of SXSW for the social sector.”

That means enabling local nonprofit leaders to decide what should rank high on the nonprofit sector’s agenda and then creating a shared space where those leaders meet and showcase work, as Mr. Cardinali explains it. And instead of emphasizing the single annual conference as the only time and place for that, there will be multiple gatherings, virtually and or in person, throughout the year, in addition to the conference.

Mr. Cardinali and his colleagues at Independent Sector have dubbed the effort Upswell. It got underway this week, and a website went live Thursday to collect ideas and connect nonprofit leaders with one another in virtual groups focused on specific causes.

“We really hope folks just say, ‘I want to opt in. I want to become part of this.’ " A nonprofit leader in Tulsa working on homelessness, Mr. Cardinali offered as an example, can join a group of 20 or 30 nonprofit leaders and national experts focused on homelessness to mine ideas and work on solutions during an extended period of time. Lobbying Continues

Lobbying work in Washington by Independent Sector, one of the nonprofit world’s biggest membership groups, with a $10.5 million operating budget, will continue unabated, Mr. Cardinali said. It is leading an effort to extend charitable deductions to everyone.

But otherwise, the association will avoid running its own programs.

“The question we’re asking is, what is it that we can do really well?” said Mr. Cardinali. “If there is some other organization running an extraordinary leadership program, then we want to bring them in and point to them so the sector can learn and catalyze activity rather than say, ‘We will have a unique initiative.’ "

One such group being organized as part of the Upswell project will focus on education, Mr. Cardinali said. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is paying for it. Experts have identified many ways to improve public education, said Mr. Cardinali, and yet local leaders often struggle to adopt changes in the face of local challenges.

“So it is closing the gap between local innovation and what we know nationally in terms of expertise.”

Chronicle photo by Megan O’Neil

In addition to the support from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Upswell is supported by Independent Sector’s general operating funds and organizations such as the Fetzer Institute, and the Hewlett, JPMorgan Chase, and Citi foundations.

Concerns About Washington

The conference was the second for Independent Sector under the leadership of Mr. Cardinali. The 2016 event occurred just four months after he started as CEO and one week after Donald Trump was elected president.

Even as main-stage speakers and session panelists largely avoided saying the president’s name, or those of other policy makers in Washington, they repeatedly expressed alarm over partisan politics, the spread of misinformation, and the dearth of principled leadership.

“We are the people who have to get the work done. No one else is coming. We’re it,” said Jill Vialet, founder of Playworks, a nonprofit that promotes physical activity for kids. “I don’t know how it happened, but we are the grown-ups. I find that shocking.”

Among the most pointed was Rip Rapson, chief executive of Detroit’s Kresge Foundation, who said that shortly after the outcome of the 2016 election became clear, he wrote he hoped the vulgarity and mean-spiritedness of the campaign would give way to nonpartisan, rational, and consistent governance. That hope has been shattered, he said, describing what is currently happening in the country as “an existential crisis.”

“The ethical imperative of action is searing,” he said.

The question is what do nonprofits and others working to make the world better do when what they stand for comes under assault, he said. It’s understandable for community workers, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropists to question whether their voices matter amid information chaff.

Their voices do matter, he said. They are needed to tell the stories of ordinary people working to improve economic, social, and political conditions in their communities and to jolt people out a sense of defeatism about the imbalance of power, he said

“They are needed to give us the courage to persevere,” Mr. Rapson said.

Groups like those represented in the room, he said, are antidotes to the democratic degeneration precipitated by apathy and indifference, and their plates will be increasingly full.

“We must support them generously and without hesitation.”

He called on organizations to forge alliances around what he described as the “nonnegotiable.” Foundations can’t lobby, he noted.

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t help build and strengthen the alliances necessary to speed and advance those truths of equity, fairness, and justice that we know to be inviolable,” Mr. Rapson said.