Last year Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke to the National Rural Assembly and attracted attention when he criticized philanthropy for its lack of commitment to rural America.
By all accounts, foundation support to rural communities has dropped ever since 2011, when the USDA signed an agreement with the Council on Foundations that was supposed to encourage more grant makers to put money into rural causes. Rural philanthropy now accounts for less than 7 percent of the total that grant makers give every year, even though 20 percent of Americans live in rural places.
The truth about rural disinvestment is, of course, more complicated than the lack of a foundation presence. As we might expect, foundation contributions, or lack thereof, play a fairly modest role in the overall picture. As those of us attending the forum of the Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems Funders learned this month, disinvestment in rural communities has been a problem for decades, caused in large measure by changes in U.S. antitrust policies that have increasingly encouraged scale and efficiency over competition, fairness, and local control.
In 1970, for example, rural communities retained some 60 percent of farm income compared with roughly a third today (at least in Iowa, where forum attendees reviewed data). The difference ends up in the pockets of large agricultural companies, their mostly urban shareholders, and absentee landowners, many of whom live elsewhere.
Secretary Vilsack has fought against the policies that have caused these problems, and he knows well the industry pressures on both Des Moines and Washington. Those forces have created a policy environment that rewards a few companies (and families) with enormous returns from corporate consolidations that would have been unheard of only 50 years ago.
The United States treats its rural communities like colonies, extracting profits and rents from the production of food, fiber, and energy and sending them mostly to urban centers. Many farms in the Midwest have lost half their topsoil in just a few decades, a result of farming practices that extract nutrients from the soil that are systematically depleting our most productive rural assets. It’s like sending tiny pieces of soil away with each bushel of corn or soybeans harvested. Intensive animal agriculture degrades water and air, making uninhabitable swaths of bucolic countryside while producing jobs that systematically keep rural workers poorer than their urban cousins.
Small Changes, Big Gains
This bigger picture doesn’t excuse philanthropy from playing a role in improving rural lives. Our collective contribution has been woefully inadequate, not simply in relation to population and need but considering the opportunity to achieve the goals we care most about.
For example, small changes in how we treat land, when made at a landscape scale, can yield dramatic improvements in curbing climate change as well as economic benefit. By encouraging farmers to adopt new products and progressive practices such as cover crops or added rotations and other methods that capture carbon, we can make a meaningful difference to planet health.
There are, no doubt, many other ways we could make a huge difference, not just to rural communities but to the entire country, if foundations were paying attention. So what’s getting in our way?
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy identified several reasons for this gap in its 2007 study Rural Philanthropy: Building Dialogue From Within. Although the research is several years old, the reasons cited remain valid. Among them are the attitudes of mostly urban-based foundation boards and staff who misperceive rural folk as living in a backwater without the ability or organizational capacity to make use of foundation support. Or worse, urban foundations that see rural communities as self-sufficient.
Although accurate, the study’s insights about philanthropy are incomplete, and they have proved insufficient on their own to cause a change in grant-maker behavior. Cries of bias and the exhortations of Secretary Vilsack and others are inadequate because the core problem is probably more structural than attitudinal.
Foundation Obstacles
Most rural philanthropy comes from a very few large foundations and some small ones based in small towns, like the one I work for. Our commitments are articulated in our missions and in our budgets, which make resources available for learning and for developing meaningful relationships with rural leaders and others pushing for change.
Many foundations that have missions to solve the kinds of problems faced in rural communities would be interested in supporting nonprofits outside America’s cities if they had the organizational capacity to do so. It’s not attitude. Foundation staff and trustees even at small foundations are by and large progressive and smart. They would be doing more grant making in rural America if they could.
Many of the nation’s largest foundations are based in cities, as are the largest community foundations, whose missions and bylaws preclude them from supporting communities outside their city or county limits. (Ironically, although such data isn’t collected, we know anecdotally that at least some of the wealth preserved by these institutions comes from rural profits and rents.)
If you really think about why urban agriculture is a big deal today, it’s probably not unimportant that many of the food movement’s strongest supporters face strict restrictions and can only give in the cities.
All of us in philanthropy must wrestle with some questions if we are to change the current situation in America’s most sparsely populated regions.
Among them:
- How can we promote a better understanding of the opportunities philanthropy has to make a difference in rural communities relative to foundation missions?
- How can those of us who care about rural communities support foundations that have a strong interest but limited organizational capacity to work in rural communities?
- How can foundations with geographic limitations come to think more in terms of supporting projects that deal with complex systems than with the problems in their own neighborhoods?
- What actions can philanthropy take to support and advance policies that can influence the big picture?
- Who can lead an effort that’s based more on collective action by America’s foundations than pleas to individual grant makers?
It seems to me what philanthropy needs right now is a rural strategy, and action, not more shaming from federal officials and lawmakers. And all of us must keep in mind that ultimately the health of the entire country depends on the vitality of America’s rural communities.
Bruce Karmazin is executive director of the Lumpkin Family Foundation.
