Even though Americans have now twice elected a former community organizer as president, very few people really get what such people do and how they have changed the face of this country.
That’s among the many reasons that social-justice causes have always struggled to raise money, especially at a time when the economy is still sputtering and causing fundraising challenges for all groups.
In my 30-some years of working at social-justice organizations and then making grants to them, I have seen too little innovation when it comes to attracting money.
With a few exceptions, most of these organizations depend too heavily on a relatively small number of foundations and lack a strong pool of small donors. They rarely have ways to earn revenue beyond getting donations, and most have even failed to explore such options.
So what are some of the things that get in the way?
Here are a few of the reasons, based on my own experience and the suggestions of leaders of some of the nation’s most prominent and effective antipoverty, environmental, and human- and civil-rights groups:
- While many philanthropists like to provide service and support groups that have made a “demonstrated impact” to “help” the poor, they often can’t relate to “building power” among low-income people.
- Foundations too often have a “pick-a-winner” mentality and rarely see the importance of supporting the broader ecosystems of social change. And they have largely failed to invest in developing social-justice leaders who connect well with both the grass roots and more elite circles. Social-justice groups don’t have a clear enough brand or large enough vehicle to capture the attention of small donors.
Social-justice groups also:
- Are much too fragmented, competing with one another and at times canceling one another out. Foundations generally make this worse, not better, and the organizations themselves avoid discussions of mergers or alliances that might overcome this fragmentation.
- Fetishize process and not outcomes or substantive problems.
- Have too small an apparatus for raising money and have failed to invest in the necessary infrastructure for it. Indeed, they don’t approach their work with an investment mentality, often viewing fundraising as a burden and not as something intricately connected with the work itself.
- Don’t tell a compelling enough story to capture people’s hearts. They don’t compete well in the cultural domain. They lack adequate language even to explain what they do.
- Fail to claim their collective power—ironically, they haven’t approached money as they have approached other forms of power. As I suggested at an Independent Sector conference a few years ago, to the horror of my foundation colleagues, why didn’t our grantees ever think to picket or strike about their grievances against philanthropy? After all, what foundation could survive without groups to give money to?
This is a daunting catalog of challenges. But the possibilities for changing the picture are great if charismatic leaders could get more exposure for their ideas and learn to shape their ideas in the language that social entrepreneurs can grasp. Many affluent young people are eager to become allies and supporters.
The most significant regret I have in looking over my 15 years as a leader of two big philanthropies is that while we thought a lot about sustainability at the Open Society Foundations and at the Atlantic Philanthropies, we rarely made grants to strengthen organizations’ fundraising in a way that encouraged innovation and democratization.
The one exception to this, which I wish I’d done more of—that I wish others would do more of—came a few years back when the JEHT Foundation and the Picower Foundation vanished virtually overnight because of the Madoff scandal.
Many human-rights and social-justice groups that were among their grantees were left with instant and devastating holes in their budgets.
Eli Pariser, then director of MoveOn.org, called me soon after the news broke because he remembered conversations we’d had over the years about the need to democratize philanthropy and said that his members were eager to take action to help these groups stave off dire cuts.
Would Atlantic be interested, he asked, in matching the contributions of MoveOn members?
I said we would, though of course we hadn’t planned for that in our budget.
I then invited Open Society and Ford to join us, because they were the other key supporters of many of the groups affected. Our pledge attracted over $1-million in small contributions. Why can’t that happen more often, and not just in emergencies?
The social-justice movement is in dire need of fresh thinking, and some positive signs are emerging from civic and philanthropic leaders who are developing or leading promising efforts to help social-justice groups move toward true sustainability:
- Peter Murray, a Tides Foundation Fellow, founded the Center for Progressive Leadership and trained hundreds of diverse young leaders to run for public office.
- Anna Burger, long a key figure of the labor movement, used her recent time as a fellow in the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University to develop the Gettysburg Fund, an investment vehicle to expand the progressive grass-roots social movement and give voice to all Americans. She’s built an advisory team to see how private equity and other parts of the financial world can generate significant and sustainable revenues for social good.
- Colin Greer, the longtime president of the New World Foundation, which has provided vital support to many social-justice groups and movements, was a leader in developing the Resource Lab, a kind of economic-stimulus package for community-based organizations. The effort is helping groups assess the feasibility of starting services they could charge people to use and review group-purchasing arrangements, retail deals, and ways organizations could share real-estate space.
He realized that the most powerful and enduring nonprofit organizations, like AARP and the National Rifle Association, offer services of value—gun-safety classes, for example, in the case of the NRA or insurance programs from the AARP. That attracts people to become members and provides a powerful platform for effective advocacy.
Working now through a new nonprofit, Accelerate Change, Mr. Murray is starting partnerships with nonprofits like the Center for Community Change to provide services that help immigrants, parents, students, and other groups in the model of the NRA and the AARP.
The sustainability discussion in philanthropy is not a new one. Indeed, it is virtually an obsession.
But there is a big difference between the dominant talk about sustainability, which too often is a kind of philanthropic shell game—our grant is ending, so sustain yourself with some other foundation’s big grant—and the kind of sustainability these new efforts are seeking.
It’s time to push for more efforts like these that draw on the sources of an organization’s strength and base in the community, that are evergreen, and that do not require groups to align themselves with the fickle fashion trends of foundations.