What difference can $80,000 make?
At the University of California at Los Angeles, students enrolled in Philanthropy as Civic Engagement spend an academic quarter turning over that question. They research local nonprofits, visit with charity executives, and discuss how to make the greatest impact through giving. After 10 weeks of inquiry and debate, they vote on how to award $80,000 among three Los Angeles nonprofits.
Most donors don’t learn about the practical nuances of giving until well into adulthood. The Once Upon a Time Foundation in Fort Worth, Tex., launched its Philanthropy Lab program to start to change that, funding hands-on classes where college students collectively make big donations to nonprofits. UCLA received a $100,000 grant to create such a course in 2012. Philanthropy Lab has underwritten classes at 26 universities to date. Eight of those institutions, including UCLA, now pay for those classes on their own.
Past classes have granted $100,000, but fundraising for the gift fell short this year so the course donated $80,000. In the future, its professor, assistant vice provost Jennifer Lindholm, hopes the gift will be endowed.
Although this year’s grants came from a smaller pot of money, students say the grant making experience was humbling.
“When it’s actually in practice, it’s a lot more difficult than you could ever imagine,” says Johnny Perez, a first-year psychology major, who took the course last spring.
‘A Lot of Responsibility’
Current college students — most of whom belong to Generation Z — are still decades away from their prime giving years, but they’re already making contributions. In a May 2020 survey of 1,441 adults, 46 percent of Gen Z respondents said they had given to charity within the previous 12 months. By comparison, 53 percent of millennials said the same, as did 51 percent of Generation X respondents and 59 percent of baby boomers.
Although their economic power is still nascent, Gen Z already stands out for its civic engagement. According to a September 2020 study on volunteerism by the Points of Light Foundation, Gen Z was particularly active during that year’s health emergency and racial reckoning. Almost 60 percent of Gen Z respondents said that within the previous year, they had considered a company’s values before making a purchase. Another 54 percent said they had added their name to a petition, and 53 percent said they had volunteered. What’s more, Gen Z doesn’t plan to let up its engagement when the pandemic subsides. Fifty-three percent of respondents said they planned to become more active in their community in the future — a higher proportion than any other age group.
Aaron Sokthavy Tann, a first-year communications major, had volunteered with education charities and was active in campus groups for Southeast Asian students before enrolling in the course. But he says taking on the perspective of a grant maker was an entirely different experience from the civic engagement he had known.
“It’s a lot of responsibility for an undergrad student,” Sokthavy Tann says, emphasizing the size of the grant money. “It was uncomfortable, different to be in such a position.”
He and his classmates discussed how their own values informed which charities they believed made the most impact. Those discussions demonstrated how people’s experiences can dictate who gains money and power, he says, and underscored the importance of diversity among philanthropic decision makers.
The hands-on structure of the course helps students glean these kinds of practical takeaways. Local philanthropists and nonprofit leaders join the class to share their insights from working in the charitable world. Students — who are referred to as “board members” during the course — break into working groups of eight to vet 42 Los Angeles nonprofits working in the arts, environment and animals, civil rights and social services, and health and wellness. They research the organizations’ missions, programs, and impact and then draft briefing documents and make presentations to advocate for certain charities to receive funding. At the end of the course, students convene as a board and formally award funding to the three finalist organizations.
Multiple Perspectives
Gen Zers were born at the end of the 1990s and entered their teenage years as the country recovered from the Great Recession. They have witnessed historic wealth inequality, climate change, intractable politics, continuous war, and protests for civil rights — including marriage equality, voting rights, and police reform. They’re inheriting a civil society that’s at once more inclusive and more frayed.
“This generation that we are privileged to educate in higher education right now is terrific,” says Lindholm, who teaches the UCLA course. “They have a weight of responsibility that they are faced with. I think that could be daunting, I think it could be overwhelming, and I think that it is our responsibility as educators to really help support them in learning how to lead and how to thrive.”
Her course emphasizes philanthropy as a means for civic engagement — something her students’ generation has adopted with alacrity. But course readings offer a wide-angle view of the nonprofit world, from cultural philanthropic traditions to pointers on strategic giving and critiques of how the wealthy give.
“There isn’t necessarily one right lens,” Lindholm says. “Every decision you make about how to focus your philanthropic giving is fraught with values-related decisions.”
To that end, Lindholm works hard to ensure that class discussions are respectful. She asks students to consider a series of questions about their own values as they complete course readings and assignments such as “What kind of community/society do you want to live in?” and “What are your personal giving priorities?”
Perez, the psychology major, recalls a discussion among a small group of students during the second week of class about what philanthropy as civic engagement meant to them. Mulling it over, Perez says, the group realized “we all have different ways of viewing philanthropy, and maybe one of them isn’t necessarily better than the other.”
This piqued his curiosity in his peers’ views and values. “I can’t just be stuck within my own bias, within my own mind-set,” he says. “I have to want to learn, to want to expand.”
Michael Lima-Sabatini, a third-year public-affairs major, says the course required that kind of collegial classroom culture because students had $80,000 in cold, hard cash to award by consensus.
Grounded in Values
At the end of the course, an executive board of students led their peers in a virtual vote to distribute the funds.
Facilitators shared a graphic of the values students had previously said guided their giving — ideas like “evidence-based,” “sustainability,” and “future-focused.” They asked their peers to identify a value from that list that now informed their decision making in a way it hadn’t at the start of the quarter. Many students chose sustainability, the likelihood a program would make an impact even after their gift was spent.
Immediately following the discussion, students cast their votes. Rather than take an all-or-nothing approach, they split the $80,000 among the finalists. The charity with the most points, mental-health nonprofit Open Paths Counseling Center, received $40,000. The second, School on Wheels, an education charity serving children experiencing homelessness, received $25,000. The third, Jazz Hands for Autism, which serves musicians on the autism spectrum, received $15,000. Students could make the case for reallocating money if they were unhappy with the point tallies.
The vote was decisive — with just one last-minute debate over whether the language of one grant should be altered to lift restrictions on how the money could be used.
Lindholm commended the executive board on its decision to ground the vote in values. It was a novel approach, she said, and some participants felt it helped establish a consensus among the students before they cast their votes.
With that vote, the virtual board meeting concluded. Students thanked their professor and peers in the chat box and sent heart emojis. It was the kind of cohesive boardroom dynamic that many nonprofit leaders dream of. Unfortunately, they’ll likely have to wait until this generation starts to fills those seats.
