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Why Foundations Should Connect Policy Groups to the People They Seek to Help

By  Betsy Krebs
June 11, 2019

In the early 1960s, a group of black mothers in a suburb of New York City organized to close a segregated elementary school and enroll their children in nearby majority-white schools. Civil-rights lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, fought side by side with the mothers and children, taking the case to the Supreme Court. Together they won one of the first post-Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation cases in the North.

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In the early 1960s, a group of black mothers in a suburb of New York City organized to close a segregated elementary school and enroll their children in nearby majority-white schools. Civil-rights lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, fought side by side with the mothers and children, taking the case to the Supreme Court. Together they won one of the first post-Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation cases in the North.

A few years later, thanks to those parents, children, and lawyers, I started kindergarten in one of those formerly all-white schools in a town that some called the Little Rock of the North. I never questioned that it was normal to be in a racially mixed classroom, but today I recognize how desegregating the schools changed our community for the better and influenced my personal commitment to racial and social justice. As a vice president of the JPB Foundation overseeing anti-poverty grants, I now also recognize how profoundly important the strategy of organizers and lawyers collaborating was to the win.

That’s one reason I’m especially interested in a new report commissioned by the Fund for Shared Insight, a collaborative that includes JPB and a dozen other core supporters. Shared Insight seeks to promote listening and feedback in philanthropy and to amplify the voices of those least heard. We have helped direct-service nonprofits create high-quality feedback loops with their clients through our signature effort, Listen4Good.

We recognize, however, that many organizations don’t work directly with clients, even though they may say that “ordinary citizens” or “members of x community” are their beneficiaries. Instead, they often focus on influencing decision makers, researchers, or journalists. Shared Insight hired researchers from the Aspen Institute to understand how organizations that don’t provide direct services can best connect to the people they ultimately seek to help.

The Aspen report, “Meaningfully Connecting With Communities in Advocacy and Policy Work,” lays out a framework for understanding how advocacy and policy organizations build trusting, respectful, transparent relationships with the people and communities their work is intended to benefit. It describes nonprofits reporting levels of engagement that include:

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Informing. Seeking to provide information (such as know-your-rights materials) with the goal of helping people understand an issue and take action.

Listening. Trying to understand the priorities, perspectives, and experiences of the people at the heart of their work and listening to what such people think about an idea, strategy, or proposal. This commonly takes place through focus groups, community meetings, interviews, surveys, or formal advisory groups.

Creating strategies together. Building capacity to lead or jointly lead advocacy or policy work so organizations can hear diverse voices and give people involved in an issue decision-making roles — no matter what those organizations’ strategies for change are.

These categories of engagement and connection will be familiar, since the social-justice philanthropy world generally rejects top-down solutions in favor of listening to those it seeks to help. But the report notes that while many advocacy nonprofits say they want to listen to and connect more closely with the communities they intend to serve, they lack the resources to do so. It says grant makers could remedy that by making grants that reflect an understanding of the time, money, skills, and flexibility needed to build connections with communities.

At JPB, we try to do this.

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Knowing What People Need

As a national foundation that is leanly staffed, JPB typically makes grants to organizations either that have a national impact or that support grassroots groups. We don’t fund policy-advocacy work, but we do support litigation, research, and efforts to educate the public or key decisions makers about relevant issues.

So the Aspen report’s analysis resonates with me as we consider how best to help grantees listen to and respond to the voices of people we seek to help.

Barbara Picower, president of JPB often asks questions like “How do we know what people need?” And throughout the foundation, we are careful to go beyond the typical jargon and labels, such as “beneficiaries,” instead referring specifically, for example, to immigrants applying for citizenship, employees working multiple jobs so they can pay rent, parents concerned about their children’s health, students getting birth control, or citizens waiting in a long line to cast their vote.

Linking With Legal Advocates

An elite think tank, researcher, or litigator might find it challenging to listen to the communities they say they’re helping. This might be due to a shortage of time and money or a lack of expertise and comfort with listening. In part to address that, we structure grants to build trusting, two-way relationships between the people who are living everyday with an issue and those, like the lawyers at the legal groups we fund, who are considered the professional experts.

In some cases, we provide support for legal groups to hire people who have lived through the issues at stake. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the same group that fought to integrate my childhood public-school system, deploys its community organizers to work with local advocates and inform its lawyers to make sure litigation and remedies are tailored to the needs of the community, such as protecting the rights of tenants in public housing or combating voter-suppression tactics.

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At the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, our grants pay for organizers from communities most impacted by voter suppression to inform the lawyers’ work and to have people on the ground to ensure elections are fairly administered.

Other times we fund legal organizations and grassroots groups to have the staffing and bandwidth to collaborate. For example, legal groups in the Shriver Center’s Legal Impact Network work closely with community-organizing groups in the Community Change network in Kentucky, Maine, New Mexico, and Washington State. In one such partnership in New Mexico, a workers’-rights group brought the state’s failure to enforce its minimum-wage laws to the attention of a legal group focused on poverty issues, and together they sued the state, reaching a settlement that protects workers.

Honest Conversations

While these collaborative efforts are already producing results, the approach laid out in the Aspen report gives us a new way to ask deeper questions about how the groups are building relationships with communities, where they would like to do more, and what the challenges are.

In philanthropy, we need to ensure that the people and communities we intend to benefit are meaningfully connected to the nonprofits, grant makers, think tanks, researchers, and advocacy groups working on their behalf.

Without that connection, we risk focusing on the wrong priorities, building weaker or misguided arguments, and making gains harder to achieve and wins less secure.

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Grant makers need to take the lead in holding honest conversations about how grantees are grappling with this issue and how we might better support and learn from their efforts to build more meaningful connections. This is especially critical at a time when we are all talking about the importance of elevating the voices of the people most affected by the challenges we tackle in our grant making and those who are so essential to our democracy.

Betsy Krebs is vice president for poverty programs at the JPB Foundation in New York. She previously helped found and led a nonprofit that promoted policy change and self-advocacy education for youths in foster care and other government systems.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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