As a scholar who studies the science of social change, I spend a lot of time talking to philanthropists. Sometimes I leave those conversations feeling like they care more about controlling the solutions than solving the problems. In many cases, philanthropists are unwilling to confront hard questions about how to create truly resilient solutions.
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As a scholar who studies the science of social change, I spend a lot of time talking to philanthropists. Sometimes I leave those conversations feeling like they care more about controlling the solutions than solving the problems. In many cases, philanthropists are unwilling to confront hard questions about how to create truly resilient solutions.
Consider racial injustice. Its scale and complexity can be overwhelming — rooting out its insidious tentacles requires changing everything from individual attitudes and behaviors to the structures, policies, and practices of most societal institutions. Philanthropists often like to focus on top-down nudges or policy solutions. Yet these ignore the consistent history of backlash in American politics that stymies any sweeping change, and the unintended consequences that result when strategic actors manipulate institutional reforms to their own ends. History teaches us that making gains resilient to changing political winds requires a public committed to them.
But how do you generate (and sustain) public will, especially in the face of intentional and unintentional attempts to stoke innate prejudice? I examined this question in my book Undivided, about the Crossroads Church in Cincinnati, the nation’s third-largest church, a predominantly white evangelical community. From 2016 to 2022, I traced a group of congregants, Black and white, organizing around racial justice through a Crossroads program called Undivided. I found Undivided because of its unexpected role in a 2016 municipal ballot initiative designed to raise taxes for universal preschool with targeted resources for Cincinnati’s poorest Black communities. In an election that was otherwise marked by divisiveness, Undivided volunteers — Black and white people of faith — helped propel this initiative to victory.
What made this possible? The answer was no nudge, policy, or magic bullet. Even the Undivided curriculum, a six-week program that taught topics common to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — implicit bias, the history of structural disparities, empathy, and so on — was not unusual. Instead, its uniqueness was in creating a vehicle through which people could struggle directly with basic human questions about race in the messy reality of their lives.
‘Belonging Before Belief’
Consider Jess, a white woman who grew up with a father who had the word “White” tattooed on one arm and “Power” tattooed on the other. For most of her life, she never had the opportunity to do more than wonder why the nonwhite people she encountered as teachers, friends, and peers did not conform to the white supremacist stereotypes her father taught. With trepidation, she decided to try Undivided, but knew only enough to know how much she did not know. When she walked into Undivided the first week and had to sit in a mixed-race circle of eight people and recount her early experiences with race, she was, as she put it, “terrified.”
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Yet Jess, like thousands of other people who went through Undivided, persisted. She fearfully admitted to her small group the ideology of racial subjugation she had learned. Undivided, like Crossroads, organized itself around the motto that “belonging comes before belief” — so people in her small group welcomed Jess with hospitality despite their discomfort and learned over time to help Jess probe her beliefs. In that group, Jess cried when a Black woman described a friend, at age 6, who tried to scrub the color off her skin with a washcloth. When Jess learned statistics about the way persistent racial inequalities embedded themselves in society, Jess blurted out her surprise. These unscripted reactions enabled the group to enter into deeper conversations about the way racism extended its tentacles throughout American life.
This six-week journey, however, was just a spark to ignite participants’ willingness to engage in anti-racism. The rubber hit the road when Undivided challenged people to put what they learned into action in their real, messy lives. Once the program ended, leaders invited participants into a series of programs through which they could continue to put their anti-racist values into action and move from the lab to the field, as scholars say. Jess joined a prison ministry. That helped sustain her friendships with people from Undivided, which became the scaffolding to begin confronting the racism she saw in her workplace.
Jim Gormley
A group from Crossroads Church visits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala. The church’s GO Alabama trips visit historic sites in the civil-rights movement to explore racial history in America.
A social worker in the criminal-justice system, Jess felt compelled to speak out about patterns of racism she saw. The more she spoke up, the more her colleagues pushed back. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, her co-workers stopped talking to her altogether because of her support for the Movement for Black Lives. Isolated, Jess considered walking away and giving up. But she stuck with it. As she put it, “The thing Undivided taught me [is] if you build relationships with people, true relationships, you can have hard conversations. You can help people move their goalposts without moving yours.”
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Remarkably, Jess’s experience of Undivided was not unique. Sandra, a Black woman, was married to a white man. She started Undivided because she wanted better tools to talk about race within her marriage. She was surprised that the program forced her to confront her own internalized biases. “We all have racial wounds,” she said.
The examples go on. For each of these participants, Undivided offered an intimate experience of vulnerability, risk, and failure in their small groups, yet it was connected to 150 other small groups operating as well as to tens of thousands of other people within the church. The work was small and big at the same time.
It was not easy. Undivided didn’t shy away from the risk of letting people grapple with the hard questions. The experience was, as I wrote in the book, a process of “revolution by trial and error.”
Giving Up Control
How often are people given the opportunity to engage in this kind of struggle? Very rarely. Most people in a social-change effort are spoon-fed formulaic tasks designed by professional technocrats, tested by experts, and funded as “data-driven solutions” by philanthropy. They are not invited to design their own solutions, practice vulnerability, or take emotional and strategic risks. Instead, they are given easy solutions — buying tote bags, donating money, signing petitions — that leave control in the hands of people who design them. Ordinary people — those who need to be the agents of change — are never given the chance to own it. Without that opportunity, their support remains forever fickle.
To confront that reality, philanthropy must fundamentally give control of the solutions to people who must make the change. That requires more than multiyear, general operating support grants and limited reporting requirements. It requires fundamentally rethinking the incentive structures philanthropy creates.
Right now, most philanthropy-backed organizations are more accountable to their funders than they are to the people they purport to represent or serve. What if we were to reverse that? Consider the “democracy vouchers” piloted in Seattle, a public-financing system for municipal electoral campaigns. The city creates a pool of public funds from which all registered voters receive a “democracy voucher” that they can donate to one or more candidates. The system creates incentives for candidates to organize and raise money from voters at all income levels — not just the wealthy — since everyone has money to give.
Imagine if grant makers were to create vouchers for the constituencies they purport to care about. Instead of persuading philanthropists of the merits of their work, nonprofits that need funding would have to organize those constituencies to obtain the vouchers. In this system, ordinary people could decide which organizations best represent them — which means that the organizations would have to work to make themselves valuable to constituents.
Undivided didn’t begin by hiring experts to design a program. It emerged when a Black pastor in the church spoke of his calling to act on racial justice, and the congregation responded with an unexpected outpouring of support. The team that designed Undivided studied and rejected traditional DEI models that they felt didn’t enable the commitment to risk and distributed ownership they felt Undivided needed.
A key lesson: They could innovate because they were not dependent on institutional philanthropic dollars. Individual donations fund 96 percent of the average megachurch in the United States; perhaps it is no surprise that such churches are investing in and growing members even as other advocacy organizations struggle to maintain followers. You invest in the relationships you value.
The Commons is financed in part with philanthropic support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Einhorn Collaborative, JPB Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. None of our supporters have any control over or input into story selection, reporting, or editing, and they do not review articles before publication. Seemore about the Chronicle, the grants, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and ourgift-acceptance policy.
Hahrie Han is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church.
