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Okay, so you call the community foundation. The community foundation says, “We’ll be happy to help you think about this and give some options, and come back to you with three options.” Option A. To give $100,000 to a homeless services provider on Skid Row, and in the write-up that comes before you, this homeless services provider is a well known, well-established non-profit. And your $100,000, you can provide meals and shelter for 500 people over a course of a year. Okay? You feel good about that.
Option B. To take that $100,000 and rather than giving it all to one provider, you give it to five homeless service providers that are all working on Skid Row. $20,000 each. Midnight Mission, etc. Good organizations.
Third option. There is a new and emerging effort that is an organization that is trying to organize providers and homeless people to advocate for integrated services and better funding.
Now in that scenario, therein lies the Sophie’s choice for philanthropy. You have this money. It seems like a lot of money but it’s a limited pot. The range of options about where to send that money is broad and wide, and among the options before you is – do you put this money in services? Or do you put this money in change?
As a foundation president at The California Endowment, I’ve struggled with this issue with our board of directors, with our staff. Do we write grants to community health clinics to help them provide free care to people who don’t have health insurance. Or do we put the money in organizations that are trying to advocate for a newly reformed health care system that works better for the uninsured?
Now obviously, I’m kind of setting you up here, but the point I’m making is if you think about philanthropic dollars as do-gooder charity money that helps feed homeless people and get health care for people who don’t have health insurance or buys books for kids in school, to a large extent, what you are doing is you are letting the public sector and the policymakers off the hook. That is not to say that providing grant dollars for resources to provide charity care is a bad thing. Of course, it’s a good thing. The Bible says it’s a good thing. How could it not be a good thing?
But I need you to understand in context, when you have discretionary dollars, and foundation dollars are relatively discretionary. Public sector dollars are large, but very siloed. The public sector responds to votes and political perceptions. The corporate sector responds to quarterly profits. This is not to say that corporate philanthropy isn’t doing good things. But at the end of the day, the business sector and the corporate sector, where their bread is buttered is the quarterly profit and the quarterly profit statement. For elected officials, their bread is buttered in the votes. Who else has resources of some reasonable size that can meaningfully look at what it’s going to take to solve problems in a way that thinks about doing business differently?
The answer to that is philanthropy.
So the case I want to make, and there’s a wonderful adage by our friends at the Liberty Hill Foundation that I wish I had thought of first. Which was, their adage is “change, not charity.” And I’m thinking about whether I should do a hostile take-over of the Liberty Hill Foundation. Some kind of a leveraged buy-out. Where’s Jeffrey Richardson? Jeffrey’s thinking of how much money it would take for us to do that. I love that adage. “Change, not charity.” Again, it’s not that charity is a bad thing. But when you have limited precious dollars, how do you use them?
Now a couple of examples of change, not charity. A couple of examples of what philanthropy must do better. In short, we’ve got to tear down three Berlin Walls that get philanthropy in the game in terms of social change and problem-solving.
The first wall we need to tear down is the wall that exists with one another. The philanthropic organizations. Going back to the example of $100,000. What if each of you were notified by a rich uncle that you were being left $100,000 to spend on homelessness. Wouldn’t the coordination and the use of those dollars be better served if we all got in one room at one time and talked about how we might want to use those resources? And philanthropy is really good at forcing and encouraging and cajoling non-profits and grantees to collaborate and partner for better results. We are largely awful at enacting on that ourselves. And philanthropy – the philanthropic sector is very much like herding cats. You get big foundations, small foundations, family foundations – I mean, it’s a whole range of foundations out there. So getting them to sort of march in tune or get in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, is not an easy thing to do. But we have got to figure it out.
Second wall that needs to come down is this wall between the non-profit sector and the community based leaders in philanthropy. There’s a power gradient there. And that power gradient says, we have the money and you need it. And that power gradient plays out in a whole range of ways that adds up to us having less than a candid and therefore productive relationship about driving a change agenda. And that conversation must become candid. In fact, I view non-profits and grantees that are grant seekers very much on the same continuum as foundations. We have a social mission to uplift the under-served and advance health and well-being. Non-profits have a social mission that wants to do the same. We have a limited amount of resources. They have a limited amount of resources. We have some assets. They have some assets. But this power gradient that goes on between the grant seeker and the grant maker is really standing in the way of meaningful partnerships and true collaborations for change between the nonprofit sector and the grantees and community-based organizations and us in philanthropy.
And it plays out in a whole variety of ways. Among them is how people treat me as a foundation officer. I know my jokes are not that funny. I know I’m not that good looking. I know my IQ didn’t get raised from when I used to work for the county. Okay? And I know every one of my remarks is not witty or insightful. But there’s this kind of altar that we either place ourselves on or that grant seekers place. It’s just not good for the sector and it’s not good for the communities that we serve. That wall has got to come down.
Last wall. There are others as well. These are the three primary.
In philanthropy we have a tendency to be either snooty or scared or intimidated or too busy to deal with the public sector. I have just laid out to you why it’s critical that problem-solving on issues of poverty, or health care, or housing and transportation have got to increasingly come from the local communities. And policy-making – it’s a dirty game. It’s a difference between – philanthropy kind of feels like a video game of football or baseball. Public sector policy-making is football on the field, alright? We get bloody, we get hurt. You get your teeth knocked out. You make first downs. You get tackled. I mean all kinds of things sort of happen. It’s a contact sport. Moving a change agenda is a contact sport. As philanthropists we need to understand that we have got to get on the field. And it means a meaningful engagement with policy makers and elected officials that for a variety of reasons, philanthropy is loathe to intersect with and to interact with. And we’ve got to get away from this notion of ATM philanthropy where a grant seeker shoves a proposal in a slot, you know, whispers some incantations and then hopes that a check comes out. And if there is not a meaningful partnership and engagement, then how do we move the issue forward?
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