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Case in point. This is actually a real story. Got a phone call last week. A grantee of ours in Southern California, for whom we provided a grant to work with ex-felons. I actually visited the program maybe 6 or 9 months ago. Thought it was a great program. At that point they didn’t have any information or data about how the program was going. What they do is they take ex-felons, they integrate the health services and health supports, mental health, drug treatment, housing, job training, and they move ex-felons into being taxpaying, responsible citizens. The executive director of this community-based organization who is running this program calls me, leaves a message with my secretary, “I have to speak with Dr. Ross. I have exciting news for him that I’m pretty excited about.” I call him back, “Scott, how you doing? What happened?” “Doc, we just got our two-year evaluation study back, and the university evaluation shows that the two year state recidivism rate – people who are returning to prison after they’ve been let out of prison – is 70%. For the population of ex-felons served by this particular program, it was 30%.” A pretty remarkable and significant improvement on an issue that the public believes is actually intractable. I mean, the public believes that the best thing to do with these people is to put them in jail and then put them back again. Just keep ‘em out of my neighborhood.
So, I congratulate Scott. “Scott, that’s great news.” And I hang up the phone. Question to you. If you’re a foundation president, and a non-profit organization that you’re funding calls you with that kind of news, what do you do? How do you handle it?
Now, there are a variety of ways to answer that question. One way is to say, okay, let me know when the evaluation report is done and send me a copy. Okay, sounds like we can do a policy brief. In foundations we’re famous for that. We do these glossy policy briefs with graphs and pictures and then we put them up on our website and send them out.
The defect is actually not in the lack of problem-solving ideas and approaches. At the federal level I actually had zero confidence that they know what the meaningful change strategies are to solve problems here in Los Angeles. I have slightly better confidence in Sacramento. My confidence level goes up as you get closer and closer to the communities where the problems are. In this case, this non-profit provider is onto something that the State of California needs to think about in terms of the madness that is going on in incarceration recidivism. How do you get that program and what it’s doing and mobilize it to scale? What we’re really good at is actually asking people to evaluate what they’re doing. We’re good at getting reports out about what these numbers look like. We are just plain awful and pathetic as a field in terms of what it takes to lift up that program and what it’s doing and work with advocacy organizations, policy makers and the public to impose the will of that approach on systemic change. Because that stuff’s called politics. It’s kind of a dirty, nasty game, right? And in the academic sector, and in the philanthropic sector, we have been far too sterile about what it takes to move a change agenda. I would argue that it takes what Elizabeth Shore has called “no stories without data and no data without stories.”
And there’s a third leg to that stool, which is the advocacy to move it forward. So you’ve got to have something on the ground that works. We’ve got to be relentless about getting the data. We’re actually pretty good about that. Then you’ve got to have the organizational capacity in communities to not only carry those services out in a way that works, but then transcends that pilot program to move it to broader change.
Tory Osborne, who has now left Liberty Hill for the mayor’s office, and the Hilton Foundation and the Weingarten Foundation, know that homelessness is not an intractable problem. It is a solvable problem. Other cities are actually solving it. Maybe not 100% completely solved, but they are making significant headway. I would argue that it is our burden in the field of philanthropy and in the non-profit sector to join hands and fight that battle for how you move that approach from a nice little pilot project to a change strategy. It’s got to break through that bipartisan, ideological bickering that suffocates it and keeps it where it is. And the only way you can do that is by engaging community-based mobilizers that can say, “yes, this kind of approach is going on and that non-profit is important to this community and we want it, and you better look at it.”
And it means that – you know, when I left that program that I visited six months ago, I actually called the governor’s office on the I-5 from my cell phone. Now that’s not lobbying. There’s a lobbying restriction for most foundations. That’s not lobbying! Okay? I left a message with the governor’s office. I sent the governor’s office and the correctional secretary for the state of California a letter letting him know about this program and that I thought it was a great program. I didn’t hear anything from him. Now, I have my phone call, I have some data coming in. So now I’ve got numbers to go with the story. And now we need to, as a foundation, think about how do we get this approach on the radar screen and steal the hearts and minds of policymakers? And that’s a different kind of conversation than the power gradient conversation of we had the money and you need it and here’s your grant and send in a report when you’re done. It is a message that says, we will walk down this path with you in support – not because we’re smarter than you, but because we had the capacity to move the precious discretionary resources to drive change.
So I just want to share with you why the philanthropic resource is so exceedingly precious given the ecology and the landscape that we find ourselves in right now. And there are other examples of foundations coming together. In Pacoima, Elwood Hawkins is here with Los Angeles Service Funders. We work together. We have a variety of foundations that are all working and supporting efforts in Pacoima. And as a result, after 10 years of funding, we’re seeing better student achievement rates, better parental involvement in schools. These are low-income, predominantly Hispanic low achieving schools. We’re seeing better access to health care. We’re seeing a new community bank for the first time in Pacoima because economic development has been supported. So you see how foundations that are in their silo can come together around a neighborhood and say, okay, we’re an education funder and we want to join a partnership around this, what’s going on in Pacoima. We’re a health funder. We’ll do the health funding. This is a community development fund, and they’re going to do that.
So what is happening is that we’re seeing a synergy, because we’ve climbed out of our silos to support meaningful, sustainable change in a community like Pacoima. Kids and Health Coverage, Santa Clara and Alameda, found ways to move private sector and public sector dollars to create universal health coverage for those kids in those counties. No act of Congress, no bill from the legislature. Just went and did it. And us, in partnership with other health funders, have helped to replicate those models. There are now 18 of those counties around the state. Those counties are now working an advocacy agenda and now we have a ballot initiative with some legislation that they’re pushing to achieve the vision, of the very simple vision of having every child having insurance coverage in the state of California. Grassroots to tree tops. And advocacy driving the agenda.
So what I want to say is that this is not from a sort of a know-it-all foundation that has mastered the art of philanthropy. We certainly know what we need to do better. They are great examples of philanthropy stepping out on these three areas of where these Berlin walls need to come down. But the stakes are too high. The trends are dangerously unsustainable forthright in Los Angeles. And the pressure is on us, not just in philanthropy but as Angelenos to begin to demonstrate legitimate, meaningful problem-solving for the state of California and the rest of the nation. Demographically we are today where they are going to be in 10 or 15 years. San Francisco would argue that they’re the incubator. I would say whatever happens in San Francisco is not generalizable. Right? (Laughter) I love San Francisco. But it’s the People’s Republic of San Francisco. Okay? Politically what San Francisco looks like, looks like nowhere else in the country.
How am I doing on time? I’m done. Okay.
Let me close with what needs to happen. Number 1, there is an association of regional grantmakers called Southern California Grantmakers. It has been functioning largely as a membership organization to support philanthropic needs. I’m on the board. So I’m pointing a finger at ourselves. That organization must become reenergized and retooled to think about collaborative, meaningful advocacy-driven, change-driven philanthropy.
Secondly, we need to open up a conversation with our non-profit sector, providers, colleagues and friends and partners about a candid relationship, about one that’s based on honesty and a shared mission and a shared sense of values.
And thirdly, we gotta get in the game. Homelessness in Skid Row is one example. I think you’ll see Weingarten Foundation, Hilton Foundation, and we’re going to try to support that effort as well. Working with elected officials trying to move that issue forward. Tory’s going to help us with that as makes the move from philanthropy to the mayor’s office. And we cannot miss the opportunity of having an energetic, charismatic, bridge-building mayor and attach our train, our car to that train. It doesn’t mean we have to cozy up to the mayor and just become a checkbook for what Mayor Villaraigosa’s trying to do. But there is a different kind of dynamic approach that’s coming out of City Hall right now in problem-solving and we’ve got to take advantage of it. Thank you very much.
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