When NCRP released its Philamplify report on the Walton Family Foundation this past spring, we also launched a new poll on Philamplify.org, asking: “What is the top reason why a nonprofit would choose not to openly criticize a foundation?”
This poll was chosen because our Philamplify reports have found that many grantees are reluctant to publicly criticize the foundations that fund them. It struck a chord and received almost 100 responses, so I summarized the results in a brief blog post after the poll closed in June.
Recently, Andrew J. Coulson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Education Freedom, posted a response on Cato’s blog. Oddly, Coulson’s post links not to the original post on Philamplify.org, but to a repost on PressReleasePoint. (Editor’s note: We have chosen not to link to the PressReleasePoint repost because it violated our Creative Commons license by stripping out all of the hyperlinks contained within the post and incorrectly labeled it as a “press release” instead of a “blog post.”)
Coulson repeatedly refers to my blog post as a “report” – seemingly willfully misinterpreting the text (even if he truly thought the blog was supposed to be a press release, we never refer to the poll as a report). As a result, he criticizes us for using an anonymous, unscientific web poll as the basis for a research report. Unfortunately, this is one of several false assumptions that Coulson leans on in his response. Coulson writes:
“The report seeks to explain a phenomenon whose existence it does not bother to establish. Rather than presenting evidence that nonprofits are in fact intimidated into silence by grantors, the report instead simply assumes that they are. … No evidence is presented to substantiate or quantify this claim.”
Not only is this false, but it suggests that Coulson never bothered to visit Philamplify.org. If he had, he might have learned that the lack of unvarnished feedback from grantees to grantmakers is the primary basis for Philamplify’s existence. Perhaps he could’ve read the Walton Family Foundation and Hess Foundation reports, which were linked to in the original blog post, where he would’ve found anonymous quotes from grantees describing their reluctance to provide direct feedback and, in the case of Hess, the foundation’s reluctance to hear it.
This Nonprofit Quarterly article authored by NCRP Director of Foundation Assessment Lisa Ranghelli and Communications Director Yna Moore – again, linked to in the original blog post – explains in detail the hesitancy grantees have for providing foundations with feedback, even when given the opportunity to do so anonymously.
Furthermore, Coulson must have missed that one of the poll’s answer choices was “I don’t think nonprofits avoid foundation criticism.” Only 2.2 percent of respondents selected this option.
Thus, Coulson ironically accuses NCRP of failing to support its claims with evidence, while apparently neglecting to do any research of his own.
Coulson notes that there are nonprofits that have criticized foundations (and does so by pointing to his own research at Cato). True enough, but this doesn’t refute the premise of the poll. First, the question refers to grantees’ reluctance to provide direct, honest feedback to their funders, not whether research nonprofits are willing to criticize foundations in general – something NCRP has done its entire 40-year existence. Second, the willingness of some grantees to criticize foundations does not dispel the idea that others are reluctant to provide their funders with direct, honest feedback.
Coulson concludes his post by requesting that his readers provide him with examples of empirical research that are critical of foundations so that he can send them to NCRP, allowing us to “make amends for [our] earlier baseless, question-begging speculations.” I’ll save him some time and tell him he can find examples of such research in our Philamplify reports on The Kresge Foundation, Hess Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, The California Endowment, Daniels Fund, Lumina Foundation, Woodruff Foundation and William Penn Foundation.
NCRP welcomes criticism of our research and blog posts (even ones written about anonymous Web polls). Visitors to the site are encouraged to comment and vote on our reports and recommendations. One of Philamplify’s primary goals is to stimulate debate and discussion, and we were pleased to see thorough critiques of our Walton Family Foundation report from Nonprofit Quarterly and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. But when the criticism is based on false assumptions and a lack of knowledge about what NCRP and Philamplify do, as in the case of Coulson’s response, it isn’t useful to anyone.
Peter Haldis is a communications associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Follow @NCRP and @PeterHaldis on Twitter and join the #Philamplify conversation.
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