Editor’s note: NCRP Senior Research and Policy Associate Ryan Schlegel and Field Associate Ben Barge recently visited the Alabama Black Belt as part of a listening tour hosted by Grantmakers for Southern Progress and the Black Belt Community Foundation. This is the first in a series of blog posts from activists, organizers and community leaders they met during their trip. NCRP strives to elevate the voices of grantees and potential grantees in conversations about philanthropy. This blog series will address topics relevant to the work underway for social, economic, racial and environmental justice in the Black Belt from the perspective of the people doing that work.

Many in Alabama recently participated in the Reenactment of the Battle of Selma, where Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was defeated by Union troops on April 2, 1865. During the re-enactment, the Confederates are portrayed winning on the first day, and the next day is portrayed more historically accurate.

Before the battle, Dallas County, where Selma is located, was the fourth wealthiest county in the nation, largely because it had the highest number of enslaved people in Alabama and the fourth highest in the U.S. Dallas County was one of the South’s main manufacturing centers during the American Civil War.

Following the Battle of Selma, much of Selma was destroyed including many private businesses and residences, as well as the army arsenal and factories. Many lives were lost, more people were taken prisoner and even more saw their jobs disappear. Selma’s economy has never recovered and neither have the broken relationships that were intentionally created so the rich could stay rich and those in poverty, black and white, would believe that we are each other’s enemies; that all of this loss was for and because of black people.

In the 1960s, many battles were won and laws changed. However, we never got around to building the relationships needed to change hearts and minds. Because more white people were killed in the Selma area for supporting the movement than blacks, a clear messaged was sent about the consequences of supporting and associating with black people.

Thus, in 2016, when an African American woman attempted to pass out leaflets explaining a different perspective, a different “truth” than those who were re-enacting the Battle of Selma, wishes of death and injury were expressed about her on social media. “Maybe a stray confederate bullet will find its way.” “Someone needs to put crosshairs on it!!”

After the same mayor who was in power during Bloody Sunday, the day of unmitigated violence against marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, was unseated in 2000 by black man, many leaders felt and expressed that the new mayor could not run the city. Some systematically attempted to make him fail by making Selma fail and even incorporated an adjacent town, Valley Grande, which takes needed tax dollars and resources from Selma.

When a group of black people protested for months in 1990 to ensure that their children weren’t tracked in inadequate and unequal classrooms and subjected to in-school segregation, almost all of the white children were pulled out of public schools for private or county schools. As one young white man said to me, “Now, no one is learning.”

It is seen in the united effort by some to keep industry from coming to Selma without losing the few businesses that are already here. Or their expressed effort to keep wages to no more than $8 per hour. Yet, because many black and white people view each other as enemies, we have not joined together for the benefit of all.

Therefore, in 2014, Dallas County was the poorest in the state and one of the poorest in the country. Selma remains engulfed with racial and class divisions that hinder the city’s progress. Selma, like most of the South, has never confronted years of racial violence and prejudice that keep the city from a healing path forward.

In 2015, Dallas County was named the most dangerous place to live in Alabama. This year on the day we commemorated Bloody Sunday there were two murders in Selma and have been five more since then.

It is not surprising that Dallas County was named the poorest and most dangerous county in Alabama in consecutive years. As violence increases, the economy suffers, and as the economy suffers, violence increases. We are in desperate need of help to stop this vicious, bloody cycle.

Although the poverty rate in Dallas County is nearly double the state rate, Dallas County receives less than 1 percent of grants in Alabama. However, I know from experience that we receive many more political leaders and foundations who come to Selma and learn our rich history and then leave us just as they found us: with great need and great opportunity. It is time for political leaders and foundations to do more than learn and leave. They must invest in Selma as Selma has invested in the world, enabling Selma to once again change the world.

The Battle of Selma may have ended but Selma is still battling. Selma is in need of truth and reconciliation. Selma is in need of you.

Ainka Jackson, Esq., is executive director of The Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth & Reconciliation at the Healing Waters Retreat Center. Follow @SelmaCNTR and @NCRP on Twitter.

In an upcoming blog post, she’ll discuss the Center’s current work in Selma and how foundations can support it.

Image by damian entwistle, modified under Creative Commons license.

LAANE (Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy) was part of the Raise the Wage coalition to raise the minimum wage for almost 900,000 people in the Los Angeles region in 2015. Building on this local momentum, Governor Jerry Brown signed a California statewide minimum wage of $15 per hour into law on April 4, a victory that resulted from minimum wage wins in various cities across the country such as San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Several funders supported the LA effort directly, including the California Wellness Foundation and the California Community Foundation.

However, we drew most of our resources to cover our work on the campaign from foundations that provide us with general support, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Weingart Foundation.

Foundations have helped us and our allies to raise the minimum wage in LA in two major ways:

1. More than ever, funders are recognizing the importance of nonprofit organizations working together collaboratively to build a network. To help move the dial on progressive issues, a regional network needs to be broad and robust.

In working to raise the minimum wage across Los Angeles County, LAANE was part of the Raise the Wage coalition led by the County Federation of Labor, which included unions, local nonprofits, worker centers and numerous community organizations working toward the common goal of lifting hundreds of thousands of Angelenos out of poverty.

Los Angeles County’s population is approximately the size of Ohio. Given that scale, no major victory can be won by one organization alone.

2. Foundations are increasingly looking at how multi-year, general operating support creates opportunities for organizations to work on long-term planning that results in advocacy and organizing wins.

Multi-year, core support allows us to respond nimbly and quickly jump into campaign work as new opportunities to build power for low-wage workers arise.

These have also enabled us and our allies in the region to win the campaigns that helped to lay the groundwork for the minimum wage victory, including the original living wage victory or the more recent hotel workers’ policy. Those kinds of policy wins, over many years, helped create the context for an across-the-board victory that accomplishes real scale and begins to address the profound income inequality in our region.

As Judy Belk, CEO of the California Wellness Foundation, said in a blog about the positive impacts on health outcomes for low wage workers, “Let’s be real: Living on the current minimum wage of $10 an hour is not enough to survive, let alone thrive. Do the math. Workers and their families in California and across the nation deserve the dignity of a fair wage.”

This support from funders is impacting working people. After Los Angeles raised the minimum wage in June 2015, LAANE continued working with the Raise the Wage coalition to advance minimum wage increases in other neighboring cities. City councils in Santa Monica, Long Beach and Pasadena voted to raise the minimum wage in January 2016.

As funders support regional coalition-building and general operating grants that can further long-term strategy, LAANE and our allies look forward to continuing to champion working people.

“Earning a living wage of $15 per hour gives you your life back,” said Rafael Sanchez III, a Teaching Assistant at LAUSD. “To survive in L.A. on low wages, you’re basically always working to pay the bills. It means you put your dreams on hold. Knowing I’m on track to earn $15, I can now focus on my goal of becoming a teacher.”

Roxana Tynan is executive director of LAANE. Follow @LAANE and @NCRP on Twitter.

Image by Eric Carcetti, modified under Creative Commons license.

In the historic Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court found bans on marriage equality unconstitutional and that marriage is a fundamental right for all. To put this monumental victory for LGBTQ people in context, let’s rewind to 12 years ago.

The LGBTQ movement suffered a startling setback in the wake of securing equal marriage in Massachusetts. Among the 2004 wreckage, voters in 13 states banned same-sex marriage, bringing the number of states with such amendments to 17. A Pew research poll found that 61 percent of the U.S. population opposed same-sex marriage. This was a debilitating defeat for our community and it appeared only a small fraction of the population would ever have their same-sex relationships recognized under the law.

Around that same time, with the law and public opinion seemingly at odds with social justice, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund became the first foundation to publicly support marriage equality as a major priority. They made a $2.5 million investment into Freedom to Marry’s national campaign for marriage equality. And in the few years since that initial gift, their insight about marriage equality has helped to deliver profound positive change and has provided equally profound lessons on effective grantmaking.

In the years leading up to the Supreme Court marriage ruling, nearly every large LGBTQ organization began working on marriage and hundreds of millions were spent in support of the issue ($44.1 million in California against Proposition 8 alone). In the same short period of time, public support turned in favor of marriage, and roughly 60 percent now support same-sex marriage.

The outpouring of resources and public support that energized the movement was not happenstance. Like many social movements, our LGBTQ movement owes much to the relatively few foundations that stood up for the fledgling initiative and made big bets on smart strategy. To that end, much credit is due to the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. Their support came at a time when few would publically support marriage equality, let alone put money behind it.

Due to the investment by the Haas, Jr. Fund and others, our community was able to study why we were losing at the ballot box. Studies showed that to change the public opinion on marriage, we needed to change our messaging and communicate our shared values: love, family and commitment. These findings led the movement to portray itself in a new light and win dramatic gains in public support.

The Haas, Jr. Fund ultimately contributed $39 million to marriage equality and inspired other funders to contribute to the cause. Leading advocates credited the fund’s trailblazing support for the state-by-state and then national movement as pivotal in achieving our Supreme Court victory. Their investment paid off. And they aren’t finished.

Social change can move fast, but it can also take generations. Although marriage equality was achieved relatively quickly, history is replete with examples of religion being manipulated to provide a “moral” cover story for the most appalling actions. Recently our community has seen a swift and dramatic backlash from those who use “religious liberty” to take liberties with faith and cherished constitutional rights, all in the cause of legalizing discrimination. More than 100 of these anti-LGBTQ laws were introduced in state and local legislatures in 2015 alone. This tactic from the opponents of equality has done immense harm to the LGBTQ community, and it is time for the LGBTQ community to reclaim faith.

The Haas, Jr. Fund recognized early the fallacy and dangers of the “God vs. Gays” divide advocated by our opponents. In fact, “coming out” can be a profoundly spiritual journey. The Haas, Jr. Fund is one of the first foundations to focus on turning faith and religion into one of our community’s most valuable assets, investing in mobilizing LGBTQ and allied people of faith. Its support has been critical to the Task Force’s ability to build a vibrant, faith-based network for LGBTQ equality that will continue to shift public opinion and increase support for LGBTQ people of faith and against broad religious exemption legislation. With the Haas, Jr. Fund, our Faith Organizing program works to ensure that needs, expertise and resources of faith communities are respected and well-integrated into larger state-wide efforts.

Philanthropy is in a unique position in that their ability to make big bets can raise awareness and give legitimacy to otherwise invisible opportunities. Philanthropy is well-suited to work within the movement-building field, but it is an opportunity that many funders are not seizing. For example, Bridgespan Group reports that 80 percent of the country’s biggest givers articulate a powerful social change goal as a primary philanthropic objective. However, only a modest proportion of their biggest philanthropic gifts are focused on these types of social change initiatives. Between 2000 and 2012, only 20 percent of their giving was social change giving. The other 80 percent of large gifts largely went to institutional giving, primarily to schools, hospitals and cultural institutions.

We readily admit that making big bets on social change is a hard process that is often painful. They require a great deal of patience, trust and profound vision. For that, the Task Force is thankful for partners like the Haas, Jr. Fund. Our partnership is largely based on trust, and trust has been shown to almost always be the most important currency of any big bet. It has required the Haas, Jr. Fund to know us thoroughly and deeply; a relationship built over years. This kind of ongoing relational support is necessary because it may take years, if not decades, to see a gift’s full effects.

Sustained trust and longevity can give nonprofits and movements flexibility to experiment, fail, reflect, build on success and seize “movement moments” when the time is right. Such understanding is how philanthropy can serve movement building in a way that utilizes its resources to address systemic issues most effectively, respectfully and responsibly.

It is a rare gift to find funders who are unequivocally committed to challenging the pervasive negative attitudes toward society’s most marginalized groups. The Haas, Jr. Fund is one of those treasures that prove that philanthropy can play a key role in transforming social movements – and thus the world.

We wholeheartedly congratulate the Haas, Jr. Fund for its 2016 Impact Award and for achieving what so many initially thought was impossible.

Follow @TheTaskForce on Twitter.

Image by Elvert Barnes, used under Creative Commons license.

America leads the world in locking away its citizens. With only 5 percent of the global population, the United States accounts for a quarter of its incarcerated population, and the toll does not fall upon us equally.

Our prison population is almost exclusively poor and disproportionately of color. The disparate impact of our administration of justice is arguably the greatest civil and human rights issue confronting our nation. Thus, it is encouraging that there is growing bipartisan interest in addressing mass incarceration and that some philanthropies are lining up their support.

But mass incarceration is a symptom of a larger problem: Our collective acceptance of a narrative that portrays poor people, particularly those of color, as less than human and therefore deserving of a lesser standard of justice than the rest of us. Additionally, the focus of criminal justice reform has been on achieving easily quantifiable results. As we set our sights on reducing the prison population, the answers seem obvious: arrest fewer people and reduce the terms of imprisonment.

While reducing the prison population is a laudable goal, if we do not transform our assumptions about the poor and how they deserve to be treated, equal justice will remain elusive. As long as we continue to “otherize” minority populations, we will continue to over-arrest and over-punish them. And while we may shrink the number of people in prison, our prisons will still be solely reserved for the poor.

Public defenders, who speak for more than 80 percent of people in the criminal justice system, provide a ready-made army to transform the attitudes that drive injustice and to begin reforming our racist, classist justice system from the inside. If we are to realize meaningful reform, more quality public defenders are necessary to make sure that the voices of those seen as expendable are heard, and that criminal justice decisions are made with the humanity of those impacted at front of mind.

While many progressive thinkers understand the importance of public defenders, progressive philanthropists’ funding choices indicate they have yet to appreciate how these advocates can drive systemic reform.

A keyword search for “public defender” in Foundation Center’s grants database shows just $5.75 million was invested in such grants over the last 12 years. More unsettling, over 90 percent of those dollars came from just four major funders.

The philanthropic sector has a choice: It can do nothing and risk a strategy change by a single funder eviscerating the organizations working for a robust public defender movement. Or, it can move more money to organizations supporting the work of public defenders. A single additional major funder investing in public defender organizations would dramatically increase – perhaps by as much as 50 percent – the resources available to those groups.

As the founder of Gideon’s Promise, an organization building an army of defenders to change a criminal justice narrative that sees poor people as less human and unworthy of equal protection, I envision a movement of public defenders that challenges the assumptions that drive our collective views about race, class and criminality, and thereby transforms justice in America. Through policy fixes we can attempt to alter how police, prosecutors and judges mete out justice. But many of these professionals have internalized a “tough-on-crime” mindset inconsistent with the values underlying these reforms, making the status quo that much more persistent. An army of public defenders is the best way to ensure that violations are brought to light in the short run and, more significantly, to begin the process of changing the value systems that drive injustice in the long run.

Building such a movement is at the heart of what we do at Gideon’s Promise. We provide training and support to an ever-growing number of public defender offices joining this movement and to new lawyers fighting to raise expectations about just outcomes for low-income populations. We work with public defender leaders to build more client-centered offices and to advocate for reform in their communities. We partner with law schools across the country to build a pipeline of committed future defenders to join the effort to reform criminal justice in some of the most challenging environments.

But in order for organizations like Gideon’s Promise to recruit talented, passionate professionals to staff this new public defender army, foundations need to be part of the collective effort – especially foundations that already consider criminal justice reform a priority. Progressive foundations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal justice reform in the last decade, and their investments are only growing. A movement of knowledgeable, committed lawyers serving as public defenders, helping protect the most vulnerable members of our society, is critical to the success of any of these efforts. They are the key to reform when we understand these lawyers as not only indispensable to protecting individual rights, but as a powerful vehicle to transform systemic assumptions that drive injustice. That is why it’s crucial for foundations to begin devoting more resources to building the public defender infrastructure.

Jonathan Rapping, a 2014 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow, is founder and President of Gideon’s Promise, Inc. – a 501c3 nonprofit transforming the criminal justice system by building a movement of public defenders who provide equal justice for marginalized communities. Follow @JRapping and @Gideons_Promise on Twitter.

Image by Mike Steele, adapted under Creative Commons license.

Consumer voice and engagement are core values of the Consumer Health Foundation. We believe that everyone, especially in low-income communities and communities of color, has to be heard and engaged to eliminate health inequities and build healthy communities. By virtue of our position as a funder, we do not often get the chance to directly talk with community members and instead rely on our grantees to inform us. This compromise has not been enough for our organization.

About five years ago, our board expressed a desire to engage more deeply and directly with communities involved in complex social change initiatives. In response, we researched and learned of a strategy that allowed us to do this – learning journeys. The purpose of learning journeys is to “allow participants to break-through patterns of seeing and listening by stepping into a different and relevant perspective and experience.” The board and staff decided to go on a day long trip in a community where one of our grantees had a strong presence.

We embarked on our first learning journey to Langley Park, an “international corridor” settled between Prince George’s County and Montgomery County in Maryland, just a few miles away from our office. The trip (consisting of a tour of the community by van and foot) was arranged by our grantee partner CASA, an organization that advocates for policies and programs that promote economic and social justice and equity.

The most powerful moment of the journey was the dialogue between community members and CHF’s board and staff. Residents told stories of the fear of displacement with the planning of the Purple Line, a new line on the Washington Metro transit system, and racial and ethnic profiling. They also told uplifting stories about the many small businesses in the community. Board members had voted on funding based on summaries of grantees’ work developed by staff, but it did not compare to experiencing the place and listening to community accounts firsthand.

Since that learning journey, CHF staff and board visited Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx to learn about how 2,000 mostly Latina and African-American home health aides experience work within an organization that values cooperative decision-making and ownership.

Last Thursday, we went on yet another learning journey to Bread for the City’s Southeast Center located in D.C.’s Ward 7, a predominantly African-American community where the effects of structural racism in employment, housing and access to healthy food are evident. BFC offers food, clothing, social services, and a legal clinic at this center. We had the chance to not only tour the center but also the neighborhood where clients live and play (most residents have to venture into the city for work). We were joined by two residents who were also members of BFC’s client advocacy council, which serves as a liaison between the staff and clients, and they provided insightful commentary as we explored the neighborhood. (Learn more about CHF’s work with BFC.)

Similar to previous journeys, the most rewarding part of the day was hearing from the community leaders and staff. We heard about their experiences after attending an “Undoing Racism” training and coming back to their community transformed and eager to share what they had learned; how empowered they felt when they realized that they had rights and a powerful voice. We also heard from an organizer who told us of her experiences working with community members and their efforts to successfully pass legislation. The room erupted when community members jokingly chanted, “All we do is win!”

At CHF, we strive to be more than a funder. We work hard to be a resource and a partner, which means taking a closer look at the issues that we fund from the perspectives of people directly impacted. The learning journey, among other strategies, is one opportunity that we value in order to respectfully and responsibly engage.

Yanique Redwood is President and CEO at Consumer Health Foundation, a 2016 NCRP Impact Awards recipient. Kendra Allen is Administrative and Communications Assistant at CHF. Follow @chfprez and @CHF_News on Twitter. Photo by Bread for the City.

Editor’s Note: This post follows up on a January webinar that looked at the rural perspective of mass incarceration and philanthropy’s role in reform efforts. Nick was a panelist in that webinar.

For nearly 20 years now, I’ve met with relatives of prisoners freighted to rural prisons. For working class families, the long distance phone calls and road trips required to keep in touch with an incarcerated loved one are hard to manage and put important human relationships at risk. It’s a problem that gets resolved through broad public awareness and popular dissent. What’s the most pragmatic, sustainable way to make that happen?

Even as mental health providers caution that prisoners fare better while incarcerated close to home, where frequent visits from family and friends are possible, the majority of the prison population is transported 100 miles or more from their communities of origin. Exiled from everything and everyone they know, these prisoners lack for nearby advocates, leaving them with few options when they face harsh treatment and civil rights violations.

In response, artists, activists and citizens are undertaking a cooperative endeavor to end mass incarceration, one that spans the urban-rural divide. We organize around everything from releasing aging people from prison to setting up best practices around how prisons impact and are impacted by environmental issues. But these types of enterprises require long-term grantmaking from philanthropists interested in bridging two seemingly disparate locales. Linking urban and rural communities is complex work that takes time, but it pays dividends in optimizing strategic grassroots power.

The vast majority of our country’s prisons are disproportionately filled with men and women of color from struggling urban centers, and are disproportionately located in white, economically-hard-hit rural areas. Urban criminalization and rural exploitation are tandem oppressions, and for as long as our criminal justice system functions as a kind of Stanford Prison Experiment – pitting people against one another in false games of power and fear – the brutality will continue to be routine.

The urban-rural dichotomy is mostly contrived. Talk of out-of-the-way backwaters and insular cities belies the deeper reality: urban and rural Americans live in comparable worlds bound by common values. Very few rural residents are farmers. Instead, they live civic lives similar to those of their urban counterparts but on a smaller scale. By the same token, both communities battle social pathologies like poverty and the drug war.

Rural communities are often depicted as homogeneous, but during the last couple of decades, they’ve grown more diverse. And they’ve always included vibrant communities of color. As Beyoncé Knowles notes in her much-discussed song and video “Formation,” rural Black art has often been a catalyst for the American identity and culture we’ve most benefitted from.

That’s not to minimize what’s emerging as a remarkable urban-rural political divide. As Josh Kron writes in this The Atlantic magazine article, presidential election data indicate that polarizing, ideological rifts along party lines increasingly manifest themselves geographically, giving rise to Democratic cities and Republican states. Red and blue Americans seem to be rushing to their sides of the playing field: “Cities, year by year, have become drenched in more blue. Everywhere else is that much more red,” Kron writes. A recent Pew Research Center report referred to these us-and-them communities as “alien tribes.”

Yet criminal justice issues are one way to unite both sides in solidarity for change. Almost everyone has had an incarcerated relative, friend or acquaintance. As The Crime Report noted, surveys show that Republicans and Democrats favor prison reform equally.

Less than 1 percent of philanthropic funding flows toward rural counties. As philanthropic sources realize how important it is to strengthen inner-city justice movements that push back against systemic criminalization (something we need to see much more of), they’re slow to reach out to remote counties where the infrastructure for criminalization is largely built and people are increasingly subject to it (the bottoming out of rural towns means escalating arrest rates).

“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now,” Martin Luther King once said. That couldn’t be truer than for rural and urban communities facing down the prison industrial complex. Dedicating more foundation resources to networking rural and urban grassroots organizations is a simple step toward growing grassroots power and building a robust movement to end mass incarceration.

Nick Szuberla is executive director and co-founder of Working Narratives. Follow him on Twitter @NickSzuberla.

Image by Robert Stringer, adapted under CC license.

To advance housing justice, residents must be treated as true partners in creating what change looks like and how it happens. It’s crucial to have philanthropy’s support of community engagement to successfully support resident leaders and build the movement to a scale needed for real change.

The California Resident United Network (RUN) is a unique and exciting collaboration between the Center for Community Change’s Housing Trust Fund Project and Housing California. RUN unites residents who live in affordable homes, front-line housing staff and management at a power-sharing table where residents have the majority voice. Together, they learn about the systemic inequity that created California’s housing crisis and advance solutions both locally and statewide to change that system. Enabling residents to have a majority voice in RUN is imperative for a couple of reasons:

  1. Residents can connect and inspire fellow residents to action more effectively. There are close to one million people living in homes made affordable by public subsidy in California. Even if RUN reaches just a portion of those folks, tens of thousands of families with unique voices will be added to the advocacy efforts for stable, healthy communities in the state.
  2. Empowered residents can have a huge impact on public perception by telling their stories, talking about their love for their community and the world they want to see. For real lasting change to occur, the movement for housing and community justice must be grounded in the vision, passion and lived experience of residents.

Theresa Winkler experienced homelessness for many years on the streets of L.A., facing such barriers as untreated mental health issues and drug abuse. Today, Theresa is in recovery and living in an affordable apartment at Skid Row Housing Trust. But her story is not about redemption or charity. And it doesn’t end with a safe, affordable home – rather, it begins there.

Now, Theresa’s story continues through her work as a RUN resident leader. As part of a RUN action last year, Theresa spearheaded the collection of more than 40 letters in a matter of days that urged Governor Jerry Brown to sign a bill to expand affordable housing. Kicking off 2016, Theresa delivered the opening address at the new California Assembly Speaker’s press conference advocating for more affordable housing.

There are many resident leaders like Theresa within RUN who have stepped up to be spokespersons, advocates and organizers: Zondre, William, Kenneth and more. RUN and our partners recognize the power that organized residents can bring, including introducing new tactics that impress decision-makers, sharing powerful stories and mobilizing other residents with their passion and commitment.

California has nearly 39 million people, boasts an economy that ranks 7th or 8th in the world and is the 3rd largest U.S. state by area. To organize throughout such a large state begins with building trusted partnerships so that “game changing” relationships can develop among residents, staff and management. Currently, RUN focuses on five regions (Sacramento, the Bay Area, Fresno/Central Valley, Los Angeles and San Diego), working with trusted backbone organizations to anchor the work in each.

With organizing in such a big state comes challenges, chiefly how to get everyone in the same place and keep a vibrant communication system operating across the state. So far our solutions have included:

  • Monthly leadership conference calls to make RUN decisions.
  • Online training through interactive webinars.
  • Online/offline communication with our members.
  • Periodic regional meetings for partners with similar agendas.

These challenges provide an opportunity for grantmakers to invest in innovative strategies to help groups like RUN expand upon traditional organizing, such as simultaneous training via video stream and development of texting and social media networks that keep people connected while being accessible to folks with technology barriers.

However, nothing comes close to in-person meetings and actions, and grantmakers should continue to embrace their convening power. Face-to-face gatherings generate energy, build strong connections among members and catch the attention of decision-makers.

Some philanthropic early adapters like the Liberty Hill Foundation have helped with funding for Los Angeles residents to travel to RUN events in northern California. The California Endowment has made their space available for meetings. Face-to-face meetings are also staff intensive, underscoring the importance of core support, such as that provided to the Housing Trust Fund Project by the Oak Foundation and the Campion Foundation.

Foundations that support resident engagement can look forward to seeing their investments have real returns in the numbers of people who have been directly impacted by housing inequality coming together to create lasting change for social justice.

Katy Heins, a senior organizer with the Center for Community Change, leads the resident organizing initiatives of CCC’s Housing Trust Fund Project. Before joining CCC, Katy was the executive director of the Contact Center in Cincinnati, which works to empower low-income women to organize for social justice in their communities.

 

This post first appeared on the National Center for Family Philanthropy’s blog, Family Giving News, on January 26, 2016.

Foundations seemed so mysterious to me when I started my career in nonprofits.

At the time, back in 1993, I was a novice grantwriter for a tiny Seattle organization called Treehouse. As a young professional just getting started in the field, I was eager to learn as much as possible. I spent countless hours researching guidelines and putting my newly minted English degree to use writing as many proposals as I could.

It should come as no surprise that I learned quite a bit about the foundation world. But as I look back on that experience, there was one proposal that stood out — and that guides how I approach my work today as a foundation leader.

During my research, I had discovered a foundation that seemed like a perfect match for Treehouse’s Little Wishes program, a program that paid for things that every child deserves such as school pictures, Boys & Girls Club memberships and sports fees.

I thought it was a promising sign when I heard from the foundation’s program officer, who agreed that we may have a fit, although she told me that her foundation wouldn’t pay for staffing. Since I hadn’t included any of my time or our executive director’s time in the budget, I wasn’t sure what she meant. It turned out that she didn’t even want to acknowledge the Little Wishes Program Coordinator in the program budget.

I was scared to contradict a funder, so I revised the budget to only include the funding that directly paid for children’s needs and activities — even though there was no way the program could run without the coordinator. In the end, after an onerous application process that took a lot of my time, we didn’t even get the grant.

That was the first time that I truly realized the importance of general operating support: unrestricted funding that organizations can apply to any part of their organization.

If every funder only pays for a specific program or a specific line item, an organization becomes fragmented and unstable. Without general operating support, an organization doesn’t have the money for staffing, rent, technology, training, or even the phone bill. And, without a strong infrastructure, programs that improve our communities can’t happen.

Not Yet the Norm

While there has been increasing recognition of the importance of funding general operating support, it is not yet the norm.

Various surveys show general operating support accounts for between 20-25 percent of grantmaking, although that number seems to be gradually increasing. It helps that the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, the Nonprofit Finance Fund, the Center for Effective Philanthropy and many other leaders in the field have identified unrestricted funding as a best practice.

There are promising signs of change on both sides of the funding equation.

Several foundations are shifting their funding. Most notably, the Ford Foundation announced last year that it will strive to double the total it gives in general operating support to 40 percent of its grantmaking budget. Ford — with a grantmaking budget of more than $500 million a year — is making a powerful statement that will hopefully inspire other foundations.

Nonprofit leaders, meanwhile, are also raising their voices on this issue. While I stood silent as a professional working at Treehouse, today’s leaders are starting to speak up about the great need for unrestricted funding. Vu Le, a Seattle nonprofit leader, has received national recognition for his humorous, spot-on blog that contains several posts about this issue.

Yet with all of this momentum, why does general operating support still account for only a relative fraction of all grantmaking?

I believe it is primarily because foundations want to understand and quantify their own impact. By earmarking dollars to a specific program, many foundations hope to draw a line from the dollars they give to the outcomes nonprofits achieve.

But grants are often too small to cause a measurable outcome. Philanthropy Northwest’s six-state Trends in Northwest Giving Report has shown that the median grant size has been under $10,000 since it first began reporting on regional grantmaking in 2004. That means organizations need to piece multiple funding sources together to pay for their programs, and that also means that one foundation can’t take the credit.

This piecemeal approach threatens the health of nonprofits. One Seattle-based organization, Solid Ground, provides shelter, food, transportation and other basic services annually to over 60,000 people in need. It has an annual budget of about $23.5 million, of which 80 percent is government funded. All of that government funding is restricted, which is not unusual. To supplement that funding, Solid Ground wrote 104 requests to foundations in 2015, and only 9 of those were for unrestricted dollars.

One can quickly see the great challenges this presents. The amount of writing, reporting and matching specific dollars to specific programs takes staff time away from the important work of their mission. There is no guarantee that each program will get fully funded, and a lack of unrestricted dollars prevents an organization from responding to the changing needs that they see firsthand.

A Grantmaker’s Perspective

Since 2003, I have worked for the Medina Foundation, a Seattle-based family foundation founded in 1947.

We grant about $4 million a year to local organizations addressing homelessness, education, hunger, and other basic needs. Fortunately, I’ve never had to make the case for general operating funding because it is something the board has always understood and believed in. This may have something to do with our founder, Norton Clapp, a businessman who knew that you need a strong infrastructure to succeed in business, and that this must carry over to the nonprofit sector.

In an excerpt from his writing over 40 years ago, he said that he wanted Medina funds to “be directed to improve the quality of organizations and their management and their operations so that their own resources would be used more effectively.”

In 2015, 72 percent of Medina’s grant dollars were for general operating support. Some organizations still ask us to fund a capital campaign or a program that they need matching dollars to support, but I envision that 72 percent increasing based on what we hear from our grantees. Over and over, organizations tell us that unrestricted support allows them to be innovative, meet the community’s needs as they shift, and help them operate more effectively.

I asked Medina Foundation Board President, Piper Henry-Keller, why she thinks unrestricted support is so ingrained in the strategy of the Foundation. Here’s what she had to say:

“Organizations that are doing the work are the experts. They are the ones who see the needs and know what could be done. We don’t feel that it is our role to dictate. We rely on our staff to find organizations that are doing good work, and then we put our trust in those organizations. It’s important to trust organizations enough to give them the freedom to accomplish their mission in the way that works best for them.”

It’s important to know that giving general operating grants doesn’t mean giving up on outcomes. We do a lot of work on the front end of a grant: reading proposals, going on site visits, meeting with executive directors and board members, reviewing financials and, ideally, seeing a program in action. We look for strong leadership, a clear mission that aligns with ours, and effective programs that are truly meeting the needs of a community. We support organizations that engage in thoughtful planning around financials, goals and outcomes.

If we make a grant, it’s because we believe in the organization and we want to see the same outcomes they want to see. But we always need to remember that we are investing in their work, not ours.

Of course we want to make a difference. But it can’t be at the expense of the health of the organization. We ask for final reports from our grantees and when we learn that a tutoring program helped 62 percent of its students gain one or more grade levels in reading; a food program distributed 15.3 million pounds of food to feed 1.4 million people; a housing program moved 352 formerly homeless families into permanent homes; and a domestic violence program responded to 10,364 calls from survivors, we know that we helped with those outcomes in some way.

We contributed to them; we can’t take credit for them. And, unless we are fully funding the work, that has to be enough.

Jennifer Teunon is executive director of the Medina Foundation.

It is clear that our justice system is designed for control rather than healing. And with the alarming demographics of national incarceration rates, it’s also clear that it helps facilitate an economy of exclusion that considers many people of color to be unemployable and disposable.

As a global top-down investor, Zevin Asset Management approaches investing by looking at the big picture of what’s going on around the world. We can’t ignore how mass incarceration affects – and undermines – the financial health of our institutions by shutting people out of real economic opportunity and driving income inequality. Foundations committed to social justice are uniquely poised to address this social and economic issue both in their work, and in their investments.

For example, the widespread and often irrational use of criminal background checks in employment decisions fuels a vicious cycle that pushes many formerly incarcerated people back to prison. This is something that investors are starting to chime in on – educating companies about this issue and then urging them to take action. We recognize their legitimate concerns about the risk of hiring workers with criminal histories, but companies and the people who work there must understand their role in recidivism. Providing formerly incarcerated people with paths to employment is one way to break the cycle.

Ban the Box is a great example of reform to end discrimination in the workplace. The campaign has persuaded more than 100 cities across the country to pass legislation that removes criminal history checkboxes from job applications. However, private employers are largely exempt. To maximize the impact of improving the employment prospects of people with records, companies must instigate a more thoughtful review of their hiring processes. Concerned foundations should have their investment managers investigate where the companies they invest in stand on this issue.

Sadly, for-profit prisons have an interest in maintaining the status quo, not rehabilitating inmates, to drive more repeat business. The more people that are in prison, the more money they make. Other companies also benefit from our system of mass incarceration – banks and municipalities fund prison construction, some companies use prison labor to lower costs, and others like CenturyLink charge hugely inflated prices for inmates to keep in touch with their families. As noted in “Why We Must Divest from Mass Incarceration,” featured in the November 2015 issue of NCRP’s Responsive Philanthropy, there is a whole system that profits from incarceration – especially devastating to communities of color.

The American Friends Service Committee’s recent mapping of all of the main corporate players involved in the privatization of punishment, ranging from for-profit prisons to privatized services, can be used to put shareholder pressure on these companies, shaming them in the way that the climate change movement is starting to do with fossil fuel companies.

As investors, we should work to:

  • Divest from companies that profit from mass incarceration.
  • Understand the institutional racism in company practices.
  • Engage companies on prison labor.
  • Ask companies to thoughtfully review their criminal background check policies.
  • Urge companies to pay a living wage.
  • Urge companies to locate facilities in low-income communities and provide good jobs there.
  • Consider social impact bonds that target recidivism.
  • Support worker-owned cooperatives and other social enterprises that employ formerly incarcerated individuals.

On a practical level, foundations can:

  • Talk with their investment managers about why these strategies are important and challenge them to think about these issues from a moral perspective.
  • Update their investment policy statements to integrate how their investment managers should consider their mission.
  • Communicate changes to their managers and let them know that they will be held accountable.

As investors but also as citizens, we need to educate those outside of our echo chamber, and act on issues of racial equity and economic justice. This last part is the most challenging as we need to build new economies and systems not yet in place. We must recognize that finance is fundamentally about serving society, and therefore, serving people – not the other way around. We all have a role to play to ensure that our society doesn’t lose sight of this.

Sonia Kowal is president of Zevin Asset Management, LLC. Follow @ZevinAssetMgmt on Twitter.

CC image by Jonathan McIntosh.