As a senior program officer at the Tides Foundation, I was both excited and nervous when asked to provide programmatic advice to the Hill-Snowdon Foundation. Excited because I knew the Snowdon family was interested in funding young people, and youth organizing was my area of expertise – and inspiration. Nervous because up until that point, I had never managed a multigenerational family foundation of more than two family members. Ever.

I ended up working with this dynamic family for over three years, both as Tides staff and as a consultant. When we met, the family had begun revisiting their grantmaking to be more intentional about strategy and to think about increasing impact – as described in the funder profile on Hill-Snowdon in NCRP’s new report, Families Funding Change: How Social Justice Giving Honors Our Roots and Strengthens Communities. While family members had differing views and opinions about how to accomplish their goals, they were guided by a strong belief that they could collectively work towards creating a more just and equitable society.

With that strongly held belief as a starting point, I began to introduce youth organizing programs to the docket, which was then largely comprised of youth development and service programs. This was a way to expose the board to social justice strategies, and also explore the differences between service and organizing. We used board meetings to conduct site visits to grantee organizations and to listen to panelists who discussed how organizing and advocacy was “service-plus.” The Hill-Snowdon trustees learned that adding social justice strategy to youth development funding multiplied their impact by allowing organizations to meet day-to-day needs while bringing about systems change by influencing the public discourse and public policy.

One of our most memorable site visits started in Jackson, Mississippi. Four family members and I traveled along the Mississippi delta. We met in the homes and offices of our funding partners. We heard about and saw the conditions communities were fighting to change. We talked, asked questions, laughed and ate together. This deep level of engaging with grantees changed the way the Snowdon family thought about grantmaking and social change.

The Snowdon family used site visits, panel presentations and grantmaking allocation discussions to determine how they could accomplish their goals through a social justice strategy. In the words of Ashley Snowdon Blanchard:

“In some ways, it’s a lot easier for a family with divergent views to agree on community organizing and the basic idea that the people who are most affected by a problem should have some say in the solutions. We may not agree on education reform – whether charter schools or standardized testing are good or bad – but we can agree that the families with kids who are falling behind in failing schools know best about what they need to achieve.”

The paradigm shift from funding traditional youth service to youth organizing was not easy. It did not happen overnight, and it was not necessarily a direction that all the family members agreed on. There was concern among some family members about whether small grants could really have a big impact on the complex social, emotional, economic and environmental forces that shape young people’s lives and opportunities. Given this concern we agreed that instead of continuing to fund nationally, the foundation would focus on discrete regions where they could feel and see progress. During my tenure, I helped the foundation identify the South and Southeast as its target geographic focuses.

Today, the Snowdon family leads the philanthropic community in funding for youth organizing and economic justice.

What are the lessons the Snowdon family learned and how can these lessons inform your family foundation’s grantmaking?

  • Social change happens in places where the people who are most impacted are included in developing strategies and playing a leadership role.
  • Spend time in the communities you fund and meet the people in those communities who are actively involved in making change. Use the time together as an opportunity for the family to embrace adventure and to act boldly.
  • Although complex, social change work is measurable and impactful. Find ways to feel the impact by focusing on defined regions or communities and put resources into connecting them. Share and discuss research and resources to help measure and assess the work.
  • Small grants can make a big difference. Funding advocacy and organizing amplifies other efforts because it is proven that leadership development and policy change can lead to long-term, systemic changes.

I encourage other family foundation staff and trustees to read NCRP’s new report, Families Funding Change, and to consider how the Snowdon family’s embrace of social justice strategies can inform their own work.

Leticia Alcantar is a principal at Lighthouse Philanthropy Advisors.

Foundations looking to create systemic change make an expensive mistake when they ignore religious institutions as potential grantees. They miss an opportunity to fulfill their multiple and multiplying missions, one that exists in plain sight.

Religious institutions serve as an intermediary, providing glue between space and ideas. By intermediary, I mean what sociologist Peter Berger meant – they link the public and private sectors. They are rare sources of genuine and uncontrived interaction with community members, the very kinds foundations often say they are funding. They provide much needed space to gather for an astonishingly interesting array of artists, activists, recovering addicts and more. They mediate populations. They glue people to their values. They embody a community, sometimes of 1400 people, other times of 14. They gather and link. They often have enormous assets in real estate and endowments, about which they rarely know what to do.

Some grantmakers focused on social change do give grants to religious institutions, as this Michigan State University resource list shows. However, because most funders are “spiritual but not religious” (much like the wider population), they don’t always see religious institutions as the valuable intermediaries they are. This is no doubt propelled by examples of how closed-minded some religious institutions can be. But many others are open and democratic and hopeful, and they deserve a hand up; they are vital to the task of diminishing the closed-minded fear and hatemongering of those who distort religion. They especially need education and recognition as they manage their assets in a 21st century that is either scared by them or doesn’t “understand them.”

Foundations should not fund the parish itself. Congregations can and should pay their own way. But many places of worship fill multiple functions that go beyond religious services, often providing office and operating space for valuable nonprofit activities. Foundations should support the non-parochial work they do, which can include inexpensively renting space to day care centers, theaters, dance schools, “Stop Stop and Frisk” sign assemblies, fossil fuels suturing events or faith-based community organizing movement headquarters.

Religious institutions also can partner with foundations to achieve greater impact that relates to our shared goals for social change, regardless of whether congregations and program staff share a religious affiliation. Many congregations have “dead” or “inert” money about which they know not what to do. The same is true of the space-hosting value of their properties. My congregation in Miami invested one million dollars of its endowment, matched by a million each from Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Knight Foundation, to bring ACCION International to Miami. ACCION is now giving $12 million in loans per year and has been doing so for over a decade. Together, our organizations made an investment in our missions.

What is expensive? Waste. What is inexpensive? Asset appreciation and investment. Religious institutions and philanthropic organizations have a lot in common. Maybe we should get to know each other better.

Here are six things foundations can do to encourage such partnerships:

(1) Learn about religion from the ground up. Attend worship services in four faiths before you reject the next proposal from a religious institution. Realize that cultural competency includes religious competency. Lessen elitism by moving around in the places where people move around.

(2) If your foundation has an anti-religious policy exclusion in your guidelines, change it.

(3) Think frugally, the way congregations do. A little goes a long way. For example, a $3500 new screen projector could enhance activities for activists, artists, recovering addicts, schools, teachers, students and more, all at once. Activate long-term thinking and imagine how long a small capital gift for, say, a new boiler could assist other organizations you might want to help. With just a little bit of money to build material culture and real infrastructure, religious institutions especially those serving the marginalized, would be able to maintain physical spaces that could provide real value to multiple communities.

(4) Fund the study of development rights, such as for air rights banks and land rights banks, which keep sacred sites from knowing their rights (and selling their spaces, because they don’t have the capital to buy a new boiler).

(5) Become active over the long-term. John D. Rockefeller founded both Judson Memorial Church and The Riverside Church in New York City with a combination of lead gifts and thousands of small gifts. This created a century of leverage and activity that has created positive change for our congregations – the type of change most foundations would be proud to support.

Donna Schaper is senior minister at Judson Memorial Church in New York City.

Privilege. Although often unacknowledged, it permeates the philanthropic sector and was put squarely on the table at NCRP’s Philamplify debate last month.

As a panelist, I was asked to consider whether market driven strategies can be expected to drive equity in education. That question requires us to focus not on whether individual schools do a better or worse job, but rather on the structures that are most likely to produce a just system. And we must consider the privilege – or lack of privilege – of those the system is to serve.

In education, when we make parents “consumers,” we undermine the collective responsibility to educate all of our children that is central to our democracy. When markets and “choice” become the drivers of policy, our connection to the overall social mission of schooling deteriorates, and the public commitment to funding public education can be expected to diminish. And if state budgets for education are any indication, that does seem to be the trend.

Choice makes sense to so many of us in positions of privilege, who direct philanthropic investments and public policy. Markets have worked for us: we have the financial and social capital to choose the supermarket we want to shop in, the kind of work we want to do or where we want to live. However, unless we examine the relationship between privilege and access to markets, we will ignore the constraints that many families face in a market driven education system.

Applications may only be available in English, meetings are held in times and places that are not easily accessible to families without a car or flexible work hours, the school may not have services that some families need, such as transportation, after-school programs or participation in the federal free lunch program. All of these factor into families’ ability to access the range of “choices” a system has to offer. Even for parents of means choice creates challenges, and so parents in New York, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and elsewhere are paying private consultants as much as $2000 to help position their children for the most desirable schools, not something all parents are able to do.

Students are also explicitly excluded from schools participating in education tax credit programs which use tax dollars to fund private school vouchers. In Georgia, for example, the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) has documented the exclusion of LGBTQ students and students with LGBTQ parents. Further, the vouchers rarely cover the cost to the family; the Milton Friedman Foundation puts the average tax credit scholarship at less than $1000, not nearly enough to cover the cost of tuition at any private school. It’s not a surprise then that in Georgia, according to SEF’s research, the average gross income of families receiving the tax-funded scholarships was more than $35,000 above the gross average income of half of all Georgia taxpayers.

This is not a market of schools being selected by families, but rather, a market of students being selected by schools. And since markets are driven by competition, some children will win and some will lose, by design. The very antithesis of equity.

But we can do better and, in fact, when we have made a commitment to equity, we have. In 1971, African American students performed about 39 points worse than white students in reading. With the enforcement of integration that figure was cut basically in half, down to a gap of 18 points by 1988.

But today, schools are resegregating, and school choice is contributing to that racial and economic resegregation. The Washington Post reported that white children in San Francisco have become more concentrated in the best elementary schools since a school choice lottery system was implemented across the city, as families with greater access and ability to navigate the complex rules for student assignment are able to “work” the system. Duke University has documented the fact that white families in North Carolina have used charters as a way to choose segregation; more than two thirds of the state’s charter schools are highly segregated, while only about one third of the state’s public schools are. The Duke researchers work also showed that white parents in the state indicated a preference for schools that are less than 20 percent black, although black parents preferred schools that are racially balanced.

It would be a mistake to think that I am arguing for the status quo. In fact the Hazen Foundation has spent more than two decades helping parents, students and communities build the power to drive an agenda for their schools and communities rooted in the values of equity and justice. They know that alone, as consumers and competitors, only a small number of them may succeed, and are committed to doing better for all our children.

Lori Bezahler is president of the Edward Hazen Foundation. Follow @LoriBezahler on Twitter and join the #PhilamplifyDebate conversation.

Of all the rich details in NCRP’s newest report, Families Funding Change: How Social Justice Giving Honors Our Roots and Strengthens Communities, the one that resonated with me most was the description that family foundations see social justice philanthropy as a “political third rail.” So many family foundations seek measurable change – and yet view a key element for it as a subject too dangerous to broach.  However, this misconception is easily changeable.

When family foundations disregard social justice strategies out of caution, they prevent themselves from serving society to the fullest. Let’s face it; most family philanthropists are not interested in reducing homelessness a tiny bit, polluting our environment just a little less, or giving one kid a scholarship. They are in the business of positive social change. They posit audacious mission statements: “end poverty,” “reverse climate change” and “restructure our public education system so all children have access to equal opportunities.”

Families Funding Change shares that, between 2004 and 2012, family foundations classified only 9 percent of their collective grant dollars toward social justice purposes. According to the definition cited in NCRP’s Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best, “Social justice philanthropy is the practice of making contributions to nonprofit organizations that work for structural change and increase the opportunity of those who are less well-off politically, economically and socially.”

The dearth of dollars for social justice philanthropy is a missed opportunity. Yet, there is good news. In the new publication, NCRP identifies seven “perceived barriers to funding social justice” by family foundations – and lays out recommendations for addressing each.

Many family foundations refrain from supporting social justice because they are leery of the legal rules of advocacy, not realizing the rules are actually quite generous. Alliance for Justice’s newest publication, Philanthropy Advocacy Playbook: Leveraging Your Dollars, sheds light on this very topic. The Playbook provides benefits, tips, diagrams and examples for how foundations can effectively and legally support advocacy within their foundations and through their grantmaking. Eleven chapters give foundation leaders the confidence to better reach their missions by incorporating organizing, civic engagement, public policy, voter registration, grassroots work and other advocacy strategies that could fall under the tent of social justice philanthropy. These strategies address the heart of the matter: how to practice philanthropy that matters.

I have witnessed how foundation leaders, who courageously and inclusively pursue social justice philanthropy, end up addressing root causes of problems. In doing so, their philanthropy yields deeper, stronger and longer-lasting outcomes. The NCRP publication cites helpful case studies of leading foundations – Surdna Foundation, Hill-Snowdon Foundation and Needmor Fund — that have championed advocacy and social justice.

As we know, there is no perfect formula for philanthropy, and it is often more of an art than a science. Yet, imagine if 90 percent, or even 50 percent, of family foundation grants supported social justice. Then we might all agree that the political third rail of philanthropy would be the absence (not the presence) of social justice philanthropy.

Christine Reeves Strigaro is the associate director of foundation programs at Alliance for Justice. She previously was senior field associate at NCRP. Follow @CReevesStrigaro on Twitter and join the #FamiliesFundingChange and #AFJPlaybook conversations.

In the end, it all came down to Tiffany Lopez.

On September 29th, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) held its first-ever Philamplify Debate asking: “Can market-oriented reform strategies advance equity and empowerment in education?” Robert Pondiscio from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute argued the affirmative. In my opinion, within minutes, he lost. The trouble was Tiffany.

Mr. Pondiscio began by reflecting on his time as a teacher in a New York City public school, and an 11- year old student he had named Tiffany. Tiffany always did her homework, wore her uniform and kept her desk organized and neat. She was ready to learn. Though his principal told him “not to worry about Tiffany,” Pondiscio disagreed. He thought she deserved something more than what her public school offered.


(Editor’s note: Watch the whole debate on YouTube!)

This was Pondiscio’s justification for charter schools. Charter schools are a pillar of market-oriented education reform. The theory hails from Wall Street: create a vibrant market of privately-operated, yet taxpayer-funded, schools and allow consumers (i.e. parents and students) to choose among them. Shut down the ones that don’t perform and open new ones that might. Voila! Eventually, only successful schools will remain. For stock traders, this kind of model makes perfect sense. But markets don’t have a history of creating equity or empowerment in communities of color. For the low-income African American and Latino communities that are heavily targeted for charter growth – and school closings – it can feel a lot like some of the other great ideas imposed on them by Wall Street, like payday lending and sub-prime mortgages.

But back to our story. In Tiffany, Pondiscio saw a child who could thrive, if she could escape her public school. As he told us at the NCRP debate, when he moved from teaching to advocacy, he made a commitment to himself called the “Tiffany Rule.” Before supporting a new idea, he asks himself, “Would this work for Tiffany?”

The Fordham Institute is one of the nation’s leading voices for market reform in education. Mr. Pondiscio’s “Tiffany Rule” is consistent with the Institute’s view of chartering. In 2013, Fordham president Mike Petrilli argued in Education Week that charter schools should serve as an escape hatch for the “especially deserving poor.” The ones who have potential. The ones who do their homework. Like Tiffany.

But what about the 30 or 40 kids – whose desks might be a little messier, who might require a little more help with their homework – who surrounded Tiffany in that New York City school? Pondiscio’s principal may have been encouraging him to pay a little more attention to those kids, the ones who also deserve a public education. But Pondiscio never mentioned them.

The research is clear: charter schools, in the aggregate, do not consistently produce better outcomes than traditional public schools. Some charters do well, others perform poorly and the majority offer basically the same academic outcomes as traditional public schools.

The research also says that three things tend to happen when lots of charter schools open up in under-resourced districts:

  • Racial segregation increases.
  • Students with special needs, like English Language Learners and students with disabilities, are underrepresented in charters and become disproportionately over-represented in traditional public schools.
  • Traditional school districts are tasked with educating and providing services to these high-needs children with fewer resources, because the charter sector siphons more and more taxpayer dollars from their budgets.

This is not a fluke of market reform – it’s the foundation. Two parallel systems of schools are created: one public, with the obligation to serve all students; and another funded with public dollars but managed privately, with the incentive to attract more resourced students, cap enrollment and turn away kids who don’t “fit” the model. The inequity is inherent.

None of this is Tiffany’s fault. Nor is it the fault of the parents who choose to send their children to charter schools. But the children who don’t win a lottery to get into a charter school, or who are “un-chosen” by them or who choose traditional public schools – they are left behind and worse off because of the dual system.

It was painfully obvious in the debate that Mr. Pondiscio never made a rule for them. He never asks, “Will this help all my students?”

Markets create winners and losers. For free-market education advocates, philanthropists and hedge fund managers, the focus is on the winners, not on the rest.

In a debate on whether market-oriented education can advance equity, the market reform side lost the minute they invoked the story of Tiffany, the especially deserving student.

Leigh Dingerson is the author of Public Accountability for Charter Schools: Standards and Policy Recommendations for Effective Oversight, published in 2014 by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and Brought to You By Wal-Mart?, published by Cashing in on Kids in 2015.

You’ve heard that “everything is bigger in Texas,” but let me put this into context: Texas has over 1000 school districts, 202 charter operators and 8,571 campuses (including 588 charters). There are 5.15 million students, 61 percent of whom are low-income, 52 percent of whom are Hispanic. And these numbers are only growing. We add an average of 80,000 students per year at a cost of approximately $1 billion dollars per year. Our 5.15 million kids make up roughly 10 percent of all public school students in America. That means right now, one in ten public school students in America is sitting in a Texas classroom.

Recently I was honored with the opportunity to be a panelist at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s recent Philamplify debate on whether market-based approaches are compatible with community-led solutions for educational equity. I drew from my experience as founder and manager of the Texas Education Grantmakers Advocacy Consortium (TEGAC), which works to protect and improve public education through policy and advocacy. My goal was to describe how our work might somehow be a bridge between the debaters’ perspectives. In Texas, we have no choice but to focus on far-reaching, equitable, systems-wide improvement. Texas education funders know that if we mess up, the whole country suffers, so the stakes are high. This presents us with a huge challenge but also an incredible opportunity if we get it right.

What is TEGAC?

The Consortium was created in 2011 in response to a $5.4 billion cut to the state’s public education budget. $1.4 billion of this was from the state agency’s “discretionary grants,” which meant a direct cut to the funds that had allowed for decades of public/private partnerships between the state and Texas philanthropy. Since then, 33 private, community and corporate foundations from across the state have joined the Consortium to work together to improve educational outcomes in Texas.

Our members represent the diversity of opinions expressed by the Philamplify Debate participants. We don’t get to pick and choose our perspective because our membership ranges from liberal Austin tech entrepreneurs, to Dallas and Houston oil gazillionaires, to rural old money ranchers who don’t want their home towns to get blown off the map by depopulation and economic stagnation. Our diversity is our greatest strength because it demands consensus.

What does TEGAC do?

Texas grantmakers have diverse priorities, but we all agree on one thing: We’re tired of putting bandages on seemingly intractable problems. Foundations know they should be involved in statewide policy issues with the potential for systems change, but often don’t know how to engage in a manner that’s comfortable for trustees and in partnership with other philanthropists.

The Consortium puts funders in the driver’s seat for education advocacy. Our members determine shared goals that fit within our equity lens and then actively engage in advocacy.

This process turns traditional advocacy grantmaking on its head – and it’s working. We’re having a different conversation at the Capitol and among our grantmaker peers about the role of foundations in improving Texas education.

The small, nimble, creative and fearless foundations are the ones leading this effort in Texas, not the big guys. This was out of necessity; early on, smaller foundations achieved the power and safety in numbers that large foundations don’t traditionally encounter. Together, we:

  • Encourage philanthropy to use statewide public policy and advocacy as the grantmaking strategy with the most potential for system-wide improvement.
  • Focus exclusively on statewide policies that impact equity, which we define as policies that affect the largest number of students, especially those with the greatest needs. This includes fighting budget cuts, expanding and improving access to pre-kindergarten and implementing policies to ensure low-income, first generation students are able to graduate, go to college and join the workforce.
  • Encourage policymakers to consider scaling best practices from the education reform world so that all children can benefit.
  • Ask districts and the state agencies what information and capacity they need to do their jobs well.

Texas foundations were brought together in the crisis of a budget cut, but they have chosen to stay together because of their shared interest in thinking bigger than individual programs and using strategies with the power to create true equity and systems-level change. The trustees of the foundations involved in our consortium are becoming known around the Texas Capitol as advocates of policies that improve the lives of 5 million Texas kids. Philanthropy can make things happen without even writing a check, and this is what foundations have chosen to embrace in Texas. It is big and bold, and very Texan.

Jennifer Esterline is the founder and manager of the Texas Education Grantmakers Advocacy Consortium.

How do funders transform themselves into changemakers?

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy is asking this great question. In a new white paper, Families Funding Change: How social justice giving honors our roots and strengthens communities, NCRP highlights how some family foundations make advocacy, community organizing and civic engagement central to their work to address root causes of social problems. NCRP believes that family foundations’ values-based approach to giving positions them to do bold, changemaking work, and calls on more family funders to discover the power of social justice philanthropy.

Based on an evaluation of Foundation Center data, the report finds that only 9 percent of grant dollars from family foundations goes to social justice work, compared to 14 percent of the sector as a whole. While we can speculate that the families drawn to social justice philanthropy are those whose values and missions perfectly align with building leadership in disempowered communities, social justice philanthropy holds potential for a much broader array of family funders.

Social justice funding is changemaking, and changemaking is a form of philanthropic leadership. In my interviews with experienced philanthropists, I have learned that all funders hold the potential to make a transformative shift into leadership. This kind of leadership encompasses the goals and actions of social justice philanthropy. It means using money as well as non-dollar assets – such as deep connections with communities and the freedom to take calculated risks – to catalyze change on important and urgent problems.

Through my work at Exponent Philanthropy, I’ve met dozens of funders around the country pioneering new ways of doing and thinking without the support of a sizeable staff. Changemaking by small-staffed funders is transforming how people think about and approach the most important and urgent issues we face. Bold and daring, it is shifting the status quo.

I believe many more family foundations and philanthropists could embrace their power to provide the authentic, responsible and bold leadership necessary for change.  

What is the pathway to leadership? What are the first steps?

The Starting Point: Passion and Curiosity

Two qualities put funders on the road to changemaking: passion for an issue and a curiosity to learn everything they can about it. These funders are driven to make sense of things, reflect on their knowledge, look for patterns and connect the dots. This drive takes funders on a journey to a level of insight few people have attained.

To do this, they make full use of the following:

  • The freedom they have as funders to delve deeply into an issue.
  • Their unique perspective to see across organizations.
  • Their unique access to people in positions of knowledge and power across the business, government, academia and the nonprofit sector sectors, who provide them with valuable insights.
  • The passion to persist and follow the path of learning wherever it goes.

Passion and Curiosity Lead to Vision

As they push further, they see new ways of doing and thinking – ways of changing how people think about and approach important issues. In doing this, they make imaginative leaps, seeing beyond what is currently possible and leaving assumptions behind.

One funder put it this way:

“Leadership in philanthropy is having the ability to take in lots of information, take in others’ perspectives and focus it for a purpose. The knowledge and perspective gained offers the ability to ‘see places you can’t see.’”

Enter the Mystery of Leadership

How is it that some funders make the journey from vision to bold action and leadership? Once changemakers begin to understand their issue, a really powerful thing happens: They get hooked on learning. They venture deeper into their issues, until they figure out things no one else has really understood and discern how to make change.

Changemakers then use all the assets and capabilities at their disposal to make their vision a reality. They venture far beyond making grants to convene, commission research, raise public awareness, nurture community problem solving, influence policy, mobilize, matchmake, nudge, cajole and put pressure on stakeholders to stay on course. They spend as much as 60 percent of their time, even 70 percent, out in the community or focused on the issue, becoming activists, brokers and catalysts.

The most powerful thing about this process is that it acquires its own forward motion. The journey to deeper insight takes funders places, and changes them. It is transformative. Indeed, seeing pathways and leverage points for change, and realizing that change is actually feasible, inspires these powerful qualities:

  • Confidence and open-mindedness to new and untested ideas.
  • Flexibility, adaptiveness and a willingness to follow the path wherever it leads.
  • The ability to lift their sights and think much bigger and more systemically than they had before.
  • The courage to take greater calculated risks and be daring.

In this way, philanthropy that has the deepest, most far-reaching impact and influence, begins with the humblest of acts – reaching out to listen deeply, and learn.

Many wise, savvy philanthropists in Exponent Philanthropy’s community taught us about this transformational journey, and I believe many more family funders can be changemakers if they appreciate their unique power to acquire knowledge, engage people and ask questions. Family funders, in particular, should read Families Funding Change and ask the questions needed to expand the effect of their philanthropy.

Allow yourself to fall in love with an issue and make it your own. Dive in, and see where your learning takes you.

Andy Carroll is senior program director at Exponent Philanthropy.

Meyer Trust takes on the E word

By Peter Korn

The Portland Tribune
Oct. 8, 2015

Sure, Ramon Ramirez has been arrested — more times than he can count.

Read the full article here.

For Immediate Release

New NCRP Report: Family Foundations Are Behind the Curve in Supporting Nonprofit Advocacy, Community Organizing

“Families Funding Change” explores state of social justice giving within family philanthropy

Families_Funding_ChangeWashington, D.C. (10/6/15) – Foundations funded and led by wealthy families largely fail to support strategies that address the root causes of political, economic and social injustice. This was the finding of a new study released today by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), an independent watchdog of grantmaking organizations in the U.S.

Co-authored by NCRP researchers Niki Jagpal and Ryan Schlegel, “Families Funding Change: How Social Justice Giving Honors Our Roots and Empowers Communities,” finds that, between 2004 and 2012, only 9 percent of grant dollars from family foundations went toward social justice strategies like advocacy and grassroots organizing. In comparison, private foundations, community foundations and other types of grantmaking institutions gave 14 percent. However, previous research from NCRP has shown that these strategies are particularly effective in benefitting communities, garnering a return of $115 for every dollar spent.

“It is our hope that ‘Families Funding Change’ will provide valuable insight for family funders into the challenges they may face when they consider adding a social justice lens to their work,” said NCRP Executive Director Aaron Dorfman. “We believe that embracing a social justice framework opens new doors for family foundations, and is compatible with the goals of every funder dedicated to improving the lives of the people they serve.”

Family foundations, often driven by passion, legacy and commitment to their communities, are well-positioned to fund strategies that empower their stakeholders. However, these same attributes subject them to unique challenges when they begin exploring an explicit social justice framework.

Usefull tools to start supporting social justice

This report offers three useful tools for family foundations to begin their journey in being effective social justice philanthropists:

  • A discussion guide for grantmakers – seven key questions to consider when developing strategies, recognizing perceived barriers and solutions to overcome them.
  • Profiles of family foundations – Learn from three different family philanthropies that went through the process of explicitly deciding to engage in social justice work: Hill-Snowdon Foundation, the Needmor Fund and the Surdna Foundation.
  • Additional resources – A handy list of reports to help family philanthropies understand the nuts and bolts of how to effectively incorporate a social justice lens into their work.

No matter the issue area a foundation focuses on, from arts to the environment, the need for foundation funding of community organizing and advocacy is crucial.

NCRP urges trustees and staff of family foundations to read “Families Funding Change: How Social Justice Giving Honors Our Roots and Empowers Communities” and begin supporting efforts to find lasting solutions to the tough challenges faced by the communities they care about. The report is available for free at www.ncrp.org.

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy in Washington, D.C., is a national watchdog, research and advocacy organization that promotes philanthropy that serves the public good, is responsive to people and communities with the least wealth and opportunity, and is held accountable to the highest standards of integrity and openness. Visit www.ncrp.org.

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To request a media copy or interview the authors, please contact Alison Howard at ahoward[at]ncrp.org or call (202) 387-9177 x33.

MacArthur and Ford Foundations Diverge on Strategy

By Alex Daniels

The Chronicle of Philanthropy
Aug. 17, 2015

The Ford Foundation’s new approach to grant making is designed for the long run, while the MacArthur foundation is looking to shake things up quickly.

Read full article here.