National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty logoEditor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

“The American people, fully informed as to the purposes of the death penalty and its liabilities, would in my view reject it as morally unacceptable.” The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) has taken Justice Thurgood Marshall’s words as gospel, and is now in its 41st year of transforming his insight into action.

As it turns out, he was largely correct in his assessment: When Americans are fully informed of the death penalty’s shortcomings, they roundly reject its implementation. However, the trouble lies in actually informing the public.

NCADP serves as a resource for 100 grassroots organizations seeking abolition at the state and municipal levels. The coalition has earned several victories over the past decade, but scarce funding to build out the infrastructure of NCADP has kept progress slower than an otherwise healthier funding stream would have allowed.

Philanthropy must invest in the basic infrastructure necessary for organizations like NCADP to be successful in informing and persuading the public about the injustice of many of our social institutions and systems, and it must commit to doing so over the long term.

It’s worth reviewing why the death penalty should be discarded:

  • For every 11 people sentenced to death since 1973, 10 have been executed and one has later been exonerated. This is an egregious error rate for something so consequential. To borrow Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director Bryan Stevenson’s analogy, we would never fly on airplanes if one crashed for every 11 that took off.
  • Capital punishment is more expensive than alternative sentences. One study found that first-degree murder cases in Oklahoma for which the death penalty was pursued cost 3.2 times as much as those that did not. California has spent $4 billion on the death penalty since 1978. This money could instead be funneled to victims’ services for anything ranging from grief counseling to funeral costs to paid work leave for court hearings. Additional support would go a long way, as victims’ families lament the painful, lengthy appeals process that forces them to relive their nightmare over and over.
  • The death penalty has no deterrent effect on murder rates in the United States.

These realities are not exempt from the persistent racial bias that has long marred our entire criminal justice system, including its most severe consequence. While people of color account for roughly half of all homicide victims, the death penalty is most frequently used when the victim is white. Since 1976, 288 black defendants have been put to death for killing white victims, but only 20 white defendants have been executed for murdering black victims. Plainly stated, capital punishment treats certain victims as better and certain defendants as worse based on the color of their skin.

One has to ask how such a flawed, costly and biased process remains on the books in 31 states. The standard for capturing the public’s attention is high, and the death penalty appears to affect only a small number of people – even though its impact is much broader. It would take a steady, strategic communication plan to convince the unaffected.

Sparse infrastructure funding has made executing such a plan difficult for NCADP, though not for of a lack of vision on the coalition’s part. Executive Director Diann Rust-Tierney would use a boost to general operations funding to hire a communications director to ferry NCADP’s message from frontline activists to the public writ large. The new hire could amplify the futile role capital punishment plays in preventing violent crime through concerted messaging on social and traditional media, appeals to national partners for access to their networks, conference calls, letters to the editor and engagement with grassroots organizations.

But NCADP continues to push forward, with or without ideal funding. In 2014, the coalition launched the 90 million strong campaign to empower individual activists with the tools and resources necessary to erase the death penalty.

A recent partnership with Lush Cosmetics has signed up more than 22,000 people to receive information and training to advocate against the death penalty and for policies that keep communities safe. NCADP also advised Lush on what national, state and local level organizations to whom it should direct its “Charity Pot” funds.

NCADP’s dogged pursuit of a more humane criminal justice system should hearten observers in the philanthropic community. But is it right that an organization with such an undeniably consequential mission should have to thrift its way through this fight?

The question isn’t whether the death penalty will be struck down, but when. Every day it remains on the books, capital punishment jeopardizes the lives of the potentially innocent and unjustly sentenced, while undercutting our commitment to a more fair and humane society for all. Is philanthropy willing to propel the movement across the finish line, or just watch as NCADP sweats out the final laps? For some, time is running out.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Image by Andrew Petro, used under Creative Commons license.

PICO National logo

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

What would happen if every congregation of faith in this country had the tools to free their communities of systemic inequities? PICO National is trying to find out.

With affiliate organizations in 21 states, PICO draws from the accumulated knowledge of varying faith communities across the United States to advocate for movements dismantling systemic oppression, and pairs that advocacy with the largest independent voter engagement program working outside of political campaigns and labor.

But each affiliate also operates as an independent organization day-to-day, wielding their resources to cut down root problems in their respective cities and neighborhoods.

Lessons learned locally inform the direction of PICO’s national strategy, but they are sometimes lost in conversations with funders. Philanthropy could better serve organizations like PICO if it acknowledged that those closest to the work best know how to accomplish it.

PICO federations have racked up quite a few wins of late. Under their criminal justice reform/gun violence prevention campaign Live Free, they have targeted 15-20 counties for local level reforms including the adoption of gun-violence reduction strategies such as Ceasefire.

PICO California helped win the strongest sanctuary policy in the country, while the Minnesota affiliate (ISAIAH) took on the school-to-prison pipeline. Their economic justice campaigns have produced successful ballot measures like minimum wage increases in Massachusetts and Colorado, public transit expansion in Indianapolis and universal prekindergarten in Cincinnati.

Regressive headwinds blew PICO National into a more defensive posture this past year due to changes in direction at the federal level. Their long-sought reform to payday lending rules, developed in partnership with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, appears doomed with the agency’s leadership now in flux.

PICO worked to influence the Department of Justice on the so-called “ban the box” policy, which would have barred federal contractors from discriminating against returning citizens in the hiring process. This too seems unlikely to succeed.

Constant threats to the Affordable Care Act and the revoked protections for Dreamers have encumbered PICO National’s ability to aid those hurt by systems of injustice, forcing them to replay previous battles instead of fighting new ones.

Despite these setbacks, the national arm is evolving to help support its thriving state and local level federations through its “Five Levers of Change”:

  • First, PICO National is helping its individual member 501(c)3s set up sister 501(c)4s to cultivate their regional electoral influence.
  • Second, they have expanded their professional and leadership development programs to help fledgling executive directors – drawn largely from community organizing backgrounds – understand the minutiae of managing a nonprofit.
  • Under the third lever, they are refining their own leadership, with a restructuring of the PICO National board to better represent the communities they serve. 
  • This should help as they expand both the locations and the means by which prospective congregations could join PICO; this fourth lever would remedy the network’s absence in non-urban areas and unlock an obscure recruitment process that over-relies on word-of-mouth.
  • Concurrent with these endeavors is a deliberate push to find new funding sources. PICO has historically fundraised almost exclusively through foundations, but is now aiming to raise money from individual donors and other non-foundation entities. This fifth lever should buttress PICO National’s already agile support for its affiliates. Ideally these prospective funders would take their cue from PICO’s core set of foundations, and back the network of faith-driven movers-and-shakers with general operating support that lets those closest to the work steer its progress.

Faraway philanthropists who dictate the scope and methods of change jeopardize an affiliate’s ability to authentically organize its community.

Failing to do so would be a real shame, because the roots of organized religion in this country run deep. As they branch out into non-urban communities and sprout (c)4s to help congregations influence local politics, fully empowered PICO federations could bloom with unbound social good – think ending mass incarceration, instituting gun violence prevention, creating a pathway for citizenship for those currently without one and more.

Systemically, PICO could lead the dismantling of white supremacy and the fortification of community leadership by ensuring each affiliate has the tools to enact their communities’ envisioned change. This approach beseeches funders to take risks and forge partnerships with nascent nonprofits so they can fulfill their great promise.

PICO’s model of faith-based community organizing has yielded concrete results, so the risk lies less in the capacity of either the affiliates or the national body, and more in a grantmaker’s willingness to cede control. If they are courageous enough, funders could unleash truly transformative change.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

MapLight logo

Editor’s note: This post is the first in a series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Undisclosed donations. False information. Compromised elections. Corrupted democracy. The rise of online propaganda, political bots and fake news has jeopardized our ability to separate fact from fiction in a public discourse that has grown increasingly antagonistic to the truth.

Irresponsible loopholes in campaign finance regulations have robbed everyday Americans of their right to know who’s bankrolling their candidates’ campaigns and, ultimately, their ability to influence those candidates once they’re in office.

There are organizations that are eager for philanthropic partners bold enough to confront the root causes of these societal perversions and committed enough to make changes at the system level. Philanthropy needs to heed their call.

One particularly enterprising potential partner is MapLight, which combines journalism, data and advocacy to fight back against the hidden forces who seek to disrupt our politics.

Founded 12 years ago to shine a light on money in politics, Berkeley, California-based MapLight has since expanded to add exposing the spread of intentionally misleading information online. MapLight works in three primary ways to illuminate and combat money’s role in politics.

First, they advocate making money in politics a top political issue through a targeted use of contributions data and their own investigations.

Second, they publish specific news stories based on their findings to push the government to act in citizens’ best interests.

Third, the organization compiles Voter’s Edge, an online guide for nonpartisan information on candidates and how they’re funded, made through a joint project with the League of Women’s Voters.

Because of MapLight, communities across the country have made their governments more responsive to them. MapLight partnered with the International Business Times on an investigation in New Mexico that found “hundreds of millions of investment dollars ha[d] been flowing to firms whose executives donated to groups that supported” Gov. Susana Martinez.

Her platform included a commitment to stamp out corruption in her state, so her donors’ disregard for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) rules on pay-to-play schemes was particularly egregious.

This investigation led Martinez to request the removal of all elected officials – including herself – from the State Investment Council, federal officials in New Mexico to pressure the SEC to apply pay-to-play laws to political groups and a state legislator to call for an investigation into the results of the report.

In Berkeley, MapLight helped pass a ballot measure for publicly financed elections and partnered with the California Clean Money Campaign to improve transparency in state elections through the California DISCLOSE Act.

MapLight’s work clearly supports a healthy democracy, but it could shine even brighter if more foundations invested in the kind of work they do. The organization currently earns some of its revenue by licensing its proprietary data for media and data companies to use commercially, but philanthropy remains the primary fuel for MapLight’s work.

Dan Newman, MapLight’s co-founder and president, expressed appreciation for the funders he partners with who help his organization develop project ideas and connect MapLight with other groups in their networks.

Newman expressed particular gratitude to the financial supporters who are strategic in their actions and see the needs to address root problems in democracy, including unchecked money in politics.

Unfortunately, these funders are hard to find, according to Newman. MapLight aims to solve systemic problems, yet few donors focus on making fixes at the system level. The vision to address root causes lags behind attempts to address their snowballing consequences.

Local campaigns across the country seek MapLight’s guidance in interpreting electoral finance data and advocating for citizen-funded election legislation. There’s a groundswell of populist disgust for the role special interest plays in our national discourse. Meeting this hunger for information and insight can be challenging. The systems of our democracy are broken, and philanthropy’s poor track record in funding systemic solutions is of great concern.

But challenge yields opportunity.

MapLight continues to expose how deeply money perverts our politics, pairing scrupulous investigative reporting with concrete policy solutions. If they had all of the resources they need, MapLight could reveal the scope of foreign and secret influences in our elections, and do so in alignment with groups who confront root causes and make changes at the system level.

The fervor to rein in an electoral process overrun with dark money presents a rare moment of confluence for the American people to rally around, and then insist upon, the redistribution of power from shadowy special interests to the will of the people. Will philanthropy seize this opportunity to right a fundamental injustice of our time and push dark money into the light? MapLight has already begun to illuminate the way.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

As the historic 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has demonstrated, extreme weather events can have devastating impacts. And such events are becoming more and more common as the effects of climate change take hold. But those impacts are heightened in the American South, which sits on the front lines of the global climate crisis.

Our newest report, “As the South Grows: Weathering the Storm,” explores opportunities for philanthropy to invest in environmental, racial and climate justice in the South. Using examples in Eastern North Carolina and Southern Louisiana, the report details how the organizing and mobilizing of Southerners around these issues is not matched by foundation investment in their communities.

Learn about:

“As the South Grows: Weathering the Storm” is the third report in the five-part As the South Grows series. The fourth report will be released in February.

We hope “As the South Grows” inspires you to look at the South as an important opportunity for deeper engagement, investment and partnerships.

Yna C. Moore is senior director of communications at NCRP. Follow @ynamoore and @NCRP on Twitter.

Texas Organizing Project (TOP) is the Houston-based affiliate of NCRP nonprofit member the Center for Popular Democracy. The following is an urgent appeal from Ginny Goldman, TOP’s founder and former director, who is now chairing the Harvey Community Relief Fund, which has been established by a network of Texas-based social change organizations.

As Ginny puts it, “When camera crews head home, and it’s time to rebuild Houston, the people on the ground will need organizing capacity and legal support to fight for themselves. The partners of the Harvey Community Relief Fund will be there.”

While my family and I remain safe and dry, unfortunately, for the broader Houston community, this is a disaster of historic proportions. As you are well aware, our community is agile and committed, so we are ready to mobilize in response to this crisis to meet immediate needs and rebuild our community over the long term. To paraphrase Mother Jones: we are mourning our losses, but fighting like hell for Houston.

The Texas Organizing Project Education Fund, Workers Defense Project, SEIU Texas, Faith in Texas (a PICO affiliate), CWA, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid and the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service have established the Harvey Community Relief Fund. This fund of organizations trusted by communities in Houston will pool resources and coordinate their distribution. In this way, we can not only make sure that the resources are used in a timely and effective manner, but that they are used to meet the needs of the most vulnerable communities as we rebuild Houston.

Spread the word. Please distribute the Harvey Community Relief Fund information widely. Nearly a quarter of Houston’s population lives in poverty – approximately 550,000 people. In addition, an estimated 575,000 undocumented immigrants live in the Houston metro-area without access to many of the public disaster relief resources.  We will work to move material support and critical services to those who need it – from first response and humanitarian aid to housing and legal needs.

As many of you know, Hurricane Harvey is not our first rodeo. In the wake of Hurricane Ike and in the aftermath of the 2016 Tax Day Floods, our volunteers, staff and members worked hard ensuring resources were secured and families were supported.

We know that the impact of Hurricane Harvey, as it continues to unfold, will not cease after the national attention turns elsewhere. That’s why we are asking you to join us to support the Harvey Community Relief Fund. Together we can make the forecast for Houston better than the one we see on our television screens.

Onward,
Ginny Goldman
Chair
Harvey Community Relief Fund

Ginny Goldman chairs the Harvey Community Relief Fund. They are accepting donations on their website.

Social justice work is tiring, painful and unpopular, but there is nothing that is more important to me than this work. I am grateful that it is so integral to our foundation’s mission.

Consumer Health Foundation, as one of our board members puts it, has run into burning buildings when others were running out. So, it was an honor to receive a 2016 NCRP Impact Award, knowing that we were joining 17 other courageous peer foundations who have prioritized smart philanthropy practices such as targeted grantmaking and supporting advocacy and community organizing.

Since winning the award, we continued to demand bolder grantmaking and leadership of ourselves on racial equity, especially given our current moment. We revisited our grantmaking protocols and developed a new practice to ensure that our investments are truly impacting communities of color.

For the first time in our history, we are requiring that potential grantee partners use a racial equity impact assessment tool when applying for a grant. Although we are mindful of the burden that learning how to use a new tool places on our partners, we are committed to supporting the field of advocates who have asked for assistance in operationalizing racial equity. We believe that engaging in racial equity impact assessment is a first step.

According to Race Forward, a Racial Equity Impact Assessment (REIA) is a systematic examination of how different racial and ethnic groups will likely be affected by a proposed action or decision. REIAs are used to minimize unanticipated adverse consequences in a variety of contexts, including the analysis of proposed policies, institutional practices, programs, plans and budgetary decisions. The REIA can be a vital tool for preventing institutional racism and for identifying new options to remedy long-standing inequities.

In partnership with Western States Center and borrowing from existing tools, we have developed an REIA tool that asks questions such as:

  • Are people of color disproportionately and adversely impacted by this issue, policy, regulation, program, practice or budget? If yes, in what way and why?
  • Are stakeholders from different racial/ethnic groups – especially those most adversely impacted, leading the development of proposals to address the issue, policy, regulation, practice, program or budget? If not, who is missing? If yes, in what way? If not, why not and how can they become engaged?
  • Do the stakeholders know the systems of power that must be interrupted in order to gain racial equity? If no, what would be needed to make that possible?
  • If there is a policy, regulation, practice, program or budget under consideration to address an issue, does it address the root causes of racial inequities and racialized outcomes? If not, how could it address the root causes?
  • If there is a policy, regulation, practice, program or budget under consideration, can you anticipate adverse impacts of unintended consequences?

It is no longer enough to say that our organizations are impacting communities of color because of the issues that we work on or where we are located. To reduce inequities, we must do more. We must analyze the way history informs current conditions faced by communities of color in order to determine the right interventions.

We must disaggregate data by race/ethnicity to identify groups and places where our interventions will have the most impact. We must be in partnership with communities so that those most impacted are leading the development of solutions. And we must work with our elected officials and agency leaders to educate them about the solutions that they can formulate into policies, programs and systems changes to advance racial equity.

For some, thinking in this way has been difficult. For others, it is very natural to consider their work through a racial equity lens. We recognize the continuum, and we are balancing the need to take leadership in this way while providing capacity building for advocates who are expressing commitment to racial equity.

We will share lessons with the field after our first full year of implementation, and we hope other funders will join us in having more intentional conversations with our grantee partners about how their work advances racial equity.

Consumer Health Foundation (2)Yanique Redwood is president and CEO of the Consumer Health Foundation. Follow @chfprez on Twitter.