New “Responsive Philanthropy” Looks at the Power of Civic Engagement

The 2016 election season is already in full swing, and voters are likely already experiencing fatigue from the endless news coverage and debates. Even still, before we know it, the election will be over, and many of the voter outreach efforts currently in progress will fade away. However, the smartest people in philanthropy know that civic engagement must take place all the time, not only in election years. This edition of Responsive Philanthropy is a special issue devoted to civic engagement and the important work of fostering democracy in the U.S.

In our cover story, “Systems Change in the Yakima Valley,” sector leaders affiliated with the Win/Win Network, George Cheung, EJ Juárez and Kristina Logsdon discuss a years-long, multifaceted campaign to make the local government in Washington State’s Yakima Valley reflect the local population. They emphasize that, to achieve lasting change, foundations and other actors must support efforts that employ a complementary set of charitable (501(c)3) and political (501(c)4) strategies.

Next, PICO National Network’s Kristee Paschall shares “How Integrated Voter Engagement Builds Power and Changes Policy.” Paschall offers two case studies from local PICO federations in Indiana and New Mexico that show how year-round voter engagement and community organizing can achieve success on key issues like criminal justice reform and living wage, and even help prepare leaders for public office.

In “Democracy Is the Best Theory of Change,” elections expert and political leader Steve Phillips argues that instead of trying to change hearts and minds to foster democracy, progressive philanthropists should engage the already-existing voter blocs aligned with their beliefs. Phillips draws on data and analysis from his new book, Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority.

Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance and vice chair of NCRP’s Board of Directors, offers his insights in “Control, Disruption and Democracy: Philanthropy’s Role in Inclusive Civic Engagement,” a piece adapted from his keynote speech at last fall’s Funders Committee for Civic Participation conference.

Our Member Spotlight looks at the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, whose work with civic engagement contributed to the Supreme Court win for marriage equality.

The issue also contains information about recent publications and projects relevant to civic engagement.

As always, we hope Responsive Philanthropy is a useful resource for everyone in philanthropy. We are always looking for ways to improve; let us know how we’re doing at readers@ncrp.org.

Aaron Dorfman is executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

In The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty, Erica Kohl-Arenas’ first book, The New School professor is bent on busting some fondly held philanthropic beliefs. Thoroughly researched, beautifully written and convincingly argued, The Self-Help Myth explains how philanthropy, by its inherent nature, often fails in its attempts to reduce inequity and poverty.

The setting is California’s Great Central Valley, a region Kohl-Arenas knows well. The wealthiest food production area in the history of the world, the Central Valley is also home to some of the poorest people in America, many of whom are immigrant farm workers.

Historically under-resourced by philanthropy, the Central Valley has seen at least three major periods of sustained foundation investment since the 1960s. Kohl-Arenas offers case studies of each, demonstrating how well-intentioned grant programs, unwilling to address the structural issues behind poverty, have diluted, diverted and co-opted farmworker community efforts that challenge the California farming economy’s status quo.

The thrust of the book’s argument is sadly not new: private foundation funding has little appetite for taking on the American economic system that created the “capital surplus” that allows for philanthropy’s pool of wealth.

Kohl-Arenas makes her greatest contribution by showing that philanthropic influence is rarely heavy-handed, top-down or hegemonic. Rather, it is more often a set of complex negotiations, full of nuance, within contextual constraints on both the philanthropic and community sides of the table.

By means of literature review, extensive archival analysis, participant observation and scores of interviews, Kohl-Arenas describes in fascinating detail how this complex foundation/community dance has played out over five decades of work and millions of dollars of investment in the Central Valley.

During the ’60s and ’70s, the evolving conversation between the Field Foundation and Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Worker (UFW) movement helped to steer the latter away from “mutual assistance,” “all-volunteer,” “dues paying,” “self-sustaining” organizing, and toward the creation and maintenance of a bevy of 501(c)(3) service organizations. In the ’90s, the Stewart Kinney Foundation’s Immigrant Participation Collaborative[i] “launched two successful campaigns and several productive projects,” but ultimately demonstrated the difficulty of building lasting “strategic coalitions” from “monetarily-driven partnerships.” In the early 2000s, the Western Foundation’s Farm Worker Community Building Initiative, guided by a “double-bottom line,” “win-win,” “philanthrocapitalism” approach that sought to engage both farmers and farm worker organizations, diverted attention from “action organizing” to “leadership training,” and never did manage to bring farmers to the table.

Kohl-Arenas organizes her analysis under the umbrella of “civic participation,” and its many possible interpretations inside and outside foundation offices. Is “civic participation” a guise through which canny, progressive program officers sell hard-action community organizing to conservative, confrontation-shy board members of their foundations? Is it a hegemonic means by which the wealthy place the burden of changing their life conditions on the backs of the poor, while ignoring any challenge to the economic structures that have entrapped them in poverty?

Civic participation is this and more, as Kohl-Arenas enables us to understand. As she says in her conclusion:

“[Traditional philanthropy] tells people how to help themselves in order to change their purportedly bad behaviors, neutralize conflict and maintain systems of power. [Radical action] calls for people to analyze their own relationship to power in order to transform it. Most often we are caught somewhere in between.”

Kohl-Arenas also writes about South Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a farmworker group that provides an ideal model for philanthropy-supported organizing. CIW is known for authentic ownership by its farmworker members, as well as for its politically savvy strategies to transform power relationships. Kohl-Arenas mentions support given to CIW by the Kellogg Foundation, and we readers eagerly wish to know more about the ongoing relationship between CIW and its funders. Perhaps this will be her next book.

In her research and teaching on philanthropy and participatory community engagement, Professor Kohl-Arenas describes herself as working in the space “between scholarship and practice.” At a time when prominent foundations like the Ford Foundation are refocusing their work “to disrupt the drivers of inequality,” the field needs many more such scholar practitioners. Let’s encourage the strategic planners at all foundations interested in promoting equality and ending poverty to read Kohl-Arenas’ important book.

Craig McGarvey previously served as a foundation program officer, and worked in California’s Central Valley with Erica Kohl-Arenas.

[i] Names have been disguised under ethnographic protocol.