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One of the key charges in David Callahan’s recent compelling indictment of progressive philanthropy is that progressive foundations have wasted time and money by committing to a harebrained scheme of endless program grants while their conservative opponents long ago embraced the power of general support giving.

An empire of conservative philanthropy giants “didn’t invest in issues or programs, or dole out one-year restricted grants. They invested in ideas, institutions and people. They gave general support to a core group of multi-issue think tanks, legal groups, leadership institutes, and media outfits year after year, decade after decade.”

Since we launched Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best in 2009, NCRP has been banging the same drum on general support.

We agree that foundations who share our values of equity and justice hamstring themselves and their grantee partners when they make grants piecemeal, forcing organizations to string together a series of restricted grants while their opposition fires on all cylinders without worrying about rent, salaries or the electric bill.

The percentage of general operating support grants is the same as 15 years ago

Philanthropy’s version of the “gig economy” has bedeviled the progressive nonprofit sector for decades: Nonprofit leaders chase program grants that pay some portion of their bills – effectively serving as short-term contractors for foundations – while hoping one day their luck will break with a general support grant that gives them time and space to actually lead.

Despite what appears to be broad consensus on the value of general support grantmaking, foundation staff and executives don’t seem to be able to jump the mental, institutional or structural hurdles that prevent them from giving general support grants.

NCRP’s research shows that among the largest 1,000 foundations in the country, general support grantmaking still only comprises 20% of all domestic funding – roughly the same as in 2003 when NCRP began collecting data.

Between 2010 and 2015 (the most recent year available), the share of domestic funding given as general support declined from 25% to 20%.

The real reason foundations don’t give general support: They don’t trust their grantees

The TCC Group’s “Capturing General Operating Support Effectiveness” by Jared Raynor and Deepti Sood may offer some explanation.

While our data contradicts their assertion that general operating support has increased, their thoughtful recommendations for measuring general support impact are something we agree on: The barriers to general support grantmaking are not primarily evaluation or metrics, but trust, control and power.

Recognizing that many foundation staff cite “difficulties in measuring the impact of general support” as an excuse for not giving more of it, the authors’ goal is to “present a comprehensive outcomes framework to ground practitioners and evaluators in thinking about GOS effectiveness.”

The report outlines good reasons why evaluating the impact of general support can be beneficial to the grantee-funder relationship and provides sample indicators of impact from general support.

The report concludes: “We believe that evaluation issues should not be used as an excuse” to justify continued reliance on program grants.

They also shouldn’t be used to mask a far knottier problem: The massive imbalance of power and trust between funders and grantees.

The report suggests sample indicators for evaluating general support impact, positive externalities that might be generated and negative externalities for funders to be wary of. The last category could mostly be grouped under the header “Loss of Funder Control.”

Examples include:

  • “Over-reliance on grantee goals” (at the expense, it is implied, of the foundation’s).
  • “Lack of clarity on how funds are used when integrated into the broader organization” (clarity for the funder, it is implied).
  • “Complacency or reductions in urgency” on the part of grantee staff.

The report’s appendices, especially on “foundation readiness to award GOS,” are substantial and revealing. Down the line, nearly every capacity the authors suggest is some form of trust, risk-tolerance or funder accountability.

  • “Foundations need enough field credibility to have the trust of grantee organizations.”
  • Foundations must show a “willingness to relinquish control.”
  • “Foundation program officers … need to be both a sounding board for any questions the grantee might have, and also have enough trust in the organization to allow them to maintain independence.”
  • “Foundations need to be committed to supporting the grantee’s work and mission and to nurturing the relationship.”
  • Foundations must adapt an “open and honest ‘learning culture.’”

The odds are against general support from the beginning

A funding decision tree provided by the authors offers some insight: 5 of 11 possible paths lead to “don’t support,” and 2 each to “capacity building support” and “negotiated general support funding,” by which they mean “general support with significant funder control.”

Just 2 of 11 paths lead to “unrestricted general support.” Already the odds are stacked against general support. The question is: Why?

While the tree’s questions begin innocuous enough, other questions with answers highly susceptible to implicit bias appear too:  

  • “Does the organization have strong leadership and adaptive capacity?”
  • “Does the organization have a strong existing funding base?”
  • “Do you want to support this organization, writ large?”

The first, as NCRP has argued in publications like As the South Grows, is too often an opportunity for white- and male-dominant, funder-centric definitions of capacity to crowd out those better suited to the context of, for example, faith organizing in rural Alabama.

The second would establish a nonprofit ecosystem where the lack of foundation support justified and perpetuated itself ad infinitum.

The third question’s meaning is vague enough to enable a plethora of biases.

Frameworks and decision trees are not a replacement for trust in grantees

These questions serve as a deadly effective filter for any potential grantee that does not have conventional (which usually means white and male) leadership; any new innovative organization without robust funding; and any organization that just “doesn’t feel right” to the foundation making that call.

The TCC Group evaluative framework is useful to those grantmakers who have already taken that “leap of faith” toward trusting that their grantees know how best to do their work.

But there isn’t a decision tree or framework in the world that can get a program officer to trust that they can let go of some of their control and still see inspiring results.

Foundation staff who recognize the value of general support in theory, but aren’t making it happen in practice, should reflect on the reasons why.

Ryan Schlegel is NCRP’s director of research. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

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

Seeing is believing­ – a nice proverb, but also an often unsaid maxim for philanthropic giving. After all, if a would-be funder can’t see a problem or isn’t aware of its impact, how can she be expected to buy into potential solutions?

So what’s a willing advocate to do when a community faces systemic adversity that could benefit from philanthropic investment, but is too new and too dispersed to speak at a volume funders can hear?

This is the predicament Asian Pacific Community in Action (APCA) finds itself in. Founded in 2002, APCA seeks to foster greater health and empowerment for the two fastest growing populations in Arizona: Asian-Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders (AANHPI). It does so through a combination of services, advocacy and education.

APCA has enrolled community members in health insurance plans and educated them about preventative care. It has championed language access in the health insurance marketplace, resulting in some translations of various insurance notices. APCA staff and volunteers occupy key leadership positions in the governing councils of county health clinics and hospitals, city commissions and chambers of commerce.

Yet there is still a long way to go.

Nearly every one in 20 persons in Arizona is a member of an AANHPI community. But, because most of them arrived only in the 1990s or 2000s and settled into areas sequestered from the rest of the population, they remain invisible to the public eye.

There is no Chinatown or Little Korea to help center these disparate locations. Other standard community infrastructure, like legal and housing services, are not yet developed. The Arizona Department of Health doesn’t even collect Asian-American data, instead cramming it into an ill-defined “other” category.

The needs of a Chinese-American whose family has been here for four generations are plainly different than those of a recently arrived Myanmar refugee, but if the health department doesn’t disentangle the responses of the former from the latter, how are health care providers to know who needs what?

Problems like this pushed APCA to progress from a strictly outreach and health access portfolio to a broader emphasis on community organizing. APCA now registers people to vote and educates community members on how issues affect them, how a bill becomes law and how to connect with lawmakers to ensure they are meeting the AANHPI community’s needs.

In 2016, APCA launched the first Asian-American Pacific Islander Advocacy Day. At the state capitol in Phoenix, about 20 community members were directly connected with their elected officials. The following year, the organization helped introduce a data disaggregation bill that would have collected and separated out Asian-American data. It wasn’t passed, but APCA did get a resolution read on the Senate floor, introducing the issue to many legislators for the first time.

APCA has committed to building out space for a coalition of community health workers, faith leaders and health professionals to work together around shared issues in the AANHPI community.

Take oral health, for instance. APCA has designed a community organizing and advocacy training program that brings in oral health providers serving communities of color to talk about social determinants in health and what’s happening in the state legislature around the issue.

APCA is not an organization that wants to exist in perpetuity. As more and more members of the AANHPI communities see the value in civic engagement and seize the collective power available to them, APCA would victoriously grow obsolete.

In the meantime, APCA could use some help. General operating support would jumpstart its efforts to connect with the growing number of AANHPI individuals in the state and help as it recruits leaders from each set of the 60-plus different languages and cultures therein to guide its approach until the communities united are ready to stand on their own.

Beyond funding general operation, there are specific programmatic areas awaiting support too. APCA would like to resurrect a dormant interpreter service to help its constituents navigate a language and culture in which they’re not yet proficient. Alternatively, the organization has collected a trove of data and stories from the Arizonan AANHPI communities; it could use additional funding to hire a staffer to sift through all of this information.

The Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in Arizona are no longer hidden. Their individual experiences may vary, but their expertise in their communities does not. Funding in the long-run should capitalize on this insider knowledge and let it guide future research and community action. In the end, seeing isn’t just believing; it’s doing.

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

Image by Rob Young. Used under Creative Commons license.

Atlanta is the philanthropic center of the South, and is known as a city of prosperity and inclusiveness. Unfortunately, that reputation is not the reality for all residents of the Metro Atlanta region, as many of the city’s underserved citizens have been pushed to the margins in the name of progress.

Fortunately, there is a huge opportunity for foundations and wealthy donors to step in and support those communities. Currently, most of the city’s philanthropy supports direct service work. Just 2 percent of funding goes to the power-building strategies that would enable grassroots organizations to advocate for themselves. And, only 20 percent of Atlanta’s philanthropic dollars go to low- and middle-income communities, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ people and other underserved communities.

NCRP’s newest report, “As the South Grows: Bearing Fruit,” provides a blueprint for how foundations and wealthy donors can respond to the “historic dearth” of philanthropic investment for these strategies and communities in the “city too busy to hate.”

Learn about:

“As the South Grows: Bearing Fruit” is the fourth report in the five-part As the South Grows series. The final report will be released in May.

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

Aaron Dorfman is president and CEO of NCRP. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

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.

“How do we respond to our new political and social reality?” Many in philanthropy are grappling with this question at this very moment.

Some foundations have taken bold steps in providing much-needed funding to groups working on the ground to mobilize and organize communities against harmful policies. More are either still trying to figure out what to do or are opting to take a wait-and-see approach. But there is an urgency for grantmakers to get involved.

“Time and again in our nation’s history, philanthropy has demonstrated its power and potential to help solve urgent problems and ensure that this country lives up to its democratic ideals,” writes Aaron Dorfman, president of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), for the group’s journal “Responsive Philanthropy.” “Now could be another of those times.”

The spring edition of “Responsive Philanthropy” highlights some of the different ways that funders can make a difference in communities and issues they care about.

Can philanthropy help rebuild trust in news and the public square?

Josh Stearns, an associate director at Democracy Fund, writes about the prevalence of misinformation and why it’s important for our country to reclaim “truth” and regain trust in our democratic institutions, including the press. He shares some of the innovative trust-building efforts underway and how grantmakers can support them.

In today’s complex and uncertain times, philanthropy associations and networks are more vital than ever

Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers chief executive David Biemesderfer highlights the various leadership roles of associations, affinity groups and other philanthropic networks. For example, he writes that these organizations can help foundations in getting more involved in policy and advocacy “while learning from experts and sharing with colleagues within a critical state and local context.”

Long-term general support: The elusive Bigfoot in philanthropy

Nonprofits across the country, especially those fighting the resistance, continue to need long-term, general support. Yet these grants are nearly as rare as the mythical Bigfoot. So NCRP asks its nonprofit members: “Why do you think funders shy away from awarding flexible, multi-year grants?” And how would they respond to these concerns?

Rebuilding the middle: How United Ways and foundations can get in the fight to bring communities together

Pete Manzo, chief executive of United Ways of California, believes that it is possible and important to find common ground to ensure that our communities to thrive. Philanthropy has an important role to play, he says, such as by advocating for policy changes “that can increase the odds of success for the people and communities we serve.”

Funding change in the Deep South

There’s a need for more philanthropic investments in the South. Bill Bynum, a board member of NCRP, shares lessons for foundations based on his experience leading HOPE, a Mississippi-based community development credit union serving families and businesses in the region.

Member Spotlight: The Economic Policy Institute

EPI, based in Washington, D.C., aims to “inform and empower individuals to seek solutions that ensure broadly shared prosperity and opportunity.” Members of its Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) in 43 states produce research and conduct policy advocacy at state and local levels to improve the economic security of low- and middle-income working people.

Responsive Philanthropy articles are available at no cost on NCRP’s website. NCRP members receive hard copies for free.

Let us know what you think of these stories in the comments or on Twitter @NCRP.

A week ago, Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees issued a powerful joint statement calling on funders to take a stand against President Trump’s executive orders on immigrants and refugees. Since then, 140 foundations have signed on, and NCRP is proud to have signed through the CHANGE Philanthropy network.

For us it’s simple: We believe we’re stronger when we put love before fear and when philanthropy devotes its resources to make that vision a reality. This is also personal for us. These orders target our families, our friends, our board members, our colleagues and our next door neighbors.

It’s personal for many in the philanthropic community. Yet the vast majority of foundations and major donors have stayed silent, with giving unchanged.

If you’re one of these funders and you disagree with the President’s latest actions, let’s consider what’s holding you back. Does it have to do with fear, as David Callahan at Inside Philanthropy suggests? Is it a question of workload or inertia? Maybe you’re unsure how to begin.

I’ve been a staff member at a medium-sized foundation, and I remember all the reasons we have not to act. When you’re in charge of thousands, or millions, of dollars, every step can feel weighted. “What if we make the wrong grant?,” I’d think. What if we say something controversial and someone in power targets our grantees? What if I piss off that board member I don’t see eye to eye with and there goes my docket?

During one of these spirals, a wise grantee reminded me of something blindingly obvious: The stakes we feel in philanthropy, even on our worst day, are nothing compared with the stakes felt every day by a teenager whose parents have been suddenly deported, or a mother struggling to escape a civil war with her child, or an undocumented student who can’t go to college, or a citizen thrown off an airplane for speaking the language they grew up with. It’s nothing compared to a business owner who can’t get a driver’s license, or a domestic worker without basic employment protections, or a young queer DREAMer who bravely comes out twice.

Silence, I know, feels strategic. Today it’s a luxury none of us can afford.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve spoken with leaders working on immigrant and refugee rights about their experiences with philanthropy. They include long-time legal service providers and community organizers who just received their 501c3 status. I asked them what they wish philanthropists knew. Here’s what they said:

  1. Now is the time to act. The longer philanthropy holds back, the harder it will be for communities to prepare, to persevere and to fight back.
  2. Resistance is an ecosystem, and all of it needs support. Community organizing and direct action build power, making real change possible. Legal services change lives, offering access for the most vulnerable populations seeking relief. As government actions threaten more families and agency programs get cut, these needs will grow.
  3. Immigration isn’t “one” issue, but a thousand. If you care about education, health, economic development, the arts, the environment – there’s work for you to do here.
  4. There’s no “single immigrant or refugee story.” The narrative includes new arrivals and folks who can trace their heritage back generations; refugees who are black, white and brown; and Jews, Muslims, Christians and more from the Mediterranean, Caribbean, Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Africa and beyond.
  5. Be flexible with your funding. This is not the time for onerous reporting requirements, or hyper-specific program grants. General operating support enables people to work effectively. Future historians will care about whether we all took action, not the percentage spent on “overhead.”
  6. Finally, if you’ve joined the choir, help recruit more singers. Call on your philanthropic peers, privately and publicly, to join you.

Ready to dig in? There’s work to be done. GCIR has tons of great resources to help you start, as does NCRP. Your dollars and your actions have more influence than you think. Now is the time to use them.

Ben Barge is senior associate for learning and engagement at NCRP. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.