Is your foundation prioritizing leaders and organizations that have the trust of the communities you serve? Or perhaps your nonprofit feels that donors simply “don’t get it” and are hindering instead of helping positive change from taking place?

NCRP and Grantmakers for Southern Progress have put together a list of five key Do’s and five key Don’ts for foundations and donors to have the greatest impact in the communities they serve.

You can find these Do’s and Don’ts and other important recommendations in our latest report, “As the South Grows: On Fertile Soil.”

We hope “As the South Grows” inspires you to look at the South as a ripe opportunity for impact and a source for ideas on how to deepen donor investments, collaboration and partnerships wherever you are.

It’s usually a moment of dread for the leader of a nonprofit. One of your major funders commissions a study, and they inform you they want you to spend who-knows-how-many hours working with the consultants they hired. “Damn,” you think to yourself. “There goes a whole bunch of hours down the drain.” You have to say yes and agree to participate, of course, or risk alienating that funder. But most of the time, if we’re being honest, the study that was commissioned has little or no relevance to how you do your work.

I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when the field scan commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation turned out to be tremendously helpful to NCRP, our strategic planning process and our plans for future work.

Peer to peer: At the heart of influencing more effective philanthropy is a first-of-its-kind study of how U.S. foundations access and use knowledge. It involved more than a dozen grantees of Hewlett’s Effective Philanthropy program, including NCRP, GEO, CEP, Bridgespan and more.

One of the scan’s most significant findings is that foundation leaders are more likely to be influenced by their peers and colleagues than by any other single factor. Learning this information last year, while NCRP was in the process of strategic planning, helped us commit to double down on using an organizing approach to our work under our new strategic framework.

Another key way foundation staff acquire knowledge is at conferences, the scan revealed. Knowing this makes it easier to justify the huge budget allocation at NCRP for us to attend and present at more than 50 philanthropy conferences each year. Thanks to the field scan, we don’t just have anecdotal evidence now that this investment is worth it, we have hard data.

There are many other interesting findings in the study, and I encourage anyone interested in improving philanthropic practice to read it.

But I want to focus for a minute on a slightly different question: Why was the end product useful to us? Too many foundations commission studies that are not useful to grantees. So what did the Hewlett Foundation do differently that made their effort a success?

The most important thing Hewlett did was to engage the grantees up front in thinking through what questions the study should seek to answer. Fay Twersky and Lindsay Louie listened to our input. They didn’t have the whole plan fully baked and then pretend to listen to us – they listened first, and only then designed the study.

Additionally, Hewlett spent enough time and money on the study to actually answer the questions we wanted to answer. Too often, foundations have limited budgets for their studies, or they have arbitrarily short timelines. When that is the case, a foundation will naturally design the study to give them the information they need when they need it, but they don’t make the adjustments necessary to make the study useful to grantees. I don’t know how much Hewlett spent on the field scan, but I’m sure it was a lot. The investment was probably worth it because the foundation has invested more than $35 million in grants in this program over the past 17 years and they are committed to millions more in grants in the coming years. In other words: If you’re going to pinch pennies on a study, it’s probably not worth doing it at all.

Finally, Hewlett gave us data privately that was specific only to our organization. More than 700 people responded to the survey, and hundreds answered questions specifically about what they like or don’t like about NCRP’s knowledge products. Having that information has been really helpful to our team as we seek to make our products as useful as possible. In past years, we have paid thousands of dollars to have an independent firm get that kind of data to inform our work. The Hewlett study, and the fact that they shared all the data with us, means we won’t have to pay for this kind of feedback for several more years.

Funders, if you’re going to commission a study of your grantees, you should do the three things Hewlett did in this particular case: 1. Engage grantees up front in designing the study and determining what questions are worth answering. 2. Spend the time and money necessary to actually answer the questions. 3. Share as much data with the grantees being studied as possible. If you’re not committed to doing it right, please don’t waste everyone’s time with another foundation-commissioned study. We all have more important things to do.

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

These are incredibly challenging and scary times. Philanthropy has a hugely important role to play in protecting the most vulnerable in our society.

Nonprofit organizations of all shapes and sizes are driving the largest mobilizations and the judicial defense of civil rights. Those groups will continue to play a critical role in the years ahead to protect and promote equity, justice and democracy.

But they can’t do it alone. They need philanthropy – grantmakers and wealthy donors – to step up, too, as leaders, partners and supporters to ensure that they have the resources to win.

In “Philanthropy: It’s time to choose sides,” NCRP’s Dan Petegorsky sees two options for foundations and wealthy donors: They can either side with the most powerful or stand with the most vulnerable. “General statements aren’t enough,” Petegorsky writes. “The times demand more specific actions targeting specific policies.”

Tony Mestres of Seattle Foundation answered questions about the foundation’s journey from an impartial “philanthropic bank” to a civic leader in “Serving Greater Seattle with a commitment to equity and opportunity.” In the interview, Tony says, “When we do what’s right for the community, we are doing what’s right for the community foundation. This requires taking a stand and leaving impartiality behind.”

Rolling back the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been a priority of the new presidential administration from day one. Kate Villers of Community Catalyst and an NCRP board member shares why this spells trouble for the millions of people who rely on the ACA and the country’s other health insurance programs. In “The ACA battle in the headlines only hints at opportunities for concerned foundations and donors,” she identifies critical lessons from the passage and implementation of the ACA for funders to help the fight for health care rights.

We asked NCRP members to share in their own words what they think nonprofits need to effectively advocate for and organize communities in defense of equity, inclusion and social justice. Read their responses in “From outrage to action: How philanthropy can support the Resistance.”

The LGBTQ Racial Justice Fund has been listening to their movement-building grantees from the South about how the fund and its members need to respond to the challenges brought by our new political reality. The Fund’s Miabi Chatterji shares what she heard in “8 Lessons from our Southern grantees in the fight for equity and justice.”

Our Member Spotlight features The San Francisco Foundation, a community foundation in the Bay Area that “mobilizes resources and acts as a catalyst for change to build strong communities, foster civic leadership and promote philanthropy.” Last November, they launched the Rapid Response Fund for Movement Building.

We hope you find value in these articles and other resources[1] we’re sharing with all in the sector striving for an equitable and just society. Let us know what you think: Send comments and story ideas to community@ncrp.org.

Aaron Dorfman is president and CEO of NCRP. 

[1] Check out our latest research and blog posts at http://www.ncrp.org/publications/ and https://www.ncrp.org/blog.

Photo courtesy of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

In supporting foundations and nonprofits working for long-term, systemic change, one of NCRP’s greatest roadblocks is not the stringency of IRS regulations themselves, but the fear many foundations and their grantees have of running afoul of them. As a result, they too often operate under self-imposed restrictions that go well beyond those rules, hamstringing groups from being bold and effective advocates.

This type of caution is far more prevalent among liberal and “mainstream” funders than their conservative counterparts – so it’s especially ironic that calls to overturn the Johnson Amendment (which prohibits nonprofits whose donors receive tax deductions for their gifts from supporting or opposing candidates for public office) come precisely from groups that have deliberately walked not just up to but way past the legal lines.

Under the banner of fighting for “religious liberty” the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is designated as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has long sought to tear down the separation of church and state by pushing the exemption of religious institutions from a host of laws including the Johnson Amendment.

Among ADF’s largest supporters are foundations devoted to privatizing public resources such as the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, run by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s family. The current debate over the Johnson Amendment is just one front in an ongoing battle. (Another major supporter is the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, whose eyebrow-raising support for a range of right-wing organizations we noted last spring.)

First, a reality check: Churches, congregations and a wide range of affiliated religious institutions are already among the least regulated and accountable nonprofits in the country. Unlike almost every other nonprofit organization that is exempt from federal taxation and benefits from deductibility of donations, religious institutions are not required to file tax returns with the IRS, which is also limited in its ability to audit them.

You wouldn’t know that by listening to the groups that form the vanguard of the Christian right, their funders and politicians who’ve curried favor with them to build their political power.

Instead, the issue has been drawn into a narrative of grievance and persecution that drives so much of the rhetoric about “religious freedom.” This narrative has been central to a series of political and legal victories that threaten to impose religious strictures and privilege in a host of areas, from civil and employment rights to access to health care, and now even immigration policy.

The irony here is that for decades right-wing political donors, foundations and pastors have flouted the law with virtual impunity. And starting in 2008 through its Pulpit Freedom Sunday, ADF began  encouraging pastors to defy the Johnson Amendment, with more than 1,500 pastors participating in 2014, none of whom were sanctioned by the IRS, according to ADF itself, as noted by Frederick Clarkson of Political Research Associates (PRA).

The narrative of Christian persecution underlies a much broader attack: It’s the basis on which right-wing organizations have won significant legal victories exempting businesses from observing anti-discrimination laws, challenging access to birth control under the Affordable Care Act and more.

As defined by Rewire in its new legislative tracking site, “Religious Imposition laws cover a range of legislation designed to shield private individuals and businesses from complying with nondiscrimination laws and to affirmatively deny services such as employment, housing and reproductive health care based on a religious objection to that service.” We’re seeing a marked increase in the introduction of state-level bills designed to exempt both businesses and individuals from complying with anti-discrimination statues.

In an important 2016 piece, PRA’s Clarkson summarized the strategy as a “campaign to carve out arenas of public life where religious institutions, individuals and even businesses may evade civil rights and labor laws in the name of religious liberty” in alignment with a broader “antigovernment strategy … to restrict arenas where government can legally act.”

Most nonprofit sector coalitions and watchdogs have lined up solidly in opposition to Trump’s call to get rid of the Johnson Amendment. The Council on Foundations warns that “a repeal of the amendment would have far-reaching, and potentially devastating effects, on charities, foundations and nonprofits by allowing unlimited and tax deductible money to flow through them and into the political process.”

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) says the order would “favor religion, allowing the government to penalize some political viewpoints by nonprofit organizations while protecting the opposite viewpoints,” and “would create a massive loophole for dark money.”

NCRP shares those concerns, and we see this move in the context of a larger push to weaken the public sector and remove vital protections against discrimination that we’ve fought so long to win.

Update 3/6/2017: Since this post was published, NCRP has signed on to a letter urging Congress not to repeal or otherwise weaken the Jonhnson Amendment.

The letter is a collaborative effort of the Council on Foundations, BoardSource, the National Council of Nonprofits, the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers and the National Human Services Assembly. NCRP agrees with the letter that the Johnson Amendment “protects the integrity and independence of charitable nonprofits and foundations,” and that without it the charitable sector would be exposed to the “rancor of partisan politics” and “ulterior partisan motives.”

NCRP will continue to monitor congressional efforts to undermine the Johnson Amendment and to speak out on behalf of its members and allies about the amendment’s vital value to the field.

Dan Petegorsky is senior fellow and director of public policy at NCRP. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Image by Chris Potter, modified under Creative Commons license.

There are no limits to what philanthropy can accomplish in this world if we dream big, take risks, and set aside our egos so we can truly find ways to work collaboratively.

“That’s ridiculous,” some of you may be thinking right now. “Philanthropic dollars are a drop in the bucket. The best we can hope to do is to fund effective programs and improve as many lives as we can.”

The truth is, that kind of small-ball thinking is horsepucky, and we need to abandon it if we want to truly transform and improve our nation and the world. There is an urgent need, right now, in 2017, for foundations and high net worth donors to invest serious money in organizations on the frontlines of transformative social movements.

Think back 20 years ago, to 1997:

  • Gas was $1.22 per gallon.
  • Arne Carlson was Governor here in Minnesota.
  • The Lion King musical debuted on Broadway.
  • And the Spice Girls had a song at the top of the charts.

Did anyone in this room believe in 1997 that in less than 20 years marriage equality would be the law of the land? It didn’t seem remotely possible.

Full marriage equality for same-sex couples seemed very, very far off.

But then, in 2000, leaders of the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, a California-based philanthropy, began thinking about how the foundation could best support work to advance rights and dignity for gay people.

The Haas Jr. Fund made a $2.5 million investment in 2001 in the Freedom to Marry campaign. At the time, it was the largest investment ever made by a foundation in the history of the gay rights movement.

That investment got the ball rolling. And in 2003, the Haas Jr. Fund, recognizing that it couldn’t possibly win this campaign alone, helped form The Civil Marriage Collaborative, which included a handful of committed, like-minded funders from across the country.

It took visionary leadership and trust to make this funder collaborative work.

These funders, working together for the next dozen years and in deep partnership with the movement organizations, accomplished what was once unthinkable.

It wasn’t always easy. Changing society is tough work. Even as the campaign secured many wins, they also had to deal with serious setbacks. But the funding partners stuck by each other and their grantees, keeping their eyes on the prize and building momentum by winning an increasing number of state victories. And on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled and made marriage equality the law of the land.

It was a great day, and the culmination of a very long campaign in which funders and nonprofits worked together to make our society a little more fair and just.

I’m sure everyone in this room has a story about how this ruling has impacted your life. For me, I got to attend the wedding of my sister a little over a year ago, right here in Minnesota.

And here’s some more good news. These same philanthropic strategies work just as well for creating bold changes at the local and state levels.

In 2010, a group of California funders launched a collaborative. The goal of the California Civic Participation Funders is to support nonprofits to strengthen civic participation in communities of color and among other underrepresented populations. The funders involved all focus on different issues – some on health, some on immigrant rights, others on criminal justice or women’s rights – but they know that having robust civic participation from groups that have traditionally been marginalized is essential if they want to see success on any one issue. So they decided to work together to boost civic participation in four counties.

They worked in deep partnership with their grantees, and helped grantees collaborate with each other, rather than compete for funding.

Their work is paying off.

Last summer, citizens of San Diego passed an Earned Sick Leave and Minimum Wage Ordinance. The minimum wage went up to $10.50 immediately, and it just went up again on January 1st to $11.50 per hour. San Diego is not known for having progressive policies, and no one would have guessed they would enact this kind of ordinance. But with years of sustained investment by these funders, a new reality became possible. Thousands of families will benefit as a result.

I’ve been studying this stuff for years, and I want to offer up 6 things to keep in mind if you want to maximize impact:

1. The first thing you have to do is invest heavily in advocacy, civic engagement and community organizing. That is where the leverage is in philanthropy. Rigorous research shows that for every dollar invested in nonprofit advocacy, community organizing and civic engagement, families and communities get 115 dollars back in benefits. The Public Welfare Foundation, based in DC, tops NCRP’s list of funders who invest heavily in these strategies.

2. Second, you need to use targeted strategies, even when you have universal goals. To help everyone in your community, you need to employ a different strategy to reach the Latino community than you use to reach Whites or African-Americans. You may also need different strategies for women and men. Be intentional. The Lumina Foundation, based in Indianapolis, does this well. Their goal is universal – to increase college attainment rates in the U.S. – but they use different strategies to reach different groups.

3. Also vitally important is that you provide multi-year general operating support. Big changes don’t happen during one-year grant cycles. Research has shown that multi-year flexible support leads directly to effectiveness and impact. It builds trust between the funders and the grantees. In 2015, the Ford Foundation announced it intends to double its commitment to providing this kind of long-term general support. What would it take for you to double the amount of general operating support you provide?

4. The fourth key is to collaborate with other funders, and help your grantees collaborate, too. None of us, not even the Gates Foundation, has enough money to solve the biggest, thorniest problems on our own. We’ve got to work together if we want to have impact. Coalitions are needed to achieve statewide or significant policy reform.

5. We also have to invest in long-term movement leadership. People drive social change. When we invest in the leadership of social movements, it has profound and lasting benefits. Leadership by and mobilization of marginalized communities is essential to success. And burnout of movement leaders can cripple a campaign. The Levi Strauss Foundation runs a terrific leadership program for social justice leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area.

6. My sixth piece of advice is that you give special attention to issues of race and gender. The presidential election campaign made it abundantly clear that racism and sexism are still huge problems facing our society. Effective philanthropic strategies recognize that fact and work to promote greater equity. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has been a national leader on this, if you’re looking for an effective model.

We don’t have any time to waste. There are huge challenges facing society. Big change is possible, and philanthropy has an important role to play.

We just need to dream big, take risks, and work collaboratively. When we do, we all benefit.

Aaron Dorfman is president and CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Follow @ncrp on Twitter.

Scrolling through the daily barrage of philanthropy-related news releases, I often encounter numerous articles from large foundations announcing prizes, summits and fellowships. Indeed, these are all noteworthy organizations doing significant and impactful work, but should donors looking to support nonprofits only look to large foundations and ignore micro-philanthropies? Are prospective donors aware of the benefits of working with a micro-philanthropy when it comes to impact and engagement?

Following a Different Path

As the co-founder and executive director of The Good People Fund, I believe that too often donors overlook organizations such as ours that specifically address the needs of these small grassroots efforts, who by their very nature lack the means to be visible to larger numbers of donors despite the effectiveness of their work. With grants totaling nearly $8 million during the past eight years and a modest infrastructure, I like to believe that we are changing the philanthropic landscape.

The Good People Fund is an organization that works exclusively with small grassroots nonprofits started by inspiring individuals committed to changing the world. In the past eight years, more than 150 grantees, all small to mid-sized organizations, have benefited from our insight and support.

Each operates with low overhead and on a personal scale, developing creative solutions that address poverty, hunger, disability, trauma recovery, social isolation and other significant challenges, but whose work would otherwise go unsupported. At The Good People Fund our vision is clear: Help donors do a maximum of good with each dollar spent by connecting donors with the Good Person (grantee) whose work best realizes their personal giving goals.

Emphasis on Direct Mentorship and Guidance

What makes our work both unusual and highly effective is the strong personal relationships we build with grantees. I strongly believe in our 4S model: Scope (focusing on programs that address a wide range of social needs), Screening (carefully vetting each prospective grantee), Supervision (mentoring and guidance continues well beyond the issuance of a check) and Speed (working efficiently and with minimal bureaucracy).

What we emphasize to both grantees and donors about our philosophy is that a newly established or a smaller scale nonprofit has their best chance of success if they can take advantage of the benefits of a personal connection; a mentor to guide them in addition to the shared experiences of other successful nonprofits. This connection to direct mentorship and guidance is too often overlooked by donors. We are very closely tied in to the grantees’ work in ways that larger entities can not be.

With so many years of involvement with small nonprofits, I find donors appreciate the strategic perspective we provide and grantees appreciate the unique way we handle their needs. We have established a deep network and general knowledge of the nonprofit world and take pride in facilitating partnerships, connecting people and programs, and offering guidance and expertise.

“I have been supporting the work of the Good People Fund since it began back in 2008,” explained one long-time donor. “I believe in its mission and have seen first hand how my donation can directly impact this work. They are attuned to what is important to me as a donor and I appreciate the guidance they provide in selecting to support an organization that shares in my values.”

Traditionally, funders donate, step away and perhaps ask for a report on how their funds were used. The Good People Fund works on a much more personal level and believes that our model could play an even more significant role in philanthropy today. It is not just about site-visits and grant reports; relationship building, hands-on support and acting as a partner, collaborator, advocate and sounding board for both donors and grantees is essential to our model’s success.

Naomi Eisenberger co-founded The Good People Fund in 2008 and became its first executive director. Follow @goodpeoplefund on Twitter.

Image by Cliff, used under Creative Commons license.

This commentary was originally published on The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

In the last week, we learned unsettling information about money the Baltimore Community Foundation channeled to the police for mass surveillance of Baltimore residents.

Community foundations serve a valuable role nurturing local philanthropy and leading efforts to improve the neighborhoods, cities, and people they serve. But the funding in question, uncovered by Bloomberg Businessweek and the Baltimore Sun — from two private donors with vast wealth and influence who financed a clandestine police program — violated not just the tenets of philanthropy at its best but the vision, mission and values of the Baltimore Community Foundation.

Policing is a public good, governed by community priorities and overseen by a community’s elected representatives. When private donors conspire with a private company to subvert the public oversight process and engage philanthropic dollars in a secret policing program, they pervert this foundational democratic value.

What’s more, most of the citizens being surveilled by this program are black, and as the Movement for Black Lives policy platform points out, such government surveillance has and “continues to be concentrated within targeted communities of color, namely black, Arab, and immigrant.”

Such unwarranted and racially unbalanced surveillance could, the Black Lives platform continues, violate citizens’ constitutional rights.

Problem With Neutrality

The Baltimore Community Foundation is a tax-exempt organization created “by and for the people of Greater Baltimore” whose vision is for a Baltimore where “all have the opportunity to thrive” and where “enlightened civic leadership” based on values of trust and inclusivity can be leveraged to make Baltimore a better place for all of the city’s residents. It also calls itself a foundation “committed to transparency and accountability.”

Yet these values are undermined by their facilitation of a secret funding stream for a project that, in other communities similarly stricken by conflict and distrust between police and community, such as Los Angeles and Dayton, were rejected wholesale by democratic debate.

The Baltimore Community Foundation ought to serve the Greater Baltimore community and not just house transactional philanthropic activities that serve donors’ interests. What does the foundation stand for? How is it leading the community in the wake of a year of political and social strife over the violence visited on Baltimore residents of color by their police department?

Vocal Leaders

Many community foundations across the country are struggling with these questions. Some really do see themselves as facilitators of philanthropy by donors, without taking positions on the causes being supported. Others, like the San Francisco Foundation, have taken strong positions and are using the foundation’s reputational and financial capital to advance equity.

I urge all community foundations to undertake serious discussions about what they stand for. Many are already doing this, but far too many others aren’t. Neutrality isn’t nearly as valuable as some in philanthropy have claimed over the years, and it isn’t really even possible — as the Baltimore ordeal illustrates. For foundations, attempting to be neutral often means that the foundation — even if unintentionally — is actually supporting greater oppression rather than standing on the side of those in their communities who have the least wealth and power.

Community foundations ought to be vocal leaders on issues that impact their communities, and the only responsible way to do that is to listen — especially to those most harmed by injustice. We can learn from several leading community foundations that are acting on their values.

For example, in 2014, the Cleveland Foundation became a presenting sponsor for the Gay Games, using the foundation’s money and influence to advance LGBTQ equality. It also used the opportunity of the games to start a community-driven LGBTQ fund to accept donations and channel them to local charities.

Similarly, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation has been taking a bold stand combating predatory lending, recognizing that one in four of the people in the community it serves is cash poor and is disproportionately impacted by the abusive payday-lending industry. The foundation has also spearheaded a national coalition of community foundations to work on the issue.

These and other community foundations have a vision for their communities and are willing talk out and act on important issues. The Baltimore Community Foundation has an opportunity — and an obligation — in the coming days to begin answering questions about its vision for the community and the role of philanthropy, and of the community fund specifically, in helping to bring about that vision.

The statement the community foundation released on Friday saying it will “require government agencies to promptly and publicly disclose receipt of funds and adhere to all applicable public reporting requirements” is a start, but it is not sufficient. The leaders of the foundation owe it to their neighbors to be as transparent, accountable, inclusive, and civically minded as they claim to be.

Aaron Dorfman is president and CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Follow @ncrp on Twitter.

As labor union membership has declined dramatically over the last several decades, economic inequality has risen, and the American working class has been increasingly less protected from economic storms by the bulwark of organized labor. This Labor Day, in a year when social and economic ties seemed to have frayed up and down the income scale, foundations and high net worth donors interested in economic justice need to recommit to supporting a robust, responsive labor movement – especially by funding labor organizing and grantee collaboration with labor unions.

Labor union membership has historically been a ticket to the middle class for American workers. Since the 1960s, though, powerful corporate interests have capitalized on a conservative political resurgence to push anti-union policies at the state and federal levels – and they’ve won. Combined with deindustrialization across large swaths of the country and barriers to organizing workers in the service industries, this anti-labor revolution has decimated union membership and dramatically tipped the scales of power away from working people.

This movement away from organized labor spells trouble for many of the trends foundations and their grantees care about. While national wage stagnation, gaping inequality and household financial instability are perhaps not caused solely by the decline in union membership, it appears to be a significant contributor to these troubling trends. A recent Economic Policy Institute analysis of the decades-long labor union membership decline found that wages for nonunion workers would have been 5 percent higher in 2013 if union density had remained at 1979 levels. The downward pressure declining union density exerts on nonunion workers appears significantly worse for those with less educational attainment.

These issues demand organized, grassroots-driven solutions that require a strong labor movement to articulate and win. Here are some ways that foundations and wealthy donors who care about the economic well-being of low- and middle-income Americans can help boost the power of organized working people to affect change.

  1. Explore and encourage collaboration between their grantees working for economic justice and organized labor, including funding labor organizing efforts when appropriate. Foundation funding from community and public foundations must abide by generous limits set by tax law when they fund lobbying activities like those undertaken by many labor unions.Private foundations’ work with labor unions is more tightly controlled by prohibitions on private funding for lobbying. For this reason, foundations and donors may operate under the false assumption that working with or funding labor unions is forbidden.But this is precisely why fostering partnerships around shared goals between grantees and unions is so crucial: community organizations (501(c)(3)s) and labor unions (501(c)(5)s) each have a role to play in movements for economic justice, and both are stronger and more successful when they work in tandem.Additionally, workers centers and sector-wide alliances like the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (both 501(c)(3)s) are two examples of the potential in foundation funding directed toward labor organizing and union collaboration.
  2. Increase funding for labor organizing.  According to Foundation Center data, since 2003 only 4 percent of all funding for employment – including job creation, retention, training, counseling and benefits – for poor people was dedicated to organized labor. Of these dollars – about $100 million total – nearly a third came from a just one funder: the Ford Foundation.If the top five funders of employment for poor people (of which Ford is one) made a commitment to funding organized labor on par with Ford’s – about 10 percent of their employment dollars – investments in organized labor could increase by 30 percent over the next three years.Foundations that prioritize work to secure employment, benefits and job training for poor people without also prioritizing organized labor undercut their own investments. Any gains secured by foundation investments in working people’s economic wellbeing without organizing those workers are insecure.
  3. Build relationships with others in philanthropy and the labor movement. The Neighborhood Funders Group’s Funders for a Just Economy working group understands the importance of an integrated approach to improving the lives of working people. The working group brings together almost 50 foundation staff persons from across the sector to identify opportunities for deeper collaboration between philanthropy and labor.Additionally, the Democracy Alliance has been increasingly bringing together union leaders, foundation leaders and high net worth donors and is now chaired by a union leader for the first time in its history.It is also importance of ties between the philanthropic sector and the labor movement. That’s why last year NCRP’s board of directors welcomed two new members with deep ties to the labor movement: Molly Schultz Hafid of the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock (and a member of the Funders for a Just Economy working group) and Bill Dempsey of the Service Employees International Union.

There is work to do to better bind the philanthropic sector and the labor movement – the members of the Funders for a Just Economy working group and the Democracy Alliance are already leading the way.

Let Labor Day be a reminder of the potential if other funders and donors follow their lead.

Ryan Schlegel is senior research and policy associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Follow @NCRP on Twitter.