Progressivism and donor-advised funds in local charity.
Are community foundations willing to “go woke” even if it might mean they could “go broke?” That certainly seems to be the implication of some comments made by representatives of a “new generation of community foundation leaders,” as reported by Alex Daniels in a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy article. He notes that they want to stop just “managing the charitable assets of local wealthy donors” and instead “form regional grant makers into a progressive policy juggernaut.” As the Seattle Foundation’s president Alesha Washington put it, “We have to blow up the whole notion of a community foundation.”
“In 2022,” Daniels reports, “Washington announced that the fund would stop serving simply as a philanthropic bank for its donors and become an agent of change with greater focus on political advocacy.” Like-minded community-foundation leaders around the country, according to Daniels, are becoming “players in city debates” and “banding together to share expertise and advocacy muscle on issues that include racial justice, immigration, and climate change.”
Some foundation leaders whom Daniels interviewed caution that this shift toward progressive political activism will be more welcome within the largest community foundations. Those in smaller cities have faced pushback over this dramatic move toward progressive political advocacy. When Mary Thomas, president of the Spartanburg County Foundation in South Carolina, began emphasizing racial equity in her work, “People started saying, ‘Is this some kind of woke thing? That’s not our mission.’”
The distaste by progressive community-foundation leaders for merely serving as a “philanthropic bank for donors” rather than progressive “agents of change” may well run headlong into a diametrically opposed trend characteristic of community foundations over the past several decades, namely, the growing popularity of donor-advised funds (DAFs).
While DAFs may seem to be nothing but contemptible, idiosyncratically driven personal bank accounts cluttering up the unified, progressive agenda of the new leadership, they may also have been the only way community foundations remained relevant in the face of stiff competition. DAFs originated within community foundations, but it’s only in recent decades that they have become so popular, largely as a way to counter the immense success of the advised funds now offered by the major commercial houses and special-interest groups.
A 2022 study by Chuck Collins and Helen Flannery at the Institute for Policy Studies found that DAFs account “for nearly $46 billion of the assets held at the country’s community foundations.” They note that DAFs are particularly popular at the largest community foundations, where they make up 44% of assets. And yet these larger community foundations are precisely the ones progressives hope to persuade to abandon the “banker” mode and embrace instead the progressive political-advocacy alternative.
It must be said that community foundations have always wrestled with the appropriate balance between the roles of neutral banker and committed activist. The pioneering Cleveland Foundation was launched in 1914 by Frederick Goff, who was deeply suspicious of the narrow, constricted, scattershot philanthropic interests of the city’s elites and hoped that his new community foundation would persuade them instead to pool their resources behind a unified municipal vision animated by the new “scientific” social surveys popularized by the then-fresh progressive movement. “Although community foundations now offer donor-advised funds that adhere to their creators’ wishes,” I noted in 2014, “it’s clear that their original purpose was to substitute for donor intent a flexible, forward-looking view of the community interest, which could be discerned only by enlightened civic elites” at the helms of local foundations.
So this new generation of community-foundation leadership, seeking to collect and unify local resources behind a coherent progressive vision rather than just writing donor-driven checks, is traveling a well-trodden path. But as many have pointed out, today’s progressivism is dramatically different from 1914’s. Progressivism utterly dominated early 20th Century American politics because it held out what seemed to be an objective, scientifically ratified vision of the future, developed by elites who were thoroughly credentialed in the much-vaunted new professions taught in the nation’s universities and practiced in think tanks. Progressivism then enjoyed wide support because it promised to unify a nation in the face of the deep divisions introduced by industrialism, urbanization, and corrupt politics.
Today’s “woke” progressivism, by contrast, arises in the wake of the utter collapse of that earlier version. Elites are no longer trusted to govern according to objective scientific standards that, indeed, no longer seem to exist. Instead, “wokeness” is a deeply pessimistic vision of an America forever tainted by white supremacy, structural racism, and settler colonialism—which cannot be remedied without dramatic and fundamental changes in our social, economic, and political institutions, in order for diversity, equity, and inclusion to be realized.
Frederick Goff enjoyed some success in persuading Cleveland elites to turn over their philanthropic giving to the local community foundation, since he championed a widely shared, professionally designed, uplifting understanding of the city’s future. One wonders if today’s progressive community foundation leadership, driven by a very different and far more divisive vision and spirit, will enjoy the same success. As skeptical as I am of DAFs, and as much as they do indeed need reform, I much prefer the diversity and concreteness of goals they typically pursue at community foundations over the single-minded, resolutely progressive political activism championed by some of their new leaders.
