If proponents of participatory philanthropy are looking to attract receptive conservatives to their cause, it may be impossible if participatoriness comes to be—or even to seem—just another mechanism to rationalize tax-incentivized philanthropy in furtherance of one particular ideological or partisan political end. If conservative philanthropy is honestly and self-critically looking to exemplify anti-elitism in and improve its grantmaking, however, it would more aggressively explore options to humbly check what might be its own elitism and increase participatoriness in that grantmaking.
The below article is an edited version of a chapter in Participatory Grantmaking in Philanthropy: How Democratizing Decision-Making Shifts Power to Communities, edited by Cynthia M. Gibson, Chris Cardona, Jasmine McGinnis Johnson, and David Suarez and published by Georgetown University Press last year.
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Participatory philanthropy could benefit greatly from drawing on the Iong tradition of conservatism that underlies conservative philanthropy. Participatory philanthropy continues to evolve as a model, and “conservative philanthropy,” as a general category of grantmaking, is still relatively undefined, making it difficult for participatory practitioners to see connections between the two. Conservative philanthropy, however, has several traditions, values, and practices that dovetail with philanthropic “participatoriness.” The authors provide an overview of these areas of alignment, discuss how they have been applied in conservative philanthropic practice, and explore some of the reasons for conservatives’ caution about incorporating a full spectrum of power sharing in all aspects of the grantmaking process.
Introduction
Most studies of participatory philanthropy involve organizations associated with progressive causes, but we argue that participation might align with some traditions, values, and practices in conservative philanthropy. We begin by describing conservative philanthropy, positing that this lab encompasses two distinct perspectives or streams of thought. We then focus on the Burkean or Tocquevillian perspective, which emphasizes “mediating structures” and empowering people to be active participants in solving the problems they confront. We conclude by considering why conservative philanthropists might be reluctant to practice participatory grantmaking as it is currently conceived.
What is “conservative philanthropy,” anyway?
While there is no formal definition of “conservative philanthropy,” those who have attempted to describe it usually point to specific foundations with a conservative philosophy or tradition, using their principles and practices as indicators to make a general characterization. These usually include the John M. Olin Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and Scaife Foundations.
Risking oversimplification, these foundations use approaches that, to varying degrees, have generally reflected a respect for history, tradition, religion, the market, and localism, and an aversion if not outright hostility to “bigness,” centralization, professionalization, and elitism. This conservative view also looks proudly askance at well-credentialed experts from institutions afar and, instead, prefers weighing the wisdom of real people, such as responsible businesspeople, from a family neighborhood around the comer, which may even have a church or synagogue on it.
In the eyes of conservative grantmakers, this respect and these aversions stand in stark contrast to what they have seen as the progressivism of establishment philanthropy in America. To the degree that participatory philanthropy similarly stands against powerful credentialed experts making decisions about communities and residents with which they have little contact, there might be opportunities for some of these conservatives and participatory philanthropy advocates to explore listening to and learning from each other.
Two traditions
Those who have studied conservative philanthropy—including former Oli Foundation executive director and trustee James Piereson, now the president of the William E. Simon Foundation—suggest there are two traditions undergirding its paradigm, which first emerged around the time of the French Revolution.[i] These two traditions are distinguished by whether they believe that market capitalism can function on ts own or requires external support from societal structures like law and civil society. This matters when it comes to their views about nonprofits and philanthropy, which are see either as essential for the functioning of market capitalism or are superfluous.
First is the tradition originating with the eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, who employs the language of prudence and tradition to defend representative government, the rule of law, and the nongovernmental units of civil society—what political philosophy would label classically “liberal institutions,” according to Piereson. “Conservatism brings something from outside liberal thought to the defense of these liberal institutions.”[ii] Note that “liberal is used here as a political philosophy, rather than in the contemporary sense of being associated with a particular ideology or even political party within a democratic system.
Alexis de Tocqueville and others in the nineteenth century consonantly argued, Piereson notes, “that it is necessary to preserve” these institutions, “namely, church, family, local governments, and voluntary associations as a foundation for markets and representative government. … Liberal institutions cannot stand entirely on their own and require support from the outside as it were.”[iii]
Second is another, newer tradition: the one undergirding market capitalism. This tradition, Piereson notes, “suggests that market capitalism can stand on its own foundations without external support from the kinds of institutions discussed before.” In such a tradition, nonprofits and philanthropy are not viewed as essential to support the effective functioning of a capitalist society.
The Burkean and Tocquevillian tradition of conservatism, therefore, offers more of a grounding for a conservative approach to participatory philanthropy. In such an approach, grantmakers would pay special attention to how the institutions of civil society—including nonprofits, but also less formal volunteer efforts (particularly at the local grassroots level)—serve to moderate, supplement, or bolster the function of market capitalism in society. Such an approach would eschew the centralized, planned efforts of a top-down progressivism—in government policy or establishment philanthropy—and instead focus on a smaller-scale, more locally driven version of giving that values the unique contributions of grassroots leaders.
Mediating structures and grantee-orientedness
To the degree that there has been and is a conservative interest in this form of grantee-oriented philanthropy, it has been and is rooted in the first tradition’s perceived necessity of preserving Tocquevillian civil society. More contemporarily, it can be found in the work done by the sociologist Peter Berger and the theologian Richard John Neuhaus at the American Enterprise Institute in the 1970s. Their monograph To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy argued that American public policy had become deadlocked between two diametrically opposed approaches: (1) the championing of a powerful central government, and (2) the emphasizing of the centrality of the individual in public affairs. The deadlock basically resulted from deemphasizing—if not missing—the first, older conservative tradition.[iv]
Echoing Burke and Tocqueville, Berger and Neuhaus argued that there isa very important approach nestled between the individual and the centralized state: a vast array of mediating structures such as families, neighborhoods, houses of worship, and voluntary and ethnic associations. All these mediating structures are used by everyday Americans seeking to solve their own problems according to their own values and based on their own lived experiences, rather than relying on experts or other outsiders for answers. Essentially, these structures have always been and remain participatory. It would be in this framework of conservative philanthropy that participatory philanthropy could be well received.
This framework has been best exemplified by the work of Robert Woodson Sr., a former Urban League official who had been recruited by the American Enterprise Institute, considered a conservative and business-friendly think tank, to apply the mediating-structures framework to issues of urban poverty.[v]
To do so, Woodson developed what he called the “zip code test.” He argued that every neighborhood—no matter how seemingly distressed—has community leaders who are living day-to-day with difficult problems and who are, despite these challenges, developing insightful, if often idiosyncratic, ways to address those problems. The most effective poverty programs, Woodson maintained, are rooted in the experience, wisdom, and authority of local leaders living in the same zip code as the problems needing resolution.
Woodson went one step further, however, suggesting that this approach could and should be used to distinguish conservative philanthropy, because it emphasized what Tocqueville described as the “everyday institutions of American civil society” to solve public problems, rather than relying on large, remote, intrusive, centralized institutions like government and other more top-down institutions.[vi] As later inspiringly described by Woodson in his 1998 book The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods, by seeing community residents as actors in their own lives, this approach had the added benefit of providing opportunities for them to engage more fully and authentically in civic life, which strengthens democracy.[vii] In short, Woodson argued, it does little good for conservatives to merely talk about the virtues of civil society while employing the same top-down, expert-driven approaches that they believed progressive philanthropy had been increasingly employing and, in his view, substituting for local democracy.
Woodson is both a MacArthur Foundation fellow (the so-called genius grants) and a recipient of the Bradley Prize—prestigious awards conferred annually by their respective progressive and conservative foundations. His work has been supported by some conservative foundations that practice what could easily and should be considered participatory philanthropy, though they might not recognize the term as such. One of these is the Bradley Foundation, which awards the Bradley Prizes. In addition to its embrace of participatory approaches like those described by Woodson, Bradley has also helped to lay the foundation for a demonstration project supporting parent-driven educational choice (first in Milwaukee, and then nationally)—something that we believe was and remains a fundamentally participatory endeavor.
In a healthy democracy, conservatives with a Woodson-like inclination assume that regular, everyday citizens can and should be trusted at least as much as or even more than well-credentialed professionals in ivory towers and/or their allied government bureaucracies to contribute meaningful and actionable “expertise” to—or, again, to participate in—the way we go about living with each other. This is in direct (and ironic) contrast to progressive foundations, which these conservatives note have relied on those (fellow) elites since the Progressive Era and through the failed War on Poverty.
Elitism and progressive philanthropy
More than a century ago—led by one of its intellectual godfathers, Herbert Croly—the modern Progressive movement came to view local communities and their Tocquevillian mediating institutions—as well as libertarian-touted individual rights, for that matter—as backward, parochial, and irrational. As explained by Croly in his 1909 book The Promise of America Life, they only gummed up the works of the smoothly humming machinery of public affairs, which had been crafted according to the new sciences of sociology, psychology, and public administration.[viii]
The aim of these sciences was to organize and engineer human affairs in a rational, objective, coherent fashion. Progress required removing authority from local communities and placing it in the hands of professional elites trained in these sciences.
Applying the thinking of Croly, these purely public-spirited social engineers would be devoted heart and soul to a grand vision of national purpose or national community—a vision all too likely to elude ordinary citizens, trapped as they are in shabby local communities, still clinging to antiquated, parochial moral and religious beliefs.
The first large American foundations—Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage—were enthusiastic supporters of these social engineers and this vision. Their early grantmaking thus focused on reforming and rationalizing the elite leadership professions of American public life: medicine, the law, education, and public administration. They also established research universities and policy institutions to provide the nonpartisan, objective research necessary to expand the scientific management of public affairs by rationalized, centralized social service bureaucracies.[ix]
Today, this philanthropically funded vision heavily influences American politics, policymaking, and culture, making it challenging for everyday citizens to question the authority invoked to inflict the social engineering behind it. Participatory philanthropy is, and might be more of, a good and effective way to check this authority, because it is an implied and potential actual threat to establishment philanthropy. While there has been more receptivity to participatory philanthropy from progressive foundations—especially small or community-based organizations—a limited but growing number of conservatives are either applying similar anti-“elite” thinking in their philanthropic efforts or are becoming more receptive to it.
What do conservatives consider to be participatory philanthropy?
As introduced by Cynthia Gibson in her important, path-breaking 2017 paper—Participatory Grantmaking: Has Its Time Come?—participatory philanthropy covers a wide range of institutional and individual activities, such as incorporating grantee feedback into grant guidelines and strategy development, inviting grantmakers to sit on foundation boards, crowdfunding, and giving circles.”[x]
In that paper and in the introduction to this volume, the term participatory grantmaking is distinguished from participatory philanthropy to describe a process that narrows the focus to how, by, and for whom grant decisions are made. Some see participatory grantmaking as one of many types of participatory philanthropy. Others think it is distinctive because it moves decision-making about money—seen by them as the epitome of power—to the people most affected by the issues donors are trying to address.
The conceptual refinement of participatoriness in philanthropy overall to grantmaking in particular would be—and in some cases, is—a monument shift from how philanthropy traditionally has allocated funds. It is a disruption that may explain why participatory grantmaking is for the most part still relatively rare, particularly when compared with other forms of participatory philanthropy. It also gives rise to real, genuine, and perhaps justified skittishness among conservative givers who might otherwise be receptive to participatoriness.
In both Gibson’s paper and in this volume, one need not really stretch too far to see the anti-elitist impulses from which both participatory philanthropy and grantmaking spring. “Long-lasting change within foundations will only occur when the field fully embraces participation’s transformative potential and when … people are willing to cede control and power,” Gibson writes in her published paper. During recent years, some conservatives have issued similar calls for cessions of control and power from establishment progressive philanthropies that they see as having forgotten about the average American and/or condescending to them.
The heart of the matter, left and right
At the heart of the participatory approaches is the notion of trust, as many of its proponents have written (and, indeed, as participatory philanthropy/grantmaking was gaining visibility, a new framework, “Trust-Based Philanthropy,” emerged, echoing the centrality of trust in “addressing the inherent power imbalances between foundations and nonprofits”[xi]). Gibson for example, notes that “for participatory practices to take hold in philanthropy, foundations have to trust the community of nongrantmakers. Foundations also have to value the lived experience and wisdom that nongrantmakers bring to the table in important decisions about how resources—including money and more—are distributed.”[xii]
Like some progressives, some conservatives think and hope that participatoriness should include a bit of healthy self-abnegation on the part of establishment philanthropy. Although conservatives like to assume that their trust always resided in non-elite (and maybe even anti-elite) institutions and structures, still relatively few conservative foundations have incorporated participatory approaches that share or cede power about resource allocation. And while progressive foundations like to proclaim their allegiance to helping underserved or “disempowered” constituencies, in our opinion, their funding tends to rest on strategies developed in large, bureaucratic, and expert-driven think tanks, universities, and/or consulting firms.
On the right, at least some familiarity
The first components
The framework for philanthropic participatoriness put forward in Gibson’s paper—helpfully created as a “baseline” on which the larger field would be asked to iterate with comments and suggestions—has four components. The first two are “informing” and “consulting.” The third component, “involving” can have something to do with the actual awarding of a grant, or not. The fourth component, “deciding,” seems to have to do directly with which groups get a grant, and for how much. Some have since added a fifth component, in which funders explicitly cede all decision making to nonfunders.[xiii]
Gibson’s paper and this book also provide examples of activities and processes for each component. Almost all the examples are from liberal or left-leaning organizations. Given the expressed desire for a “common language” and a “consensus” behind the cause, there should also perhaps be a right-leaning example or two.
We think it is easy to find examples of conservative foundations “informing” and “consulting” with existing or would-be grantees about program issues and aims, no differently than from liberal foundations. Grantmakers and nongrantmakers alike find similar tools in their toolboxes: these include public relations and public education campaigns; websites; officials’ appearances on conference panels; published papers, articles, and op-eds; site visits; meetings with board and program staff members; and the like. Fewer, but still many, conservative foundations could be considered to involve nongrantees, especially if that is considered to include extensively consulting with them and relying on their input.
Indeed, some conservative foundations are clearly cognizant too top-down in their thinking and know that humility is a prerequisite for ultimate success in the exercise of their grantmaking power. But humility is challenge for any human being or human enterprise. At the board level, humility represents an effective, professional stewardship of resources. At the staff level, it is just good program officer practice, part of the obligation owed to board and donor alike.
At the Bradley Foundation, for example, the program staff on which we served knew quite well that we did not know which schools in which parts of central Milwaukee were preferred by parents living in the community, so we attentively listened to—and were genuinely instructed by—them in putting together grant recommendations for our board. We knew we did not know the challenges facing human services case workers in the state’s welfare system, so we asked them what they would do as we tried to put together a welfare reform grant program in Wisconsin. We knew we did not know how to run a community-based residential facility—or an Ivy League political science department, for that matter, or a publishing house, or a symphony, or a museum.
We were not stupid, let us please say, but we were generalists, trying to apply common sense, in line with the foundation’s founding intent and directors’ directives. For Bradley, success followed, we believe, including in the contexts of school choice, welfare reform, neighborhood revitalization, higher education, public discourse, and others.
School choice as participatory philanthropy
We believe that privately funded school choice could easily have been and still could be considered participatory philanthropy, in that it devolved decisions on the best use of grant dollars not to foundation officials but to community members—namely, to the parents of school-age children.
In 1990, the State of Wisconsin began to fund vouchers that poor parents in Milwaukee could use to send their own children to whichever participating private K-12 school they themselves chose. Before the program was expanded to include religious schools in 1995, Bradley substantially supported a charitable organization that offered parents the option to send their children to a religious school participating in the private program. The donated money was given directly to the parents, who funneled it to any participating religious school that they themselves deemed the most worthy recipient. They
where the money went, which is an important component of participatory grantmaking.
Neither Bradley nor any other donor picked which parents got the empowering largesse, which schools were on the list, or which religions they taught or the tenets in which they believed. The grant support was premised upon trusting participating parents to make the decision.
It is worth noting that, unlike many conservatives, Bradley did not frame its support for school choice in the libertarian language of markets, through which schools would be improved by competing for vouchers wielded by parents. Rather, Bradley understood school choice as an essential device for undergirding the mediating structures (e.g., churches and community centers) necessary for a healthy local democracy. Families were strengthened by enabling parents—too often infantilized by public programs—to make the critical decision about their children’s education on their own and according to their own values. And the schools thus supported through vouchers were often themselves vital centers of Tocquevillian community life, reflecting the full range of moral, spiritual, and cultural principles of local neighborhoods.
Although there was cross-ideological (and bipartisan) support for the system-transforming school choice effort, however, we recall it being quite harshly attacked by many prominent progressive philanthropies and their grantees, which included many (well-funded) lawsuits. When the prominent parent choice activist Howard Fuller was named to the board of directors of Chicago’s Joyce Foundation and Brother Bob Smith was on the Bradley Foundation board, moreover, no one lauded it as properly “participatory” or anything similar.
While it may not fit the definition of participatory grantmaking advanced by its proponents, including those in this volume, we offer the example of a foundation funding school choice as a meaningful alternative in the sector’s understanding of what counts as participation in philanthropy. The essence of this example—that these programs gave parents the ultimate choice for how to allocate foundation dollars, and that this was the explicit intention of the funding—to us shares something fundamental with the spirit of participatory grantmaking. And this is an intriguing area of commonality between conservative efforts in the Burkean/Tocquevillian mediating-structures tradition and the progressive efforts described elsewhere in this volume. They both explicitly seek to devolve decision-making power over philanthropic dollars from credentialed foundation officials to everyday community members.
One could argue that school choice is different because the decisions made by parents are fundamentally individual ones, while participatory grantmaking tends to be done in an intentionally collective manner. In our opinion, an openness to individual parents in participatory philanthropy by its proponents might get them more conservative allies. And conservative funders could also consider pursuing efforts that promote collective participation in participatory philanthropy. We turn now to some of the considerations—and concerns—of conservatives vis-à-vis participatory philanthropy.
Conservatives’ concerns and caveats
There are really no examples, at least about which we are aware, of a conservative philanthropist consciously, systematically, and procedurally ceding or delegating grantmaking authority to an external decision-maker. To the degree that one has even been presented with the idea by a trusted partner, they would have concerns and caveats about doing so—perhaps some, though not necessarily, borne of their underlying conservatism. For example, because foundations are still fiscally and legally responsible for their operations, they would be remiss in ceding all control over the decisions they make.
Another potential risk that both conservative and progressive foundations face in participatory grantmaking are conflicts of interest among participants who are actual or would-be grantees. Conflicts could also occur when participants are working in, on the board or staff of, and/or have professional or personal relationships with an organization being considered for funding. As we understand it, these topics come up regularly in discussions of participatory grantmaking, and various techniques for addressing them have been developed.
Donor intent
There are additional issues, however, that conservative foundations would be particularly concerned about when deciding whether to wade into participatory-philanthropy waters. At the top of the list is donor intent, which is not sufficiently addressed in the current participatory grantmaking literature, and to which conservative philanthropists and “philanthropoids” have historically and traditionally accorded great value.
Obviously, if the donor is alive and seeks participatoriness, this is not a problem. But it could be in the case of an absent donor who did not approve or even know about participatory grantmaking before their departure. External participants will very likely not be as concerned about donor intent as the board and staff of a donor’s philanthropic legacy whose stated role is to safeguard that legacy.
Advisory roles
Another concern that arguably may have more resonance with conservative foundations is the role of philanthropic advisers when it comes to participatory grantmaking. An analogy using the financial services industry may be helpful here. Within the financial services industry, there has been an ongoing debate for years about the legal, moral, and ethical standards to which certain types of advisers should be held. Historically, investment advisers who work directly for the client investor have been held to a fiduciary standard (i.e., they must place the client’s interests ahead of their own) by law, regulation, and licensors. Investment brokers, by contrast, also make recommendations to a client investor, but they are employed by broker-dealers, meaning they need only believe that their recommendations are suitable for the client, which is a lower standard than the advisers’ fiduciary one. To some, that is not good enough.
While it is unlikely that grantmakers will ever be governed in the same way as financial advisers (and they should not be), the debate about the standard to which financial advisers should be held offers insights into how givers and their advisers should think about these questions. Conceptually, to what sort of standard or standards, if any, should giving advisers or external participants of various sorts be held, by whom, and how? To the degree that internal program staffers may compromise their ability to meet whichever standard, intentionally or not, the board and executive should internally hold them accountable—up to and including severing the employment relationship.
Such a duty is certainly breached if there is an actual outright undisclosed conflict of interest, financial or otherwise, of course. Short of that, however, a wide spectrum of more nebulous factors could risk a breach, and there could pretty much always be a carefully tuned sensitivity to it—ranging from serving formal roles at or with a grant recipient or applicant organization to allowing themselves to be seen as “playing favorites” in making recommendations or evaluating performance.
Program officers should internally hold themselves accountable to the same standard, too, with the necessary, but unfortunately uncommon, humility and discipline to do so. If there were an imaginary fiduciary standard for program officers in big American philanthropy, it would currently be often outright breached, and more often—too often—seriously compromised.
For more nebulosity, widen the spectrum to include “independent” advisory board members, outside reviewers, and consultants. In most cases, for their wisdom and advice, they will have been retained by the foundation or grantmaker, to which they thus owe something. And in most cases, they will be employed by another entity to which they also owe something in return (not unlike investment advisors, in our analogy).
That which they owe to the client, and separately to the employer, might conflict—or at least be in tension, skillful as they will likely be at rationalizing away or reconciling any such dissonance. When considering already-existing professional and personal connections, for example, an adviser might plausibly think that these are why they were asked to participate in the first place, after all. Or maybe the firm’s other clients fully share this one’s goals and worldview—or, at least, they largely overlap—so tailoring guidance to other donors’ interests is not wrong or anything. As always, a moral and ethical compromise is awfully tempting.
Potential pawnmaking
Finally—perhaps less charitably, if not outright cynically—there is another serious risk that participatory grantmaking could become a mechanism by which to invoke—then misuse—the moral authority of real-life, everyday participants in ways that give a foundation some street cred. In other words, if this brand of grantmaking acquires enough popularity, foundations may simply give lip service to “participatory grantmaking,” inviting grantees or outside participants whom they believe will endorse whatever program they already want to fund.
For instance, if it turns out that all or most grants made through the participatory process just happen to flow into conspicuously progressive or conservative causes, then one might become suspicious that behind the process there had been careful, ideologically tainted prescreening of those engaged in the process. If participatory grantmakers overwhelmingly support, say, nonprofits devoted to defunding the police or making abortion illegal, then a possibly uncharitable (but not incomprehensible) reading could lead one to conclude that a great deal of prescreening had indeed been involved (e.g., in the case of defunding the police, most opinion surveys suggest that low-income BJPOC communities are more interested in an increased, if more culturally attuned, police presence).
On some parts of the left, a well-established doctrine exists for explaining this sort of discrepancy between what “the masses” should want and what they in fact do want: namely, “false consciousness.” In Marxist theory, false consciousness is a way of thinking that prevents people from properly perceiving the true nature of their social or economic situation. This doctrine soon leads to the certainty that only an enlightened vanguard can be trusted to make the appropriate decisions for the masses, who are otherwise too immured in petty, everyday concerns to see their true interests.
Ironically, if participatory grantmaking were to be misused in this way—letting the outcome justify the decision—it would perversely resemble the intellectual errors whereby certain foundations used powerfully credentialed academics or “experts” to justify what they were going to do in the first place, This seems, to us, a plausible risk.
The Woodson approach to participation, by contrast, assumes and validates the authenticity of what emerges—without implicit, expert-designed ideological filters—from the grassroots. Whatever filtering occurs when grantmakers seek out those whom the local community has already validated— which can be discovered by, say, the level of activity and energy present in a nonprofit, and by word-of-mouth among everyday community citizens, who can point out quickly and precisely where they go when they are in need of assistance, advice, and support.
This may not fit together into a rational and orderly pattern in the program officer’s mind or in the foundation’s strategic plan. Why, for instance, is Milwaukee’s Cordelia Taylor—the founder of the community-based senior care center called Family House—also dispensing advice to low-income mothers about how to make nutritious meals from the canned goods she gives them? It is because Mother Taylor is the first person to whom the neighborhood turns when a problem—even one not related to senior care—arises. The Woodson approach would say: support her generously, and in turn ask her who else in the circle of community leaders she would advise one to support.
Democratic participation, in this sense, is always already present, in whom the local community has informally but clearly elevated to positions of authority. It does not need to be reconstructed through a formal institutional process, as some participatory grantmaking may seek to do, and indeed may well lose something in the effort to do so. But seeking out and identifying grassroots groups that have already come to embody the community’s spirit is subtle, difficult—and, of course, also subject to abuses, as are all human institutions and behaviors.
To pursue this approach, a foundation’s board and program staff must put aside all ideological preconceptions about what people should want and remain humbly open to whatever the community has indicated that it does want, by the sorts of nonprofits to which they have given rise and which they support by their presence, their voluntary energies, and their own giving. To our way of thinking, this Woodsonian approach in the Burkean/Tocquevillian tradition of conservatism would be a genuine alternative to the current practice of participatory grantmaking, and one that hold promise worth exploring in practice.
Ifs, buts, and let us
If proponents of participatory philanthropy are looking to attract receptive conservatives to their cause, it will be difficult for them to do so if the standard of participatoriness means conceding the principle of donor intent (if and when applicable), and breaching a properly perceived, fiduciary-like duty of loyalty to a grantmaker. It may be impossible if participatoriness comes to be—or even to seem—just another mechanism to rationalize tax-incentivized philanthropy in furtherance of one particular ideological or partisan political end.
If conservative philanthropy is honestly and self-critically looking to exemplify anti-elitism in and improve its grantmaking, however, it would more aggressively explore options to humbly check what might be its own elitism and increase participatoriness in that grantmaking—maybe even potentially riskily including, if and when appropriate, “deciding” about it. The caveats we have raised here are genuine, and, we believe, surmountable. As in so many other contexts, we believe we could and should trust and—with respect and good nature—try learning more from each other.
[i] James Piereson, remarks made during the event “What Is Conservative Philanthropy?” held at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, Washington, DC, September 2012.
[ii] Piereson.
[iii] Piereson.
[iv] Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1976).
[v] For examples of Robert Woodson Sr.’s work, see Robert Woodson, A Summons to Life: Mediating Structures and the Prevention of Youth Crime (Pensacola, FL: Ballinger, 1981); Robert Woodson, Youth Crime and Urban Policy: A View from the Inner City (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1981); Robert Woodson, On the Road to Economic Freedom: An Agenda for Black Progress (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1987); and Robert Woodson, The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods (New York: Free Press, 1998).
[vi] Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York; G. Dearborn & Co. 1838).
[vii] Woodson, Triumphs.
[viii] Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909).
[ix] See William A. Schambra, “Charity, Progressive Philanthropy, and Eugenics,” October 8, 2005, https://phillysoc.org/schambra-charity-progressive-philanthropy-and-eugenics/.
[x] Cynthia Gibson, Participatory Grantmaking: Has Its Time Come? (New York: Ford Foundation, 2017), 11, https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/participatory_grantmaking-lmv7.pdf.
[xi] Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, “Principles,” https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/principles-1.
[xii] Gibson, Participatory Grantmaking, 42.
[xiii] Nwamaka Agbo, Powershift Philanthropy: Strategies for Impactful Participatory Grantmaking (Los Angeles: California Endowment, 2021).
