Woodson

Well-credentialed social-service expertise and everyday, actual, real-life, neighborhood authority.

On the 30th anniversary of substantial, work-based policy revision to social-service delivery, a still-relevant call for grantmakers to look beyond “picking up the slack” and instead strengthen the grassroots institutions that foster self-governing citizenship.

As American philanthropy continues to evolve, may it one day catch up with Bob Woodson.

It’s only with the recovery of the principles of the American constitutional order—a genuinely unique contribution of conservative philanthropy—that conservatism achieved the degree of theoretical coherence, patriotic allegiance, and fidelity to human nature essential for political success.

As faith in national politics declines, Americans can find purpose, agency, and community by investing in the local institutions and civic associations that have long been the foundation of American life.

During Center for Civil Society podcast, the scholar, author, onetime philanthropy executive, editor, and commentator discusses establishment philanthropy’s elitist progressivism and alternative thinking and examples, as well as the need to balance philanthropic freedom against concerns about philanthropic power.

Serious purpose mixed with grace, good nature, fellowship, and maybe a little Marvin Gaye. Basic, common, connection-making humanity.

To conservatism and conservative philanthropy, the Woodson Center founder suggested conscious and active alignment with new and different audiences.

Of conservatism and conservative philanthropy, the Woodson Center founder asked a question.

A lot of grassroots work actually can scale, but not the way you (probably) think.

Donors and their advisors are going to have to come out from behind the desks and get out into the neighborhoods and see first-hand the sort of work that’s being done.

Most sensible people of all ideological stripes can probably agree that feeling excessive shame (for whatever reason) probably inhibits the formation of fruitful social connections and that feeling an excessive sense of entitlement (also for whatever reason) probably inhibits fruitful individual effort. The conviction that one feeling is problematic to the exclusion of the other, however, leads not only to dueling studies and paper-writing efforts to prove the other side wrong, but also to mutually exclusive prescriptions for cultural change.

Remembering her guidance in recognizing and supporting it.

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.

Both efforts can be resource-intensive and deeply misguided.

Handbooks and lectures rarely result in on-ramps to the “success sequence.”

“This will not be the first movement in human history to flourish by incorporating the wisdom of unorthodox groups hitherto exiled to the margins of respectable society. … [I]t’s time for a conservative parallel polis. But the outline of that polis is already there, to be discovered and nurtured, not created. It’s up to us to provide it the attention and resources that it deserves.”

N. S. Lyons will also be on same “Alternative Political Structures” panel. “Parallel polis” boldly urged by Lyons may already exist in latent form, Schambra has written.

In the framework of the “parallel polis” for which N. S. Lyons called at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels, there already exists a latent one in America’s central-city neighborhoods.