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.
Below is an edited version of William A. Schambra’s remarks to a meeting of the International Association of Advisers in Philanthropy on April 23, 2010.
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It’s an honor to be here with you all today. If I’m helpful to you in any way, you owe it to my friend and your colleague Phil Cubeta. If I’m not helpful at all, then you really owe it to Phil—talk to him.
But Phil has my deep admiration for being one of the most-honest and -thoughtful commentators on philanthropy today. He’s also a person who’s willing to enter into civil discourse with those of different political and cultural viewpoints—and to understand that such discourse is the best way for all of us to improve our thinking and practice. That is a rare commodity in today’s public climate.
It would probably be useful for me to say a word or two about my background in the practice of philanthropy, by way of introducing my approach to it this morning.
I worked for a decade at a foundation just up the road from here, in Milwaukee—The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Some of you may have heard that name, because it earned a reputation as one of the two or three major funders of conservative think tanks, scholars, and other public-policy efforts.
Indeed, there are those who believe that Bradley was almost single-handedly responsible for the conservative political resurgence of the 1990s, due to its funding in the policy arena.
When I moved from Washington, D.C., to Milwaukee in 1992, I was thrilled to be working for an institution at the center of conservative intellectual life. After all, I had spent years in graduate school studying political philosophy.
I had spent more years working at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a major conservative think tank, and serving as a speechwriter for a couple of cabinet secretaries in the Reagan and Bush Administrations. So I was ready and eager to help direct millions of foundation dollars to big-time scholars and institutions.
But after I had spent a decade in Milwaukee, I was finding my greatest satisfaction in a very different way: sitting down with a neighborhood leader in a ramshackle inner-city storefront office, with duct tape on the industrial carpeting and water stains on the ceiling tiles, talking about a $5,000 grant to replace a failing boiler that needed to be fixed before the temperature dropped below 32 degrees.
I’m going to tell you why that became such a satisfaction to me, because you’re one of the very few philanthropy audiences in America that might be interested in it.
As I understand it, few of you are likely to advise any of the American mega-foundations—which, of course, have their own professional staffs and are absolutely not interested in making $5,000 grants anyway.
Instead, your advisees may well think that a $5,000 or $10,000 gift is a pretty big deal. It is a big deal—especially if it is given in the spirit I’m going to try to convey to you today.
Incredible people
First, let me describe to you some of the incredible people I met in my years in Milwaukee. Cordelia Taylor is a nursing-home administrator by training who had become disenchanted with the inhumane procedures of the large facilities for which she worked.
So she opened her own community-based senior care facility, located in the house on 11th Street where she had raised her family.
The neighborhood had deteriorated badly since then. It was often necessary for her to go toe to toe with drug dealers twice her size in order for her to move them out of her neighborhood.
But this was the ideal place for her to begin to serve the low-income and homeless seniors who were closest to her heart. The demand was such that she soon expanded to the house next door, then to another and another, until today Family House includes most of the block, and is expanding across the street.
The houses are now connected by a wooden ramp, surrounding a pleasant garden with a fountain in the middle. For many of the impoverished residents who pass their last days here, it is the nicest place they will ever have lived.
Then there’s Bill Lock, who introduced me to Mrs. Taylor. He ran a small electrical-transformer company until he was asked by his church to take his lifetime of experience in business and help establish an incubator for small businesses in an abandoned tire warehouse it had inherited.
At any given time, that warehouse would shelter some 12 to 15 start-ups, with shared logistical support.
But the essential ingredient was the continual presence of Deacon Lock, who was always available to dispense advice, wisdom, or just plain commiseration to the young men and women who were first encountering the daunting obstacles that stood between them and the fulfillment of the dream of owning their own businesses.
One of his advisees went on to establish Wisconsin’s first and only wholesale electrical-components company to be owned by an African-American woman.
Finally, there’s Deborah Darden, who started a group called the Right Alternatives Family Service Center at the Parklawn Housing Development. Deborah worked with a group of AFDC mothers—this is in pre-welfare-reform days—who recalled fondly the strong moral and religious values that had been imparted to them by their own grandmothers and mothers.
Their lives were seriously diminished, they now understood, by the seeming eclipse of those values. So they pledged to hold each other accountable for living by those values again, changing their own behavior so that their children would have the same sort of principled upbringing they had enjoyed.
Deborah and her colleagues drew up a list of 13 behaviors from their grandmother’s time, which they committed to observe in their own households.
These included items like “Reteach our children to use Mr., Mrs., and Ms. titles to all adults;” “become more conscientious about social behaviors we allow our children to see;” and “demand that all guests who visit our homes abide by the same value structure.”
Hundreds of women in the development came to subscribe to the principles, so signifying by putting a “Count Me In” sticker in their windows. Neighbors understood that to mean this household observed strict moral and religious principles, and would be a safe haven for other children in the neighborhood.
There were scores of other neighborhood leaders like these that I came to meet in the toughest neighborhoods of Milwaukee. I never would have had the honor of knowing them without the direct assistance of Bob Woodson, from whom you’re going to hear tomorrow. So really, my role here today is just to be John the Baptist, the voice crying the wilderness.
Coming away stronger, and with more faith
But the point is that I was never around Mrs. Taylor or Deacon Lock or Deborah Darden without coming away a stronger and better person—a person with more faith in America, and even more faith in God.
I could and did listen to the stories of their lives and works for hours, because it gave meaning and purpose to my philanthropic work, in a way that reading a grant proposal for another study of social security or the tax system never could.
Indeed, whenever I had spent too much time in the office, and had begun to wonder what kind of impact I was having on the world, I would call up Bill Lock and repair to the Q F & H Diner on Martin Luther King Drive for a long lunch.
I would absorb his wisdom and gradually recover my sense of mission from this gentle reminder that I had some small part in his work by helping to secure a modest grant now and then.
I’ve struggled all my professional life to understand this feeling, and in the final analysis, I have to recall that sometimes even the greatest teachers can’t put something into words. All they can say is, “Come and see.”
But consider this: the neighborhoods I’m talking about are, in the eyes of city agencies and the larger nonprofits and foundations, vast wastelands of social dysfunction.
Nothing has worked here: the industrial parks meant to bring back jobs have long since closed up, the social workers put in their perfunctory eight hours and look forward to early retirement; the police only venture in with trepidation.
Periodically, government and the major foundations decide to launch yet another initiative against poverty—to import some new program model that worked in Seattle or Denver. After millions of dollars and salaries for lots of social-service providers, consultants, project directors, and evaluators, the program quietly folds, with nothing whatsoever to show for it.
So all the experts have failed, and that leaves us feeling pretty hopeless about these neighborhoods. Because we’re a society that insists that expertise is the answer to all our problems. We’ve come to believe that we need to leave problems like urban poverty to those who have earned the appropriate credentials, learning to speak its secret language and apply its privileged scientific techniques.
And yet in the midst of what to us may seem to be a situation calling for complete despair, the Bill Locks, Cordelia Taylors, and Deborah Dardens one day look around themselves at their own neighborhoods and say, “OK, everybody else, all the pros, have had their shot, and now, I’ve got to do something.”
They may not have the right professional credentials or the right sort of building or any sort of financial backing beyond their own wallets or the support of their churches. But they step forward and begin to gather their neighbors in a mutual effort to remake their own communities, in the face not only of daunting social problems, but also of arrogant, disbelieving elites.
A great American story, and one of spiritual renewal
This is, on the one hand, a great American story. As Alexis de Tocqueville explained long ago, one of the main reasons Americans would remain free is that when they confronted a problem, they didn’t sit around and wait for a government official to show up and solve it for them. They instead gathered with their neighbors and worked out their own solutions their own way.
Now we’ve gotten away from that a bit, but the remarkable thing is that here, in seemingly the most desolate neighborhoods, the great American story is being acted out again.
These everyday citizens now know that it’s pointless to wait around for government or business or big nonprofit solutions, and so they organize themselves to take on their problems.
Furthermore, this sort of self-reliance and no-excuses personal responsibility—all principles critical for American freedom—are precisely what these community leaders cultivate in those around them, as essential parts of the solution.
You cannot observe what they’re doing without realizing that the central principles of the American republic are alive and well and being put to concrete, practical use everyday, in the most-hostile environment imaginable. You cannot come away from these experiences without a deepened faith in the American experiment.
This is, on the other hand, a great story of spiritual renewal. The three leaders I’ve mentioned and most of their peers will tell you that they’ve taken up the struggle because they are answering the call of God.
And they will tell you that those who answer the call of God are precisely not those whom the world thinks are best-suited for the job, or have the right professional credentials.
They will tell you stories of the barren woman who gave birth to a great prophet; the lowly shepherd from the smallest tribe who became the great king; the reclusive man with a speech impediment who led the great Exodus.
And when you see what these leaders are accomplishing in the inner city without professional training, without fancy buildings or elaborate programs, without adequate financial support, you too are tempted to believe that some larger spiritual work must be underway here.
You cannot come away from these experiences without a deepened appreciation for the possibility of the divine hand in human affairs.
So that’s why, I think, I invariably drew such inspiration, both as a person of faith and as an American, from seeing the work of neighborhood leaders.
Go and find
As I learned from Bob Woodson, these groups are present by the score in every neighborhood in America, no matter how seemingly desolate it may be.
But they’re not going to come downtown to the large, wealthy donors and their advisers. They’ve long since learned that it’s a waste of time, because they don’t have a business plan and an updated personnel manual and a glossy annual report and a professional evaluator waiting to do a double-blind experimental study of their program.
They don’t have time to waste on all these accoutrements of the professional social services, because they’re too busy doing what they’re doing.
We’re going to have to go and find them. And that means that 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. Bill Somerville, a philanthropy adviser in San Francisco, has written a wonderful book about this necessary reform, entitled Grassroots Philanthropy.
Phil Cubeta suggests it might be called “walking-around philanthropy,” and I rather like that. I especially like its ambiguity, since it is in fact advisable to “walk around” most of what institutional philanthropy has to teach us today.
Let me throw out some tips about what to look for when you’re doing “walking-around philanthropy,” because I think it will give you a better feel for what we’re talking about. I draw these especially from Bob Woodson and the leaders to whom he’s introduced me over the years.
Look first for activity. Effective grassroots groups are typically extremely busy, and may even appear at times to be chaotically overwhelmed.
If they are truly serving the neighborhood, they wind up pursuing not just their announced mission, but dealing with the full range of human needs brought to their doorsteps by a desperate community.
When children started showing up on Cordelia Taylor’s porch in Milwaukee, she could either have sent them away with the explanation that this is, after all, a senior-care facility, or she could have tried to meet their manifest need for an immediate, caring adult presence.
She, of course, did the latter. Her son James took the kids under his wing with after-school activities and a homework club. Eventually, a volunteer organized karate classes in the basement. So she became a senior-care and martial-arts facility.
This sort of flexible, unplanned, “off-mission” response to whatever the neighborhood needs next is a hallmark of effective grassroots work. But it plays havoc with program budgets and reporting, and makes it difficult to attract funding from larger foundations that expect to see rigid adherence to program designs and budget line-items.
A group’s busyness speaks to its valued place in the neighborhood, which is reflected in another visible sign of effectiveness, namely, the neighborhood shows tangible respect for the group.
Cordelia Taylor had to reassure the construction company working on Family House’s expansion that it was unnecessary to put fencing around its equipment at night, because the neighborhood knew it was helping her. Nothing was ever stolen from the unfenced site.
Sister Jennie Lechtenberg notes that one sign of PUENTE Learning Center’s importance to its East Los Angeles community is the fact that no graffiti appears on her facility’s walls.
Conversely, it’s fairly easy to tell when a group enjoys an uneasy relationship with the surrounding neighborhood, by the locked doors and elaborate security systems.
Similarly, it should be apparent on a site visit to an effective grassroots group that it respects the neighborhood, no matter how “pathological” it might seem to the experts.
The group’s leadership typically lives in the neighborhood it is serving, thus meeting what Bob Woodson calls the “zip-code test.” The leaders know the neighborhood thoroughly, and can take you to its most-forbidding corners without fear.
David Worm, a housing specialist at ACTS Community Development Corporation, can drive a donor through his Milwaukee neighborhood, pointing out and telling the stories of every house and every low-income family he has ever matched up. You’ll hear things from him like “The Lopezes in 608 just built their own back porch. Looks like it probably has seven code violations, but they couldn’t be prouder of it.”
A further sign of respect for the community is the fact that good grassroots leaders do not refer to the people they serve as “clients,” and they never treat them as passive, helpless victims of their circumstances.
Grassroots leaders know and use the names of those they are serving. Even if they’re showing a wealthy potential donor around a site, they don’t dismiss the child who comes up to the director with an urgent need.
Typically, project beneficiaries are engaged directly in helping to run the program, and may over time join the staff. A program shows its respect for the dignity of those it helps by placing responsibility on them, and asking something in return.
A site visit should also surface evidence of good stewardship, well before you ever get to the point of examining the books. In one of my site visits for the Bradley Foundation, Sharon Mayes-Ferguson pointed out a somewhat-awkward window at Intercessions, her group home for teen mothers, and noted that she had wedged it in during construction because it had been donated by a supporter when she remodeled her kitchen.
When one tours Bob Cote’s Step 13, a residential addiction-treatment center in Denver, one learns which church donated that crucifix for his chapel and which company donated that sofa or that computer.
For effective grassroots groups, nothing—not even a cast-off window—is wasted, and every donation of resources and volunteer energy is welcomed, remembered, and acknowledged.
The very method a project uses to tell you about itself says something about its effectiveness. A quality grassroots group will seldom usher you into an empty conference room to view a power-point presentation about abstract interventions.
Rather, you may be invited to sit down with a group of people whose lives have been touched by the group. Since many grassroots groups are rooted in religious faith, to understand what they do, you are asked to witness comprehensive life transformations, not superficial behavior modifications. That can only be conveyed by listening to full-length narratives of redeemed souls.
A final indicator of effectiveness appears when the site visit arrives at the funding-pitch stage. From a solid grassroots group, you never hear “Unless you make a donation, we can’t do anything.”
In fact, you may not get an explicit pitch at all. The often-implicit message from the visit is: “You’ve seen the fruits of our labor, not a promise about what we might do with more money. If you choose to help us, fine. If not, fine. But we’ll still be right here, doing our work.”
As Woodson argues, you should look for the groups that were already working before funding became available, and that will continue to be there if it no longer is.
One mistake potential donors often make is to rush past these truly significant, if-subtle indicators of effectiveness, in the haste to see an audited statement, a sophisticated accounting system, or an elaborate method for tracking and reporting outcomes. You won’t find them.
A better approach would be to rely on favorable first impressions, to trust your gut, and make a small initial grant to the group. You will have the opportunity later—now as a trusted supporter—to ask for improvements in accounting and reporting, with which you should be willing to help.
Once you have established funding relationships with grassroots leaders, they begin to lead you to other effective programs.
Bill Lock was not only himself an effective program director, but was also a font of community wisdom about who else was doing good work in the city. He never hesitated to share that information, even if it pointed beyond his church’s denominational walls, because he understood all effective neighborhood leaders alike to be doing God’s work.
What a group does, and what it is
By now, it should be apparent that “walking-around philanthropy” concerns itself less with what a group does than what it is. To be a transforming and healing agent in a neighborhood, a group must be embedded therein, reflecting its best traditions and its hopes for the future. It is not enough simply to deliver services, however efficiently.
While the major foundations continue to fund massive outside social-service interventions, smaller donors are free to undertake the deliberate, cumulative, intuitive process of mapping networks of effective grassroots groups in their own backyards. Over time, they will compile their own checklists of indications of effectiveness, based on their own local experiences.
Let me propose this to you as philanthropy advisers: that developing this sort of map of the groups in your own backyard that are doing effective work would be a critical service that you could offer those whom you advise.
Many of the now-wealthy individuals with whom you work may themselves have been very much like the inner city leaders you will find—upstarts, outsiders, amateurs, easily dismissed by the entrenched elites in their fields.
And your advisees may often attribute their ability to prevail in the face of long odds to a reliance on good old American principles like self-reliance and personal responsibility, or to a belief in divine power.
They may now find that the prospect of dedicating their modest fortunes to big, impersonal social and cultural projects and institutions leaves them cold.
But I guarantee, if you could introduce them to Mrs. Taylor or Deacon Lock, they would see in those leaders the same fire and the same spirit that helped them build their own businesses, and they would be inspired by their stories in the same I always was.
Entering into a relationship with these grassroots leaders will draw out and help clarify the charitable impulses that they’re beginning to explore and expand. They will see first-hand that a gift of $5,000 or $10,000 doesn’t have to simply disappear into the great maw of the downtown art museum or symphony or Boys and Girls Club, but can rather make the difference between life and death for a small inner-city nonprofit needing to fix the roof before the next rainstorm.
And they don’t have to wait for some evaluator’s report they can’t understand to know if anything was accomplished. They can see the results of their gifts immediately before them: the roof will be repaired, the boiler will be fixed, the second-hand bus will be purchased, the trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame will be taken.
As know, you can recite dry and abstract statistics about urgent human needs until you’re blue in the face and just leave wealthy clients wondering whether, in the face of the overwhelming problems before us, modest gifts can make much of a difference.
But once they’ve met a Mrs. Taylor or a Deacon Lock and experience the quiet competence these leaders bring to the modest work they’re doing, and can see directly how much modest funding for their efforts can accomplish, then your donors will begin to think and act much more confidently and coherently in the charitable realm.
You will now have shared charitable experiences that you can explore together, allowing you to plumb reactions and thoughts about the leader he or she has encountered—“I liked what I saw here, but not there.” That will in turn be a vital tool for you to help the donor articulate the vision he or she would now like to bring to philanthropy.
But beyond providing tools for you to do a job and to earn a living, let me assure you that as you seek out these grassroots leaders and begin to learn from them—and you will, I guarantee, want to spend more and more time with them and hear more and more about their lives and work—you will yourself find more satisfaction in your job.
I’m sure you too as an adviser must periodically wonder if you’re having any real impact in the world, helping to steer gifts from donors to a huge, wealthy university, for whom the contribution represents the downpayment on a vacation home for the assistant dean of admissions.
If you can begin to link your advisees to the Cordelia Taylors and Bill Locks of the world, you will be providing a service that government and business cannot provide and that big foundations and nonprofits have no interest in providing. You will find that you always have a place to “come and see,” immediately and concretely before your eyes, the difference that you’re making. You will be able to find your own place in the story of America, and in the divine plan.
