Good evening, everyone:

I’ve attended a half-dozen meetings over the last months discussing the role place-based philanthropy might/can/should play as the new policy environment intensifies – from immigration to climate, from housing to food access, from health care to community development finance. Our perspective at Kresge is clear: working at the local level across sectors and across disciplines in a non-ideological way is the way to both protect essential civic systems and continue to build toward an equitable social and economic future.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, therefore, to see a piece entitled “Who Can Rescue Democracy? Local Funders Have the Edge,” in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. What did surprise me was that it came from a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, with whom Kresge doesn’t always agree. It was written by Daniel Stid, who used to run the deeply thoughtful, if sometimes provocative, work on civil society and democracy at the Hewlett Foundation. I thought I should probably read on and see where we agree and where we might diverge.

The Chronicle notes that the piece is adapted from an address Stid gave to the Pennsylvania Community Foundation Association and later shared on his Substack.

Stid argues that the challenges facing democracy are less suited to resolution from national philanthropy than they are by locally-based philanthropy, particularly community foundations. If I close my eyes for a moment, I can recall my saying that at least a dozen times over the past months. So far, so good.

Stid recalls a conversation with a community foundation leader who described the foundation’s support of local journalism, civic dialogue, and local assets like parks and libraries. He writes: “I [told him that if] more parts of the country had a community foundation doing such things, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.” Well, a slight point of divergence: it’s not that this isn’t really important, because it is. It is instead that this is not the exception. It is exactly what innumerable community foundations are, in fact, doing.

Stid goes on to observe:

Compared to their richly endowed national counterparts, community foundations are often regarded as more modest and often more staid institutions, lacking the scale, big ideas, and visibility to take on the nation’s biggest problems. Yet precisely in their local embeddedness and quieter, steadier role lies an overlooked strength. Because they are accountable to the communities they serve and indeed inseparable from them, community foundations can develop and deploy intangible assets that national funders, for all their resources, cannot replicate.

[T]hese place-based institutions hold the promise of bottom-up civic renewal, helping to cultivate the habits of association, the culture of citizenship, and the social trust on which democracy in America depends.

Absolutely no divergence there. Couldn’t agree more.

Stid underscores community foundations’ unique ability to carry local knowledge, build local networks, develop local mechanisms of accountability, and stay put. He observes that “Community foundations are not trying to fix a broken and distrusted national democracy; rather, they can build on proximate institutions and civic cultures in which people already believe.”

Again, spot on. But a slight cavil.

Stid’s advice to community foundations is exemplary, as far as it goes. Invest in local journalism. Fund citizens’ assemblies to wrestle with local issues. Support participation in civic groups and gathering spaces. A la Robert Putnam, but with an eye toward building the musculature of self-governance.

My small – or maybe not so small – divergence stems from its limited line of sight. There is no consideration of the powerful table-setting role community foundations might play in the community’s “third rail” issues that neither the public nor private sector wants to touch. There is only the skim-over of the potential role community foundations can play in building civic problem-solving capacity – community development organizations, community finance organizations, community organizing bodies. There is scant mention of the financial de-risking role foundations can play in bringing private markets back to disinvested places.

I would argue that those kinds of roles are an important supplement to the very valuable roles for which Stid advocates.

He closes with a strong Kresge-convergence: “One of the greatest strengths of community foundations is their inherent ability and inclination to learn from each other. The 900 community foundations nationwide represent test kitchens that develop unique recipes for civic renewal.”

Right on the money. I just returned from a meeting in Cleveland in which that is exactly what the Chicago Trust, the Gund Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Hyde Foundation, Blue Meridian, and the Cleveland, Central Valley, and New Orleans Community Foundations did. The exchanges were rich, detailed, and aperture-expanding. Test kitchens indeed.

Rip

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