The Common Good: “THE STATE WE’RE IN”
SAFRO Conference, Macalester College
INTRODUCTION
Thank you for that kind introduction and welcome.
I’m reluctant to go through territory you know far better than I – how our nation’s liberal arts colleges can best position themselves in a highly fluid philanthropic environment.
You have done an extraordinary job identifying and appealing to long-standing donors, new sources of wealth, and institutions interested in particular aspects of your programming.
So I thought I would instead proceed in three parts:
- I’ll start with a general overview of the social and political environment that private and community foundations find themselves in;
- Second, I want to suggest the issues philanthropy is struggling with as its seeks to respond to this environment;
- And third, I thought we might preserve the balance of the time to have a conversation about where you see higher education fitting into all of this.
I. THE CONTEXT IN WHICH WE WORK
So let me start with some reflections about the social and political forces that are shaping our work. My apologies in advance if this strikes you as peculiarly midwestern – I’ll be interested in whether this resonates with your respective communities.
The Erosion of Basic Values
For many of us, the last few years have been like having the anesthetic wear off after a serious operation – little by little, comes the dawning realization that something is profoundly different … and something is gone for good. Our deepest communal values – based on solid American concepts of public responsibility for the common good – seem to have been shed, inexorably, until we’re left with a dominant social and political ethic that enshrines individualism as the ultimate public virtue.
I’m not inclined to tie this to a particular election cycle, political party, or set of elected officials. Instead, I’m struck by the corrosive effects of subordinating an ethic of long-term investment to an obsession with minimizing tax payments ... of casting aside compassion for those less fortunate in favor of a deification of those who have achieved positions of privilege ... of dismantling structures of mutual assistance in pursuit of grandiose concepts of market efficiencies.
Now I understand that it can be useful … maybe even necessary … to place stresses on complex systems in order to generate change. Reducing budgets, re-allocating priorities, and introducing new approaches are all part of it. Those tactics are widely used in corporate cultures.
Seen this way, the attempts at the federal and state levels to “starve the beast” of government might make some sense. But only to a point. Any corporate executive will tell you that this kind of stressing only produces . . .. well, more stress … unless it is accompanied by a genuine commitment to reform.
Sorry to say, that kind of commitment to reform has not been in evidence – intellectually, politically, or financially. But if we’re going to ask nonprofits, local governments, and other community actors to bulk up their capacity to help, you have to get serious about investing in that capacity. What we have instead seen is a highly focused, precisely engineered dismantling of the fundamental building blocks of a civil society based in mutual caring and respect.
This isn’t temporary or minor or limited. It’s real, it promises to endure, and it’s becoming embedded in virtually every dimension of modern American life.
The Problem in Minnesota
And let’s be clear about something else. This is not solely a national phenomenon. As I’ve traveled around the country over the last number of years, it has become clear that states and localities from coast to coast are experiencing the same set of challenges.
As nationally, our local political, economic, and social environments are hardening.
Increasingly, the roles of community and the public sector – particularly as they relate to family life – are being called into question. Here in Minnesota, the divisiveness of political ideology makes the idea of having a substantive policy discussion at the legislature about as likely as Dick Cheney and Ted Kennedy taking a family vacation together.
This divisiveness is more than just distressing to policy junkies. It also undermines one of the cornerstones of Minnesota’s good-government tradition – the long-standing positive working relationship between public managers and nonprofits in Minnesota. More and more, compassionate, principled, and competent public staff have no choice but to ask nonprofits to do the impossible.
And, far more ominously, the consequences of this divisiveness come crashing down on our state’s most vulnerable. A couple of examples.
About a year ago, former Vice President Mondale used the money he had raised in his brief campaign for Paul Wellstone’s senate seat to fund something called the Minnesota Community Project, an attempt to determine the extent to which notions of community good were eroding and why. His research documented clearly that our state’s emerging diversity is seen by many residents as a threat … with those living outside the metropolitan area harboring a deep suspicion of and disdain for government … and how and for whom it works. Despite all evidence to the contrary, new immigrants, the poor, the urban are all seen as a drains on our economy, as impediments to a social order of economic progress.
Vice President Mondale was shaken by these results. The divide is more profound than he had wanted to believe. There is no clear antidote.
The second example is a report recently released by the American Political Science Association. Entitled “Inequality and American Democracy,” the report documents what you all know – that by any measure, the way decisions are made in America has to do with power and money. 1 This politics of privilege marginalizes low-income
communities. They start with fewer resources, operate with fewer resources, acquire fewer resources, and must swim against the tide of public appreciation and support.
It’s an old … and even shameful … story in a democracy such as ours: an upward spiral for the lucky few. And a flat or downward spiral for the rest.
Abdication of Leadership
In the face of this erosion of trust and sense of mutual obligation, one could argue that our political leadership should step forward and lead us to a more enlightened place.
Correct me if I missed something, but I haven’t seen much evidence of this. Instead, we have budgets balanced through gimmickry, legislative deliberations strangled by bickering, substantive action dwarfed by gesture politics.
It is the negative interplay of these factors – economic downturn, the rise in individualism, the distrust of government, the abdication of real leadership responsibilities – that is so destructive … so transformationally destructive … to the values of a compassionate, reflective, forward-looking society.
Of course, fiscal constraints force difficult policy choices. That’s always been true. But in this state – and I suspect many of those from which you hail – we’ve always believed that policy-making is a serious business, to be undertaken with an attitude of objectivity, an openness to new and differing perspectives, an ability to step outside one’s immediate experience … a fundamental respect for the process of civil discourse.
Strip those qualities from policy-making and you’ve got a different creature altogether.
And if the choices are filtered through six-second sound bites in one-dimensional media, and interpreted through a lens of self-centeredness that scorns the very idea of the common good as old-fashioned and outdated … well, it’s not hard to see where this is going.
So with that uplifting start, we should probably turn to what’s to be done. I’ll get us started with some observations about what issues philanthropy will need to struggle with if it is to be relevant to this condition.
II. PHILANTHROPIC RESPONSE
Let me suggest that there are three tensions that private, family, and community foundations are struggling with as they contemplate this new world, each with profound implications for their future roles.
Balancing Responsive and Strategic Philanthropy
First, is how – individually and collectively, - foundations will strike a balance between responsive and strategic philanthropy.
Ever since our founders, Virginia Binger and Russ Ewald, began hand-delivering checks to food shelves and settlement houses, the McKnight Foundation has sought to carry out responsive giving – grantmaking tied directly to compassion for those in need. Like so many of our sister institutions, this compassionate impulse lies at the heart of our foundation’s sense of mission.
As the surrounding social climate has become more complex, however, our foundation – together with the field of philanthropy generally – has increasingly supplemented direct charity with an interest in understanding and attacking the root causes of social problems.
We understand that responsive giving has a role to play in this larger aspiration. If we hope to move larger systems, we need the legitimacy that arises from the data, experiences, and learning generated from literally thousands of grants to organizations that are dedicated to helping improve the bedrock conditions of less advantaged people.
But we also recognize its limitations. Responsive grantmaking can only go so far in changing the fundamental social and political dynamics that shape people’s lives. It is not plausible to believe you can break deeply embedded patterns of disinvestment, inequality, and injustice without altering the machinery of governmental and civic relationships.
Hence the dilemma. If we confine ourselves solely to immediate social needs, we will, at day’s end, have made the lives of thousands of people better. A noble and worthwhile calling. But for some of us – particularly those with larger endowments and the ability to work flexibly – there is the nagging sense that in the process we will not have found ways to solve the underlying problems that perpetuate those needs into the future. We believe we have no choice but to work, selectively, at the larger contextual issues that determine the day-to-day quality of life and opportunity for our citizens.
This becomes maddening to many community workers because working this way requires that we make choices they might not agree with. But we can’t choose everything. What we can do is focus on a handful of things, things that seem susceptible of change, things that may suggest possibilities to other fields.
That efficacy of this approach has been illuminated by some of the most enlightened philanthropy of the last fifty years. Ford’s efforts to promote civil rights and voting rights in the 1960’s. Carnegie’s role in giving birth to public television and the pathbreaking programming of Sesame Street. Robert Wood Johnson’s work in promoting a national network of community health centers. The contributions of the Open Society,
Rockefeller, and others in strengthening international institutions of democracy and diplomacy. The list goes on.
But that was then, and this is now. Although a glorious tradition, it does not necessarily characterize the present state of our sector. We have some urgent and difficult self-reflection to do if we are to find an appropriate balance between the time-honored tradition of responsive philanthropy and the increasingly compelling impulse of strategic philanthropy.
Balancing Funding for Projects versus Funding for Ideas
Let me turn to a second tension facing philanthropy: that between funding projects and funding ideas.
We can’t make any headway in the current environment without a meaningful reassessment of the roles and responsibilities of the different sectors. As my earlier description suggested, we’ve been pushed over the wall into an entirely different piece of real estate. We can spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how to climb back over that wall. But my sense is that this would be unproductive energy. We might better be advised to ask what we want the terrain on the other side of that wall to look like.
One part of this new picture simply has to be a clearer articulation and actualization of the relationships between the civic sector and government. What is it, exactly, that we want government to be, and do? The Mondale survey suggested that there is, at best, no clear answer to that question.
But we cannot get by without an able, committed public sector. We look to government set public priorities through informed public spending, equitable and reasoned public policy, and respectful, responsive public institutions.
The problem is that when these functions are significantly compromised – when we lapse into the malaise I described earlier – the basic calculus falls apart and people start believing that government really doesn’t have a role to play.
So how to reassemble that calculus? Let me suggest that we start by taking our bearings from Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson. Tim Wirth, the President of the United Nations Foundation, recently wrote:
I think it is fairly obvious that the conservative movement today is dominating the marketplace of ideas and has successfully outflanked progressives in organization, communications, politics, and overall initiative . . .. The conservative movement is the Wal-Mart of ideas today – and as a result, they are a juggernaut in public policy. 2
Power to them. They have been disciplined, far-sighted, and effective. But I want to make a slightly different point. Conservative philanthropy has, in short, mastered the art of building a pervasive and effective infrastructure of ideas. But they have done more than simply float a host of new ideas; they have invested in the places those ideas are generated, the machinery that disseminates them, the venues in which leadership is cultivated to advance those ideas, and the organizations that will advocate on their behalf.
In contrast, progressive philanthropy has mastered the skill of promoting projects, supporting example after example of good programming that without question makes our communities better places to live.
The question is whether there is a set of ideas to which progressive philanthropy needs to be committed just as steadfastly as conservative philanthropy has been. If the answer if yes, and I believe it is, how are those ideas identified, distilled, communicated, and supported? I just don’t think this country’s progressive foundations – a characterization that could be applied to the vast majority of private and community foundations – have thought about this at any depth. Pew perhaps. Maybe Ford, Casey, and Robert Wood Johnson, but the list is short and their collective actions are few.
The emphasis on projects seems to maximize progressive philanthropy’s claim to be social venture capitalists – no one is better positioned, after all, to seed ideas and invest in underrepresented communities and causes. By helping good models get a start, we hold out the possibility of moving those models to scale, of creating a critical mass that can ultimately start moving the needle in the right direction on key community issues.
The problem is, though, is that this notion of moving to scale is far more elusive than the foundation and nonprofit world wants to admit. Too often, the models are rooted in the culture of a place, or in a particular leader’s vision, or in some other factors that limits their portability. It’s stunning, actually, how infrequently we move demonstration projects from one place to another, particularly in the field of human services and community development.
So I would argue that we need to begin with far greater intentionality working on a parallel path of changing the larger marketplace of ideas, the domain that Tim Wirth believes has been ceded to the conservatives. It’s not just semantics and spin. It’s a way of telling a story … based on credible facts and themes … that helps people to see the world differently.
We have all the tools we need. Money. A bias toward empirical research. The enormous privilege of being able to work with the long-view in mind. A predisposition toward a patient intelligence that permits us to work slowly and steadily on challenges that strike others as overwhelming, even intractable.
So philanthropy has to, once again, find an appropriate balance. Invest in good projects, by all means. But also begin a slow and deliberate build out of the ideas that underpin those projects and can propel them into the larger public domain.
Balancing Signature Projects with Collective Action
That leads to the third tension philanthropy will need to struggle with: balancing the desire for particular, signature programming with the potential of collaborative programming.
There is something enormously seductive to foundations, especially the larger ones, about creating a unique niche, differentiating their work from that of other philanthropic institutions.
Understandable. I have, after all, just made the case that strategic philanthropic focus has an important role to play in the lives of our communities. Indeed, it may be the highest and best use of foundation resources within a broader community ecology in which others are more suited to meet generalized, day-to-day needs – the United Way, emergency fund drives of one kind or another, and the like.
But all of this is not necessarily to say that strategic priorities can’t be pursued by foundations working in concert. The problem is that a mentality of collective action – September 11 th and Tsunami relief excepted – is noticeably lacking within philanthropy.
One of the first pieces of advice I received upon coming to McKnight, from a senior staff member who could sense I was up to some mischief. She suggested that I should chart a course that did not depend on the cooperation of others for its success. Collaborations, I was told, take too much time, generally collapse of their own weight, and are, ultimately, be no more effective that flying solo.
I’ve got to tell you that this advice ranks fairly high up in the “I can’t believe she said that” category. For the last six years at McKnight, we’ve have indeed tried to walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve created some strong signature work – particularly in regional growth, early childhood development, alternative energy, and protection of the Mississippi River – but we’ve also tried hard to work in concert with others.
Let me note just a single example, something called the Payne-Lake Community Partnership, through which McKnight has pulled together about a dozen local and national foundations - including Rockefeller, Ford, Surdna, Knight, the St. Paul Travelers, the Northwest Area, and the Minneapolis and St. Paul Community
Foundations - in an effort to deepen and accelerate the entrepreneurial energy of new immigrants along two commercial corridors, one in Minneapolis, one in St. Paul.
Among other things, we’ve invested in new immigrant business organizations, put new dollars on the table for housing and economic development, brought in national expertise to help re-design a potentially disastrous road construction project, encouraged new job training efforts, and drawn in a national technology firm to introduced a new small business web platform.
The Payne-Lake group’s collective activity has been transformational – it has deepened public commitments, solidified the pre-existing energy of community organizations and small businesses, heightened community aspirations, and accelerated the pace of private investments.
This has required an extraordinary commitment of our foundation’s institutional standing – we have had to represent to our board, the community, and other funders that we believe in the work’s long-term importance. But rather than being a one-of-a-kind gesture, it has pointed the way to a way of working, an approach to collective action that amplifies multifold our effectiveness.
By engaging others, we make it our collective work. We may have started it, but we collectively now drive it. It has enabled us to get multiple partners on the same song sheet – building trust, bridging common values, and setting the stage for group decisionmaking.
It has underscored that, in effect, philanthropic networks function like a set of extension cords. Once members are plugged in and juice starts flowing, not only do the individual foundations become more effective, the network becomes a force in its own right. The double result is better services to individuals and more sway in public decision making.
And it’s pretty clear that networking can help us to break out of insularity and parochialism. It is one way to go against the grain … to reinforce the values and practices of “community” and the common good in a time when they seem to be out of favor. Or, as Gandhi put it: It’s a way to be the change you want to see in the world.
This is not going to happen simply by attending more meetings together. It will instead require that organizations working in networks cultivate a new discipline and new practices. Decision-making is different. Implementation of decisions is different. This is hard work, but it pays off.
IV. CONCLUSION
I propose to stop there and ask the question of you of where, if at all, you fit into all of this.
I’ve tried to answer that question for myself. But I keep falling back into some fairly predictable answers. Matching the passion of your students and faculty with the needs of the community. Being good neighbors. Partnering with other community institutions on projects that benefit the common good.
But there is one level at which I find some greater clarity. That is the value of your institutions in producing exactly the kind of person who can navigate this very complex set of challenges. People capable of working across sectors. People who can
conceptualize beyond the pre-boxed solutions that have shown such limited utility.
People with highly honed abilities to communicate their thoughts clearly and creatively.
In a word, people with the qualities our nation’s liberal arts colleges have sought to promote since their inception.
But I don’t want to fully prejudge the question. So let me step aside and hear your thoughts.
Thank you.
Footnotes
1 L. Jacobs et.al, Inequality and American Democracy (The American Political Science Association: 2004).
2 Timothy Worth, President of the United Nations Foundation, “Mobilizing for Social Change: Impacting Policy, Politics and the Legislative Agenda,” Address to the Center for Philanthropy and Public Policy, March 22, 2005, Los Angeles, California.