The ongoing revolution in philanthropy: An open-ended reading list

 

 

I recently had a conversation with a friend and colleague about what I perceive to be a revolution in progress.  Grant makers and nonprofit professionals are now talking openly about some very painful (and inter-related) issues in philanthropy, such as

• The lack of inclusion and equity in philanthropy.
• The difficult power dynamics among grantors and grantees.
• The origins of some foundations’ wealth, which in some cases includes slavery and other forms of exploitation.
• The tendency of philanthropic professionals, big donors, and other relatively privileged people to assume that they know what is best for the people who are directly affected by the problems that need to be addressed.

It is really inspiring to see philanthropic and nonprofit professional engaging in public conversations about these challenges, and even more inspiring to see them taking action to create positive changes.  I offered to send my friend and colleague a list of key articles and books about this revolution, and it now occurs to me that I can share this list with everyone who is interested.  Here it is:

Books:

• Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
• Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better
• Giving Done Right: Effective Philanthropy and Making Every Dollar Count
• Unicorns Unite: How nonprofits and foundations can build EPIC Partnerships
• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
• From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth
• Philanthropy Reconsidered: Private Initiatives – Public Good – Quality of Life
• The Givers: Money, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

Articles, reports, podcasts, and videos:

• The Problems With Philanthropy, and What We Can Do to Fix Them
• In the March Toward Equity and Justice, Foundations Need to Remember: It’s Not Our Money to Control
• Social Change Won’t Happen Unless Philanthropy Gives More Power to Grassroots Leaders
• It’s Time For Philanthropic Billionaires To Share Power
• Deciding Together Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking
• Philanthropy is at a turning point. Here are 6 ways it could go
• No Time for Complacency: Preparing Foundations for a More Turbulent Future
• Letting grantees lead: What we’re learning from the BUILD evaluation
• Empowering Communities: Participatory Grantmakers Say We Must Go beyond Feedback
• A Place Where You Can Speak Your Mind to That Foundation
• Center for Effective Philanthropy: Grantee and Applicant Perception Reports
• The state of grant seeking
• What if pizza shops were funded like human service nonprofits?
• Do we know best what others need?
• Solutions Privilege: How privilege shapes the expectations of solutions, and why it’s bad for our work addressing systemic injustice
• A Call to Modernize American Philanthropy
• Decolonizing Wealth – Nonprofit Radio Podcast
• Good People, Hidden Biases, and Navigating Your Blind Spots
• Can Philanthropic Money Listen? Some observations from Atlanta.
• More than money: philanthropists as activists
• Transparency: One Small Step for Funders, One Giant Leap for Equity
• Reimagining Our Vision & Value to the Field
• The US is growing more unequal. Some say philanthropy isn’t the solution.
• Are the New Megadonors Distorting American Society?
• As Distrust in Big Philanthropy Grows, Here’s How Leading Foundations Are Demonstrating Their Value
• Answers on grant proposals if nonprofits were brutally honest with funders
• On Not Being Constrained by the System You’re In
• Choosing to be a Liberated Gatekeeper
• The 2018 Diversity Among Philanthropic Professionals Report: A Tale of Two Sectors
• Why Impact-Per-Dollar is a terrible, harmful way to measure nonprofit effectiveness
• The Power of Dialogue about Nonprofit Data and Evaluation
• Joint Statement of Associations Advancing Equitable Evaluation Practices
• Insights from an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Journey
• Announcing the first foundation assessment guide on power and privilege
• Philanthropy for change, not charity
• How Philanthropy Can Get Serious About Racial Healing
• ‘You Can’t Lift People Up by Putting Them Down’: How to Talk About Tough Issues of Race, Poverty, and More
• Inching Toward Equity: Grant makers want to be sure their giving does more to benefit people of color, but progress is slow
• Results Count: The Path to Equity
• Showing Up with an Equity Lens
• Race, Equity and Boston
• The Smartest Way to Promote Diversity: Pay for Overhead at Charities Led by People of Color
• How corporate foundations and CSR need to evolve to be more effective partners with nonprofits
• Employee Pressure Will Help Redefine CSR in 2019
• Lessons Learned from Two Decades in Philanthropy
• Moving People Forward: How Equity Leads to Greater Progress
• You’re not serious about equity if you don’t post salaries
• Survey: Nonprofits Struggle with Demonstrating Outcomes
• Evaluating a Culture
• Get a BEER* and Undo Nonprofit Power Dynamics Day
• Can Power Be Anything But Zero-Sum?
• Self-Interest (Rightly Understood) in the Nonprofit Sector
• You can’t give from an empty cup: Funders can enable movements to flourish by helping grantees reduce burnout
• Race to Lead: Confronting the Nonprofit Racial Leadership Gap
• Diversifying Boards Means Ceding Control—Are White Nonprofit Leaders Ready?
• Trust in Grantees, Not Command and Control
• Trust-based grantmaking: What it is, and why it’s critical to our sector
• Trust-Based Philanthropy Project
• How Foundations Can Grapple With the Reality That Their Wealth Was Accumulated Unjustly
• Kids Choose Their Donors in a Twist on Sponsorships
• How funder fragility is similar to white fragility and what funders can do about it
• As Foundations Reimagine Themselves, They Should Give Attention to DEI in Operations
• The Challenge of Nonprofit Leadership: Navigating a Perilous Moment
• Nonprofits Struggle to Implement Diversity Measures, Survey Finds
• Nonprofits that empower leaders of color are more apt to do something about racial inequality
• Why more and more executive directors of color are leaving their positions, and what we need to do about it
• Report Identifies Barriers to Nonprofit Advancement for Women of Color
• What Does It Look Like to Support Women of Color to Lead?
• Leaders of Color Speak Out…about being underestimated, breaking barriers, and whether things are getting better.
• White Men Still Dominate CEO Offices at Big Charities
• Fund The People: Talent Justice Initiative
• Undoing Power Dynamics in the Nonprofit Sector – Two Perspectives
• We Need to Talk About ‘The Giving Tree’
• Systems Change Is All about Shifting Power
• Who are our nonprofit disruptors and instigators?
• Momentum for Change: Ending the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle
• Making Amends: How Funders Can Address Slavery’s Legacy
• Real Equity Means Including People With Disabilities in Philanthropy
• Belonging In The Workplace: A New Approach to Diversity And Inclusivity
• Cultural Organizing Needed for Equity: A Framework of Belonging
• Philanthropy with a Racial Equity Lens
• Social Innovation Alone Can’t Solve Racial Inequality
• More than money: philanthropists as activists
• Sometimes the best thing we donors can do to advance social justice is to just write the check and get out of the way
• General Operating Support and Relinquishing the Illusion of Control
• Rethinking Social Justice Grantmaking
• Going Upstream: Philanthropy’s Role in Advancing Justice
• Justice over greatness: A new year’s reflection
• From “Keep Out” to “Please Come in.” Opening Up Grants Processes Leads to More Equity’
• After Slamming the Doors on Too Many Grantees, a New Approach Improved Our Foundation’s Impact
• Nonprofit Leadership at a Crossroads
• Nonprofits as Agents of Tension and Democracy
• Why diversity, equity, and inclusion matter for nonprofits
• Environmental Justice: Moving Equity from Margins to Mainstream
• From Promise to Practice — Embedding Equity and Inclusion
• Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity Policy Template
• Practical Ideas for Improving Equity and Inclusion at Nonprofits
• So you don’t think race, equity, diversity, and inclusion are relevant to your mission
• Equity in the Center: Video Case Studies
• Bay Area Equity Atlas
• Dismantling White Supremacy in Nonprofits: a starting point
• The Road Ahead: Will Philanthropic Critique Change Philanthropic Practice?
• Critiques of Philanthropy Are Important, but Some Have Entered the Realm of the Absurd
• Reflections on a Conference for Well-Intentioned Funders: We can do better
• Abigail Echo-Hawk on the art and science of ‘decolonizing data’
• Allison Bauer Discusses Philanthropy Today & Nonprofit Support
• How Being a 13-Year-Old Busboy Prepared Darren Walker to Lead the Ford Foundation
• Growth Mindset: The Evolution of Tricia and Jeff Raikes’s Philanthropy

I’d like to point out that Vu Le, a few of whose publications are listed above, is a revolution in his own right.  He uses his blog, Nonprofit AF, to analyze overlapping issues such as philanthropy, justice, inclusion, power dynamics, racial equity, nonprofit leadership, outcomes reporting, and financial sustainability. And as a bonus, he’s very funny as well.

Tools:

• Reflective structured dialogue
• Community-based participatory research
• Community engagement governance

 

This is an open-ended list. I plan to add more items, and I invite you to use the form below to let me know of anything that I have missed. I always have more lessons to learn!

 

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What every nonprofit executive needs to know about information technology (Redux)

This article is another in a series of republications of items from my now-defunct first blog.  I wrote this in 2004, as one of my first blog articles.  Reflecting on these ten items, I’d say that the underlying principles still hold true, although if I were writing if from scratch today, I’d include more examples and different examples.  I’d be less sure about the percentage break down of a typical nonprofit’s budget. I’d be more sanguine about donated services and hardware, in cases where a really well-planned and well-executed model was in place.The availability of cloud computing has probably made a couple of the bonus items obsolete, but it’s still important for a nonprofit CEO to know how to deal with the organization’s digital storehouse. 

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29 Dec 2004 01:03 PM EDT

1.  Very little technical knowledge is required in order for nonprofit CEOs to participate actively in strategic IT planning.

As long as you thoroughly understand your organization’s overall mission, strategy, and tactics and (are willing to learn a little bit about the technology), you can keep your information technology infrastructure on target.

Example: Your mission is to save the whales (not to maintain a local area network)!  In order to save the whales, you need a strategy: to stay informed and inform others about the issues, lobby for policy changes, to issue action alerts, to raise money, and to maintain relationships with various legislators, constituents, communities, donors, potential friends, and allies. Keep pressing for tactics that will help you achieve your desired outcomes (saving whales); this will enable you to hold your own in most discussions with technical experts.

2. Your board of directors should be calling for and participating in your strategic information technology planning.

If they’re not, it’s time to recruit some board members who are techies. For example, your region probably has an internet service provider, a high-tech corporation, or a large retail firm with an extensive IT department. Perhaps you can recruit representatives from these organizations to serve on your board as part of their community benefits program.

3.  A tremendous number of high-quality resources for strategic IT planning are available to nonprofits at no charge.

Free advice, products, and services make it possible for nonprofits to lower the risk of trying new technology – but in the long run you’ll have to pay real money to have precisely the right tools for supporting your mission.

4.  You can keep an eye on innovations in IT, and think about possible uses for them in the nonprofit sector, even if you don’t have a technical background.

If you regularly read the technology columns of a good daily newspaper, and a few general interest magazines such as “PC Monthly,” “MAC User,” or “Network World,” you will soon catch on to the basic concepts and terminology.  (Don’t worry if it seems over your head at first – you’ll catch on! Everybody has to start somewhere.)

Example: You work for a nonprofit organization with five employees and four non-networked computers. It’s time to link them up so that you and your colleagues can share information and regularly back up your work. As you read articles on wireless networking, and look at the building where you work – which is a pre-electricity Victorian house only somewhat successfully retrofitted for its current functions – you see that you may actually save money by going wireless.

You ask your IT vendors for estimates on drilling and running cables through the building, and find that the cost of labor, support, upgrades, future expansion, and maintenance for a more conventional network will exceed that of a simple wireless network.

5.  Information technology, no matter how strategically you apply it, will probably never save your nonprofit organization any money.

It will, however, enable you to work more effectively. You will probably be able to do more work, of higher quality, with fewer person-hours. But don’t be surprised if this raises the bar of expectations on the part of the board, the community, the clients, the constituents, and the donors!

6.  You need an in-house IT committee.

Convene an Information Technology team or working group, within your nonprofit, and make sure that you meet regularly to give input to the senior management on strategic IT issues.

The team should include a cross-section of staff – administration and finance, programmatic, secretarial. Be sure to include staff members who are overtly or covertly technophobic; their concerns should be addressed.

7.  Secretaries and administrative assistants should be the lynchpins of your IT infrastructure. Budgeting for IT training for these employees can be one of your best investments.

Which staff members are more likely to be there when problems arise, to knowabout the technical abilities (and phobias) of their colleagues, and to know where the (paper or electronic) files are? Professional development that includes IT training is likely to increase job satisfaction and employee retention. Don’t forget to revise job descriptions and job titles as your secretaries and administrative assistants move into IT management responsibilities!

8.  In the long run, IT training and support (and other operating expenses) will make up about 70% of your IT budget.

The more obvious line items – such as hardware, software, and network services – will comprise about 30%. This is a highly counter-intuitive fact of nonprofit life. However, there is research on the “Total Cost of Ownership” that bears this out.

9.  Donated hardware, software, and services can cost a nonprofit more than purchased products or services in the long run.

The cost in person hours of using and maintaining non-standard or sub-standard configurations is astonishingly high, and donated equipment tends to be in non-standard or sub-standard. Likewise, donated services will cost you a great deal of time in support, supervision, and ongoing maintenance. Beware of the web site design services donated by a close relative of the chair of your board! You may end up with something that you don’t like, can’t use, or can’t easily change.

10. In a nonprofit organization, most strategic IT problems are actually organizational development problems.

Is it a CEO who is resistant to technical innovations? A board of directors that hesitates to make the commitment to raise the money need for the IT infrastructure? Line staff who are already stressed and overworked, and can’t stop to learn and implement new technologies? An inability to make outsourced IT consultants or in-house IT staff understand organizational processes? All the information technology in the world won’t resolve these issues, if you don’t address them at the organizational level.

Bonus items: Hands-on IT skills that the CEO, CFO, and COO of every small nonprofit ought to have:

• How to compose, send, read, and delete email, using the organization’s standard application.
• How to create and save a simple text document, using the organization’s standard application.
• How to do the daily back up of the system.
• How to bring down and bring up the network server.

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Now that you’ve read what I formulated in 2004, I’d like to invite you to post comments about what you’d add, cut, or revise in this list of crucial knowledge for nonprofit executives.

Freecycle.Org (Redux)

This is another article, salvaged with the help of the Wayback Machine, from my now-defunct first blog. Since 2005, Freecycle has only grown more awesome, and I have only grown more deeply obsessed with online tools that assist nonprofits and philanthropies in matching underutilized resources with unmet needs.  Although Freecycle serves everyone, regardless of sector, there is certainly a soft spot in the heart of Deron Beal (Freecycle’s founder) for nonprofits in need.  He is a member of an informal group on capacity mapping and resource matching that I facilitate, and I frequently point to his work as an example of success in using online tools to make the world work more effectively.  I would love to see Freecycle-type tools for locating other kinds of resources that nonprofits need, and my big vision is to create a single sign-on, data sharing, and a consolidated project wish list for all such online tools.

Wed 23 Feb 2005 05:16 PM EST

The world does not have to be divided between beggars and donors; it can be divided between those who have a spare toaster ovens today and those who need them now.  Tomorrow – or five minutes from now – these categories will be completely different.  We all have needs and surpluses, but it’s hard to arrange for easy redistribution of goods on the scale of a cupboard rather than a planeload.

One of the things that really appeals to me about putting the world online is the possibility that nearly everyone in the community can both offer and receive resources seamlessly.

We are very far from realizing this ideal at the moment; there are many digital divide issues that must be resolved.

However, the Freecycling movement is an excellent example of internet-based community sharing that can work wherever obstacles to access have been solved. It has one central web site, and thousands of intensely local email distribution lists.

The process is simple:  you begin by joining (or creating) your local Freecycle list.  If you have one to give away, you post a message with the subject heading “Offered:  Toaster Oven.”  If you’re looking for one, you post a message with the subject heading “Wanted:  Toaster Oven.”  If you see a possible match, it’s up to you to take it off-list and arrange for a pick-up; various guidelines are in place to ensure that this is done in a manner suitable to civil society. For example, no payments or barters are allowed; anything posted to a Freecycle list must be freely offered and freely taken.

This is not a solution to all of the world’s problems or even a perfect instrument for fulfilling its modest goals, but Freecycling is an excellent way to combine the internet with community-building, recycling, and volunteerism.The potential exists for effective, local, pin-pointed giving that goes beyond – and complements – what institutions such as foundations and nonprofit agencies are able to do.

Now that Freecycle.Org has been invented, it seems simple and obvious.  But that’s the way it seems with many innovations in information technology – after the fact!

The telephone analogy (Redux)

This is another article salvaged from my now-defunct first blog.  (Many thanks are due to the Wayback Machine, which enabled me to retrieve a copy.) It was first published in 2005, well before smart phones were prevalent among non-geeks. 

An inherent flaw in the analogy at the time was that telephones, once installed, caused much less trouble to nonprofit executives than the typical IT infrastructure. 

As we flash forward to 2013, with a culture in which smart phones are not only prevalent but offer functions previously associated with information systems, it’s interesting to reflect on how well the telephone analogy has stood the test of time. 

So many of us, inside and outside of the nonprofit sector, devote an inordinate amount of time looking forward to upgrading our phones, and that’s a shocking change. 

One thing that hasn’t changed enough is the failure of many nonprofit organizations to think through the budgetary and operational implications of acquiring new technologies.

Fri 11 Feb 2005 10:52 AM EST

Are you a nonprofit/philanthropic professional who is having trouble making the case that your organization needs to bring its technology infrastructure into the 21st century – or at least into the 1990s?

Please allow me to acquaint you with the telephone analogy.*

First of all, can you think of a functioning nonprofit/philanthropic organization whose board, chief executive officer, or chief financial officer would ever say…

• “… we don’t need to find or raise the money to install telephones or pay our monthly phone bill.”
• “…we don’t need to dedicate staff time to answering the phone or returning phone calls.”
• “…we don’t need to orient staff and volunteers about personal use of the phones, about what statements they can make on our behalf to members of the media and the public who call our organization, or about how queries that come into the main switchboard are routed to various departments, or about how swiftly high-priority phone calls are returned.”
• “…we don’t need to make sure that when donors, stakeholders, constituents, and clients call our main number they can navigate the automated menu of choices.”
• “…we don’t need to show staff members how to put callers on hold, transfer calls, or check voice-mail now that we have an entirely new phone system.”

Apparently, most mission-based organizations have resigned themselves to the fact that telephone systems are an operational necessity.  Somehow, the leadership finds the money, time, and motivation to meet the organization’s telephony needs.

If only we could get the same kind of tacit assumption in place for every mission-based organization’s technology infrastructure!

I propose two possible strategies, either of which would of course need to be tailored your organization’s culture:

• Encourage your board, CEO, and CFO to see your technology infrastructure as analogous to your telephone system.
• Persuade them that your telephone system is an information and communication technology system – and then encourage them to regard other components of the system (such as computers, networks, and web sites) with the same kind of tacit support and acceptance.

I look forward to hearing from anyone who has tried this strategy – or developed one that is even more persuasive.

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* N.B.:  I need to warn you in advance that all analogies eventually break down, but this is a pretty useful one, especially since a telephone these days really is the front end of an information and communications technology system.