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 I’ve learned from working with mission-based organizations

 

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned, in no particular order:

1. You need to make sure that your mission, operations, and desired outcomes are aligned with each other.
2. Movements for equity, inclusion, and belonging have the potential to revolutionize both mission-based organizations and philanthropy.
3. Carefully tailored one-to-one desk-side coaching usually increases a worker’s effectiveness much more quickly than classroom training.
4. The nonprofit/philanthropic sector in Massachusetts is different from the analogous sector in any other state in the U.S.A.
5. Poverty is an insufficient reward for devoting one’s professional life to a nonprofit organization.
6. In a mission-based organization, many problems that initially appear to be about information and communication technology are really about organizational culture, knowledge management, or a combination of organizational culture and knowledge management.
7. Age discrimination is alive and well in mission-based organizations.
8. It makes much more sense to aim to run a nonprofit organization like a highly effective organization, rather than to aim to run it like a business. There’s nothing inherently superior (or inferior) about businesses.
9. Every human being is eligible to help others and to be helped by others; moreover, it’s a mistake to stigmatize being helped by others.
10. Bringing token members of various demographic minorities into the building isn’t enough; real power means being at the table when crucial information is disseminated and crucial decisions are made.
11. When you decide to solve a problem, you need help from the people who are deeply affected by the problem in order to determine:

• the real nature of the problem
• the possible solutions
• a clear and specific idea of what success in solving the problem would look like

I invite you to leave comments about what lessons you’ve learned from working with mission-based organizations!

Or, if you prefer to send me a private message, you can do so by using the form shown below:

 

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“We count our successes in lives”

Brent James is one of my new heroes.  He’s a physician, a researcher, and the chief quality officer of Intermountain Healthcare’s Institute for Health Care Delivery Research.

We had a very inspiring telephone conversation this afternoon, about whether the lessons learned from evidence-based medicine could be applied to nonprofits that are seeking to manage their outcomes.  We also swapped some stories and jokes about the ongoing struggle to document a causal relationship between what a health care organization (or a social service agency, or an arts group, or an environmental coalition, for that matter) does and what the organization’s stated aims are.  In fact, documenting that an organization is doing more good than harm, and less harm than doing nothing at all, continues to be a perplexing problem.  The truth may be less than obvious – in fact, it may be completely counter-intuitive.

In this phone conversation, we also waded into deep epistemological waters, reflecting on how we know we have succeeded, and also on the disturbing gap between efficacy and effectiveness.

It’s not merely a philosophical challenge, but a political one, to understand where the power lies to define success and to set the standards of proof.

I doubt that this is what William James (no relation to Brent, as far as I know) had in mind when he referred to success as “the bitch-goddess,” but there’s no doubt that defining, measuring, and reporting on one’s programmatic success is a bitch for any nonprofit professional with intellectual and professional integrity.  It’s both difficult and urgent.

What particularly struck me during my conversation with Brent was his remark about Intermountain Healthcare:

“We count our successes in lives.”

On the surface, that approach to counting successes seems simple and dramatic.  The lives of patients are on the line.  They either live or die, with the help of Intermountain Healthcare.  But it’s really a very intricate question, once we start asking whether Intermountain’s contribution is a positive one, enabling the patients to live the lives and die the deaths that are congruent with their wishes and values.

These questions are very poignant for me, and not just because I’m cancer patient myself, and not just because yesterday I attended the funeral of a revered colleague and friend who died very unexpectedly.  These questions hit me where I live professionally as well, because earlier this week, I met with the staff of a fantastic nonprofit that is striving to do programmatic outcomes measurement, and is faced with questions about how to define success in a way that can be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed.  Their mission states that they will help their clients excel in a specific industry and in their personal lives.  They have a coherent theory of change, and virtually all of their criteria of professional and personal success are quantifiable.  Their goals are bold but not vague. (This is a dream organization for anyone interested in outcomes management, not to mention that the staff members are smart and charming.)  However, it’s not entirely clear yet whether the goals that add up to success for each client are determined solely by the staff or by the client or some combination thereof.  I see it as a huge issue, not just on an operational level, but on a philosophical one; it’s the difference between self-determination and paternalism.  I applaud this organization’s staff for their willingness to explore the question.

When Brent talked about counting successes in terms of lives, I thought about this nonprofit organization, which defines its mission in terms of professional and personal success for its clients.  The staff members of that organization, like so many nonprofit professionals, are ultimately counting their successes in lives, though perhaps not as obviously as health care providers do.  Surgeons receive high pay and prestige for keeping cancer patients alive and well – for the most part, they fully deserve it.  But let’s also count the successes of the organization that helps a substantial number of people win jobs that offer a living wage and health insurance, along with other benefits such as G.E.D.s, citizenship, proficiency in English, home ownership, paid vacations, and college educations for the workers’ children. Nonprofit professionals who can deliver that are also my heroes, right up there with Brent James.  While we’re holding them to high standards of proof of success, I hope that we can find a way to offer them the high pay and prestige that we already grant to the medical profession.