From Euphemism to Hard Copy
Date Published: December 21, 2009
Come gather round people
wherever you roam
and admit that the waters
around you have grown
and accept it that soon you’ll be
drenched to the bone
if your time to you is worth savin
Than you’d better start swimming
Or you’ll sink like a stone,
For the times, they are a-changing
- Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changing”
Mr. Bob Dylan was not talking about the state of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, but his words are not a bad beginning to this conversation in December of 2009 about what really matters because times are surely changing and the option of sinking like a stone is not a good one.
When you write a book, after awhile, only a few things stick in your mind. One of those stories in The World We Want book is when Ralph Smith, senior vice president of the Annie B. Casey Foundation and architect of Casey’s ambitious and ongoing investment in the revitalization of poor U.S. communities encountered the Make Poverty History movement first hand. He has been thinking about the issues of poor families and persistent poverty for a long time. It was the passion at the Edinburgh 2005 G8 meeting of the heads of state of the wealthiest nations that caught him off guard.
Sixty thousand people showed up at the Bono led Live 8 concert. At the same time, 250,000 activists from all over the world were demonstrating in the street, making it loud and clear it was time “to make poverty history.” That night, shaken and stirred by the intensity of the crowds, Smith went up to his hotel room and read again with renewed focus the Millennium Development Goals that include the goal to cut in half the incidence of extreme poverty by half by the year 2015.
Smith said - “As I sat the next day in a downtown bookstore and watched the huge crowds surge by, I couldn’t help but be impressed with how directly the problem was stated, every man in the street from New York to Nairobi can understand them. Unlike so many efforts in the U.S., the MDGs are not mired in euphemisms, not diffused in data-driven qualifications. There is a clarity that is too often missing in policy meetings. That was my take-away from the experience. What I shared with my colleagues back in Baltimore was this: no more euphemisms! Our job is to make poverty history!”
So the first thing that strikes me as we encounter the “rouge wave” of the economic crises is that we remain mired in euphemisms. In the NYT report last month about the 49 million Americans who do not have adequate food I learned a new term – people are not hungry in the U. S, instead they suffer from “food insecurity.” About a third of those affected suffer from “very low food insecurity.” I find it stunning that the Agriculture Department does not use the word hunger, and am glad President Obama does. But I have this unsettling image of bureaucrats sitting around a table talking abstractly about data and not about children who do not have enough to eat. I think many of us in this room can resonate with that image – the distancing that occurs with process – even very good and important process – added to the sheer busyness of the work – and being truly present for the work.
Being present, Presence, as Peter Senge uses the term, means you know, deeply know, why you are here – in this room - doing the work you do. We do not want to lose that – it is the heart and soul of philanthropy. Language turns out to be very important. If we had more time we could have some dark fun learning what your favorite euphemisms are.
I remember many years ago in a fractious and seemingly endless board meeting of the MA Association of Mental Health in the 70’s at a time when deinstitutionalization was creating the first chaotic wave of what was to become the permanent homeless population that we live with today, one of the wiser board members, a mild-mannered dean of the School of Social Work at Simmons College, suddenly pounded the table - “Hold on” she said – “this discussion is not good for our mental health, never mind for those we are here to help.” It was a powerful reminder of “why we were there?” We need those reminders.
Lisa Holden described the distinguished panelists that follow this talk as all being “authentic” in their approach to their work – authenticity seems consistent this plea that straight talk in straightened times is more important than ever.
We are here to address the state of the sector, and it is no surprise what is happening nationally reflects what is happening here in Santa Barbara.
Surveys show 92% of nonprofits are experiencing effects of the downturn, 69% report funding cuts, all types of funders have cut support and what was $700 billion in foundation capital is now on average 27% less. Fundraisers are predicting a 9% drop in giving in the US in ’09 with a similar reduction for ‘10. Those nonprofits that rely on government are the hardest hit and the long tail of the recession for most human service organization and school systems will continue long after the recession is declared officially over. As Pat Wheatley, the Executive Director of the SB First 5 Commission put it – “we got though this year but it is the next and the next that worry me.” Small nonprofits – budgets under $1 million – are being hit the hardest – 78% in total have experienced cuts with more than half experiencing cuts of 20% or more compared with 57% for medium sized organizations. That will hit home here as more than half of the nonprofits in Santa Barbara County have budgets of less than $100,000. Of large institutions, only 7% have had cuts in revenue of 20% or more but as we are witnessing at City College and UCSB, the implications of these cuts are huge. At the same time demand for services all around has spiked, making it increasingly essential for nonprofit organizations to focus on their core mission-critical programs. [i]
Some foundations have stepped up – EOS Foundation, one of TPI’s clients launched in ’08, just before the market crash, a collaborative effort to adapt the successful NYC Robin Hood Foundation model addressing systemic poverty to Boston. The foundation lost 40% of its $50 million endowment in the last year, but the founders were so moved by the needs, and so committed, they added to the foundation from their personal assets to increase the ’09 and ’10 funding levels. As the donor, a hedge fund manager, said to me last week – “It seemed like the right thing to do.” Not every foundation or donor has that option, but the reality is many donors still have capacity, if they choose to use it. There is nothing sacred about a 5% payout, and more than half of TPI’s foundation clients are considering what had never been on the table before – spending down capital and even establishing a timeline for sunset. The “spending while living” notion, highly promoted by Atlantic Philanthropies, has become a kind of movement.
If ever a time to stand and be counted – this is one.
Meanwhile, the messaging the philanthropic sector is receiving is both operational and cosmic – and it is hard to reconcile both.
The first message, driven by the economic crises, is that both nonprofits and funders need to be more disciplined - that is the message in an article this month in the Harvard Business Review by Susan Wolf-Ditkoff and Susan Colby. [ii] The second message is that we as a society and a world are in the midst of seismic change, a sea change, a disruption, so large that it impacts everything we do, and that those changes provide huge challenge and opportunity to the nonprofit sector. That was the message Diana Aviv. President of the Independent Sector gave to the IS annual meeting. Aviv made the case that we are society divided and at risk of not being able to function as a democracy, and that every part of philanthropy must relate to the “wider societal issues of the world you inhabit.”[iii]
On the one hand we don’t want “to sink like a stone:” and the other hand the whole universe is turning upside down. So how do we do begin to do that? Let’s try this inspired quote:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the question, I could solve the problem in five minutes.” (Albert Einstein)
I think the place to begin is with the right questions.
In the Ditkoff/Colby article in the Harvard Business Review – these are the questions suggested for philanthropic organizations – “How do we define success? What will it take to make change happen? How can we improve our results over time? We think of this process as getting clear, getting real, and getting better.” Not bad language -
They begin with these kinds of process questions – none of which are revelatory:
What mission, vision, and values will guide your work?
What program areas will we invest in, and how we will we allocate resources?
What leaders will we hire/invest in, and what authority will they have?
What principles and approaches must be consistent throughout our organization, and which should be at a program’s discretion?
Which program strategies will we pursue?
How will we set annual goals for programs and initiatives, and how will respond to emerging opportunities?
How will we cultivate grantees, partners, and communities of interest?
How will we handle external communications and the brand?
How will we determine our positions on public policy or controversial topics?
How will we flag and approve risky grants or programs?[iv]
But the deeper questions, the sea change question, the transformational questions, are harder to express. Here is another slant from Nobel Prize winning physicist Arno Penzias:
“I went for the jugular question. Change starts with the individual, so the first thing I do in the morning is ask myself why do I strongly believe what I believe. Constantly examine your own assumptions.”
Do you do that? Perhaps funders should spend less time asking nonprofits for answers, and more time asking for the right questions?
As to going for the jugular, I remember some years ago in Boston during an unremarkable annual United Way lunch, Mel King, a leader in the Boston Black community, led a march into the grand ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel - a thousand people present - and dumped three bags of noxious garbage on the head table! So much for what King and his colleagues thought of the United Way’s allocation to poor people. King’s dramatic gesture didn’t exactly win the hearts and minds of Boston leadership community that day, but he sure got their attention.
I’m not sure what the analog to such behavior is here in Santa Barbara, but my guess is some of you in this room would love to find one! But Lisa Holden we don’t want to get you and the NPSC into trouble, or too much trouble.
Last week at the symposium in Boston celebrating TPI’s 20th anniversary, Leslie Haroun, the senior environmental program officer for the Geneva based Oak Foundation said what was on everybody’s mind – “if you can find within the empty space – referring to diminished resources and greater need – the creativity to begin anew, that seems to me to be the goal.”
I am on a list serve that asked a group of philanthropy and social sector leaders the question – what matters in 2010?[v] Some of their responses were interesting:
The inherent unintended consequences of the impact and response to the economic recovery - what is the "new normal" that will emerge?
The thing most essentially in need of change is investor mindset.
Foundations as Social Impact Knowledge Brokers
The role of movement-building in philanthropy and the social sector - for all kinds of issues & sectors - movements any org can join, & any1 can be a part of - more sustained than campaigns
Downturn limits money not expertise; funders recast as social fund managers; growth of managed peer-to-peer funds.
Leverage and Syndication, Convergence, and Platform Innovation
Having a vision for significant Community Change guide all work within all aspects of all orgs.
Marty Linsky, whose writing on adaptive leadership fits these times perfectly, was the keynote speaker at the TPI symposium. One observation he made is that philanthropy does not know how to conduct difficult conversations – unlike other sectors. He finds the nonprofit sector too polite, too conflict averse, and one that ducks tough issues.
Linsky comes out of politics so his perspective is of the Kennedy School climate of Talmudic debate. Yet we ride sociological currents that are very disturbing, including the amount of anger instantaneously communicated through the Web and fueled beyond reason by talk show hosts – witness the extraordinary town meetings over the health care debate.
I think the nonprofit sector has an inferiority complex. It operates in too many instances from perceived weakness, not strength - resources are always less than need. We don’t think or act like a sector that is in the aggregate 8% of GDP. Perhaps it is because we have more sellers than buyers, we too often go hat in hand – we plead, beg, and only sometimes do we get smart and advocate with conviction. Perhaps we should reconvene some day for a discussion of not-polite philanthropy.
One thing is clear, America’s deep divisions of class, race, politics and ideology, cries out for more tolerance and ability to conduct difficult conversations. The term civil society is not a euphemism, and philanthropy writ large across ever expanding communities of interest is intrinsically positioned to be an important actor in those conversations.
Marty Linsky, and others, make the case everything is being reset, and yet too many foundations and nonprofits still have the illusion that “this too will pass.” Organizations need to do far more than hunker down, and reduce costs and services. Bottom line – we as a sector need to totally rethink our purpose and our process.
One big reset is we now have to learn to manage in an era of insecurity, and learn how to adapt to what is unknown. That is very different than managing and measuring risk. Reliance on best practices – a common and useful way of think about things – may no longer work. We need to create next practice. Leadership has changed – it needs to learn how adapt on an ongoing basis.
Merilee Goldberg in “The Art of the Right Question says this - “A paradigm shift occurs when a question is asked inside the current paradigm that can only be answered outside the paradigm.[vi]
One such paradigm shift that is huge, perhaps the greatest force in our lifetime, is technology. Its impact on philanthropy is disruptive in the true definition of that term. There is an excellent new paper out of Duke by Lucy Bernholtz, Ed Skloot and Barry Varela[vii] that builds on the Open Source section of TWWW book. It raises many fascinating questions.
“Digital technologies increase access to information, thus shifting the possible ways people organize to use it. These new ways—networks, flash causes, nonmarket volunteer entities—will require norms and governing structures that are different from those that currently exist. It is not at all certain how and when these new norms and governing structures will come to fruition, nor what they will look like when they do. For now, we live in a tense period between old ways and new ways of creating social benefit.
“The functional changes that digital data facilitate—new competitors, higher-level information analysis, remixing of data, and new information dynamics—constitute a set of forces that are reshaping whole industries, governments, and communities. They do so for several reasons: they lower the costs of participation, they shift the boundaries of expertise from within organizations to outside them, and they give everyone the tools of both production and consumption. They expand accessibility and individuals’ sense of empowerment. What does it portend for philanthropic action and institutions when we marry those functional abilities with expectational shifts? What are our expectations about who has information, what information matters, and how we can get it? How do we want information to be shared? Who owns data on giving? On effective change strategies? Who owns the results of research commissioned by tax-exempt funds? How are expectations about data different today than twenty years ago, how are they being met (or not met), and for whom?
“Foundation professionals and social investors are slowly beginning to seek external input into their strategy setting practices. The Lumina Foundation for Education in Indiana has posted its strategic planning process, the plan itself, and the progress measures being used on an interactive website where the public can comment. The foundation also has a YouTube channel where you can watch and comment on video interviews with key decision makers. The Peery Foundation in Palo Alto, California recently pushed its strategic planning conversations into public view using Twitter. In 2007, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation used a “wiki” to solicit possible approaches to dealing with the problem of nitrogen pollution. In each case the foundation expanded the scope of data it was gathering to include the input of external stakeholders.
“How will networked technologies affect the major charitable volunteer civil society organizations—Rotary, Kiwanis, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Habitat for Humanity, and others? How will they affect church groups? These are the vehicles through which most Americans donate their time and money, and they represent, in the aggregate, a much larger segment of the philanthropic sector than do the staffed foundations. Will Rotary and Kiwanis become more “strategic”? Will they be more effective if they do? “
And let me throw in one more example of a paradigm shift coming into the sector from outside the sector. It relates to the fascinating expansion, in the midst of all of this disruption, of the nonprofit sector.
Some of you may have seen the Sunday NYT front page article entitled “From Fake Nuns to Red Noses – Tax-break Charities Multiply.” And right for all to see was this simple math – “The $300 billion donated to charities last year cost the government more than $50 billion in lost tax revenue.” Hmm.. says the number crunchers staffing committees on Capital Hill, therein lies an opportunity!” Forty to fifty thousand new charities were formed last year. Critics are raising questions – are they needed, are they duplicative, do they really add value to society?
The article referenced a new study by Stanford University that found, “The number of organizations that can offer their donors a tax break in the name of charity has grown more than 60 percent in the United States, to 1.1 million, in just a decade.” The conclusion of the Stanford study, and the Times article was that the IRS should scrutinize applications for tax exempt status more carefully.
My colleague and fellow TPI board member Carla Javitz, the President of San Francisco-based REDF, a leader in social enterprise innovation, suggests that the implications are much more profound than this.
“Much as the economic implosion has stimulated new thinking about the relationships between the credit markets, business, and government; it should also shake up our assumptions about the relationship between government and the private, nonprofit sector. Over the past 30 years, the US approach to delivery of basic public services has lurched along with little rhyme or reason. While public spending in some areas (the military, prisons, Medicare/Medicaid) has grown, in others, like workforce development as just one example, it has steadily fallen (if not in actual dollars, then in relation to real costs and population growth). In many parts of the country (especially the urban core) the ability of government to efficiently deliver basic public services from education to infrastructure has declined. In many cases government has – since the Reagan years – turned to the private for profit and nonprofit sectors to outsource key functions, seeking efficiencies and better outcomes. This has not been done in an organized fashion with clear goals, so the results are difficult to measure. One obvious outcome has been the proliferation of private sector businesses (nonprofit and for profit) that now implement what were once government functions; some using public funds, and some privately financed.
“The real question raised by the Stanford study is how effective the privatization of social functions has been (in this case in relation to nonprofits), and to what extent we should change or stay the course.”
Carla argues that the size and scale of the private nonprofit sector reflects values and a culture unique to the US. “It is not apparent to her, or probably to any or us, that it’s ‘bad’ for the government to lose $50B of revenue, while leveraging $300B of private contributions to activities that citizens might otherwise expect its already over-extended public sector to take on. At the same time, allowing private decisions to drive the focus of these tax-supported activities means that the more transparent processes of democracy do not determine where resources are best spent.”
Carla’s questions are these: “What can government do best? What can the private sector (nonprofit and for profit) do best? What balance are the taxpayers willing to support and how do we structure the tax system to maximize public benefits? How much and what kind of regulation and policy direction should be brought to bear to achieve the best results? It’s time for a renewed conversation about these core issues of our democracy, and if you are wondering what may be coming around the corner, it is exactly that.”
So we see so clearly the power of questions…..”The most energizing questions are those that involve people’s hopes and ideals – questions that relate to something larger than them, where they can connect and contribute. People do not have a lot of energy around questions that are only about removing pain.” [viii]
If you look at the philanthropic sector from a balance sheet perspective – our assets are financial, which we obsess over, our assets are our talented and committed people, who we do not sufficiently pay, acknowledge or celebrate but without whom we are nothing. If money and human resources are the tools, it is our standing in the community, our standing up for community needs and community action that gives us the moral authority to be a citizen actor on the stage.
Robert Wright in his book The Evolution of God wrote that “history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth.” Wright also has perhaps the best definition of moral imagination – “our capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of another.”[ix] And that is precondition of great philanthropy. It is philanthropy at its best.
In the program notes to the marvelous Yo-Yo Ma concert at the Granada Theatre on Monday night were these words – I am sure they are his. “Mr. Ma strives to find the connections that stimulate the imagination. Each of (his) collaborations is fueled by the artist’s interactions, often extending the boundaries of a particular genre. One of Mr. Ma’s goals is the exploration of music as a means of communication, and as a vehicle for the migration of ideas, across a range of cultures throughout the world.”
No euphemisms there. How fantastic to think about what we do in those terms!
I would like to end with this poem written for TPI’s 20th anniversary.
If I Had More Time
For TPI’s 20th
If I had more time I would write a poem
But my quiet morning in the sun mountains
On one side ocean the other got swept away
A dizzy array of significant calls and emails
In fact the whole week and next
A kind of blur so the pressing poem Presence
Stillness my mother’s favorite Sassy Lassy rose
Was not written and all of a sudden December
The voice of my teacher Mr. Levine rings out –
“What the hell are you doing with the writing -
Why did I waste my time on you why indeed you!”
If I had more time I would write a poem
The years flowed now ten years now twenty
There were of course occasional poems
No coronations like Auden but wedding birth
Death but not the unspoken poem passionate
About the hurt world of a hungry child
Or Abraham’s poem of bothers and sisters
Or the deep poems of inner revelation
Or the poem of magic dolphins who shadow
A lone walker on a Pacific beach at low tide.
If I had more time I would surely write a poem
Until one day Levine called out of the blue to say –
“It isn’t finished this poem called ordinary life
Poems are hard to finish so keep pushing
That is your job!” So it finally dawned on me
What I do what we all do is write the poem
Every day we write the observant poem of life
You see it isn’t a matter of time but compassion
Call it community or hope or faith or call it love.
That is the flow that is the poem.
- Peter Karoff, December 2009
References:
[i] Managing in Tough Times: May 2009 Nonprofit Leaders Survey Update – William Foster & Sarah Sable, www.bridgespan.org/nonprofit-managing-in-tough-times
[ii] Galvanizing Philanthropy by Susan Wolf Ditkoff and Susan J. Colby, Harvard Business Review November 2009.
[iii] “Fashioning Our Future Together” Diana Aviv, Independent Sector, November 2009
[iv] Galvanizing Philanthropy ibid
[v] From the list serve Philanthropy 217s
[vi] Merilee Goldberg – “The Art of the Right Question.
[vii] Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector -DRAFT v 2.0 -By Lucy Bernholz with Edward Skloot and Barry Varela - Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society - Sanford School of Public Policy Duke University
[viii] Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector -DRAFT v 2.0 -By Lucy Bernholz with Edward Skloot and Barry Varela - Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society - Sanford School of Public Policy Duke University
[ix] From Robert Wright (2009) The Evolution of God Little Brown and Company (2009)