Alliance Online - February 2007

What is a social justice foundation to do?

The first in a series of articles on social justice philanthropy was published in Alliance Online in December 2005. In this first article, Colin Greer and Barry Knight attempted to answer some basic questions about what social justice philanthropy is and why it matters. In their next article, in March 2006, they traced the history of philanthropy in the US and Europe since the end of the nineteenth century. Now they take up the discussion to try to tease out exactly what the role of social justice philanthropy is and who its targets are.

Barry Knight Despite much charitable effort and expenditure, the world remains in a terrible mess: widespread failure to meet basic needs alongside ever more greed, environmental meltdown, war, and so on.

Isn’t philanthropy just wasting its time?

Colin Greer No, philanthropy has a key role: to redeploy wealth.

As you say, greed – the insatiable desire to create and possess wealth – is the source of much of the world’s troubles. Yet philanthropy has been produced by the very processes it is trying to deal with. So for me the question about philanthropy starts with recognizing that philanthropy is a creature of the profit-driven market. So how much of a corrective can it be? That’s the challenge.

BK I agree that much philanthropy is a creature of privilege and, as a consequence, apes the class divisions in society and reinforces them though its practice. The rest is mostly harmless.

The category of philanthropy that I think most important is that which seeks to transform society as its chief objective. This leads me to the question that I think is central: ‘What are the characteristics of those foundations that are effective in redeploying wealth?’

CG The most important one lies in their commitment to create the conditions for public benefit, where public benefit is defined as (a) ensuring that the market is subject to appropriate regulation and (b) redistributing the surpluses of the market on a more equitable basis.

BK I agree that the overarching goal has to be greater equality. Rigorous statistical work by Uslaner has shown that unequal societies tend to be unhappy societies on many different dimensions. But, a century after Pareto (who in the nineteenth century observed that 20 per cent of the people owned 80 per cent of the wealth in many European countries), we seem to have made little progress in tackling structural inequality.

Surely, if we are to make progress, this is the job of government – only governments have the power, the authority and the resources.

CG Sure, it’s ultimately about government. But the problem is that we live in an era where public problems are expected to have private solutions. Public services are increasingly privatized; wealth increasingly stays in the hands of those who make it; and with the demise of the Soviet Union went the legitimacy of state intervention on behalf of equity and justice. Instead, social reform has become philosophically and practically dependent on private wealth.

In these circumstances, a key task for philanthropy is to ensure that government takes back the responsibility for dealing with inequality. To do so, philanthropy has to establish a mandate from the public, and it will have to come to understand and embrace the concept of ‘the commons’. This is the public space where ideas are assessed and actors made accountable. Otherwise, action will be based on a self-perpetuating elite.

BK So, we’ve identified the targets for social justice philanthropy: the government on the one hand and the people on the other.

CG For me the starting point has to be the people. Philanthropy needs to develop strategies to obtain a forceful mandate from the public for governments to pursue a social justice agenda. That means supporting activism across sectors to build a powerful opposition force which confronts and moves government to an equity agenda. The agenda must be developed through local policy experimentation and the gradual transfer of that to the national and global stage. In this way policy options are tested at a level close to the experience of problems and local support is built that will coalesce into a national imperative

BK That will create demand for change from the bottom up. Don’t we also need some kind of steer from the top down?

CG Yes, foundations can support this work through the agenda and policy-building they like to do already.

BK We need a hierarchy of goals with some understanding of the links in the chain between what we are trying to accomplish and what we are currently doing. It seems to me that too many unconnected things are being done without regard to the bigger picture and how things interconnect with one another.

CG Agreed, but we need to avoid the typical social engineering ethos which foundations follow that cuts off the experience and potential power of those whose condition is to be reformed and restructured. There have to be links between grassroots organizing and policy development. One should feed the other so that we get an ever-expanding constituency for change. Foundations don’t typically connect in this way and they need to.

This means that foundations should support both intra- and inter-sectoral dialogue across professions and across race and class boundaries. Whether we like to face it or not, race and class are rigid barriers that philanthropy has yet to challenge seriously. This will increase understanding and then we will be able to communicate results to wider audiences and begin to shape public expectations. Foundations will then be able to prioritize advocacy of two kinds: firstly, that organized on behalf of people living in severe conditions and secondly, that organized by people living in severe conditions.

BK But isn’t this just going to lead to more talk and no action?

CG No, the multi-sectoral approach I’ve suggested will result in strong local leadership and sustainable institutions that can connect with global research and advocacy carried out with foundation support.

Action in the short term will involve an attack on the severity of conditions at the bottom of society and a nimble readiness to take advantage of openings for change created by political, economic and environmental circumstances. Short term, we want to push back poverty, fight exclusion, empower oppressed people, and combat assaults on human rights. Longer term, we want to restructure social priorities to reverse poverty creation processes, exclusionary systems, and the wasteful use of human and environmental resources. Short-term and long-term integration means that foundation evaluation of grantmaking programmes would both assess short-term targets and include attention to long-term goals in short-term tactics and strategies.

BK This is big and ambitious. I think that foundations need to figure out who does what in going after big issues like poverty, race, gender and class together with their intersections; otherwise it’s just tilting at windmills. What are the specific things that we can accomplish that will affect the big picture? At the moment, it seems to me that social justice foundations are doing specific things without regard to a big picture. We need to get a greater sense of working together in which particular foundations pursue particular goals but there is some higher-level co-ordination necessary. Otherwise, there’s just a series of well-meaning initiatives that don’t necessarily add up to much.

CG Yes, there needs to be joining up. For example, economic development must be integrated with political participation. If economic development projects occur without empowering constituencies, the market will rule, and its rule is ruthless even when its goals are benign. Recent advances that foundations can support in the US include community benefits agreements and tax subsidy accountability. These have developed out of local initiatives by community activists, who have treated the market’s use of the public commons and the public purse as an opportunity to restructure the social costs of private ventures.

BK I agree that we need to do more to join these efforts up. I estimate that there are around 80 foundations across the world that focus on social justice, human rights or building peace or some combination of those. It is important that those foundations begin to engage in this dialogue so that we can begin to develop a common agenda and theory of change that we can test and evaluate together.

CG Yes, and efforts to develop this dialogue must include the community organizing sector, where new policy models and tools are being developed that reform economic and governance systems that might lead to a new social contract. Pursuing social justice must move forward from the reinvention of the social contract and the development and support of countervailing structures that permit the public to weigh in.

We want to hear from you

The aim of this series is to involve people all over the world who are committed to achieving greater justice in their own societies and in the world in a dialogue about how to realize our aims. If you would like to offer your views on any of the issues raised here, or to write an article about the role of social justice philanthropy in your society, please contact Colin Greer or Barry Knight at the email addresses below or email Caroline Hartnell, editor of Alliance, at carolineh@allavida.org. We will be happy to post your contributions on the Alliance website.

Colin Greer is President of the New World Foundation (US). He can be contacted at cgreer@newwf.org
Barry Knight is Secretary of Centris (UK). He can be contacted at barryknight@centris.org

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