Alliance Online - June 2007

Here in America

Caroline Hartnell

EVENT Council on Foundations 58th Annual Conference
Date 29 April – 1 May
Venue Seattle, USA
Theme Philanthropy and the Challenges of Our Time: Making a difference at home and around the globe

The 58th Annual Conference of the Council on Foundations, held in Seattle in late April/early May, brought together over 2,000 people to discuss ‘Philanthropy and the Challenges of Our Time’. The conference subtitle ran ‘Making a difference at home and around the globe’. If it hadn’t been for Melinda Gates, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the main challenges of our time exist within the borders of the United States – and can therefore be solved within them. The rest of the globe took a bit of a back seat – even when it came to climate change.

The four challenges chosen were Combating Poverty, Ensuring Public Health, Protecting the Environment, and Preparing for and Responding to Disasters.

Mark Warner, former Democrat Governor of Virginia and the first keynote speaker, got a clap for his expressed hope that the US will play a full part in fighting global warming but then moved on to talk about what he saw as the real challenge: it has always been seen as the birthright of every American to live in ‘the most successful and prosperous country of the world’ but this can no longer be taken for granted – and it must be fixed.

He challenged the education system to adjust to reflect the needs of workers in a knowledge economy – especially necessary in view of what he clearly sees as the threat of competition, for his own 12-year-old daughter and other American youngsters, from an emerging generation of IT specialists in India and China. ‘India and China are not playing for second place,’ he warned.

He had four suggestions for how foundations might play a part in getting the US fixed – sound suggestions that would apply to the fixing of any problem:

Collaborate more and take good programmes to scale. ‘It’s easier to get Democrats and Republicans to work together than to get foundations to do so.’
Engage more with the policy world – public resources must come in if reforms are to go to scale over the long term. He spoke of foundations ‘bringing their brands’ to stand beside policymakers at city and state levels.
Use venture philanthropy approaches to add capacity as well as programmatic support.
Make all Americans part of the solution. ‘Tap into the national spirit that makes our country so different from anywhere else in the world,’ he urged.

This focus on fixing America was perhaps not surprising coming from a politician, but it was sad to hear similar views being expressed by Geoffrey Canada in his closing keynote. Founder and President/CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City, Canada is an inspiring leader with a passionate commitment to ensuring that African American children end up in college, and a job, rather than in gaol. But he still sees problems in terms of the US, with India and China, ‘turning out droves of children with vast intellectual resources’, threatening to swamp us. ‘I know people who want to travel to other countries to find tragic situations to deal with,’ he said. ‘Why? There is the biggest tragedy to be dealt with here in the state of our children here in this country.’

The short film to highlight the conference themes took us briefly to Kenya, where we were shown children dying needlessly from malaria, but poverty, effects of climate change, and disasters were shown exclusively in the US.

So it was left to Melinda Gates, Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to remind us that all lives are of equal value and that the greatest challenges lie outside the US. She explained how she and Bill had always planned to start philanthropy at some point in their lives, but ten years ago, when they read about a disease called rotavirus killing 600 million children in developing countries, they decided to start straight away. Global health would be their focus. Their starting point, she said, was that all lives are of equal value. ‘I imagine a world in which where a child is born doesn't affect their chances of living a good and healthy life.’

Addressing climate change – here in America

Even when it came to addressing climate change, surely the most indisputably global issue, there were many looking for solutions within America. Combating climate change has generally been seen as likely to harm the economy and therefore something that is difficult to advocate in communities with high levels of unemployment or in struggling rural communities. As Jerome Ringo, president of the Apollo Alliance, put it, ‘Will fuel economy standards for cars lose jobs in Detroit?’

Alternative energy technologies happily present a way out of this difficulty. ‘People could be galvanized around the issue,’ said Ringo, ‘if development of alternative energies could create employment for all Americans and get us off the oil barrel we’ve been held over by foreign governments.’ The US needs to stop exporting R&D ideas: wind turbines, solar panels, etc need to be made ‘here in America’. The Alliance is a coalition of labour unions, environmentalists and others united to make America independent from foreign energy.

Another speaker made a similar point about rural organizations being brought together by a shared goal of new economic benefits through clean energy development. Annual payments for having a wind turbine on your farm provide a good example.

Can it be done?

While NASA scientist James Hansen warned of the imminent dangers of unchecked global warming – melting of the Arctic ice sheets will mean a gradual 7 metre rise in sea levels, he said, something to which we will not be able to adapt – the overall tone was a positive one. ‘Pessimism has no survival value. We need to be aware of the crisis but positive about solutions,’ said one speaker in a session called ‘It Can Be Done: How Foundations Are Changing the Business and Policy Climate on Climate Change’. Preliminary results of a study called Design to Win apparently suggest that there is ‘an architecture for success’.

Cities seem to be doing well here: the Mayor of Seattle signed up to Kyoto when the US government refused to and has since persuaded 494 other mayors, representing 65 million people, to do the same. He readily admits that signing up to Kyoto is only a very small step, but it is a positive one none the less.

Environmental grantmaking in China

One key to success in preventing global warming is avoiding what is termed ‘lock in’: each new coal-fired power plant will be producing carbon emissions for decades to come. At present China is building one new coal-fired power station a day, using poor-quality coal, so addressing environmental issues in China is critical. There seems to be some disagreement as to whether China is already the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases or it will overtake the US any day/year now, but the problem is clearly a massive one.

In an interesting session on environmental grantmaking in China, speakers from the Asia Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, the Energy Foundation and Global Greengrants Fund outlined what they are doing in China – but it is the merest drop in the ocean.

So much more is needed – and all sectors in all countries must be involved – if we are to win the race to save our planet before it’s too late. One message that emerged clearly from the conference was the need for leaders like Geoffrey Canada and Jerome Ringo, who speak for the poor and marginalized in the US, to make common cause with leaders in developing countries, seeing them not as competitors but as allies. When flying is so much part of the problem, I hate to say this, but US community leaders must travel.

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