Stanford Social Innovation Review

Notes on Robert Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century”

1.  In case you haven’t heard all the hoopla, sociologist Robert Putnam, most famous for his book “Bowling Alone,” has published a new article arguing that “In the short to medium run, … immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital.”

2.  It’s an excellent article; a thought provoking read.  Apart from a dicey section on the multivariate analysis of data to control for the effect of certain variables, the study is completely accessible to non-experts.  Don’t make the same mistake as 98 percent of the people who are currently dismissing Putnam’s results: read the article for yourself.

3.  An aside: More interesting than Putnam’s article, in my view, has been the sociology of its reception.  There’s a palpable hesitancy, in polite liberal circles, to bring up the subject.  First, it’s never his article, but rather somebody’s gloss on it that my colleagues suggest I read.  Second, no person of conscience broaches the subject of Putnam’s article unless, in the same breath, he also recommends a book or article that purports to advance a countervailing thesis.  Putnam’s work is clearly radioactive.

4.  Never fear the truth, whatever it might be.

5.  Putnam’s article might ultimately rival Christine Letts’s “Virtuous Capital” for the volume of eyebrow-raising commentary it will generate—much of it, I predict, involving a great deal of hand-wringing.

6.  Liberals are in some ways hoist on their own petard: Putnam uses variation in ethnic/racial category as a proxy for “diversity.” This is what I sometimes refer to as the Whitman’s Sampler Model of diversity, an impoverished notion that enables well-meaning liberals to declare victory when they have “one of these, one of these, and one of those” on their staff or on their board.

7.  Putnam’s results will play handily to those conservatives who believe that self-segregation works with, rather than against, “the grain of human nature.” We hear this kind of argument in apologetics for “a conservatism comfortable with materialist self-interest.” These same conservatives will likely pass over in silence those sections of the article that review the many benefits of increased immigration and diversity, among them: greater creativity; better, faster problem-solving; and more rapid economic growth, among others.  Putnam never argues that diversity is, on balance, a bad thing.

8.  Putnam’s results discredit the idea that greater diversity is correlated with increased inter-ethnic hostility.  He stresses that “[d]iversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.” To put it another way, “In more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do.”

9.  Putnam points out that:

All our empirical analysis to this point has involved ‘comparative statics’—that is, we have compared people living in places with different ethnic mixes at one point in time—namely different American communities in the year 2000.  Although our evidence does suggest that it is the level of diversity that matters, not the rate of change, we have not yet considered any ‘dynamic’ evidence about the effects of immigration and diversity over long periods of time within a single place (whether a single community or the nation as a whole). Exploring the dynamics, as opposed to the comparative statics, of diversity and social capital requires entirely different methods, and my research group has only begun to explore those avenues.

What would these further studies likely reveal?

10.  Finally, and most importantly in my opinion, Putnam doesn’t argue that we can’t learn to respond to ethnic and racial diversity better than we currently do.  We’re not fated forever to wallow in our ignorance and respond irrationally to fear of the “other,” however much recent history has inclined us to this view.

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Ownership Costs and Service Requirements

By MARK ROSENMAN

Presidential campaigns always seem to revive the debate about national service. Candidates, pundits, and we mere mortals again argue about its legitimacy and whether it ought be voluntary or compulsory. What usually gets missed, however, is the message that’s sent when the only price government asks us to pay is taxes and user fees. 

Most of us, I believe, want to live in neighborhoods, in communities, in societies where people care about one another. Whatever our political ideology, we want to see ourselves as compassionate and in some way as serving to help one another. Many of us learn an ethos of service—to be good neighbors, good citizens, good people, through our families and friends, through faith-based and other local institutions; but some of us don’t. 

Our schools have a role in teaching us about service. That’s part of the function of education; its purpose is to do more than try to develop our intellect and the skills we need for economic success.  Part of the role of schooling is to build character, to teach civics, to turn out good citizens, the kinds of people we want for neighbors. That’s why I think it’s as legitimate for schools to require service as it is for them to require reading, writing and arithmetic. It’s a way for them to teach and it’s something for them to teach.

Compulsory national service can also be, I believe, an important, legitimate, and reasonable expectation for citizens made by their government and by one another. If our only obligation is to pay taxes and user fees, then as citizens, we are reduced to little more than consumers of government services, to being government’s customers.  Rather, citizens are government’s owners—and owners know that in spite of your staff, every once in a while you have to roll up your sleeves, get in there, and do some hard work.

Whatever particular form it might take, mandatory national service changes the relationship between people and their government.  Rather than being passive consumers grumbling about what we do or don’t get for our tax dollars, or about the politicians from whom we feel disconnected, we’re more likely to demand accountability from elected leaders who are making decisions that affect how months or years of our lives might be spent in service to society.  As people become more immediately and personally invested in our communities, more engaged in the broader world through our direct labor, we’re more likely to feel vested in ownership of our government and to take it seriously. So, besides learning more about helping one another, actually building stronger communities and serving society, we’d become more active citizens. And that’s a good thing.

Let the debate continue…

Photo: Led by City Year corps members, volunteers paint a map of the U.S. on a playground in Harlem. (Photo courtesy of Jim Harrison)

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Surge or Rage? Guns or Butter?

BY MARK ROSENMAN
Nonprofits in a time of war.

Nonprofits across the country are scrambling for charitable dollars because recent experience has taught them not to depend on government funds to address public problems.  Economist Arthur Brooks used The Wall Street Journal (a strange choice of vehicle, it seems to me) to advise nonprofits to rely more on private contributions than on government “subsidies,” suggesting that tax-fueled funding is undependable when it comes to paying for human services and meeting societal needs; it seems the money just isn’t always there.  Or is it? 

Surprisingly, even while handing out more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest among us in recent years, the Republican-controlled Congress passed enough off-budget special appropriations to pay for about 50 years of HeadStart for each of the million or so kids enrolled in that program.  These same appropriations could cover about 16 years of medical insurance for every child living in poverty in the U.S.; or pay four-year state tuition for every undergraduate at every U.S. college and university--and still have a bit left over to send some on to grad school. 

In fact, these off-budget appropriations could fund enough new public housing to accommodate the U.S. homeless population in permanent residences, and even provide some with vacation homes.  But that’s not what President Bush asked for, and not what Congress gave him.  The appropriations didn’t fund public institutions or nonprofit organizations. 

Instead the money was used to do wrong.  It has paid for a war, started with shameful deceit and continued in a fog of failure and lies, that has cost over 3,000 American lives, wounded well over 22,000 American men and women, and resulted in the deaths of between 52,000 and 600,000 Iraqis (larger estimate by Johns Hopkins University scholars).  Congress has already appropriated over $350 billion for that war (more than $200 million a day) beyond regular military budgets, and costs are projected to total over a trillion dollars after continuing care for the wounded is factored in. 

Shouldn’t nonprofits have said something about this?  Shouldn’t they say something now?  We move from bake sales into social ventures to start bakeries, but we forsake basic financing--we have a right, an obligation, to demand that our government use funds to do good instead of wrong. 

In a sector grounded in values and in a sense of humanity, we have the responsibility of outrage.  Silence is an abdication in the face of an abomination.  The new Democratic Congress needs to hear charities’ voices! 

NOTE:  In my haste to post the original version of this now-revised blog entry, I conflated a number of points Dr. Brooks has made and ascribed them to the WSJ piece.  My apologies to him and SSIR readers.

Mark Rosenman is a public service professor at the Union Institute & University, where he has long worked in various roles. He sees his 20-plus years of initiative to strengthen the nonprofit sector as an extension of earlier professional efforts in the civil rights movement, urban anti-poverty work, international and domestic program development, and higher education.

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Our Global Warming Equivalent

BY PERLA NI
As government shrinks funding for the needy, who will pay for social services?

Whenever I talk to human services nonprofits, I hear the same problem: “Our funding is being cut by the government and no one is giving us a check to fill in the gap.” One long-term ED lamented, “What will happen to our agency, which we started in the 60’s, as it matures and there’s no new blood, no new money to keep the flame alive?”

The shift to decreased government responsibility for the aged, the sick, and the young seems to be scarily permanent. Everyone seems to have bought into this idea of small government.

Everyone except foundations and donors. Foundations don’t want to fund primary health programs, for example, because, they reason, that’s government’s job. We’re talking about a huge amount of money here. Private citizens, in general, don’t perceive the slow retrenchment of government services. And if they do, they don’t feel responsible. Afterall, they’ve paid their taxes.

My question to you, dear reader, is this: Who will pay for social services in our country if neither government nor foundations will?

I have a cleaning lady who is from Mexico. She pays monthly installments on her $4,000 dental bill from last year. She commutes three hours because there isn’t affordable housing nearby. Her daughter goes to a mediocre public high school, where the students watch a lot of videos in class. How will her kids ever make it to the middle class, I wonder. What will happen if there’s an emergency in the family?

I don’t have a philosophical opinion about whether government should be big or small. I just want to know, Who is going to provide social services that we used to expect from our government?

Year by year, it seems, local, state, and federal governments are freezing or cutting social service funding. It’s like global warning: The average person doesn’t see it; it takes place over a long period of time; and the results could be irreversible. So, who in this sector is going to raise raucous about this? I don’t see the Council on Foundations, Independent Sector, or Nonprofit Congress saying much. If they have and I’ve missed it, maybe they can speak a little louder.

We should have someone who is willing to make this the one issue that they will raise a stink about until someone stands up and says, I have the answer.

Who will pay for social services in our country if neither government nor foundations will?

Please post your comments below because this question confounds and scares me.

Perla Ni, founder and former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is the founder and CEO of GreatNonprofits. She is also a co-founder of Grassroots.com.

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Postcards from the Elections

BY ALBERT RUESGA

Now that the Demopublicans have routed the Republicrats in elections nationwide, how will low-income communities be affected?

I can answer that question with another: What is the sound of one Diebold AccuVote TS Touch-Screen System™ failing to record a vote?

Exit pollsters did, however, report significant voter frustration with corruption in politics, and Nancy Pelosi, soon-to-be Speaker of the House, promised a shakedown in Congress.  “The Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history,” she said in an apparently unguarded moment.  It’s true that Republicans might have taken the rap, but Democrats, as we know, have not been models of self-denial. In January of this year, for example, the Washington Post reported that

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) [now the majority leader—eds.], like House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), signed a letter in 2002 to Interior Secretary Gail A. Norton on behalf of an Abramoff client around the time he received a large campaign contribution from Abramoff’s tribal clients. Edward P. Ayoob, a former Reid aide, was a member of Abramoff’s lobbying team …

Abramoff picked up part of the tab for two Democrats, Reps. James E. Clyburn (S.C.) and Bennie Thompson (Miss.), on a trip to the Northern Mariana Islands in the mid-1990s, officially sponsored by the nonprofit American Security Council. Clyburn, now chairman of the Democratic Caucus, was recently named to the House Democrats’ “clean team,” tasked with leading the ethics-reform push.

Business as usual for both sides of the aisle.  Remember that heartwarming show of zeal earlier this year for meaningful lobbying reform?  That effort was so toothless, so cynical, that some advocates suggested dubbing it the “Let’s Add Effrontery to Bribery Act of 2006.” So nonprofit advocates beware.  If history is any guide, you’ll likely continue to be seriously outspent by well-moneyed interests, all cries for an “ethical Congress” to the contrary.

While the reformers do their work (or not), the nonprofit and foundation communities watch closely for new regulatory initiatives from the 110th Congress.  But do the elections hold a deeper meaning for the sector?

I was struck by the fact that many voters repudiated the Iraq War not because it was an immoral invasion based on trumped up charges, but because it was poorly executed and “weakened the United States.” Perhaps we were too busy fumbling for the keys of our SUVs to mention to the exit-pollsters that we were appalled at having become one of a family of nations that commits torture.  Ballot measures in 11 states banned same-sex marriage, giving legal cover to our bigotry.  And in no election—none—did the issue of poverty play a significant role.

This is apparently what defines the “middle” in these nefarious times.

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Big Philanthropy’s Threat to the American Way

Perhaps it’s no accident that grand philanthropic gestures coincide with moments in our history when wealth becomes concentrated in very few hands and the gap between the rich and the poor becomes intolerably wide.

It was during the time of the great robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the first—and some of the largest—American foundations were created.  In our own Gilded Age, the captains of industry try to outdo one another with their philanthropic gifts as corporate profits soar and wages continue to shrink as a proportion of the nation’s GDP.

Some cynics argue that now, as in ages past, philanthropy has functioned as a social safety valve, redistributing just enough wealth to keep people in low-income communities from taking to the streets in protest.

Dramatic philanthropic gestures are not confined to our shores.  Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing recently that he would give a third of his $19 billion fortune to charity.  This was followed days later by news that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the world’s third richest man, would match peso for peso any amount invested by Mexican or foreign foundations in Mexican social work.  Over time we can expect to hear more announcements like these from people who made their fortunes in states that cooperated in concentrating wealth into the hands of a very few.  It’s much less likely, for example, that a Swedish philanthropist will emerge to grab the headlines from the Buffetts and the Gateses.  That country has a progressive tax that functions to redistribute wealth, and a cradle-to-grave welfare system that obviates the need for many privately supported charitable organizations.*

But in the United States, the social safety net is tenuous and under constant attack by fiscal conservatives.  As a result, lower-income people feel a measure of financial insecurity that can be exploited to drive down wages and further widen the gulf between the rich and the poor.  As suggested earlier, big philanthropy, together with other leveling efforts, can provide enough relief to the underclasses to quell social unrest.  Because foundations often fill the gaps left by retreating sources of public support, they’re sanctioned by government and given fairly wide latitude in their operations.  But if they go too far—if, as Bill Schambra, director of the conservative Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal warned, they begin to “undermin[e] traditional sources of authority”—then society must mobilize to curtail their power.

We see this in Schambra’s warning, near the end of his op-ed, that the forces of law and good order** “may not be so complaisant about philanthropy’s license” if it “drift[s] carelessly and inadvertently into … a revolutionary undertaking.” We see it also in the constant vigilance that nonprofits need to exercise in order to preserve important advocacy rights.

The fear of some is that under the leadership of liberals like Gates, Buffett, and Soros, philanthropy will become the snake that bites its own tail.  Rather than forever satisfying themselves with dressing the wounds inflicted by the periodic convulsions of American-style capitalism, or with performing triage on those who don’t fare well under its rules, these philanthropists might simply decide to change the system.  If unchecked, they might succeed in introducing democracy to the United States by helping to pass meaningful campaign and lobbying reform.  They might shore up support for a public safety net worthy of the richest nation on earth.  They might even curtail our further slide into the barbarism of state-sponsored torture.

It’s our attenuated sense of social responsibility that makes big philanthropy’s interventions appear necessary in the first place.  But big philanthropy also has the potential—largely unrealized, I believe—to be a civilizing force can help us evolve toward our full humanity.
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* The White Courtesy Telephone Center for Advanced Studies recently adduced Ruesga’s Law, represented symbolically as φ α g / (s • w), and read as “phi is proportional to g divided by the product of s and w.” Here φ is the measure of philanthropic activity in a given state, g is the state’s GDP, s is the degree to which industries in that state are socialized, and w measures the state’s degree of “welfarization.”

** In this passage, Schambra deputizes “the American people.”

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Albert Ruesga blogs on nonprofits and foundations at White Courtesy Telephone.

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The Sham of Responsibility

It seems we’ve come to a point where the notion of personal responsibility in public life evokes little more than nostalgia among the elderly for a time when there were more operant values – be it in government or the nonprofit sector.  House Speaker Dennis Hastert “accepts responsibility” but sidesteps what appears to be his complicity in covering up the salacious and inappropriate behavior of a colleague, seemingly preferring the partisan maintenance of a Republican majority over the protection of young congressional pages.  Yet for Hastert, accepting responsibility means nothing – it has no cost and serves no purpose; he maintains his position and pays no price! 

In something of a parallel failure of personal responsibility in the nonprofit sector, Louise Bryson maintains the board chair of the J. Paul Getty Trust after its president resigns in disgrace and the California attorney general confirms that that was the right thing for him to have done – financial misdeeds, misjudgments and what some might see as his own sophisticated version of salacious behavior, all on Ms. Bryson’s watch.  Not only is there no substantive mea culpa heard from the board’s officers or members, they even refuse to reveal details of the misdeeds though the broad outlines are known, still keeping the wagons circled in their own variant on partisan protection.

And the Getty folks are not alone in the nonprofit sector.  The charitable community may not approach the soulless depths of politicians, but I fear we have the potential to spiral further down.  The public officials who brought the world the Iraq debacle model the worst by continuing to try to lie their way out of personal responsibility for that human, political and economic catastrophe.  Yet, with increasing public attention to the real and perceived abuses of charitable privilege by hospitals, philanthropies, disaster relief groups, religious organizations and others, unless nonprofit and foundation leaders are more willing to speak the truth about their own mistakes and those of their colleagues, we may soon find ourselves swirling around in just such a flushing vortex. 

To maintain the public trust and confidence, the nonprofit sector must be accountable for – and beyond – what laws and regulations require (as a resource, see Independent Sector).  That necessitates personal responsibility by volunteers, staff and especially the board.  When we fail to meet basic standards of vigilance and due diligence, of conduct, when we fail to behave ethically, it is appropriate to feel embarrassment, and it is appropriate also to act on that feeling, to make it manifest and real.  A failure of responsibility must have consequences or it is a sham. 

To pull a facile Hastert is to continue to fail the public whose stewardship we are to serve as nonprofit volunteers, staff or board – or as public officials.  Accountability, woefully, sometimes requires shame – and shame requires action. 

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The Public Will and the Public Won’t

A recent article by Rick Cohen points to one of the classic tensions between foundations and government and one of the possible downsides of Warren Buffet’s gift to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:

In President Bush’s proposed budget for the fiscal year 2007, the administration justified proposed cuts in its small schools programme by citing the availability of funds for the same purpose from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That made a foundation programme, where the decisions are made by a few administrators and the foundation’s two trustees, a potential substitute for a federal government action. …

This happens regularly in the US. In the administration’s 2006 budget, the White House proposed terminating programmes to educate children about the dangers of obesity due to the availability of projects sponsored by Disney and the Nickelodeon channel, again substituting charity for governmental obligations …

Mr. Cohen has it exactly right.  I’ll wager half my tax return that today, in some foundation in this country, you’ll hear an exchange like this one:

Program Officer:  ‘The city has decided it’s going to discontinue funding transitional housing programs, so ABC, Inc. is requesting $100,000 to replace lost city funds.’

Foundation Executive:  ‘Why should we replace lost city dollars?  Transitional housing programs for low-income people are a public responsibility and should be supported by tax dollars.  If we make up the funding gap, we’ll only encourage city officials to stop funding other programs.’

There are several possible outcomes to this discussion.  The foundation might decide to fill the gap for a year, to give the nonprofit time to find replacement dollars.  Or, as often happens, it might decide to hold the line.  It’s then left as an exercise to the program officer to determine how best to communicate the bad news to the applicant, to explain a decision that begs a thousand questions.

I’ll leave it to historians to describe, for a given community, how the line of scrimmage between public and private responsibility fell where it did.  The question then becomes, how and under what circumstances does that line ever shift?

Here’s an example of how that game is played: Elected officials succumb to public pressure to cap or reduce taxes.  Smaller tax revenues mean less public support for safety net programs for the poor.  Foundations yell “foul” and refuse to step into the funding breach, claiming that foundation dollars should be used not for funding basic services, but for testing new ideas, supporting programs unpopular with individual donors, and other like purposes.

Foundations have a few plays of their own in this game.  Many will support nonprofit advocacy efforts to shore up or increase public support for safety net programs.  It’s now elected officials who cry “foul” and threaten to strengthen legal strictures on advocacy funding.

It’s an old contest and the balance shifts this way or that with the blowing of political winds.

Is it the proper role of foundations to plug the gaps created by retreating public funds?  Those who say yes will often argue along Libertarian or humanitarian lines: government should be smaller, say the former, foundations should not leave poor people in the lurch, say the latter.

But consider carefully.  Foundations are the mainstays of advocacy organizations that challenge government, big corporations, and the media on a range of issues.  And they are often the only funders to support causes unpopular with donors, such as services for undocumented immigrants, programs for returning prisoners, and legal services for low-income people.  Do we really want to tie up more foundation dollars in basic services de-funded by government?

Keep in mind that total annual foundation giving in the United States is about $30 billion.  By my estimate, this entire amount would be swallowed up just by the operating expenses of the 50 largest nonprofit hospitals (and there would be another 2,800 such hospitals waiting in line).* Despite the sector’s sometimes inflated sense of self, foundation giving represents only 3.5 percent of all nonprofit revenues.  Re-purposing these funds--moving them, for example, from advocacy support to direct services--would have a large negative impact on the advocacy community but very little overall positive impact on nonprofit bottom lines.

Foundations that elect to stand firm should, at the very least, help de-funded organizations make the case for restored public dollars and/or help these organizations find new sources of support.  Foundations, in their treatment of grantees, should be setting the example for other funders.  This means making general operating support grants and grants to strengthen nonprofit infrastructure.  It means supporting an organization over several years to help it grow.  It also means never chopping an organization off at the knees by suddenly withdrawing funding.

Still, it’s the poor who ultimately pay for this game of brinksmanship between foundations and government.  Foundations can do little more than soften an often nasty blow.

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* As of 2004; data from nonprofithealthcare.com.

Albert Ruesga blogs on foundations, philanthropy, and nonprofits at White Courtesy Telephone.

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Missing In Action

Do you find it astounding that charities remained silent when Congress added $70 billion to the deficit last week by extending tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, further starving government programs?  Even if that doesn’t get to you, you’ve still got to wonder why all but a few nonprofit organizations and foundations (in spite of the activism of groups such as OMB Watch and United for a Fair Economy) say nothing as the Senate approaches a vote that will decrease charitable donations by up to $25 billion a year.  That’s equivalent to stopping all annual grantmaking by the 110 largest US foundations. 

I am, of course, talking about repeal of the Estate Tax.  Although rightwing propagandists have popularized the notion that Americans pay a “death tax,” the reality is that only about the very wealthiest 1% of estates are affected.  Furthermore, most of the tax generated comes from the top one-quarter of one-percent (00.25%) of the super rich; repeal will cost the Treasury about $1 trillion over the ten years covered by the upcoming Senate vote.  And Senator Kyl’s proposal, although disguised as reform, is just about repeal. 

If you care about social issues, if you care about the environment, if you care about arts and culture, if your care about animal welfare, if you care about anything except greed, you need to be concerned about this.  No matter whether you believe in private altruism or government responsibility in meeting needs and addressing issues that move you, repeal of the Estate Tax profoundly and severely limits our capacity for action.  Nonprofit organizations and foundations need to be heard on the issue, and heard now!  You can act!

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Poor People or Poverty: Charity or Government

Some conservatives have begun to again argue that government should no longer provide for essential social services.  They say that charity can be an adequate and acceptable substitute for government in meeting needs and resolving social problems.  That is a befogging illusion created more in service to ideology than to society.

Charitable resources are dwarfed by government funding for social programs and there’s no sign individual and corporate contributions or social entrepreneurship makes up for even partial cuts.  Even if foundations gave away every last dollar in all of their endowments, that would do little more than cover this year’s federal deficit with a fraction left toward next year’s.

But resource questions cover the real agenda:  it’s about conservatives insisting that problems are much more a consequence of failures of personal responsibility than of any broader societal or economic dynamics.  They contend that the problem is poor people and not poverty, and that the remedy must be approached person-by-person, with little or no attention to correcting inadequacies in governmental institutions, programs, and policies.  In effect, they see poverty as a consequence of bad people making bad decisions and doing bad things; they see personal redemption, education and hard work as the only solution. Liberals, on the other hand, understand that government action is necessary to create the conditions under which individual responsibility can be successfully developed and exercised, including politically. 

In the face of a deluding exaggeration of the scope and power of charity and a continuing assault on scope and power of government, nonprofit organizations need to find new ways to improve and defend government programs while popularizing a sense of public responsibility among Americans as taxpayers, donors, volunteers, and voters. And philanthropic foundations need to fuel those efforts.

An elaboration of this discussion is in the current issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

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