Stanford Social Innovation Review

Children’s Crusades

Nicholas Kristof highlighted some very impressive young philanthropists in his New York Times column yesterday; but one of his observations made the Nonprofiteer cringe:

“The humanitarian prodigies like Ana and Nick are laudable for going beyond simple protesting to help their causes. Today’s young social entrepreneurs come across as more constructive than my generation of student activists, and more savvy about how to accomplish their goals cost-effectively.”

Another term for “simple protesting” is “political action.” As committed to the service-providing nonprofit sector as she is, the Nonprofiteer doesn’t imagine—and doesn’t want others to imagine—that this sector substitutes monitoring or changing government policies in favor of those in need. Nor is it clear that organizing a nation’s worth of benefit dances to pay for anti-malarial bed nets is more “cost-effective” than organizing a nationwide letter-writing campaign urging Congress to spend money on bed nets instead of the Iraq war.

So while we’re celebrating charitable young people, let’s not devalue those who choose political involvement instead. Nothing is “more constructive” than holding our own government accountable.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

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Who are you? How do you know?

Psychologists love questions about identity and its multiple dimensions—from attitudes to behaviors. Geneticists are also ready to weigh in about your identity with different perspectives and data. Demographers will chime in—disaggregating you along various dimensions. Historians and biographers have something to say, cross-referencing what others will say about you with the written record and whatever paper trail you may leave. Religious communities and traditions also may claim part of you, sometimes regardless of whether you claim them. You may identify with a single race or ethnicity or with many of them, and this may shift over time or remain steadfast. Gender identity, though singular for many, is more fluid and plural for others. Answers to the questions, “Who are you? And how do you know?” may vary depending on who asks you and when you answer.

Why am I talking about this? Today I went to two conferences. First, the Jewish Funders Network, where questions and discussions revolved around funding Jewish identity.  Everyone agreed that there are multiple ways to identify as Jewish and multiple ways people come to those identities. The conference was held at Sixth & I, a 100 year-old synagogue that, like so many in big cities, spent decades as an African Methodist Church. It was recently renovated back into a synagogue, and now thrives as a Jewish cultural hub and house of worship for Jews of every denomination. It sits in D.C.’s Chinatown.

Then I took two subways and one cab ride to the National Harbor, a brand-new, man-made city emerging on the horizon south of D.C. the way Oz rose over the poppy fields. Overlooking the Potomac, the conference center encases a fake mini village with a glass wall several stories tall and about a football field in length. There, the Council on Foundation‘s Philanthropy Summit--with its 2900+ people from 40 countries, three hip-hop groups, two gospel choirs, and one Chinese lion dance—was just getting underway. As I checked in for the conference, I watched the council’s staff members apply banner flags to the nametag; you know, the multicolored ribbon-thingies that say “Foundation Board Member,” “Moderator,” “Presenter,” “Newcomer,” and so on. I saw at least 12 different ribbons and I wondered if anyone was wearing a foot-long name tag with all of these identifiers attached. These ribbons, intended to mark you for the benefit of others, address the aspect of identity, which is assumed, assigned, or placed on you by the outside world, the setting in which you find yourself, or the context in which someone meets you.

Even the simplest question, “Who are you?” has many possible answers. As we embark on philanthropic programs perhaps we should acknowledge the dynamism, uncertainty, and relativity of our endeavors. Data may not be as standardized as you might want to think. That fact should not thwart anyone’s gusto for good work. On the contrary, questioning our assumptions, probing the data, considering the sources, and re-calibrating our measures are vital to learning and making progress.

Lucy Bernholz is the Founder and President of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helps philanthropic individuals and institutions achieve their missions. She is the publisher of Philanthropy2173, an award winning blog about the business of giving and serves as Executive Producer of The Giving Channel on Fora.tv.

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R U Ready 2 Lead?

Assuming the impending nonprofit workforce crisis is real and not imagined, we have some work to do. The latest report on the subject, Ready to Lead: Next Generation Leaders Speak Out,* reviews the various factors that will make nonprofit leadership recruitment more difficult in the years to come. Large numbers of retiring Baby Boomers and the money worries of Gen Xers and Gen Yers will constrain the supply of would-be leaders even as we’re drawn into an all-out “war for talent” with the government and business sectors.

It remains to be seen if market forces will, as some predict, smooth out the bumps in the road ahead. It’s possible that with more openings in the leadership ranks, more young people will look for careers in the nonprofit sector. Sector leaders may also rally and create new training programs and new incentives for charitable work.

We’ll see.

I would certainly worry less about the impact of this impending crisis if the sector were, in general, better bankrolled.  Instead we operate in an environment of chronic scarcity. We don’t make the necessary investments in mentoring promising young talent or take the steps needed to retain current leaders because so many things appear to make greater demands on our limited resources.

If there’s a theme that runs through these various workforce reports, it might be something like this: Because it’s so hard to raise charitable dollars, those of us who direct the work of the sector—current executive directors and board members, in particular—are frequently tempted to try to get good talent on the cheap; but our investments in staff are the absolute last places we should be looking to cut costs.

It used to be that if one applicant turned up his nose at a nonprofit job, there’d be three waiting in the wings to apply.  We’re moving into an era when the demographics will turn against us.

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* I was one of the authors of this report together with Marla Cornelius of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and Patrick Corvington of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. I serve as vice president for programs and communications at the Meyer Foundation, one of the report’s primary sponsors.

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Albert Ruesga is vice president for programs and communications at the Meyer Foundation in Washington, DC.  He’s the managing editor of the White Courtesy Telephone blog.

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Issues That Matter

This post is about nine issues that matter to you—whether you work in a nonprofit public benefit organization, are a philanthropic funder, or happen to be a commercial technology company that serves those markets. Now, even if I do say so myself, “issues that matter” is a pretty gutsy title. Matter to whom? When? Why?

These trends matter to other people as well, but for other reasons. I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to talk to you. My goal is to raise up some questions you might not know you’ve been harboring, shift some of the ways you think about issues so that you consider a new side to them, and—most importantly—point out some patterns between issues and ways that they are dynamically linked that may explain why you feel like time is too short, information too plentiful, and decisions require too many variables.

Here are the issues that matter:

• Demographics
• Groups
• Ownership
• Mobility
• Markets
• Price
• Forms
• Time Frames
• Alignment

And here is why these things matter:

Demographics Matter
I’m going to start here because people matter. According to the 2000 Census, the U.S. is older, larger, and more diverse than it has been at any other point in time.

How many people reading this are caring for your kids and worrying about, or actually caring for, your parents?

Age matters. An increasing old population affects jobs, taxes, social needs, volunteering rates, and philanthropy.

Youth matters. The young population affects jobs, taxes, social needs, volunteering rates, and philanthropy.

These trends shape who works, who votes, who needs what, who pays taxes, who draws benefits, who supports whom. They will have strong affects on the much-tauted Intergenerational Transfer of Wealth – which is actually a three-generation phenomenon, rather than two.

Think about the demographics where you live and work. What does your community look like now? What will it look like in 20 years? How will you benefit from the changes?

Groups Matter
At first, this seems a derivative of the demographics issue. The first one is about people, the second one is about what people do together.

But Groups Matter is also about how people do things together, and with whom, and when, and why, and for how long.

Think about this – from a technological perspective on groups (let’s call it social networking). We’ve gone from an arcane academic term to Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to OpenSocial in about two years. Groups are driving users of technology, driving audiences for innovation, and driving forces in our economy.

And people are members of many groups. For different reasons. At different times. No single nonprofit organization or philanthropic effort is going to meet a person’s lifetime of needs. Go back to the question I asked you in the beginning, about kids and parents. Those of you who answered that question with a nod or a moan are members of different groups that fit your identities as (and I’m drawing some generalizations here, feel free to challenge me later) individuals, parents, children, professionals, men, women, religious, volunteers, and ethnic and racial. You use different resources for different goals, drop out of groups when they no longer serve your purpose, and create new groups for new reasons. (I just received an email from a group of neighbors volunteering to clean up the beaches around San Francisco Bay. The group is also raising money to help clean shorebirds. The group didn’t exist one week ago.)

We also know that groups are good at decision making (you’ve heard of the wisdom of crowds) and that diverse groups are even better at decision making.

Groups matter. They matter to us as people, they shape the way we work, give and volunteer, and they matter to us as technology innovators, nonprofit managers, and philanthropists. Groups matter.

Ownership matters
This seems a little bit further away from people and groups, but it’s connected, trust me. For example, groups own things – like the sky, the oceans, and the freedom to create. Entire economic revolutions have occurred in my sons’ lifetimes by companies that built enormously powerful tools – specifically Google and eBay – and own none of the things those tools are used for.

Ownership matters in our digital age. It is changing in our digital age (new versions of copyright and patent law, new expectations for the value of sharing).

Do you know what these little icons on the bottom are?
Social tags – They let you post and click and tag and save content from one place to another. We may “own” something, but in the digital world, it is very hard to control it.

Most of the discussion about this in today’s press is set up as a battle between record companies and musicians, or television networks and user-generated video or, in the case of writers and distributors, it’s set up as a strike. For the rest of us, however, I prefer to think of it as a choice – for your foundation, your nonprofit, your technology company. It’s a choice between business models and the choice is this:

“Will you be more successful building something that is protected and proprietary, and then factoring in the costs of defending it, or will you be more successful building something that gains value as it is shared, and letting it loose?”

Mobility Matters
Part of the reason ownership matters is because not only can digital content live anywhere, it can go anywhere. Think of where you do your work today. Is it at a desk? With a PC wired into the wall? On a wireless laptop?

How about the millions of people who use only their cell phone to make purchases, find out prices, sell their wares, or notify local emergency officials of danger?

What about the foundation executive who says to his CTO, “I’m not lugging my laptop with me anymore – I want everything fed to my Blackberry via a RSS feed.”

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot; it’s not just data that move so easily. People move. Jobs move. Skill sets move. Groups move. Ownership moves.

Markets Matter
Markets matter to social good in so many ways that I could focus this whole post on this issue. I won’t – I’ll just send you to my blog, Philanthropy2173, where I’ve been writing about this literally since I published a book on it in 2004.

For the sake of this discussion, let me say that “markets matter” is shorthand for the changing ways that social goods are produced, distributed and financed, the changing roles of public agencies, and the blurring of revenue sources for public benefit work.

There are three large ways of thinking about how markets matter:

1. President Clinton reminds us in his foundation work and in his book giving, that the capital markets for social good are “underfunded and under-organized.”
2. Capital for social good is now as likely to come from fees for service, government contracts, private investors, social venture funds, or socially responsible investment funds as it is from philanthropic gifts.
3. We are increasingly surrounded by market approaches to social goods – from private companies that manage public libraries to commercial restaurants that focus on job training to double bottom line investment funds.

Markets matter in general. They really matter when considered in the context of changes in the public sector and the independent sector. One reason markets matter is that they remind us to never try to predict changes in one sector – say commerce – without also considering changes in the public and independent sectors.

Price Matters
There is a book out called Strategy of Giving. It has nothing to do with either philanthropic planning or preparing for the holiday gift giving season. It is about the value that is created and attained when products – ideas, designs, music, information—are exchanged for free. In other words, they are given away.

A decade ago this would have seemed like heresy. A decade or so ago the closest example I could think of was the razor blade business. Sell the razor for cheap, make a fortune on the blades. But that’s cheap. Not free.

Then came Google. And FireFox. And MySpace. And Ubuntu. And YouTube. Everything they provide to the user is free.

This takes us back to our point about ownership and markets and that basic business model choice – will what you are doing or selling be more valuable if it is free? Is there a business model that’s about location, ads, or transaction services that might be worth a look?

Or are there other assets – information, networks, and human resources come to mind – that you are hording rather than sharing, and in so doing, limiting your effectiveness rather than strengthening it?

By the way, the book The Strategy of Giving is available for purchase. The price? It’s free. You might also check out Chris Anderson’s new article in Wired - it is all about “Free as the new price.” Oddly enough, the magazine is not free.

Forms Matter
So we’ve looked at individuals and groups. We’ve considered the meaning of ownership, mobility, markets and price.

What about form? If everything so far is really changing – who we are, how we congregate, what we own, where we use it, and how we exchange it with others—it falls to reason that the structures we use to organize ourselves are also changing.

Some of the changes have to do with technological innovation – remote workplaces, telecommuting, PDAs and airplanes that get you across the world in a day. Organizations are more global, flatter, more dispersed, and more creatively chaotic.

Other changes are arriving in the form of regulatory and structural innovation – think of hybrid nonprofits and social enterprises and corporate social responsibility officers. But also be aware of totally new structures, such as Limited Profit Liability Companies (or L3C s) and B Corporations – which are public benefit corporations supported by commercial sales.

Keep your eyes open for continuing new forms of social organization – where the movement meets the flash mob, for example. Or where giving circles, social networks, and financial innovation around charitable vehicles come into play. Keep your eyes open for new forms of giving, new organizations in philanthropy, and new structures for social good.

Time Frames Matter
Ah. Not a minute too soon. These forces work at different speeds:

Technology changes quickly. Organizations? Not so much.

Markets can shift suddenly or steadily survive bump after bump after bump.

Groups can last for 100 years. And then fall apart.

Some of us change jobs and cities frequently; mobility is part of our identity. Others will stay put for as long as possible.

Time frames matter. They are not synchronous across these trends – some move quickly, some are slow. Make sure you know which one you are dealing with, as well as what kinds of forces can accelerate or decelerate the pace you’ve calibrated.

This is not just about work, or giving, or volunteering. This one – time frames – is about everything. Some things you can and should do quickly: assess the role of new competitors, take advantage of a political window, or jump on a opportunity to be with your loved ones.

Other things will need more time and should be given it – strategic mergers, the pursuit of social justice, and the time spent reading with your children.

Make sure your time frame makes sense. That’s what really matters.

Alignment Matters
New forms of action. New prices and markets. New ways of moving and owning and sharing information, innovation, and ideas.

Just make sure there is some alignment across them, OK?

With so many choices in form, groups, markets, platforms and pricing, nonprofits, foundations and technology companies should be constantly adjusting their strategies to make sure their efforts are aligned.

We’re seeing this in the attention to mission-related investing as foundations seek alignment across financial assets as well as their intellectual and human resources.

We’re seeing this in the way savvy nonprofits are using their volunteers, social networks, fundraisers, and blogs.

We’re seeing this as individuals try to align their full financial portfolio with their values; that means their philanthropy, political giving, and investing.

Without alignment, really, the rest of this will be chaos. Consider your choices. Play to your strengths. Put power behind all of the oars in your boat and make sure they are all pulling in the same direction.

Take them all together –

1. demographics
2. groups
3. ownership
4. mobility
5. markets
6. price
7. form
8. time frames and
9. alignment. (If I were Julie Andrews I’d burst into song right now)

Somewhere in that mix is the cause of, and the answer to, your big organizational questions, your time and information challenges, and, perhaps, even something for yourself. There you have it. Nine issues that matter, and why.

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Ten Questions for Philanthropy

1.  So much about nonprofit organizations is broken: the inordinate amount of time spent hustling small amounts of money; the drag on time and resources from ineffective boards; the effort required for the care and feeding of internal systems (finance, IT, HR)—all of this taking time away from essential programmatic work.  How do we go about reinventing the nonprofit so as to avoid these pitfalls?

2.  Many of us have discussed alternative models of governance for nonprofit organizations.  How do we get the field to embrace them?  How do we bridge the disconnect between the way EDs view their boards and the way boards see themselves?

3.  How much social change can “social change philanthropy” really tolerate?

4.  How do we keep nonprofit advocacy from becoming a “random walk” through a host of unconnected tactics?  How can we best harness the tools from other disciplines (for example, systems theory) to devise effective social change strategies?

5.  What lessons, drawn from history, can we apply to efforts to reform the work of foundations and make them more accountable?  (I’m thinking, at present, of the Reverend Leon Sullivan and his work in combating apartheid.  But there are other good models.)

6.  If the unexamined life is not worth living, then the unexamined career is not worth pursuing.  How do we create opportunities for reflection and discussion about our work?  How do we democratize the discussion in our field, shifting it from heavily scripted exercises in message discipline to inclusive free-for-alls brimming with intellectual and spiritual energy? 

7.  Most foundations are Web 0.5 organizations in a Web 2.0 world.  How do we rethink and reinvigorate the enterprise using all that we’ve learned about new technologies and their likely course?  What are the possibilities for collaborative work and for reducing the burden on applicants and grantees?  How can new technologies catalyze discussions that will lead to breakthroughs in our thinking about foundation and nonprofit work?

8.  How do we turn philanthropy from a stodgy financial transaction into something that’s life- and world-changing?  How do we capture a significant fraction of the anticipated intergenerational transfer of wealth for philanthropic purposes?

9.  There’s a story about a Hawaiian medicine man who had a special talent for calling back souls that had been separated from their bodies.  He would seize a wandering spirit, then struggle with it until he managed to align its insteps with the insteps of the body it had recently abandoned.  The medicine man would then work his way upward, reanimating first the legs, then the torso and arms, and finally the head—the way one might seal a Ziplock bag.  Is the soul of philanthropy wandering?  How can we call it back, seize it, and use it to reanimate the body of foundation work?  What should the enterprise be about?

10.  How do we make sure we hear from younger people in our field and tap the new energy and ideas that they bring to our work?  How can we most effectively hear from people of color and other groups underrepresented in mainstream philanthropy?  How do we attract good people to the nonprofit field and keep them there?

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Albert Ruesga is Vice President for Programs and Communications at the Meyer Foundation in Washington, DC.  He’s the editor of the White Courtesy Telephone blog.

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The Axiology of Nonprofit Impact

In a celebrated 2001 essay, wordsmith Tony Proscio asked, “Are grantmakers a species of investor, building benevolent enterprises that produce a measurable return for society, or are they more passive enablers of good, seeking mainly to support those who pursue charitable ends by whatever path?”

He was commenting on the tendency of the charitable sector to import the language of business while remaining largely oblivious to its insights.  But his question still manages to provoke.  The debate over the “measurable return” of charitable enterprises rages on between the pointy-headed wielders of business metrics and the addled bleeding hearts who oppose them.

The Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington attempts to stake a middle ground with a new report titled, Beyond Charity: Recognizing Return on Investment.  The report includes the kinds of cost-saving arguments familiar to many of us: each dollar spent on Johnny’s education saves us ten of thousands of dollars in prison costs and helps turn Johnny into a productive citizen who pays taxes to support local schools and fire fighters.  But the report also attempts to highlight nonprofit contributions that are a little harder to quantify—strengthening community, improving the quality of life, stimulating reform.

I understand the need for arguments like these, but I also worry about their impact on audiences that have a limited understanding of the civilizing effects of the nonprofit sector.

What’s the ROI, for example, on a provocative question that interrupts, if only for a little while, our relentless consumerism and reminds us of what we once aspired to become?  And where do we learn to distinguish between those cases in which metrics apply and those in which social goods are less susceptible to measurement? 

It used to be that notions like “well-roundedness” and “good citizenship” figured prominently in arguments for maintaining the quality of a good public education.  Now it’s mostly about the dreary but important business of building a better workforce.

What do we lose when we attempt to convert every currency to a single coin?  What kind of creature is it that looks for a return on investment first, and for other values only if it must?

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Albert Ruesga is vice president for programs and communications at the Meyer Foundation in Washington, DC.  He blogs on nonprofits and civil society at the White Courtesy Telephone.

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“In the 21st century, the march isn’t the vehicle”

The new leader of the L.A. office of a venerable civil rights organization made this comment in a recent planning interview that two colleagues and I were fortunate to conduct.  Several other civil rights and public interest advocates that we’ve interviewed have made similar comments (including the observation that in L.A., marches are also dangerous to participants). So what are the new pathways for involving large numbers of people in social movements? 

The gentleman quoted above noted that we have yet to use technology to tailor mobilization efforts to how people increasingly live and work.  He went on to suggest that advocacy organizations should investigate how they might engage people through their cell phones. 

Skepticism is natural, of course–how many times have we heard how technology is going to change the world?  But there are some compelling facts to support a focus on cell phones. The sheer numbers argue that cell phones will be the predominant means of access to the Web for the vast majority of people in the U.S., and the world. As Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC (1993-1997), recently wrote on the TPMCafe blog, we are in the midst of the largest and fastest expansion of communications capacity in history: Within the next 10 years, the world will reach nearly 3 billion cell phone users. China already has 500 million subscribers and expects to double that number within a decade. 

Their affordability and diffusion give cell phones the most promise for accommodating how people live in this age, and especially perhaps, for involving people of modest means.  In the U.S., it is common for low and moderate income families to hold down two or three jobs, despite the fact that we’ve seen a large and steady increase in work hours over the past three decades. When it comes to being involved in their children’s lives or in their communities, time is at a high premium for these families. As energetic and refreshing as “netroots” are, participants in MoveOn.org and other forums are fairly elite—well educated and relatively well off. Outside the industrialized economies, low incomes and poor infrastructure mean it’s very difficult for people to focus on issues beyond survival, such as education or participating in democracy.

“Design for the Other 90 Percent,” a recent exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City, makes a powerful connection between those two goals and the availability of affordable and relevant technology.  Paul Polak, founder of International Design Enterprises, (two of whose designs are featured in the exhibit) promotes the concept of a “trinity of affordable design”—cost, expandability, and miniaturization— which squarely fits the pattern of cell phone advancements.

The growth of this potential power can be helped or hindered by policy, of course. Americans lag well behind Europeans and Asians in the use of wireless access to the Internet, and this is in large part because the status quo is profitable for cell companies, as Paul Krugman recently pointed out in The New York Times. This distortion has moved Google to make a $4.6 billion bid in an upcoming FCC auction of wireless spectrum, just to try to open it up. Apple may also make a bid, if for no other reason than to allow the I-phone to spread as widely beyond AT&T as possible.

But this is not just a commercial issue.  Not only are we spending more money for inferior service, but we are falling behind in developing our skills for this tool.  This is a drag on efforts to get more Americans to participate in civic life—in local community activities, in supporting charitable causes locally and globally, and in elections. 

Riding from JFK into Manhattan last week, the cab driver, who I believe was from Africa and has a son serving in the U.S. military, cursed the Iraq War disaster and painfully lamented that the breadth and depth of opposition to it are masked by the way T.V. and print media cover the War.  He said that the media prevents people in the U.S. from “seeing” and showing their feelings about the War. 

To involve people today in mass social movements, we may need to find a way to use cell phones to do the equivalent of the Chileans’ pot-banging in protest of Pinochet, or the cries of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” from the film Network.

This will require some very creative social innovation. Any ideas?

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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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It walks and quacks like a duck—but what is it really?

My daughter thinks ducks are cool.  You know how kids are.  Now, there’s no way I’m getting her a pet duck.  But I can “buy” a duck for someone who could really benefit from owning a duck and have a card sent to my daughter saying so.  That’s almost as good as a pet duck in her eyes—and way better than one in mine.

Gift catalogs that let donors do that kind of thing have exploded in the past few years.  No wonder:  They’re fun, useful, and donor centered.  They let donors give very narrowly to fund things they like for reasons of their own.

Or do they?

A quick look at some of the leading catalogs shows that most have disclaimers about what donors’ gifts actually do.  Here’s a typical disclaimer, the one used by Heifer International:

Each purchase from this catalog represents a contribution to the entire mission of Heifer International. Donations will be used where needed most to help struggling people.

In other words, if I buy a duck from Heifer (or many other catalogs that make similar disclaimers), I’m not buying a duck.  I guess I’m okay with that.  But my daughter would be less than pleased to learn that her duck was only a “duck"—a symbolic creature.  And I wonder how other donors would feel. 

There’s another type of disclaimer that handles the issue differently.  Here’s the disclaimer used by World Vision:

Please note that your donations go directly to their stated use, unless an item has already been fully funded or the minimum number of shares (where applicable) has not been purchased. In such cases, funds will be allocated to areas of similar need.

If I’m reading it right, World Vision says if I buy a duck, I might be buying a duck, unless too many other people already bought ducks—in which case I’ll get something not too terribly unlike a duck.  That feels a little better, doesn’t it?  It might even pass the daughter test.

If you’re going to launch a giving program like this—and it’s worth at least considering—you should ask yourself these questions about what you offer and how you offer it:

• Is it scrupulously true?
  
• Does it honor donors’ wishes?
  
• Are you prepared for “too much” success?
  
• Can you proudly explain it to your kids?
  

Done right, these catalogs are donor-powered dynamos.  Done wrong, they’re ethically questionable—and trouble waiting to happen.

Image source: stock.xchng

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Nonprofits Shouldn’t Be Silenced in 2008 Campaign

I couldn’t agree more with Robert Egger’s call in The Chronicle of Philanthropy for nonprofits to challenge the prohibition of their involvement in politics: “the nonprofit world cannot allow the country’s future to be determined by a political process in which it has no role.”

In this election, in which the candidates are already heatedly debating complex issues such as universal health care, global warming, gay marriage, poverty, and farm subsidies, nonprofits need to weigh in.  There’s a lot of confusion among the public as to which candidate’s policies are better.  Nonprofits, who are battling these issues on the front lines every day, who are witness to which policies have failed and which policies have worked in the past, can help voters make critical decisions. 

I’ve seen some of the democratic debates but I am still undecided, and I would love to hear from nonprofits that I trust on these issues.  I’d love to hear what my local organic food co-op thinks about farm subsidies, or what the local homeless shelter thinks about John Edwards’ universal health policy.  I’d love to hear from my local Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, which has been working on peace issues since the 1960s, about which candidate has the better foreign policy on the Middle East. 

The current rule makes no sense. It was established in 1954 when Senator Lyndon B. Johnson sought a legislative route to silence some of his anticommunist critics. The U.S. Senate then passed a major tax code revision which, in effect, made the IRS the speech police.

“When the Internal Revenue Service was established, it had one purpose—to collect revenue for the general treasury,” writes Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article. “Over the past 50 years, that role has expanded and, to the chagrin of many people of faith, the IRS has become the “speech police"—holding a heavy hand over non-profit organizations, including churches, and threatening to remove their tax-exempt status if they participate in political activity....The law is flawed, misplaced and a disaster.”

Nonprofits should have every right to talk about the moral and political issues of the day, especially during political campaigns when they can affect the vote. (Of course, they would still need to abide by the current campaign finance laws that restrict donations to national political parties.) I just don’t see why nonprofits shouldn’t have the constitutional right to support or criticize politicians based on where the politicians stand on the issues. What do you think? 

Image source: stock.xchng

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

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