A Big Foundation Seeks to Make a Greater Impact by Narrowing Its Focus

The board of the Public Welfare Foundation, one of the nation’s biggest supporters of grass-roots advocacy groups, voted in mid-October to tighten its grant making to focus on three key causes, in the hope that it can achieve more than it has by sprinkling $20-million annually on a broad array of organizations. The decision has been hailed by charities that will get new support, but many groups that had long counted on Public Welfare to pay their operating expenses say they will be forced to make cutbacks because of the foundation’s move.

Starting next year, Public Welfare, whose headquarters are in Washington, will make grants only to advocacy and grass-roots organizations that press for:

• Changes in the health-care system to benefit poor people and those who lack insurance.

• Improvements in the lot of low-wage workers.

• Changes in criminal- and juvenile-justice policy.

For the last decade or more, Public Welfare — one of the nation’s 150 wealthiest foundations, with assets of $500-million — has also made grants to small and medium-size groups that have advocated for civic participation, community development, environmental justice, and rights for welfare recipients in the United States, as well as human rights and reproductive and sexual health abroad. This year, grants to those organizations totaled more than $11-million.

But the foundation’s board members and its president, Deborah Leff, worried that Public Welfare’s grant making had become too diffuse. As they conducted the executive search that led to Ms. Leff’s appointment in the summer of 2006, the foundation’s 11 board members asked applicants what they would do to increase the foundation’s effectiveness. They discovered that several board members’ observations on the foundation’s shortcomings jibed with Ms. Leff’s vision for Public Welfare.

“Essentially, we’ve been the type of miscellaneous foundation that would make grants to any group that had a strong program for advocacy,” says Peter B. Edelman, a board member. “That’s self-indulgent.”

Under its previous president, Larry Kressley, who decided to step down last year after 15 years with the foundation, Public Welfare made as many as 400 grants annually. Although many board members say they approved of Mr. Kressley’s work, they believed that his departure one year ago afforded the foundation an opportunity to change.

“We took a hard look at what we were doing and found that there were too many policy areas and no synergy between them,” says Mr. Edelman. “There was too little shared strategy among the different types of grantees. We needed to find a way to have a greater impact.”

Wasted Effort

The foundation has long been a popular spot for grass-roots advocacy groups to apply for hard-to-find support with which to run their day-to-day operations, such as paying rent and salaries. Public Welfare has often received as many as 4,000 applications for grants in a year. Typically, less than 10 percent of the organizations that sought money received grants.

“We think that large number of applicants was due to the fact that people were often unclear on what we did,” says Ms. Leff, who joined Public Welfare after serving as president of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. Previously, she had served as president of the Joyce Foundation, in Chicago. “Groups were wasting hours of time putting together applications that weren’t going to be funded.”

For some groups, the changed approach at Public Welfare could signal a new era of support for efforts to help workers.

Public Welfare plans to support groups that aim to strengthen existing laws and press policy makers to create new ones to protect farmworkers and other low-wage employees, Ms. Leff says. Groups that advocate for public policies that extend benefits to a larger number of the nation’s workers will also be considered for grants.

Some leaders of workers’-rights groups, who have struggled to find regular foundation support, say that Public Welfare’s new emphasis in that area is welcome. Several grant makers, including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York, have made small grants to workers’-rights groups in recent years, but operating dollars have been hard to come by, they say.

Mary Beth Maxwell, executive director of American Rights at Work, a group in Washington that advocates for the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively, says Public Welfare’s decision to focus on the well-being of low-wage employees may help galvanize an emerging trend among foundations toward considering the well-being of employees.

“I expect we will see more of it,” says Ms. Maxwell. “There is momentum building in the public-policy and civil-society communities for this. We are excited about the Public Welfare Foundation’s decision to set workers’ rights as a primary giving priority and hopeful that its forward-thinking action will serve as a catalyst for more foundations to make workers’ rights a central grant-making area.”

She adds that the group is investigating whether it might fit in with Public Welfare’s new plans well enough to apply for a grant.

Big Loss

Groups that will no longer be able to count on Public Welfare grants are less sanguine.

To prepare organizations that no longer fit into its grant-making plans, Public Welfare mailed letters to groups in July to notify them that the grant-making programs that supported them will be eliminated.

Public Welfare supported more than 40 groups in the past year that work to organize people on environmental issues or provide legal support for local environmental causes.

Leaders of several of those groups say they are reeling because of the withdrawal of support that made up a substantial amount of their annual budgets. (The foundation awarded $2.5-million in grants to environmental groups this year, with grant amounts ranging from $25,000 to $90,000 annually.)

Some groups say they are puzzled by the foundation’s decision to cut them off.

Alyssa Schuren, executive director of the Toxics Action Center, in Boston, which rallies residents around local pollution issues in New England, says that her group, which has received $45,000 annually for the past five years from Public Welfare, will get another grant for that amount in 2008. Still, she said the fact that that is the last Public Welfare grant it will get means that the group will probably have to cut one of its nine positions to make ends meet. Its annual budget is $450,000.

While grant makers beyond Public Welfare have shown more interest in environmental causes in recent years, she says, “that hasn’t translated into more foundation support for environmental-justice organizing.” She adds: “There seems to be more money for policy advocacy, but we haven’t seen an increase at the grass-roots level, where the movements were formed. I question why Public Welfare would want to stall the momentum they helped to get rolling now when, after years of hard work, groups like ours are seeing things come to fruition.”

Toxics Action Center and other groups, such as Amigos Bravos: Friends of the Wild Rivers, a group in Taos, N.M., that seeks to protect and restore New Mexico’s waterways, say they will work harder to win over individuals to their causes, as well as investigate other possibilities for foundation grants to replace Public Welfare money.

Amigos Bravos will also eliminate a position — it currently has a staff of seven — in order to balance its $600,000 budget, says Brian Shields, the group’s executive director.

Amigos Bravos has received $50,000 during each of the past five years from Public Welfare.

“They’ve been our largest supporter in terms of unrestricted grant dollars — by far,” says Mr. Shields. “It’s the most prized grant there is in this business. It gives us the flexibility to really go after polluters. But we’ve gotten used to it. We lose a foundation every couple of years.”

His group, which does organizing work and provides training for other local environmental groups, has already been strapped because of the high cost of gasoline — a huge expense for a small organization that covers an entire large state.

Because so little money is available from foundations for grass-roots groups, organizations should do more than try to tap other foundations’ environmental programs when they search for replacement money, says Craig E. Williams, executive director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, in Berea, Ky.

“After I learned that Public Welfare was thinking of ending our funding, and that they were going to be making grants for criminal justice, I sent them back an e-mail that said, ‘It’s a good thing we deal with the criminality of spewing toxins into the environment,’” says Mr. Williams, whose group works to make sure that weapons stockpiled by the U.S. military are properly handled, stored, and disposed of, and organizes residents to battle against pollution from those weapons. “The person I sent it to said, ‘Thanks for the laugh.’ But there are ways to package yourself legitimately — it’s not chicanery — so that you can get a foundation’s interest. Sometimes, you’re forced to change who you are to get grants. For example, instead of using the term ‘environmental justice,’ you might say ‘toxics reduction’ to get a funder’s attention.”

Mr. Williams is pondering whether Chemical Weapons Working Group’s advocacy aimed at protecting whistle-blowers who report pollution violations might fit in with Public Welfare’s workers’-rights program. If that doesn’t work, his group will have a good bit of ground to make up: Grants from Public Welfare, which has supported the group for 10 years, account for nearly 25 percent of its $185,000 annual budget.

Dealing With a Change

Because many groups rely so heavily upon Public Welfare grants, the foundation will do what it can to provide as many as possible over the next two years, says Ms. Leff. “These groups do good work. We want them to have a smooth transition.”

The number of final grants that will be distributed hasn’t been determined, she adds.

Although Public Welfare is trying to avoid an abrupt cutoff of funds, some observers are troubled by how the foundation has undertaken the major shift in its grant-making strategies, and how foundations in general are emphasizing measurable results over the long, slow work of community organizing. The hard-won successes of grass-roots groups aren’t so easy to measure, they say.

Terry Odendahl, president of the New Mexico Association of Grantmakers, in Santa Fe, says that small groups in states with little philanthropy have come to count on support from national foundations, including Public Welfare.

“I worry about where something like this leaves small groups. The foundation’s theory of change seems to have completely turned over once they hired a new executive. You see it all the time in the foundation world, but that doesn’t make it right,” says Ms. Odendahl.

Several current and former Public Welfare staff members privately say that they worry that small groups may be losing their voice within the foundation, and that Ms. Leff was more likely to heed policy makers than grantees or program officers while planning for Public Welfare’s future.

Ms. Leff says she is surprised by the criticism. Public Welfare’s program officers wrote papers on their work for the board and many grantees were consulted during the process of making a strategic plan, she says.

“It’s not like we’re changing the way we work or the types of advocacy and grass-roots groups we’ve always worked with,” she says.