What Really Matters About September 11

For America’s charitable organizations, the months since September 11 have so far been alternately a time of celebration over the charitable response and hand-wringing over the potential consequences of this response for the rest of the nonprofit field. But it is now time for charities and foundations to consider, and act on, the broader implications that this cataclysmic event holds for them and those they serve.

First, the response to September 11 provides an object lesson in the perils of “go-it-alone” philanthropy. The misguided terrorists who crashed civilian airliners into unarmed buildings on that fine September morning did not assault a nation lacking the capacity to respond. And that capacity extended well beyond the conventional institutions of government to embrace a largely invisible social infrastructure of private, charitable groups and the impulses to volunteer and give that they have helped to nurture.

While the charitable response was nothing short of remarkable (at least $2.2-billion was raised and two-thirds of American households pitched in), it also provides a reminder of the inherent limitations of voluntary action, on its own, to cope with major social problems and the resulting need for active partnership with government agencies.

Indeed, the fragile systems of charitable action were nearly overwhelmed by the enormity of the September 11 tragedy. Individual nonprofit groups, concerned about their autonomy, initially resisted efforts to coordinate their responses, either with one another or with governmental authorities. Families in need consequently had to navigate a multitude of organizations, each with its own eligibility criteria and specific forms of aid. Inevitably, delays and inequities occurred: Many people fell through the slats, while others benefited from multiple sources of assistance. What’s more, misunderstandings arose between donors and charities over how donations were to be used, yet no effective representation system was in place to adjudicate the disputes.

Charities, it turns out, though highly effective in mobilizing people to act, are far less equipped to structure and organize the resulting response. Very quickly, therefore, the central challenge boiled down to finding a way to mesh the energizing initiative that charities unleashed with the organized response and government involvement that was ultimately needed. What began as an inspiring demonstration of the power of old-fashioned American volunteerism thus quickly became a demonstration of the importance of public-private cooperation instead.

In this, however, the events of September 11 are emblematic of the nonprofit world’s challenge more generally. Although nonprofit groups rightly pride themselves on their independence, it is their independence in mobilizing attention and stimulating action, rather than in carrying out solutions, on which they should truly stake their claims. For the latter, partners are typically needed, and very often government partners have the resources of money, organization, and authority that nonprofit groups sometimes lack. Such collaboration has long characterized the way we have solved our social problems in America, but charity leaders too frequently disavow it in their rhetoric and myths. September 11, properly viewed, should help us set this record straight.

If one lesson of September 11 is the limitation of “go-it-alone” philanthropy, a second is the need to re-energize the social-justice mission of the charitable world. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, our government appropriately responded militarily to those who directly threatened our safety and welfare. However, the real threat to our welfare lies not only in the Al Qaeda thugs committed to doing violence on our shores but also in the deep oceans of despair in which they swam and on which they drew. “Terror,” Martin Luther King once reminded us, “is the last expression of the voice unheard.” But our nation still remains largely deaf to this voice and wedded to a rhetoric of bellicosity instead.

Given its background and mission, the nonprofit world has a special obligation to hearken to this unheard voice, to raise the banner of social justice, and thus to help our nation respond to the rising tide of hopelessness that seems to be engulfing vast segments of the earth’s population.

Sadly, however, the social-justice voice of the charitable world has in some respects grown more faint in recent years.

While charitable giving has grown substantially over the past 30 years, the share of that giving flowing to human services has actually declined, from 12 percent or 13 percent in the early 1970s to less than 9 percent in recent years. And outside of direct September 11 aid, it remained below 9 percent in 2001 as well. Internationally, the record is even more bleak. Official U.S. international aid as a share of gross domestic product has long lagged far behind that of other advanced countries while the share of private giving that goes for international relief and development as well as for all other international causes barely reaches 2 percent. In fact, international aid charities report a drying up of donations for overseas relief.

At a time when our government is rattling the sabers of war as its sole response to September 11, the charitable world could well use this crisis as an occasion to reconnect to its social-justice traditions by pushing for a more balanced response to these horrible events, one that raises the banner of compassion at least as high and that gives greater weight to the imperatives of justice both in our own country and in the world at large. It could well carry this message not only into its own grant-making and service activities, moreover, but into its broader social advocacy role as well.

Finally, September 11 should mobilize America’s nonprofit organizations more forcefully in support of the promising civic stirrings that are evident in significant parts of the Islamic world today, part of a global associational revolution that is giving people organized mechanisms through which to gain some control over their lives.

Egypt alone boasts more than 15,000 nongovernmental organizations, and the number in Morocco is reported to be twice that number. In Pakistan, a rich array of secular social-welfare organizations, like the All Pakistan Women’s Association and the Hilal-e-Ahmer Society, politically affiliated service organizations such as Al-Khidmat, and large foreign-aid-financed organizations like the Orangi Pilot Project and the Aga Khan Rural Support Corporation offer important alternatives to radical religious movements and terror cells as routes to a better life for the rural poor.

To be sure, Islamic history and culture give the resulting voluntary organizations of this region their own distinctive flavor and hue. Yet the potential of those organizations for giving hope to millions trapped in poverty and despair, and for providing tangible meaning to abstract concepts like self-determination, is no less real.

Official United States policy has not been blind to the emergence of voluntary organizations in the Islamic world. But U.S. government support for the nonprofit organizations of this region has been uneven and narrow, and U.S. foundation support, so crucial in Latin America and central Europe, far less in evidence. As a consequence, the potential of voluntary groups to spread their agenda of empowerment and change in this region hangs very much in the balance.

A central message American charities and foundations could well take out of the September 11 disaster is the need to commit themselves to helping move this balance in the civil-society direction.

Over the long run, this may hold far more promise for giving the region’s populations a sense of purpose and participation than switching political leaders at the top or strengthening governmental institutions alone. Besides, in the battle against terror, and the despair on which terror feeds, it may well be less in the art of war than in what de Tocqueville called “the art of associating together” that America’s true comparative advantage may lie.

The time for worrying about the potential impact of September 11 on the flow of charitable resources is now well past for America’s nonprofit institutions. Foundations and nonprofit groups must now turn their attention to strengthening partnerships, promoting social justice, and building global civil society. These hold the real meaning of September 11 for the nonprofit world and those it serves.

Lester M. Salamon is director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, in Baltimore, and co-author of

Global Civil Society (Johns Hopkins) and The State of Nonprofit America (to be released this fall by Brookings Institution Press).