Grant Makers Told to Use Money and Influence to Fight Global Terrorism

Foundations should use their influence and money to counteract the harmful effects of other institutions and people who wield power, Benjamin R. Barber, professor of civil-society studies at the University of Maryland, told grant makers gathered at the Council on Foundations’ 53rd annual conference, held here.

“For better or worse, foundations represent power,” Mr. Barber said. “You are a significant counterweight in a world where power is being used for ill.” Foundation leadership should become more vocal, to make sure the interests of the needy are heard, he said.

Mr. Barber, author of Jihad vs. McWorld, a 1995 bestseller that examined the culture clash between poor Muslim countries and well-heeled Western ones, also exhorted grant makers to step up the pace of giving to reduce the poverty and sense of powerlessness that can create terrorists. “If you don’t educate the children, the Taliban will,” he said.

Mr. Barber offered a wide range of areas in which foundations could have influence — not all related to fighting terrorism. He urged foundations to forestall what he termed “the ruination of the arts” by doing more to fill gaps left by cuts in government arts funds.

Corporations and international-trade organizations — what Mr. Barber described as “the powers behind globalization that work in the interstices between nation-states” — will move with deliberate speed to remake the world in their image, he said. If foundations don’t make use of their ability to exert influence, “the other powers will win out,” he said.

The Council on Foundations’ conference — titled “Opportunity and Uncertainty: Choices for Philanthropy” — focused in large part on the potential role grant makers can play in easing the pains that accompany a global economy. Speakers talked about how grant makers can foster democracy and human rights here and abroad.

In the United States, philanthropy can do much to spur President Bush’s desire for increased volunteerism, said members of a panel that included Dorothy S. Ridings, president of the Council on Foundations, and Leslie Lenkowsky, chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees federal money for volunteer programs.

President Bush “has opened the door” for foundations and corporations to encourage community service through his efforts to expand subsidized volunteer programs, such as AmeriCorps and the Senior Service Corps, said Ms. Ridings. But now, she said, foundations must ask themselves, “How do we translate the vision he has into action?”

Mr. Lenkowsky suggested that foundations help spur volunteerism by:

• Giving money to nonprofit groups to cover increased costs associated with managing new volunteers.
• Putting pressure on the colleges and universities they support to increase the percentage of students who perform national service in exchange for government work-study money.
• Encouraging grant recipients who seek to improve local schools to include national service in their proposed curriculums. Currently, 75 percent of incoming freshmen arrive at college having volunteered less than three and a half hours weekly the previous year, Mr. Lenkowsky said. Membership in AmeriCorps requires a commitment from young people of 20 to 40 hours a week spent helping nonprofit groups.

Mr. Lenkowsky also criticized foundations and other nonprofit groups for “undervaluing” the contributions of volunteers by concentrating the lion’s share of their attention on improving the effectiveness of paid staff members.

Nonprofit groups have “professionalized too much,” Mr. Lenkowsky said. “We’re neglecting the role of the engaged citizen who volunteers.”

During the session, Mr. Lenkowsky and another panel member, Paul Glastris, editor of The Washington Monthly magazine, disagreed over whether the federal government should draft young people into community service.

Mr. Glastris espoused the idea of mandatory national service for those graduating from high school. “What we need is an 18-to-24-month service period that would be followed by a GI Bill-type package of benefits, which would promise volunteers an education,” he said.

Mr. Lenkowsky countered that studies show that “drafts” into national service would be enormously unpopular. “It’s likely to be such a divisive issue that it might hurt all the good feelings we’ve seen for volunteerism,” he said.

Some conference presenters used the meeting to call attention to recent economic struggles in rural areas.

A session of the Rural Funders Working Group, a coalition of foundations that aid people in struggling small towns and counties, reported on the loss of tobacco farms and textile factories in the South, the disappearance of logging jobs in the West, and continuing troubles for family farms in the Midwest.

Patrick Murphy, a program officer at the Northwest Area Foundation, in St. Paul, said many parts of the eight states his foundation serves suffer from “emotional isolation.”

He urged foundations to step up efforts to improve these towns, citing such concerns as “knowledge flight,” which leaves many poor towns bereft of future leaders.

Others who attended the meeting said foundations can make a difference with grants to small towns that may be overly reliant on a single industry.

For example, the Ford Foundation, in New York, has made grants designed to help logging workers in northern California towns who have lost jobs because Canadian logging companies charge lower prices than their American counterparts, said Peter Pennekamp, administrator of the Humboldt Area Foundation, in Bayside, Calif.

But sometimes rural towns raise their own money — even when they’re seemingly devoid of wealth.

In Trinity County, one of the poorest counties in California, residents four years ago formed the Trinity Trust to help children obtain food, health care, and scholarships, Mr. Pennekamp said. So far, they have raised $4-million.

“Don’t underestimate the impact we can have in these small towns, or what some people in these areas can do for themselves,” Mr. Pennekamp said.

Some people attending the session said they would like to see more grants go toward developing leaders and providing incentives for them to stay in their hometowns.

Others touted the value of challenge grants made by foundations to help prod individual donors to give more. Such grants are important not only because they increase an organization’s fund-raising potential, but also because they flush out donors in areas where they might otherwise be hard to find, said Martin Lehfeldt, president of the Southeastern Council of Foundations, in Atlanta.

Mr. Lehfeldt said studies such as one conducted last year by the Southern Philanthropy Consortium, in Atlanta — “The Philanthropy Index for Small Town and Rural Communities” — aid grant makers in identifying rural areas that have the economic potential for increased charitable giving.

“We’re discovering that there’s a pent-up demand for information like this,” said Mr. Lehfeldt.

The theme of globalization turned controversial during a session about the Global Alliance for Workers and Communities — a three-year-old partnership of corporations, the World Bank, grant makers, and nonprofit organizations.

Audience members questioned whether the alliance’s work constitutes charity or has more to do with improving the image of companies accused of mistreating their workers.

Global Alliance’s mission is to improve the lives of factory workers around the world, as well as to develop partnerships between nonprofit groups, businesses, and governments to help those employees both at work and in their neighborhoods, said William S. Reese, chief operating officer at the International Youth Foundation, in Baltimore, a founding member of the alliance.

The alliance has won support in the past from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago. But nearly $13-million of the initial $14-million raised by the group was donated by the Nike Corporation and Gap Inc., both of which are represented on its board.

“I wonder just how independent the Global Alliance is,” said Larry Kressley, executive director of the Public Welfare Foundation, in Washington.

Some of the 50 or so people at the session questioned whether the alliance should be soliciting money from private foundations for such work.

Foundations should not be responsible for subsidizing a corporation’s relationship with its workers, many of whom may be underpaid or discouraged from forming labor unions, some audience members said. Several people at the session also said that foundations shouldn’t justify sweatshop labor by supporting corporations that use it.

“I have some real questions as to whether this is philanthropy,” said Rick Cohen, president of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog group in Washington.

Representatives from the Gap and Nike defended the Global Alliance’s mission of helping developing countries.

“We only invest in programs workers say are important,” said Maria Eitel, president of the Nike Foundation, in Beaverton, Ore. Nike runs 900 factories in 500 countries, and employs 700,000 workers, she added. Foundation money would guarantee that the alliance makes a larger impact on workers’ lives in the areas of training and community development, Ms. Eitel said.

Advocacy groups working to help the poor and recent immigrants to the United States need to better explain to foundations and others how their work fits under the rubric of “human rights,” and do more to persuade grant makers that rights abuses occur within the United States, said speakers at a session on civil liberties.

Some speakers said such groups could achieve those goals if they worked to get closer to channels of political power. Krishanti Dharmaraj, executive director of WILD for Human Rights, in San Francisco, said her group has had success bringing together politicians with advocates and poor residents as a way of weighing in on California educational laws that may discriminate against ethnic groups.

But others contended that the loosely knit network of rights activists remains too far from those in power.

“The American human-rights movement isn’t a movement with a deep reach into the political system,” said John Shattuck, chief executive of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, in Boston. Mr. Shattuck served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor during the 1990s. “We need to build a movement that is as strong as the civil-rights movement was.”

A stronger movement might convince more grant makers to support human-rights groups, some said.

As an example of recent foundation support for U.S. human-rights work, Gara LaMarche, director of U.S. programs at the Open Society Institute, in New York, said the fund had committed $2.5-million to groups working with those whose rights may have been violated due to the events of September 11.

Meanwhile, some organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union’s New York branch, are offering legal services to those who may have been jailed for crimes they didn’t commit.

Still, Mr. LaMarche said, American advocacy organizations in general have a hard time selling their pitches to most of the nation’s foundations. “Grant seekers who want their calls to foundations returned might do better to say they’re calling from Kosovo,” he said.