Foundations: a Step Behind in the Poverty Fight

While grassroots anti-poverty organizations across the country have been dealing effectively with the twin challenges of welfare reform and the transfer of federal funds to state and local control, most foundations have stayed on the sidelines.

Instead of supporting those efforts — most of which involve organizing, advocacy, and public-policy work — mainstream foundations continue to be reluctant to support such activities, or to provide general operating support so that those organizations can prosper. When grant makers do act, most choose only to pump more money into research.

Yet even without adequate support from foundations, grassroots groups — many of them affiliated with churches — are making impressive gains in building coalitions, influencing legislators, and finding new and innovative ways to provide jobs, day care, and low-cost transportation to those most in need.

Some examples:

* In Minnesota’s Twin Cities, two faith-based community-organizing groups — the St. Paul Ecumenical Alliance of Congregations and Interfaith Action — have spearheaded a coalition of churches, environmental organizations, developers, and government officials that has secured from the state Legislature a $68-million commitment over seven years to clean up some of Minnesota’s 4,000 acres of polluted and abandoned industrial land. In addition to restoring at least 150 acres, those funds, it is estimated, will produce about 2,000 “liveable-wage” jobs, provide an additional $6.2-million in taxes, and generate a substantial amount of private investment.

* In Philadelphia, the non-profit Philadelphia Unemployment Project helped to form and is leading a broad-based coalition to encourage the state General Assembly to create a government-financed jobs program for 10,000 low-income people. The project and its coalition have thus far been successful in persuading Philadelphia’s mayor to create 3,000 jobs for welfare mothers who participate in the city’s welfare-to-work jobs program.

* In Columbus, Ohio, the group Building Responsibility, Equality and Dignity, or BREAD, has focused on the shortage for inner-city residents of transportation to high job-growth areas in the suburbs. The group has worked with city officials to win new bus routes, to expand the hours for others, and to create inner-city transportation centers that provide child care and other services to low-income city residents.

* In Los Angeles, the Alameda Corridor Jobs Coalition — a diverse coalition of neighborhood, community-development, and social-service organizations and churches — recently won a significant agreement from the Alameda Corridor Transportation Project, which is constructing a 20-mile, multibillion-dollar rail-transit system. In addition to providing 1,000 apprenticeship-training slots, the deal stipulates that 30 per cent of the jobs created by the project — 3,500 jobs at wages of $9 to $27 an hour, plus benefits — go to residents of the predominantly minority and poor neighborhoods in the area. The agreement is thought to be the largest of its kind ever won by community organizations.

Those highly effective and successful groups rarely have more than three to five staff members. BREAD, for example, has two full-time staff members and one part-timer. Some organizations are run entirely by volunteers or by part-time employees on loan from other organizations.

The groups are not lean by choice, however. Many of them need and want additional funds to expand their organizing campaigns, increase their memberships, and build coalitions with other organizations. They also require general operating support to stabilize their organizations over time.

Yet most foundations have done little to reshape their priorities to adjust to the new realities brought on by changes in the welfare law and so-called devolution. Paradoxically, even many foundations that claim anti-poverty activities as a priority program area remain unwilling to support the organizing and advocacy that are so crucial to the elimination of poverty. A few, however, are showing the way.

The Campaign for Human Development of the Catholic Church, long a force in this area, is by far the major provider of money for organizing efforts, with grants of more than $8-million a year. Another key player is the Open Society Institute, which recently awarded $2-million to a joint project of three national organizations — the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Center for Community Change, and the Center for Law and Social Policy — to distribute to local grassroots organizations, state coalitions, and state policy centers working on welfare-reform issues. Half of that money needed to be matched by other funds, a process that took more than a year. And then only five of the country’s large or mid-sized foundations — Annie E. Casey, Nathan Cummings, W.K. Kellogg, Charles Stewart Mott, and Public Welfare — contributed any money to that grants pool.

A limited number of small to mid-sized foundations are also giving money for grassroots organizing and public-policy intervention. They include the Butler Family Fund, the Needmor Fund, the French American Charitable Trust, the Veatch Program of the Unitarian Church, the Jewish Fund for Justice, and the Mary Reynolds Babcock, Discount, New World, New York, Norman, and Public Welfare Foundations. Yet the combined total from those funds amounts to only a very modest sum.

To its credit, the Ford Foundation recently announced a $5.3-million program that is providing three-year grants to 11 state collaborations of community groups for organizing, policy analysis, and other work related to welfare changes and devolution. Unfortunately, there is no indication that other major foundations will follow suit.

That is bad news. The recent success of grassroots activism has underlined the vast potential of effective action by low-income constituencies at the state and local levels. If more foundations are not willing to come up with the necessary funds to support those efforts, they will have to bear the responsibility for having failed to strengthen our democracy at a crucial time in its history.

Pablo Eisenberg, vice-chair of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and former executive director of the Center for Community Change, in Washington, is a regular contributor to these pages.