An Activist Takes On Foundations

Grass-roots organizer will lead a philanthropy-watchdog group

Aaron Dorfman was a sophomore at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minn., when he first thought about a career in activism.

Mr. Dorfman told his political-science professor he would like to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a schoolteacher, albeit one that taught poor kids in the inner city.

The professor challenged him: “‘What if Congress cuts the school-lunch program and the kids are too hungry to learn?’” Mr. Dorfman remembers. “‘How can you change their ability to learn if you don’t change the system? If you mean everything you say in this class, you should become a community organizer.’”

The impressionable student heeded the pointed advice and has devoted his life to lobbying on behalf of the disenfranchised. Now, after a 15-year career leading organizing efforts for groups in Minneapolis and Miami, Mr. Dorfman, 36, is taking his skills to Washington, just as his Carleton professor and mentor, Paul Wellstone, did when he became a U. S. senator from Minnesota.

Mr. Dorfman last month took over as executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group that encourages grant makers and other organizations to work toward social justice and conducts research to discover how grant making and public policy affect groups that serve the needy.

He succeeds Rick Cohen, who stepped down in September after seven years of leading the organization.

Rallying Miami’s Neediest Residents

Mr. Dorfman, who will make $85,000 in his new role, was the executive director of People Acting for Community Together — more commonly known by its acronym, PACT — a coalition made up primarily of churches that mounts campaigns designed to help people in Miami’s low- and middle-income neighborhoods.

He had joined the group in 1997 after serving as chief organizer for the Minneapolis chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Mr. Dorfman was hired largely because of his experience as a leader of grass-roots groups, according to board members of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

“We’ve always wanted NCRP to be more than an academic institution,” says David R. Jones, who chairs the board of the watchdog group. “We wanted someone who could identify with a lot of the groups we work for.”

Mr. Jones, president of the Community Service Society, a New York organization that provides social services to the needy and advocates on their behalf, says the board was especially impressed with Mr. Dorfman’s achievements at PACT.

Members of that group credit him with stepping up the organization’s fund raising, particularly among foundations, and increasing the group’s budget from $85,000 in 1997 to $500,000 this year.

By broadening both PACT’s membership and the types of causes it takes on, and bringing people of disparate classes, religions, and ethnicities together to work toward changing the conditions they live in, he put the group in a position to persuade the Miami-Dade County government to finance programs to improve conditions in the county’s poorest neighborhoods.

Reading Program

During Mr. Dorfman’s tenure, the organization took the lead in several successful campaigns, including ones that resulted in the introduction of an intensive reading program into Miami’s public elementary schools and led City Hall to start the process of doubling the size of the city’s bus fleet — a lifeline to workers of modest means.

Mr. Dorfman says he was drawn to the PACT job because “I wanted to be in the worst city with the biggest need.”

Although much of Miami-Dade County is wealthy, with upscale areas like Fisher Island and South Beach serving as the area’s pleasant, suntanned face, many of the 375,000 residents of Miami are needy. The city is the third-poorest large city in the country.

Downtown, among waving palms and whizzing traffic, PACT’s office sits on the edge of a street grid dotted with abandoned buildings and across from a vacant lot, the site of a former bank that has been torn down to make way for luxury condominiums.

High-rise condos under construction dominate the horizon to the east.

“It’s the first step toward gentrification,” Wilfredo B. Bolivar, a PACT organizer and one of the candidates to replace Mr. Dorfman as executive director, says of the vacant lot, where homeless people sleep.

Mr. Bolivar adds that housing is becoming so large a problem that PACT has begun a campaign to help the half of Miami’s population that cannot afford decent homes.

PACT is asking the city to pass an ordinance that would create a $200-million pool to help people displaced by development pay their rent.

As he rides around the rundown neighborhoods of Allapatah, Liberty City, and Overtown, Mr. Bolivar points out corners troubled by drugs, prostitution, and violence.

“Many of our churches start their own drives to deal with the most local of issues,” Mr. Bolivar says. “But for us, the idea is to gather them all for strength so we can change the conditions they have in common.”

The group’s success, he says, is the result of the diversity of people who are under its umbrella.

“We include a lot of the groups in the city in what we do,” Mr. Bolivar says. “It’s rare that Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Muslims mix. But here we can fight things together, then celebrate together when we win.”

39 Organizations Unite

Formed in 1988 by a Catholic priest who thought local government officials weren’t doing enough to help people in his neighborhood, PACT has grown considerably since Mr. Dorfman took over 10 years ago.

In 1997, its membership comprised about two dozen churches with 25,000 parishioners; today it has 39 churches and other groups as members, and says those organizations represent 100,000 individuals.

Mr. Dorfman, whose mother is a Presbyterian minister and whose father is Jewish, brings different people together naturally, says the Rev. Préval Floréal, pastor at Grace Haitian United Methodist Church, in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.

Pastor Floréal’s church joined PACT shortly after Mr. Dorfman moved to town.

“He’s been a godsend,” says Pastor Floréal. “I don’t know how to describe the potential God gave him. When he and his people came to visit me, I was skeptical. But after the second visit, they were telling me how my church and my 450 parishioners could join an action of 2,000 to 3,000 people. My reaction was, ‘Wow!’”

The group gathered strength in numbers gradually, church by church, Mr. Dorfman says.

“It’s just good organizing,” he says. “You talk to people, ask them what they’d like to see, then show them how to do it. It’s not rocket science.”

Building Leadership

Each year, the organization gets its members involved in what Mr. Bolivar calls “a listening process,” during which people gather in churches and homes to talk about what issues are the most pressing ones to take on.

As many as 40 to 50 people at each church are typically involved — up to about 1,500 total from all churches and other groups.

PACT also counts six public schools and one housing group among its member organizations.

During meetings of multiple churches, PACT makes sure that its members use three languages — English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole — so everyone can understand what is under discussion.

While discussing an issue, says Mr. Bolivar, PACT members examine it to see if it fits the organization’s four criteria: The issue must unify members of all faiths, be popular among members, be winnable, and provide enough controversy to garner news-media coverage that could help publicize the cause.

Leaders from within PACT help those members devise a solution. Selected by members of PACT, the leaders are then trained in negotiation skills and how best to run meetings, Mr. Dorfman says.

The group steers clear of most litmus tests when picking leaders from the congregations.

“The way to judge if someone is a leader is to see if they have followers or not,” says Mr. Dorfman. “We don’t consider formal education when we select them. We take them where we find them.”

Some of PACT’s leaders say that Mr. Dorfman was instrumental in persuading them to join the cause.

Gloria Whilby, a resident of North Miami Beach, says she joined the group after Mr. Dorfman encouraged her to take a spot on PACT’s education committee, which eventually spearheaded a campaign to get Direct Instruction, an intensive reading program for elementary-school children, into public schools.

Ms. Whilby, an immigrant from Jamaica, says she was appalled several years ago when, as director of Christian education at her church, she found that many of her Sunday-school students couldn’t read.

After she and other PACT members worked to persuade members of the Miami-Dade County school board and other government officials of the need for the reading program, the county allocated $18-million to start Direct Instruction in several troubled schools in 2000 and 2001. Reading scores have improved because of it, Ms. Whilby says.

“Without PACT, I would have just gone on my merry way — volunteering for my church, and that’s about it,” she says. “It empowered people here to say, ‘We can do something about the things we’re complaining about.’ That’s what PACT says: Stop complaining and do something.”

Mr. Bolivar adds that because of successful campaigns such as the one Ms. Whilby helped lead, PACT has clout among elected officials.

“We negotiate with people who have direct decision-making authority,” he says. “They know that there’s no campaign we’ve started that we’ve lost, so we have credibility with them. We know how to exercise power, and they know that.”

Dealing With Power

In his new job, Mr. Dorfman will have to rely heavily on what PACT taught him about advocacy and dealing with powerful people, says Mr. Cohen, his predecessor.

Many of the ideas that the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy advocates are not popular with grant makers, even though they provide support to the institution.

In the past decade, the organization has asked Congress to require foundations to distribute a bigger share of their assets each year in grants (an idea Congress decided not to pass), chided left-leaning foundations for their lack of effectiveness in changing public policy, and repeatedly urged grant makers to provide more support to grass-roots advocacy groups.

This month it issued a report urging grant makers to provide at least half of their contributions in the form of operating support instead of earmarking it all for projects, and included harsh comments from nonprofit leaders about the failure of foundations to help nonprofit groups cover overhead costs. (See article below.)

When the National Committee’s board interviewed Mr. Dorfman, he was asked whether he could stand up to powerful institutions, including its benefactors.

“They asked me if I could bite the hand that feeds us, and I told them I could,” Mr. Dorfman says. “I told them I already had experience with that.”

While at PACT, he says, he sometimes had to stand up to corporate donors that tried to woo the group with cash.

In 1999, when NationsBank bought a local South Florida bank, PACT asked NationsBank to honor the local bank’s pledge to finance the development of billions of dollars’ worth of low-cost housing under the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

“NationsBank said, ‘Just trust us,’” says Mr. Dorfman, but it didn’t fulfill the requirements of the federal housing guidelines. It then sent PACT donation checks totaling $25,000, he says.

“They thought they could buy us off. It was disgusting,” Mr. Dorfman says. “We wouldn’t take their money.” (The merger of NationsBank with Bank of America made it impossible for The Chronicle to interview bank officials.)

Street Credibility

Mr. Cohen, who was lauded by board members for steadying the National Committee’s financial ship, expanding its purview to include a wide range of research, and giving the group a strong voice as a watchdog, says that Mr. Dorfman brings some much-needed street credibility to the group.

“He represents a constituency that NCRP claims to represent. That will help him,” Mr. Cohen adds. “He also brings fresh blood, which is what the organization needs right now.”

Mr. Cohen, who will still provide consulting services to the group, says he stepped down from the top spot “because seven-and-a-half years is enough.”

Some observers wonder whether Mr. Dorfman can keep up the research pace Mr. Cohen set for the organization.

“The real question is will NCRP be able to continue its high quality of research and discourse,” says William A. Schambra, of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. “They lifted themselves up into a new level of research and became less a voice of the liberal left and more of an objective watchdog group.”

He worries that shifting political winds might endanger that approach if Mr. Dorfman isn’t vigilant. “When you see a Democratic Congress and it looks like things are going the liberals’ way, there’s a tendency to return to ideological bromides and revert to old form,” Mr. Schambra says.

Mr. Dorfman says he will work to stay above such concerns.

After a strategic-planning overview that will be completed in September, Mr. Dorfman says he will decide whether groups represented by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy play a strong enough role within the organization, whether the organization’s voice needs to be amplified, and the next research steps it should take. He promises to take a measured approach while running the group.

As for making the transition from PACT and its street-level activism to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the byzantine ways of Washington, Mr. Dorfman says it shouldn’t be that much of a problem.

“There will certainly be less prayer in our meetings,” he says. “But otherwise everything else is translatable.”