January 9, 2011 | Read Time: 9 minutes
Anyone who looks at the membership in Leadership 18, a network for executives at a select group of large charities, can quickly see that the organization is filled with the heavyweights in the nonprofit world.
What may not be so obvious is that more than half of its 23 member charities were founded roughly 100 years ago. Groups such as the Alliance for Children and Families, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Boy Scouts of America, Catholic Charities USA, and Goodwill Industries International were all founded within a decade of 1911.
A century ago, just as private foundations were beginning to catch on, the creation of new charities experienced a surge every bit as robust as the one under way today. And as the membership of Leadership 18 attests, some of the upstarts from a century ago survived to become the leading organizations of 2011.
These charities are so well known that they are sometimes called “legacy” organizations, as if they inherited a comfortable spot at the top of a nonprofit hierarchy.
But Peter Dobkin Hall, a historian at Baruch College, in New York, notes that these organizations survived—and in many cases thrived—despite a century of challenges and changes that couldn’t have been anticipated when they were founded. In fact, each group outlived scores of contemporaries that didn’t survive.
“When you look at the organizations that existed around 1900 and survived to today, it’s a teensy proportion,” Mr. Hall says. “We’re talking maybe 1 percent.”
These survivors, while huge and well known, are hardly media darlings. Today much of the press goes to relative upstarts like Teach for America, a 20-year-old organization that now works in 39 communities; KaBoom, a 15-year-old charity that builds playgrounds; and Kiva, a five-year-old charity that provides small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.
Many of the century-old organizations aren’t growing as rapidly as newer ones because they have already blanketed the country, largely by allowing inspired followers to start local affiliates.
But some experts believe it’s these older organizations with a broad national footprint that are accomplishing the most.
“Donors and the general public have the sense that the most-effective charitable organizations are the small, nimble organizations that are close to the ground,” says D. Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University. “But when you look at what really moves the dial for the disadvantaged in society, it’s the massive organizations. In this case, bigger really is better.”
Staying Relevant
Other experts say some of the older charities are coasting on reputations built at least a generation ago.
“It’s commendable that these groups have endured for 100 years or more, but that doesn’t also mean that they have continued to be as high-impact as they could be,” says Leslie R. Crutchfield, a senior adviser at FSG Social Impact Advisors, and a co-author of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. “Some of these nonprofits continue to receive support year after year simply because they’re perceived to have shining reputations and they’re known quantities.”
Peter Goldberg, president of the Alliance for Children and Families, a membership association of 350 human-services organizations with a combined budget of nearly $15-billion, says organizations like his have remained relevant by adapting to changing circumstances.
In the past few years, for example, the alliance, which is based in Milwaukee and was founded in 1911, has teamed up with Public Allies, also in Milwaukee, on a pilot program that provides new college graduates with two-year fellowships. The program, called Turning the Tide, is designed to introduce talented young people to careers at human-service organizations. It’s modeled on Teach for America’s successful college-recruiting model.
While Turning the Tide is currently supplying just 20 fellows to five of the alliance’s member organizations, Mr. Goldberg says the program has been a success and that he would eventually like to see all of the alliance’s members take on a combined total of 1,000 fellows or more.
“Large organizations that survive over time demonstrate a certain agility that is generally underappreciated,” says Mr. Goldberg, who is also chairman of Leadership 18. “There’s a perception that big, old organizations are lumbering giants. But just because you’re big doesn’t mean you’re brain dead.”
Old but Innovative
Some older organizations have been leaders in spreading new and innovative programs, or in demonstrating the effectiveness of their programs—two concepts that are more widely associated with the new generation of philanthropists and social entrepreneurs.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of America in the mid 1990s became the first mentoring organization to demonstrate that its programs worked.
At that time, a study conducted by Public/Private Ventures found that mentoring by the charity reduced drug and alcohol use, boosted school attendance, and improved friendships and family relationships. Since 2000 the 106-year-old group has more than doubled, to roughly 245,000, the number of children for which it arranges mentors each year.
Rotary International, founded in Chicago in 1905, began a campaign to eradicate polio worldwide in 1986. The decision to unite around a major world problem was controversial among its members—previously, Rotary chapters had focused on their own local projects. Yet the effort, which now involves many government partners and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has been widely hailed as a success.
While complete eradication of polio has yet to be achieved, the number of people afflicted with the disease has declined more than 99 percent since Rotary began its effort.
Questions About Results
Yet charity experts say there have been relatively few comprehensive, third-party studies of the results produced by charities, including the ones that have been around for a century. Given that void, some experts say that the only test of effectiveness that all of the 100-year-old charities meet is that they’ve managed to raise money through good times and bad.
“People are supporting these organizations,” says Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University. “If you believe in market tests, that means they’re effective. If you want to use external tests of effectiveness, you could raise doubts, but it’s not at all clear what the standard should be for accomplishment.”
While strong name recognition and anecdotal stories may help some 100-year-old charities win financial support today, nonprofits and foundations are working harder to develop tools that do measure results. Long-existing charities that hope to last through a second century would be foolish to ignore the trend, says Ms. Crutchfield.
While Forces for Good looked only at organizations that were founded after 1965, Ms. Crutchfield says she is now beginning to do research on older, established groups, including some that were founded roughly a century ago.
She expects that she will find the same themes that held true in her earlier work—that the most effective groups rigorously measure their progress, work with businesses, advocate for policy change, and empower others to take action.
“These groups can be the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” she says. “If they are not using that gravitas to advocate on behalf of their cause, they’re not using their assets effectively.”
Ms. Crutchfield points to the Girl Scouts (founded in 1912), which has evolved to serve a more diverse set of girls, and the YMCA (founded in 1844, in England), which aggressively advocates for healthier communities and low-cost child-care and afterschool programs, as examples of older charities that she believes are effective.
She views the Boy Scouts as a group that may be hurting its effectiveness—and certainly has lost some corporate and government support—due to policies that prohibit atheists and agnostics from membership and gay people from holding leadership positions. Boy Scouts officials have long maintained that their actions are in keeping with their ideals.
Jeffrey Bradach, co-founder and managing partner of Bridgespan Group, a management consulting firm for nonprofit organizations in Boston, says that century-old service organizations like Rotary and Kiwanis International (founded in 1915) could play an important role in helping innovative programs spread rapidly throughout the country.
“Every day, in thousands of communities, these service organizations are providing forms of civic engagement that we tend not to think about,” Mr. Bradach says. “As we identify programs that work, these groups could provide platforms for impact that could be really significant.”
Rotary, for example, has already helped build two charities that were founded by its own chapters—ShelterBox, a disaster-relief charity, and Gift of Life International, which provides free surgeries to children who suffer from congenital heart defects.
Younger Members
The bigger challenge for service organizations—many of which were founded roughly 100 years ago, during what has been called the “golden age of fraternity”—is whether they can continue to attract members. Rotary, for example, has seen U.S. membership drop 12 percent over the past 15 years, to about 361,000.
Ray Klinginsmith, Rotary’s president, says younger people are not interested in time-consuming lunch meetings or in wearing business attire, which some clubs require. The organization is experimenting with a new generation of clubs, including one in La Jolla, Calif., that meets for an hour after work. The average age of the 37 members in that club is just 31.
“We’re trying different things that are having positive effects,” Mr. Klinginsmith says. “The best days of Rotary are still ahead.”
‘Checkbook Membership’
Some historians bemoan the fact that very few of the 100-year-old membership groups still have the passionate volunteer involvement that they had during their first decades. Now the organizations are run by professionals, who primarily inform their members about issues and ask them for money.
“Today if you want to advocate, you move to a Washington suburb and do a big direct mailing,” says Mr. Hall, the Baruch College historian. “The advocacy organizations, which used to be membership based, are still nominally so, but it is checkbook membership. The average member of the NAACP has no more influence on the organization than does a subscriber to the National Geographic Society’s magazine”
Historians like Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, say that Americans have largely lost interest in joining local associations, a phenomenon that Alexis de Tocqueville captured in 1835 in Democracy in America and that was still present in 1911.
But Mr. Hall notes that Americans may be finding community elsewhere, including through online networks like Facebook and through the Web sites maintained by their favored charities.
Less Need for Chapters
One thing is certain—many fast-growing new charities today are using Internet technology to achieve their missions without building a large network of local chapters, as many charities did a century ago.
KaBoom, the builder of playgrounds, will be directly involved in building about 200 projects this year.
But the group is also indirectly involved in 1,700 new playgrounds, which are being built by local groups that come to the KaBoom Web site for expertise. The local volunteers can download blueprints, find tools for recruiting volunteers, and receive training on project management at KaBoom’s site.
A century ago, KaBoom might have put an office in every state to help coordinate construction projects. Today, a big part of the organization’s $24-million budget is set aside for making its Web platform even more robust.
“I mean no disrespect,” says Jim Hunn, KaBoom’s vice president of mass action, “but we built our ‘going to scale’ strategy almost in counterpoint to what the traditional charities did 100 years ago.”
