May 30, 2011 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Community foundations are often reluctant to step into local controversies because they typically raise money from—and are governed by—a diverse group of affluent and powerful civic leaders in their cities and towns. As a result, not every community foundation is eager to butt heads with teachers’ unions, as the Boston Foundation has done in advocating for more charter schools. (See a profile of the Boston fund.)
Nevertheless, many community funds are increasingly thinking about how far they can go in pushing for change—especially as many of them are finding that rabble-rousing has aided rather than hurt fund raising.
Each January, chief executives of the 20 largest community foundations gather for a retreat. Paul S. Grogan, the Boston Foundation’s president, first attended a decade ago, and he recalls an agenda filled with topics like fund raising, using technology, and competing against the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund.
“I was appalled,” Mr. Grogan says. “There was almost no discussion of community issues.”
This January, the discussion was almost entirely about community issues, particularly education, Mr. Grogan says.
“Raising Money While Raising Hell,” a fall 2009 report by FSG, a Boston-based consulting firm, confronted head-on the reluctance of some community funds to move beyond a neutral role.
“Sometimes what’s required to create change involves ‘raising some hell’—asking the hard questions, surfacing the difficult issues, and taking a stand in the community,” the report says.
Better Fund Raising
It doesn’t hurt that even in these tricky economic times, fund raising has improved for foundations that pursue advocacy.
“Every community-foundation CEO I have discussed this subject with will tell you that courageous leadership will result in growth,” says Steve Gunderson, president of the Council on Foundations. “People see it, and they want to invest in positive change.”
The Baltimore Community Foundation began its advocacy work in 2008, when Tom Wilcox, its president, co-wrote a newspaper opinion article calling on Maryland’s governor to restore cuts he had made to school budgets. The governor eventually restored the money.
More recently, the foundation has opposed a campaign by teachers’ unions to add some elected members to Baltimore’s school board. The board is currently appointed by the mayor and the governor, and the fund believes those two leaders can be held more accountable for education results without the dilutive effect of elected trustees.
“People have told me that our advocacy activities make them more inclined to want to leave us money for our unrestricted, discretionary endowment,” Mr. Wilcox says.
Boston Foundation executives say they know of no donors who have pulled out funds as a result of its more-aggressive advocacy strategy, although one did send a note saying: “I liked the old Boston Foundation better.”
Still, the bottom line seems to have gotten a lift. The Boston foundation started a Civic Leadership Fund in 2002 to help cover the costs of its public-policy and lobbying work and raised $300,000 that year.
‘Armed With Data’
Support has risen steadily ever since. It raised $1.2-million in 2010 and has set a goal of $1.4-million for this year.
The money is raised from a mailing to 2,000 people the foundation thinks might be interested in financing advocacy efforts. (The foundation’s advocacy efforts may also have helped turn Mr. Grogan into a steely negotiator. In April, an arbitration panel ordered a Boston man to pay the foundation more than $29-million to buy out a share in a South Pacific cruise ship that had been donated to the foundation in 2007. The man had offered just $15-million in 2009.)
The Baltimore Community Foundation also raises more than a million dollars a year for its civic-leadership efforts, and the San Diego Foundation and the Central Indiana Community Foundation are starting such funds this year.
Kevin McCall, a Boston real-estate investor, has been a “consistent supporter” of the Boston Foundation’s leadership fund and would like to see the foundation stake out an even more aggressive advocacy position in some areas.
He says the foundation’s reliance on data from its own Boston Indicators Project—an effort to track key statistics about the community—helps build credibility for the advocacy work.
“When you’re armed with data, I think your back is covered a bit there,” Mr. McCall says.
Boston Indicators, headed by Charlotte Kahn, was already part of the foundation when Mr. Grogan arrived a decade ago, but it was tucked away and received little publicity.
“We took it down from the attic and put it in the middle of the room,” he says.
The foundation will probably tap data from Boston Indicators this year as it turns its attention to the state’s community colleges. “There are some really good community-college systems around the country,” says Mary Jo Meisner, vice president for communications. “I would not say that ours is one of them.”
Unsure About Schools
Some community foundations are carefully picking their battles as they begin to put more resources into advocacy.
The San Diego Foundation published a climate-change report that successfully nudged municipalities to create plans to reduce their consumption of carbon.
The foundation also is creating a Center for Civic Engagement, which will try to get local residents involved in another project the foundation is heading—identifying what residents would like the city to look like decades from now.
Education Challenges
One obvious challenge, says Bob Kelly, the foundation’s president, will be education: How can San Diego better prepare children for college and the jobs that the area’s biotechnology industry is creating?
But on improving the schools—arguably a more controversial area than planning for the city’s future or even global warming—it is not yet clear how, or if, the foundation will have a role.
“Our board, our volunteers, and our staff are nervous,” Mr. Kelly says. “They want to be careful. They’re apprehensive about moving down this path.”
Cultural Considerations
The Central Indiana Community Foundation has led efforts to create an eight-mile greenway through Indianapolis and to bring Grameen America, a microlender, to the city.
But the foundation’s board has six members who are appointed by political leaders, as spelled out in a 1916 trust document.
The presence of board members appointed by both Democrats and Republicans has inhibited any lobbying over public-policy issues, thanks to “inherent differences of opinion about how to move forward,” says Brian Payne, the foundation’s president.
“The culture of our foundation in the past has not been to engage like that,” Mr. Payne says. “We’re reconsidering it. But it’s a slow, thoughtful process.”
