November 28, 2016 | Read Time: 6 minutes
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog that focuses on poverty and inequality, said Monday that it has acquired Bolder Giving, a nonprofit that encourages the wealthy to donate and is best known for helping to inspire the Giving Pledge.
The merger means that an organization that for decades sought to influence how foundations disburse grants will now also work to influence charitable giving by individuals.
Aaron Dorfman, president of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, said he pursued the deal because many rich people are opting to give through donor-advised funds, limited-liability corporations, or other vehicles rather than establishing private foundations.
Bolder Giving’s finances may have spurred the deal along: On its most recently available Internal Revenue Service filing, which covers July 2014 to June 2015, the nonprofit reported minus $1,658 in net assets.
The acquisition did not include a cash payment and is subject to approval by Massachusetts charity regulators because Bolder Giving, while headquartered in New York City, is a project of the Zing Foundation of Arlington, Mass. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy is covering $11,000 in legal costs for Bolder Giving related to its dissolution.
Emboldening Social Movements
The National Committee said its absorption of Bolder Giving is part of a broader 10-year plan to mobilize progressive social movements. During the next decade, it plans to push institutional philanthropies to support movements in 12 subject areas, steer individual donors to progressive causes, and court support from nonprofits in addition to the more than 100 foundations that currently provide it with grants.
The strategy, designed to coincide with the committee’s 40th anniversary, has been in the works for more than a year, but Mr. Dorfman said it has taken on new urgency with the election of Donald Trump. The president-elect has proposed cuts in domestic-spending programs, and the rhetoric on immigrants, Muslims, and other minorities that accompanied his rise to the White House generated fears among civil-rights advocates that he will be blind to their cause.
Building movements by supporting community organizing, advocacy, and litigation “will be a crucial part of how we both defend against the worst instincts of the Trump administration and secure progress on a range of issues,” Mr. Dorfman said. “Funding movements is absolutely essential for preventing bad things from happening in the next few years and for laying the groundwork for positive change.”
Such movements can achieve tangible results, Mr. Dorfman said, citing the push for same-sex marriage. To support them, the committee’s staff will seek to build relationships with nonprofit and community leaders in 12 areas, among them economic equity, immigrants’ rights, and the arts.
Key Benchmarks
The committee has set goals for foundations to help social movements. An analysis of Foundation Center data that the committee released today found that 124 of the 1,000 largest foundations devoted at least half of their grants to underserved communities in 2013. Mr. Dorfman would like to see twice as many grant makers exceed that threshold. He’s also calling for foundations to bump the share of grant funds going to general operating support for groups in underserved communities from 18 percent to 30 percent in the next decade.
While foundations have moved to increase general operating support and focus on economic and racial inequality in recent years, the committee sees a need for more action.
“The pace of change is really quite slow,” said Mr. Dorfman.
The committee will also press foundations to provide more data on diversity within their own ranks, including information on LGBT staff members and employees and leaders with disabilities. In addition, the committee will attempt to measure giving by wealthy individuals to social-justice movements and set giving goals in the future.
By reaching out to wealthy donors and to nonprofits for help, Mr. Dorfman would like to double the committee’s annual revenue to $4 million over the next 10 years.
He and his colleagues are not alone in their thinking. In the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, some foundations are making deliberate shifts to support social movements. For instance, the San Francisco Foundation, which announced in July that it would focus solely on achieving racial and economic equity in its region, last week launched a “rapid response fund” for movement building.
The fund will provide small grants — between $3,000 and $15,000 — to Bay Area groups that support people of color, low-income residents, the LGBT community, and immigrants. The goal is a quick turnaround: Winning applicants will get payments within 30 days of applying for support.
“The election brought the need for our equity agenda to higher relief,” the foundation’s president, Fred Blackwell, wrote in a blog post announcing the fund. “We want to ensure that those who are most impacted by emerging issues and challenges have the resources they need to respond in a timely and effective manner.”
Inspiring Big Donors
In addition to showing Bolder Giving in the red, the nonprofit’s most recently available Form 990 lists compensation for its former chief executive, Jason Franklin, as $140,478. Grants from the organization that year totaled about $284,000. Mr. Franklin left Bolder Giving in mid-2015, when he was named W.K. Kellogg Chair at Grand Valley State University’s Johnson Center for Philanthropy. In February 2016, the nonprofit laid off its staff.
Bolder Giving was created in 2007 by philanthropists and authors Anne and Christopher Ellinger, and its core mission has been to publish inspirational stories of major donors online as a way to move others to give. Bolder Giving has posted 180 such stories on its website, in which philanthropists explain why giving is important to them.
The personal examples are widely credited with inspiring Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to start the Giving Pledge, a commitment signed by more than 150 ultra-wealthy people and families to give the majority of their fortunes to charity before they die. In 2010, the Gates Foundation gave Bolder Giving a $675,000 grant.
Jill Warren, a member of Bolder Giving’s Board of Trustees, says she doesn’t know how much donors were inspired by the site to gave to charity, but she is certain the stories unlocked more generosity.
“Can you measure that? Not really,” she said. “But billionaires setting up a Giving Pledge is a pretty awesome thing.”
Bolder Giving’s new parent organization has long taken a more provocative approach to generating giving, nudging foundations to invest more in progressive causes and calling out by name grant makers the National Committee believes have veered off course.
Mr. Dorfman contends that in so doing his group is being a “critical friend” to foundations, but it has rankled some grant makers. In 2009, one foundation executive called the committee’s work “breathtakingly arrogant,” and another rescinded funding. Despite the criticism, the organization has produced a steady stream of reports, done with the cooperation of the foundations being scrutinized, that provide insight into grant makers’ priorities and relationships with grantees.
Mr. Dorfman conceded that it might be difficult to play the same role with individual donors.
“Living donors are highly invested in what they’re doing,” he said. “Having some critique of that work may be challenging for them. But they want to get it right.”
