Hip-Hop Philanthropy: Street-Smart Altruism

The Atlanta foundation started by the performer Ludacris brings art, music, and education to children

When Christopher Brian Bridges thinks about the reasons he started his foundation five years ago, he recalls the virtues he learned during his middle-class childhood in Oak Park, Ill.

“I followed the examples of my mother, father, and grandparents,” says Mr. Bridges, 28, better known as the hip-hop artist Ludacris.

“They were not rich in material things, but they were spiritually rich.” Those exemplars helped him see that he has “a sense of responsibility for those less fortunate than myself,” he says.

His altruism led him to start the Ludacris Foundation, in Atlanta, where he now lives. The foundation makes grants totaling about $250,000 per year, most of which goes to arts, education, and music programs designed for children. Mr. Bridges — performer of mega-selling hits, including “Stand Up,” “What’s Your Fantasy” and “Roll Out (My Business),” and actor in films, such as the Oscar-winning Crash — promises to expand the foundation through goodwill and his increasing ability to give.

So far, Mr. Bridges — whose recordings have sold 15 million copies worldwide — has donated almost $500,000 to his organization.

“Now that I have the means to do more, I will,” he says.

But the Ludacris Foundation, and other charities and grant makers that come from the hip-hop world, sometimes find their paths blocked by gloomy perceptions of the music behind the wealth.

Critics of the art form argue that hip-hop songs and videos encourage young people to use foul language, commit violence, and espouse misogyny. Allegations of hypocrisy have dogged performers, who frequently glorify gunplay, then turn around and try to help the sometimes-dangerous neighborhoods where they grew up or now live.

While some organizations started by rap musicians have successfully sought out relationships with charities, corporations, and other grant makers in recent years, hip-hop foundations remain small — a function, some say, of the contradictions inherent in the mix of street toughness and up-from-the-bottom altruism.

Experts add that entertainers in general don’t rake in wealth to the same degree as do more-traditional business moguls and their heirs, so their foundations are likely to remain relatively small.

Most hip-hop foundations make between $100,000 and $400,000 in grants annually.

Some efforts to smooth the edgier side of the genre’s image, such as the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network — an organization in New York that attempts to gather artists and civil-rights and entertainment leaders to work against poverty — have led to conferences on financial empowerment for poor people and social-justice rallies in New York on public education and other issues. Some rap artists’ foundations, including those started by Jay-Z and P. Diddy, have given donations of $1-million or more to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

And rappers have learned how to publicize even small acts of charity: Last year, Mr. Bridges served as the prom date for a disabled high-school girl, as part of a program his foundation operates with the Atlanta branch of United Cerebral Palsy to lift the spirits of people with physical impairments.

The Pepsi Controversy

But even as hip-hop artists publicize their good works and embrace the mainstream (via philanthropy and other ways), they have sometimes had as much success playing a street-wise game of hardball as they have cozying up to potential benefactors.

The Ludacris Foundation is a case in point. When Pepsi hired Mr. Bridges as its advertising spokesman in 2003, it touched off a storm of controversy. Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox Network News’s The O’Reilly Factor, intimated that people should boycott Pepsi because of the sometimes-profane lyrics found in Ludacris’s songs.

Under pressure, Pepsi dropped Mr. Bridges and hired the Osbournes — a white family led by Ozzy Osbourne, the heavy-metal pioneer who then starred in a popular reality show on MTV. The selection of the Osbournes, who are not exactly known for the purity of their language, created a firestorm of its own among black artists and the larger hip-hop world.

With the help of Russell Simmons, the producer who co-founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, and the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, in New York — for which Mr. Simmons serves as chairman — Mr. Bridges fought back. Charging that the decision to drop Mr. Bridges was racist, the group called for a Pepsi counter-boycott.

The company relented and rehired Mr. Bridges, who insisted that his fee go to charity. Since the deal was struck two years ago, the partnership of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, the Ludacris Foundation, Pepsi, and the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation has given out more than $1-million to small community groups, many of them in Atlanta.

“I’m very proud of our current relationship with Pepsi,” says Roberta Shields, president of the Ludacris Foundation and Mr. Bridges’s mother. “They see Chris differently now. The environment in general has changed in the past three years. Hip-hop is the mainstream.”

The Ludacris Foundation uses negative press as “a driver,” adds Ms. Shields. “When blacks give, they tend to do it quietly and privately. But after O’Reilly’s rant, I saw the need to become more visible and get the rest of the story out there. We’re not as reserved as we used to be.”

The story for hip-hop is changing, says Mr. Simmons, formerly the president of Def Jam Records, the ground-breaking hip-hop record label. Mainstream organizations, including corporations and foundations, are starting to change their tune when it comes to joining forces with provocative, microphone-wielding performers.

“Hip-hop artists have the biggest voices in the country,” says Mr. Simmons, who adds that it sometimes pays to stand up to people who denigrate them. “Rappers are the best brand builders and idea builders out there. Pepsi and Coke wouldn’t be cool anymore without hip-hop. Now that music is visual, kids can see the branding.”

With 80 percent of its audience made up of people who aren’t black, Mr. Simmons says, hip-hop has become a crossover success — and, he adds, something charity-sponsoring companies can use to their advantage, and hip-hop rappers and singers can employ to highlight their charitable works.

Like organizations run by other rappers, Mr. Bridges’s operation receives money not only from him, but from friends and sponsors, including Anheuser-Busch and UPS.

Hip-hop charities and foundations have taken baby steps toward courting large private foundations. Only recently has the Ludacris Foundation begun to seek out help from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J., and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich., to support programs in Atlanta that help children with disabilities. (Ms. Shields says she is awaiting answers on Ludacris’s proposals. She sought out Johnson because of its support of children’s health programs, and Kellogg because of its focus on impoverished youngsters.)

Despite their sometimes low-budget, do-it-yourself approach to music, hip-hop performers have no reason to worry about losing “street cred” when allying themselves with large organizations, Mr. Bridges says. “Street credibility is about being real — people know when you are being phony or not,” he says. His philanthropy, like his music, allows him the chance to show what he’s really about, he says: “The street and my peers respect what I’m trying to do.”

Experts say that it’s too early to tell just how much good the charities started by rappers do for their communities. But because of hip-hop’s ability to reach young audiences, such organizations could have a huge spillover effect on a group philanthropy traditionally has had a hard time reaching: people 25 and under.

“They can sell messages to youths who may be having trouble with education, drug addiction, and the like in ways we in the mainstream can’t,” says Emmett D. Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation and a noted researcher and expert on black philanthropy. “We rightly celebrate Bill Gates and his greater commitment to philanthropy, but he can’t reach these young people who can do the branding to get their messages out in one fell swoop at the Grammys. We in philanthropy should celebrate them as well.”

Part Charity, Part Grant Maker

Despite their prominent public standing, rappers have yet to turn their fame into large charitable operations. Ms. Shields and others say that hip-hop philanthropy is small not because of negative perceptions, but because it is still learning how to grow.

And because the typical hip-hop “foundation” is part charity, part emergency-relief provider, part fund raiser, and part grant maker, the organizations are learning how to do many things at once.

The Ludacris Foundation invested years of research to find suitable grantees, such as the Dance Institute of Washington, 100 Black Men of America, in Atlanta, and about 30 other groups.

The foundation began investigating potential grantees three years ago. Ms. Shields, formerly a manager at Freddie Mac, the federally chartered mortgage company, talked to board members of the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, Mr. Simmons, and members of the board of foster-care charities to learn how to match need with dollars.

For further guidance, Ms. Shields — who also serves as the chief financial officer and chief operating officer of her son’s business holdings — also studied the business models of Earvin (Magic) Johnson, the former basketball star, in his real-estate development companies, and of the Alonzo Mourning Charity, which was founded by the player for the Miami Heat basketball team.

Looking for Synergy

Like the organizations it has studied, the Ludacris Foundation maintains its focus on the interests of its founder.

“When we look at the things we do, we look to see if they’re true to Chris’s vision,” says Ms. Shields. “The question always is: Is there synergy between who he is and [what] the Ludacris Foundation is?”

As examples, she says that was the question she asked herself when she was approached for money by a charity that promotes the benefits to children of breast-feeding.

“We told them they weren’t even close,” she says. “I can’t see Chris as a model for breast-feeding.”

But Ms. Shields has had no problems approving grants that provide food baskets and Christmas toys to needy people, or those that finance campaigns that warn of the dangers of AIDS, efforts to teach children the value of a healthy way of life, or “hip-hop culture” classes that promote financial literacy and other skills.

One of the Ludacris Foundation’s grantees says that once the foundation has made a commitment to an organization, it often redoubles it.

Debra Antney, president of Rah Rah’s Village of Hope, in Atlanta, says that mainstream foundations might be loath to support a group such as hers that has no predictable annual budget, spends almost exclusively on an emergency basis, and is very small. The organization provides housing and other services for abused children, emergency help for 75 Hurricane Katrina refugees who landed in Atlanta, counseling and housing for battered women, and aid to people who are battling addiction or trying to return to society after years in jail.

In 1997, as a worker for the Georgia Department of Family and Child Services, Ms. Antney met Mr. Bridges at a charity event for troubled children, when he was a disc jockey at an Atlanta radio station — “before he was Ludacris,” she says.

“He really liked what we were doing,” she recalls. “He told me, ‘When I make it, I’m coming back for you.’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ But that’s exactly what he did.”

Ms. Antney started her charity in 2001, one year after her son, Rahleek, or “Rah Rah,” was killed while bicycling near his home.

In the past two years, the Ludacris Foundation has given the organization more than $100,000.

“We would be nowhere without them,” says Ms. Antney. “It’s funny, they’re all about arts and children, but they started what they call their LudaCares program to help groups like mine. They appreciate hands-on charities and being flexible enough to help those charities out.”

Ms. Antney, for one, says she doesn’t worry about controversy surrounding Mr. Bridges and his line of work.

“That’s just his job. It doesn’t have anything to do with his charity work,” she says. “I know his heart. The rest of what you see is just entertainment.”