Nonprofit Leaders Urged to Seek Greater Support From Black Donors

By MICHAEL ANFT

Black nonprofit executives need to do more to recruit African American donors and rely less on white donors and predominantly white organizations, Randall Robinson, president of the TransAfrica Forum, told the 500 attendees at the third National Conference on Black Philanthropy.

Mr. Robinson’s keynote speech mirrored the tone of much of the conference, held here this month in the nation’s largest majority-black city. Marked by a recognition of both the newfound wealth of a young generation of blacks and the intractable poverty of many African Americans, the gathering focused on ways to tap into financial sources that included rich rap artists, black business owners, and federal-government programs for faith-based organizations.

Mr. Robinson — author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, in which he argues that descendants of slaves in America are owed several trillion dollars — told a group of nonprofit representatives: “The only chance we have to be a successful and viable community in this country rests in this room, for we must own and pay for ourselves.” His forthcoming book is entitled The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe Each Other.

Black organizations have often softened their message to obtain support from long-established, white-run foundations, Mr. Robinson added, to the detriment of some black causes not deemed of compelling interest to white grant makers.

“Many of us who’ve needed funding have condemned ourselves to accommodating the greater community,” he said.

When it comes to battling poverty and other problems facing African Americans, blacks must mobilize their own forces to help overcome them, he added: “Those who can’t get funding from Ford, Rockefeller, or other foundations must get it from us.”

Mr. Robinson’s comments were echoed in a speech by George C. Fraser, a Chicago author and publisher who is a consultant on building networks of people in business.

Citing the “invisibility” of African Americans to white people “who would like us to go away,” Mr. Fraser said that black charitable organizations should find new ways to tap into the $572-billion the African American community spends annually, which would put it among the top-10 national economies worldwide.

Even though Mr. Robinson had earlier noted that black Americans’ “paper assets” are only a fraction of those held by whites, Mr. Fraser contended that there is enough money and good will among American blacks to notably increase charitable giving.

“We’ve shown we can give,” Mr. Fraser said. “Look at the black church.” With 20 million people represented by 65,000 black churches, the infrastructure for a rise in donations is in place, he added.

“What [the white community] is telling us is to go get our own. Well, maybe it’s time we listened,” Mr. Fraser said. “We can’t expect anyone to do for us what we have not done for ourselves.”

The conference — “Black Philanthropy: At Home and in the Diaspora” — was financed largely by grants from the Ford, Charles Stewart Mott, and David and Lucile Packard Foundations, and presented by the National Center for Black Philanthropy, in Washington, in collaboration with four other black nonprofit groups.

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The biggest challenge for black philanthropy is not attracting resources but garnering endowment funds that can generate their own wealth, according to Ronald Goldsberry, chief executive officer of OnStation.com, a software business, and a major donor to scholarship programs at Michigan State University.

“We have to go beyond annual funds,” Mr. Goldsberry told a group of about 100, including Detroit’s mayor, Dennis Archer. Invoking the conference’s unstated theme, he added: “The paradigm has to shift from ‘Help me’ to ‘Help ourselves.’ There are too many well-heeled blacks out there for us not to have more endowments and foundations.”

Data on the numbers of black endowment funds and foundations are hard to find, Mr. Goldsberry said, a sign that “there aren’t enough of them, or they’re not organized enough to share data, neither of which is acceptable.” But he said there are indications that foundations started by blacks to serve blacks are at a premium.

Raising money from churches, individual donors, entertainers, and government sources was the principal theme of many conference discussions. But Mr. Goldsberry said nonprofit groups cannot afford to overlook the philanthropic potential of black business leaders. He used himself as an example, urging conference attendees to concentrate on gaining support from successful entrepreneurs who want their charitable dollars to outlive them through endowments.

“I give primarily to enhance endowments,” Mr. Goldsberry said. “That way, I’ll know that the causes I believe in will survive me in perpetuity.”

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Given the youthfulness of many wealthy black athletes and musicians, many nonprofit groups stand to gain by allying themselves early on with an entertainer and the cause closest to him or her, many at the conference agreed. In return, charities can offer the financially unaware donor some advice on how to handle money and achieve some tax savings through charitable giving.

During a workshop on “hip-hop philanthropy,” William Pickens III, president of the Paul Robeson Foundation, in New York, and board member of the National Center for Black Philanthropy, said that black nonprofit organizations are a natural outlet for the “enormous wealth” accumulated by rap artists over the past decade or so. With artists earning millions — Sean (Puffy) Combs is estimated to have made $53-million in various ventures in 1998 — black organizations can gain not only major donors but a higher profile when they become tied to such stars.

Rap stars “have the resources we don’t and a cachet and an audience we don’t,” said Mr. Pickens. “We can help them set up 501(c)(3) organizations and help them do good. If we can convince these guys and gals to do this, then we’re doing our jobs as organizations.”

Already, Mr. Pickens said, such artists as Mr. Combs, Russell Simmons (of Run/DMC), Jay-Z, and the sometime-rapper and film star Will Smith have given to charities that reflect their interests.

Mr. Pickens said nonprofit organizations shouldn’t stop there. “We need to go after record companies who profit from hip-hop, as well as other aspects of hip-hop culture,” such as parts of the fashion industry, he said.

Ed DeJesus, director of Source Youth Foundation, in Gaithersburg, Md., which hopes to commission a study on the industry, says that hip-hop is a $5.2-billion-a-year business that currently lacks any kind of philanthropic focus. “It’s clear that there are a lot of rap artists who want to help their communities, but a lot of what we see is high-end vanity charity, hit-and-run kinds of things,” Mr. DeJesus says. “People aren’t being very strategic about where their money goes.”

Foundation-building and endowments haven’t yet become a priority, something that Mr. DeJesus’s group and others are trying to change.

But while hip-hop may represent a viable revenue stream for nonprofit organizations to tap, some said there were moral questions involved in accepting money from some of the genre’s stars. “Am I ethical enough not to accept money from Jay-Z, who has exploited women?” asked George Greenidge, executive director of the National Black College Alliance.

Mr. Pickens countered that money from rappers needn’t be considered “dirty.”

“Ill-gotten gains from ill-gotten goons can be turned around by our influence,” Mr. Pickens said. Donors to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations faced similar ethical questions in those organizations’ infancies, he said. “Those guys [Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller] busted heads. Their lawyers and wives were smart enough to advise them to be good and give back, hence the foundations.”

Some fund raisers noted that money from hip-hop artists is preferable to that from companies with poor environmental records or financial institutions with a history of discriminatory lending. “All that new money is clean,” said Diane McCain, community program manager for Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

Still, she worries about how to navigate the shoals of rapper-based philanthropy. “I worry about what my other backers might think,” she said.

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Along with concerns about the direction and continued viability of black philanthropy in the United States, the conference was expanded this year to include talks and workshops on nonprofit efforts to help African immigrants, descendants of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and South America, and denizens of African countries, many of them ravaged by AIDS, civil strife, and hunger.

Foundations are starting to “pop up” in South Africa, Senegal, and Ghana, reported Yolonda Richardson, senior vice president of Africare, in Washington, which works to mobilize American resources to aid African development. But cultural tensions between American organizations and those in Africa can result in a lack of effectiveness and understanding, she said. “There needs to be a commonality of purpose,” Ms. Richardson said. “It is absolutely critical that we deal with those cultural tensions.”

Much of the gulf in understanding has to do with perspective: In Africa, issues surrounding material well-being are paramount, while in the United States, African Americans tend to view matters through the prism of race and politics. That gap in viewpoint needs to be bridged, Ms. Richardson said, so that African Americans can appreciate those they may be trying to help. African Americans mobilized to fight apartheid in South Africa “because we understand race,” Ms. Richardson said. “But we need to develop some other kinds of lenses so we can comprehend things more fully.”

Such lenses are important, argue others, because less than 2 percent of American philanthropy travels overseas. “Africa needs more,” said Katéy Assem, executive director of the Chicago State University Foundation and a native of Ghana. “Africa is isolated from philanthropy.”

In order to make a dent in Africa’s pressing economic and development problems, foundations may have to change their rules to reflect Africans’ reality, not Americans’, Mr. Assem added. “Most foundations look to their return on investment: What can we accomplish in five years? In Africa, it might take 15 years to have a major impact,” he said.

In addition to offering larger windows of time, Mr. Assem said American grant makers can help the African cause by lobbying for Congressional support for tax deductions for gifts made to relief organizations and foundations based in Africa, and by pushing for more training programs in Africa, “so programs have a chance of working.”

While data on the amount of philanthropy flowing from the United States to Africa is hard to come by, Saeed Fahia, executive director of the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota, said that most African charity begins at home — even if the home is a continent and an ocean or two away. “Somalians in America send a lot of money home,” he said. Without a stronger system of African foundations, such support of the continent’s poor is essential, he added.