Is Obama Forgetting the Lessons He Learned on Chicago’s Streets?

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama, as well as his advisers and followers, often touted the candidate’s experience as a community organizer in Chicago. Now that he is in office, his administration seems to have left community organizing behind.

At a time when legislation on health insurance, climate change, and financial regulation is facing brutal challenges from conservatives — both Republicans and Democrats — grass-roots organizing in Congressional districts is more needed than ever.

Yet the administration has not been willing to unleash the power of such a strategy, preferring to corral and manage all organizing efforts under the umbrella of Organizing for America, which is part of the Democratic National Committee.

On several occasions, the White House has even pressured progressive groups to refrain from independent organizing efforts. It may well turn out to be a poor strategy.

Good organizing has to be an independent effort, free of direct government or political control. Organizing for America is not such a vehicle; instead it is the designated activist arm of the administration and a top-down organization that tells its members what to do but does not really care about serious participation or input.

The Obama administration’s lack of understanding of what organizing is all about can be seen not just in its efforts to pass legislation on vital national issues but also in its efforts to help nonprofit groups do more to expand their services to the neediest Americans.

The White House said that it wanted to strengthen nonprofit organizations by providing new resources through the Corporation for National and Community Service and one of its projects, the Social Innovation Fund.

The innovation fund is supposed to spearhead the administration’s efforts to solve big problems by promoting innovative practices and effective nonprofit groups, as well as by devising better measurements to evaluate effectiveness.

The advisers who laid the groundwork for the Obama administration’s national-service efforts, especially the new Social Innovation Fund, were largely people who focus on using business techniques to advance social goals. It was not surprising, then, that Maria Eitel, director of the Nike Foundation, was nominated as chief of the Corporation for National and Community Service (shortly after accepting the job she withdrew because of health problems) or that Sonal Shah, an executive at Google, was appointed to head the Social Innovation Fund.

It soon became clear that the administration held a narrow view of those nonprofit organizations it hoped to strengthen. That focus did not include community organizers or nonprofit activist organizations. It fixated primarily on social-entrepreneurial organizations and efforts like Harlem Children’s Zone and Citizen Schools that could be spread nationwide.

In its briefings on the Social Innovation Fund, including at a meeting arranged by the Aspen Institute, White House staff members made it clear that nonprofit activism was not a priority, or even a concern.

If Obama staff members were really thinking like community organizers, they never would have allowed the Social Innovation Fund to be set up to perform so much of its work by relying on aid from foundations.

According to the guidelines issued by the Corporation for National and Community Service, at least 85 percent of the fund’s money will go to grant-making organizations. Up to 5 percent of the total may go for investments in evaluation and research and development, while up to 10 percent may go directly to community organizations. Grant makers must provide $1 for every federal dollar they receive from the fund and then channel the money to deserving charities. Those charities will also be required to match every dollar they receive from foundations distributing money from the Social Innovation Fund.

Officials of the Social Innovation Fund say they adopted this top-down approach because foundations know nonprofit organizations well and have the skills to identify appropriate groups and help them grow.

The administration also hopes to inspire grant makers to give more money to promising nonprofit groups, with the goal of spreading the most effective approaches broadly. How naïve can a group of supposedly high-powered presidential advisers be? To whom have they been listening? Certainly nobody who understands the risk-averse foundation world.

The philanthropic record speaks for itself. Foundations have spent only a tiny share of their resources to help low-income people, minorities, disabled Americans, and social-change organizations. And they have spent even less to support charities that seek to organize community residents and influence public policies.

Hurricane Katrina laid bare the failure of Southern foundations to build an infrastructure for the region’s neediest people. The same problem exists in other regions of the country. While the United States has dozens of solid and creative grant makers, foundations and their boards in general are the most elitist institutions in the country, often unfamiliar with their communities and frequently insensitive to the needs of the majority of citizens and immigrants. So why give them total responsibility for running this pilot ship of innovation? Many other organizations — and their leaders — are better suited for this task.

White House staff members have said they want the Social Innovation Fund to spread promising nonprofit efforts and expand the reach of effective organizations that provide services in education and health care. But their attention is likely to focus on well-known groups with social cachet, not the thousands of successful small and medium-size nonprofit groups throughout the country that are in desperate need of financial support and assistance. They most certainly will not include community organizing, advocacy, and watchdog groups. While there is a great deal of independent community organizing and activism taking place across the country, it is clearly not a movement with which the Obama administration feels comfortable or cares very much about.

The fund’s architects do not seem to have given much thought to the leadership needs and costs that it takes to promote good programs. Nor does the fund’s tiny budget — it is expected to receive $35-million to $50-million next year — indicate any seriousness on the part of the administration.

For all the publicity given to the White House’s desire to support nonprofit groups and social innovation, we are instead left with a vague, confused, and irrelevant effort. The administration’s goal of increasing the amount foundations spend is laudable, but the Social Innovation Fund is not the way to go about it. The Obama administration could do far more by pressing Congress to increase the percentage of assets that foundations must distribute each year and by using the powerful tool of presidential persuasion to spur foundations to give more.

Those of us who thought that President Obama would bring back some of the allure of community organizing and activism can at least take some satisfaction from the improved regulatory measures, better consumer protections, and more rational foreign-policy measures his administration has promoted. But even so, a refrain based on the lyrics of Pete Seeger will still ring in our ears:

Pablo Eisenberg, a regular contributor to these pages, is a senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. His e-mail address is pseisenberg@verizon.net.