May 7, 1998 | Read Time: 4 minutes
American philanthropy is subjecting itself to a period of intense self-criticism not seen since the 1970s, with a number of high-profile national groups and commissions working to chart philanthropy’s course into the next century.
The latest to weigh in is the American Assembly, a non-profit group affiliated with Columbia University that regularly gathers influential thinkers to develop public-policy recommendations. In a report issued last week at the end of a four-day meeting of about 100 leaders and experts in philanthropy, the assembly urged the non-profit world to make improvements to deal with the challenges of what it called a “changing America.”
As a participant in the American Assembly’s meeting at the new billion-dollar Getty Center, I was pleased by the report’s refusal to call for a return to the past. It acknowledges that the federal government’s shifting of responsibility for many social programs to the states will create opportunities as well as headaches, and it does not urge restoring government funds to those programs.
What’s more, rather than bemoan the growing influence of business and businesslike behavior in the non-profit world, the report encourages philanthropy to learn from the corporate world and even to help social entrepreneurs who want to set up for-profit companies to serve benevolent purposes. It squarely embraces “faith-based’ organizations as key parts of the philanthropic effort, especially at the local level.
Yet while much of what the report says is sensible, it dwells too much on how philanthropic institutions themselves should change their relationships with one another and not enough on what it should do differently with its money and other resources.
One of philanthropy’s big problems, the report says, is that the public does not consider non-profit institutions to be fully accountable or open. As a result, the report focuses on the need to expand disclosure of non-profit financial information to the public, strengthen government agencies that oversee non-profit groups, and improve evaluation and self-regulation.
Whatever the value of such measures, they are not likely to offset fully the inevitable suspicion created when essentially private and undemocratic organizations, such as those in philanthropy, compete with democratic government to serve the public interest.
Maintaining public confidence is not a new problem for non-profit organizations. While enforcing the laws undoubtedly helps, so too does the perception that charities are accomplishing tasks that are worthwhile. In fact, it may be even more important.
Another problem is the report’s failure to deal adequately with what it says is a key difficulty for philanthropy: the growing gap between the rich and poor in the United States. Although the report claims that the philanthropic world has models of what to do about that inequality, it never offers a convincing explanation of why, if such knowledge really does exist, inequality has been increas ing, despite philanthropic activities to diminish it.
Implicit in the American Assembly report is the view that the lack of progress toward reducing economic inequality is largely due to insufficient spending or effort. But if it also results from misdirected priorities and programs — or the intractability of the problem itself — more than expanded non-profit antipoverty efforts will be necessary.
Candor on this topic would have been helpful not just for improving public understanding of philanthropy’s role but also for another task the American Assembly seeks to accomplish: augmenting the resources available to non-profit organizations. For if decades of philanthropic effort to help the poor and disadvantaged have yielded growing misery, why should anyone follow that path?
Another major study group, the National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, sponsored by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, has already delivered a more forthright, though controversial, report (The Chronicle, July 10). In its report, the Bradley Commission called for not just shifting philanthropic resources toward grassroots programs to help the poor but also changing the kinds of activities supported.
Donors should devote more of their energies to dealing with “tangible problems” at the local level and less to testing “the grand theory” of social change, it said. It also offered principles for and examples of what it considered to be effective grant making.
To expect the diverse group of experts collected by the American Assembly to agree on what the philanthropic world should do to reduce economic inequality is perhaps unrealistic. Moreover, in light of the uncertainties about what strategies are likely to work, allowing for multiple, competing approaches, as the American Assembly’s report does, is surely appropriate.
Yet if the current round of introspection is to bear fruit in creating a philanthropic world that is both more effective and more attractive to new participants, it must look beyond institutional preoccupations to deal with a more fundamental question: What should philanthropy do with its money?
Leslie Lenkowsky is professor of philanthropic studies and public policy at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy and a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is llenkows@iupui.edu.
