Progressive Foundations Need to Unite to Build a Better Government

Foundations and other big donors need to take responsibility for their role in the dysfunction that is making Congress so ineffective and that is so destructive of our democracy. They must finally step in to make a positive difference.

It’s easy to assign responsibility to donors who helped build the Tea Party movement and who are still supporting like-minded organizations. Reasons for blaming the rest of philanthropy are less obvious because it’s mostly about what hasn’t been done.

Yes, it’s been great that in the wake of the federal shutdown, important leaders in the foundation world have called for a greater philanthropic role in healing democracy and fixing a broken Washington and for developing an immediate action plan to those ends.

But it’s important to go beyond these invocations and those that have preceded them.

Now it’s time to consider why organized philanthropy has so stubbornly and adroitly avoided all previous efforts to move it to action in building a better and more democratic government.

Perhaps that’s because what is missing from the current debate about government’s problems is the issue of power. It is the failure of much of organized philanthropy to engage in this conversation that has helped get our society and our government, our very democracy itself, into its current fix.

Indeed, there ought to be more grant making to build power in support of a shared agenda about government, but so far only a small cadre of right-wing donors see it that way.

For at least two decades, progressive thinkers have urged grant makers to examine the success of conservatives and use it as a guide to their own grant making.

Sally Covington, a researcher at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, had support from a few small foundations in 1997 and wrote a report showing the way conservative strategists had directed their money over three decades, calling it “an extraordinary effort to reshape politics and public-policy priorities at the national, state, and local level.”

That unabashedly political strategy shaped the grant-making patterns of about a dozen foundations working to shrink the size and authority of government, to roll back regulations and public safeguards, and to cut public spending, especially for the needy. Their single-minded objective was to extend the number and power of extreme conservatives. And as we know today, they were successful.

Their grant making was guided by a commitment to strengthen and sustain a coordinated network of conservative organizations, and then trusting them to make program decisions without grant-maker interference.

They also used their money to develop ideas for conservative and increasingly extreme public policies and to create marketing, media, and other communications efforts to build public support for those ideas. And they poured grants and attention into nonprofits that worked to identify and orient, educate, and train existing and new conservative leaders; and to organize and fuel local and regional groups, as well as national entities, to advance their agendas.

Over the long haul, that is a formula to expand and exercise power.

Now, grant makers aligned with the American mainstream and the left need to move quickly to adopt the grant-making approaches that have made the Tea Party so strong.

Foundations must take corrective responsibility, through their grant making, for the lack of a true counterpart to the conservatives. It’s time to forge a common agenda and develop the power to advance it.

If moderate and liberal foundations are willing to learn the lessons taught by the successful strategy of their right-wing colleagues, if they are willing to talk about political power in a coherent and honest way, they can find a way to build a movement that brings more power to the political center.

And there is much grant making that can be done within the legal and regulatory strictures on foundations and the charities they support.

The conservative Koch brothers and their foundations have proven that in building the Tea Party, although they seem recently to have crossed the line and have had to admit that in their extreme zeal they operated improperly by not disclosing more than $15-million funneled to referendum battles in California.

Beyond Koch and other conservative foundations, it’s long been known that philanthropic support for efforts to influence policy and build grass-roots efforts to rally for change can provide a major return (one research study found a yield of $115 for every $1 so invested). But building power requires more than what most moderate and liberal foundations do today: support the development of (often technocratic) policy ideas and even fleeting campaigns to promote them.

What is needed is for foundations, with the help of progressive thinkers, to develop a common vision of the role of government, one countervailing that of extreme conservatives.

They need to come to an understanding of the grant making necessary to build enduring institutions and infrastructure that helps people—especially those without it—to organize and to build power in support of such an agenda. Without that strategy, we will continue to cycle through destructive crises that in and of themselves serve conservatives’ purposes.

Both the immediate battles over the budget and the deficit and the long-term political health of our democracy and our people require much broader foundation action now. Philanthropy needs to get serious about building people’s power. Foundations need to just do it.