November 5, 1998 | Read Time: 5 minutes
The progressive movement in philanthropy may soon find itself on the “reject” pile of history if it continues to embrace politically correct standards that most Americans would find laughable.
One recent example of this is a study of “progressive grant making” that was released in September by the National Network of Grantmakers, which calls itself “widely recognized as the leader of progressive philanthropy in the United States.” Analyzing grants by the foundations listed in the network’s directory, plus those by members of the Women’s Funding Network, the study found that in 1997 “only $336-million went to progressive, social-change philanthropy.”
The study is an important piece of work, but its underlying assumptions about which grants qualify as “progressive” are open to question. For large “non-family foundations” like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and Joyce Foundations, the National Network of Grantmakers asked program officers at those institutions to identify what grant-making areas they deemed to be progressive. In some instances, the network’s researchers also screened grants themselves.
To provide some guidance on what they meant by “progressive,” the researchers suggested that progressive grant making should be beneficial “to low-income women and children, the disabled, the elderly, and the poor” or “gay, lesbian, and transgender communities and people of color.” Among the grants not counted as progressive were those for international work for peace, economic development, and family planning.
The report also did not include the gifts of hundreds of foundations that make grants to some progressive groups some of the time and that choose, for a variety of reasons, not to join the National Network of Grantmakers. The political right would be quick to point out that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year on progressive causes by such foundations as Ford (through its antipoverty programs), Rockefeller (affirmative action), Kellogg (sustainable agriculture), Packard (environmental protection), and Turner (population control). In fact, probably half of the nation’s 100 largest foundations are supporting some progressive causes some of the time, with annual grants totaling nearly a billion dollars.
Despite claims of “inclusiveness,” many on the left seem quick to distance themselves from their natural allies. Indeed, many members of the National Network of Grantmakers appear to equate progressive philanthropy with support of grassroots organizing, period. Although I applaud the work of organizers and appreciate that it is terribly underfinanced, so too are many other worthy social-change strategies, such as lobbying, litigation, scholarship, and punditry, to name just a few. It is shortsighted to automatically brand those proven social-change strategies — which the right has used so effectively — as elitist, top-down, white-dominated, undemocratic, and irrelevant, as some of those on the left often do.
At the National Network of Grantmakers’ recent convention, in Minneapolis, I asked fellow panelists what they thought of the work of John Pike, a policy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, and that of other arms-control experts in Washington. I pointed out that they had successfully raised enough doubts about the “Star Wars” anti-missile plan in the news media and on Capitol Hill to defeat that costly defense strategy.
Eli Yong Lee, an organizer for the Petroglyph Monument Protection Coalition, in New Mexico, responded that the lack of active grassroots participation in Mr. Pike’s work meant that it was inherently not progressive. “Even if it prevented tens of billions of dollars a year from being drained from federal social programs?” I asked. “Yes,” he insisted.
One can only hope that, sooner or later, leaders of progressive philanthropy will abandon that kind of sectarianism and commit themselves to building a movement that knows not only how to organize the grassroots but also how to frame national policy debates, communicate in the mass media, influence legislation and court decisions, and back candidates for political office, among other things.
If the progressive movement begins to do that, it will be surprised to discover how much greater its opportunities are than what the National Network of Grantmakers’ numbers suggest. Economics America, a non-partisan group that publishes comprehensive reports each year on institutions on the political left and political right, estimates that the assets of left-leaning foundations exceed those of right-leaning ones by a ratio of four to one.
Skeptics might counter that the right still gets a lot more money from individuals and corporations. But Economics America also shows that the total budgets of social-change advocacy groups exceed those of conservative ones by nearly three to one. Indeed, its data suggest that the left-liberal tent in the United States is at least 10 times larger than what the National Network of Grantmakers’ study deems to be progressive.
A truly inclusive progressive philanthropy movement would include “white” labor leaders, “bourgeois” heads of community foundations — and even “liberals” in the big foundations who occasionally give money to progressive policy wonks. It might even try to find some common ground with conservative grant makers who oppose free trade and corporate welfare, or who support campaign-finance reform. Unless and until progressive grant makers and activists are ready to recognize and to form working alliances with more Americans who hold diverse political views, they will remain — and deserve to remain — on the fringes of power.
Michael H. Shuman is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, in Washington, and author most recently of the book Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, published by Free Press.
