Religious Groups Are Key to Diversity

To the Editor:

Since 1998, I’ve provided development training and support for faith-based and community organizations across America.

While I was delighted to read The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s recent supplement on diversity in philanthropy (October 18), I believe the uncertainty about how to achieve it only underscores the long-standing disconnect between frontline faith-based and community organizations and the philanthropy hierarchy they look to for support.

The fastest, easiest, and surest way philanthropy can remedy the diversity challenge is to help build partnerships between faith-based and community organizations. Millions of women, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and other minorities serve in the hundreds of thousands of faith-based organizations that meet human need. They, like other nonprofits, run programs, mentor participants, and raise money. They are board members, staff members, volunteers — and sometimes all three. Many of them also are persons who were once themselves recipients of the social services they now help provide. Thus, women and minorities in faith-based programs can bring not only diversity to philanthropy, but also a much-needed wealth of experience and insight.

When considering that faith-based programs are those that people in need typically turn to first, those that donors support most, and those that surveys have shown are valued most by participants uplifted by the spiritual strengthening such programs alone provide, partnerships between faith-based and community organizations would greatly advance key objectives for philanthropy. Among them: nonprofit collaboration; cost-effective service delivery; capacity-building to holistically solve problems; and new movements that more powerfully champion social well-being.

Without a doubt, the tremendous human service of nonprofits, large and small, faith-based and secular, pales in comparison to what’s possible when working together.

While I can understand the narrower thinking of many nonprofit program leaders whose limited expertise or inflated ego drives their “lone ranger” mentality, I simply cannot understand why, if philanthropy leaders and grant makers truly want to achieve diversity, improve social services, and get a bigger bang for their buck, more is not done to compel faith-based and community partnerships.

Of course, I’m not blind or deaf to all the hubbub religion conjures. But if the overarching idea is to meet the needs of hurting people, doesn’t it make sense to promote doing so in the way they say works?

Bernice Sanders Smoot
Saint Wall Street
Crofton, Md.