Shifting from charity to change
by Charlie Bernstein

Anyone wishing to become involved in making charity and philanthropy more responsive to the movements that aim to make charity obsolete should read David Wagner’s What’s Love Got to Do with It? A Critical Look at American Charity (The New Press, 2000), which offers a concise historical account of how charity in the U.S. evolved as a partner in perpetuating poverty. Wagner asks: "What if [Cesar] Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Paine, Eugene V. Debs, Margaret Sanger or Mother Jones had been content to serve at soup kitchens or join a religious mission somewhere? What if they had become therapists or professional administrators?"

At its very roots, Wagner argues, American charity benefits the haves at the have-nots’ expense, complementing our broader social practice of rewarding good fortune with better, while punishing the poor for a supposed deficit of moral fiber. In this ethic, the job of charity is not to shift wealth or power from haves to have-nots, but to meet enough of poor people’s needs to keep them alive, but not kicking – at the same time allowing affluent donors and charity leaders to feel socially engaged and virtuous.

"[T]he fight for pensions, unemployment benefits, or the minimum wage," Wagner says, "has often united working-class, poor and even middle-income groups, but social-service approaches often individualize problems or divide classes and communities, removing collective struggle from the table."

Charity, in short, has little to do with love.

In a review of Wagner’s book, John Buell adds that the social-change movement "will have to make demystification of charity part of its political practice" (see The Maine Progressive, www.maineprogressive.org, 3/30/01). Such a demystification will require, in part, getting a handle on how to shift American giving from charity to change.

For roughly a quarter century, a social-change funding movement has been growing in the U.S., transforming how many of us give and think about giving. Though this movement still only accounts for a small part of American generosity – less than 3 percent of all private giving to nonprofits, according to the National Network of Grantmakers (www.nng.org) – that’s a marked increase. The movement is real. And it’s a growth industry.

The Funding Exchange (www.fex.org) is a national association of the new breed of progressive foundations attracting donations from people who want positive social change. One thing that sets foundations like these apart is that, in addition to large gifts, smaller donations are often solicited and welcomed. Twenty-five-dollar donations are numerous. The message is, in effect: "You don’t have to be rich to be a philanthropist – you just have to find a cause to believe in and support it. " The result is that at least some foundations are funding exactly the kind of root-cause programs traditional philanthropy tends to neglect. The donor/grantee relationship is no longer benefactor/supplicant, but a partnership.

The most dramatic example of this smaller-gifts-and-more-of-them trend is the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (www.nccbuscc.org/cchd/) that raises its money through an annual second collection taken the Sunday after Thanksgiving in every Catholic church in the country. (Think about it!) Though CCHD does not support groups that counter Catholic doctrine – for instance, in such areas as birth control – it has nonetheless been of sweeping benefit to poor people’s movements in every state. Since its founding in 1969, CCHD has raised and distributed over $250 million among nearly 4,000 low-income organizing projects.

It’s true that, unlike CCHD, most social-justice funders would have a hard time surviving on small contributions. All have wealthy donors. But that’s relative. None was started with corporate mega-mega-endowments. They’re driven by much smaller donations. Their methods of giving also counter the norm. New England’s Haymarket People’s Fund (www.haymarket.org), for instance, relies on volunteer activists, not board or staff, to distribute its donors’ money. Its founding donors intentionally distanced themselves from grant-award decisions, believing that local activists know what’s best for their own communities.

So "Change, not charity" is emerging as a real 21st-century philanthropic theme. Unlike traditional philanthropic giving, the object is not to relieve government – we, the people – of the "burden" of social welfare, but to hold policy-makers accountable to the people. This democratizing approach turns out to be attractive to many donors.

There are also efforts to expand the progressive giving movement itself. Changemakers (www.changemakersfund.org) was launched last year to assist "the leaders and institutions that build community-based philanthropy." It makes grants to leading funding innovators around the country. Likewise, the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy (www.ncrp.org) has since 1976 conducted research, provided technical assistance, advocated progressive giving policies and guided foundations, corporations, workplace giving programs and individuals into ways of funding social change more effectively. Similarly, Neighborhood Funders Group (www.nfg.org) both educates larger foundations about the value and methods of grassroots organizing and advocates for social-change funding.

Another rapidly growing aspect of social-change funding is progressive workplace giving. The National Alliance for Choice in Giving (www.choiceingiving.org) is made up of a growing number of so-called federated campaigns in the United Way model. Like a United Way, these groups enable people to give at work through an annual campaign. Unlike most United Way giving, the money goes to groups that emphasize social change.

Still another kind of grassroots fundraising is canvassing. Statewide door-to-door and phone canvasses across the country may number in the hundreds. This represents wildfire growth since their advent in the mid-1970s. These canvasses encourage ordinary people to give in their own self-interest – for clean air and water, affordable health care and utilities, electoral reform, and much more. What’s more, they recruit many of those contributors as active players – real people dealing with real policy issues. USAction (www.usaction.org) is a national federation of statewide citizen action groups. The clout of these groups, which are reaching millions each year, defies calculation.

While social service providers, who survive mainly on grants (from government, foundations, and corporations) and fees for service, often complain that changing the system is difficult because they’re funder-driven, grassroots social-change leaders, supported mainly by individuals, consider themselves funder-powered, drawing their strength from the communities or movements they benefit. The Midwest Academy (www.mindspring.com/~midwestacademy/) provides a good discussion of the whys and hows of such grassroots organizing.

Networks of individual progressive philanthropists are also coming together. A number of funding groups now host "wealth conferences," at which donors discuss and explore how to effect social change through their giving. These events particularly attract people who believe that the best legacy they can leave their heirs is not an enriched university endowment, a plaque on a museum wing, or a bequest to yet another generation, but the seeds of a just society and a sustainable future.

Another networking example comes from the other side of the generation tracks: Cambridge-based Resource Generation (www.resourcegeneration.org), the locus of a nationwide network of young progressives with trust funds (they call themselves "cool rich kids") committed to undoing the inequities inherent in American culture. They’re not driven by old-fashioned altruism or by guilt. They believe that the growing concentration of wealth is jeopardizing our future, and that redistribution of wealth (starting with their own, given strategically) can save it. Today they’re giving to movements that will redistribute wealth – and recruiting friends and family as well.

The bottom line: Social-change giving is happening, and it’s zig-zagging across class boundaries as traditional philanthropy never has. Many nonprofits are also beginning to talk the language of change to prospective donors in all income brackets.

Still, not to paint a too-rosy picture, social change giving remains just a sliver of the American-giving pie. Wagner would, I’m sure, remind us that current practices continue to marginalize the poor quite efficiently. That means that if charitable giving is to evolve into a vehicle for social progress, the message of democratized social-change giving needs the widest possible airing.

Charlie Bernstein works at Maine Initiatives (www.maineinitiatives.org), a social-change fund. An earlier version of this article appeared in The Maine Progressive.