Just Spending a Lot of Money Won't Do Much to Advance Social Justice

By Leslie Lenkowsky
Chronicle of Philanthropy
From the issue dated November 10, 2005

For many years, left-of-center groups have been complaining that conservative foundations have been outspending liberal ones to advance an agenda that favors the wealthy and privileged. "Social Justice Grantmaking," a valuable new report, not only shows that to be untrue, but also raises serious questions about what liberal donors have accomplished.

The report, published by the Foundation Center and Independent Sector, defines social-justice grant making as contributions for projects aimed at "structural change in order to increase the opportunity of those who are the least well-off politically, economically, and socially."

The 1,005 grant makers surveyed for the study, representing most of the largest private and community foundations in the United States, devoted nearly $1.8-billion in 2002 to such projects. That amounted to 11 percent of their total grant making that year and 53 percent more than what they had committed five years earlier.

While part of this growth may have been due to the overall increase in foundation giving during that time, both the number of organizations making social-justice grants and the number of projects they supported also rose.

Conservative foundations probably represent a small share of those grant makers. In its last study of conservative foundations, published in 2004, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy calculated that 77 right-of-center grant-making organizations devoted a total of $253-million to public-policy causes from 1999 to 2001. That is less than the Ford Foundation alone awarded for social-justice projects in 2002.

Although some conservative donors may have been included among the foundations surveyed in the new report, none of the largest conservative philanthropies made the list of top social-justice grant makers in 2002. Nor were any of the major conservative think tanks among the top 50 recipients of social-justice grants.

Studies by groups of all political stripes have suggested in recent years that conservative foundations are influential not because of the amount they spend, but because of the focused and strategic approach they take to grant making. "Social Justice Grantmaking" buttresses that argument by pointing to some of the weaknesses in the approach taken by left-leaning foundations.

The new report shows that social-justice gifts are widely scattered, going to so many different types of groups — ranging from economic development ones to those focusing on the environment or the arts — that no one set of organizations receives more than one-fifth of the grants.

Moreover, the Foundation Center and Independent Sector count 6,625 different recipients of social-justice grants in 2002, 30 percent more than received such funds in 1998. The size of these grants was relatively small too, with more than half falling below $50,000 and less than 2 percent exceeding $1-million.

The perceptions of grant makers interviewed for the Foundation Center report reinforce the impression that the large amount of money being spent to promote social justice is not always used effectively.

Among the more common faults they saw in these grants were a lack of support for developing leadership and improving the ability of nonprofit groups to expand their operations and improve their management, conflicting objectives and strategies among donors, overemphasis on short-term results, and an unwillingness of social-justice organizations to reach out beyond the narrow world of similarly minded donors and recipients.

Tensions between program officers at foundations and trustees or senior executives also seem to inhibit more successful efforts. Despite the billions of dollars they spend, social-justice grant makers still express doubts about whether their commitments to "meaningful change" are sufficient.

Similar problems have been noted in other critiques of liberal (or as it is more commonly called today, "progressive") philanthropy.

At their root, however, is a more fundamental difficulty, which "Social Justice Grantmaking" usefully exposes: the way in which "social justice" itself is understood.

"Almost all our interviewed grant makers," the report notes, "associated the term 'social justice' with a vision that can be traced to the civil rights and liberation movements of the 1960s."

A small group, the report goes on to say, continues to embrace this vision and urges grant makers to be less timid in championing it, but most grant makers, recognizing changing times, have tried to adopt "language and approaches that are more neutral, technocratic and results-oriented," even as they strive to attain the same objectives.

Not surprisingly, the result is what the report charitably calls "incoherence" among grant makers unable to reconcile their ambitious goals with their more cautious means.

Yet, the 1960s were a long time ago, and a lot has been learned, sometimes painfully, about poverty, the environment, education, international conflict, family and gender relationships, and much more that is on the agenda of social-justice grant makers.

Many of the aims that once looked so worthy and promising now appear simplistic, problematic, or even dangerous. At the same time, changes in scientific technologies, population patterns, economic development, and other circumstances have presented new challenges to our notions of what might be just and unjust, right and wrong.

In response, "a third, albeit small cadre of funders," the report observes, has embraced a different notion of social justice, rooted in "choice, opportunity, and individual agency."

Such grant makers prefer promoting vouchers and charter schools to suing school systems for more money or racial integration, market-based approaches to improving human services over protest movements, and economic competition as a tool of international development rather than global antipoverty efforts. Most of the conservative foundations would be included in this group.

Some of the goals of foundations in this third camp, such as personal empowerment, may overlap those of traditionally liberal grant makers.

However, others, such as the acceptance of certain kinds of inequalities and risks, do not. Their willingness to entertain and support a new vision of philanthropy may offer a better explanation than their strategic and focused grant making of why the right-leaning foundations have been able to accomplish more with limited funds than grant makers rooted in the 1960s have with far more money.

The most serious obstacle social-justice grant makers face is not a lack of resources, but the fact that they are too invested — financially and philosophically — in time-worn ideas, without the desire or ability to reconsider them. Perhaps their moment will come again, but until then, they seem destined to spend a lot of money, but have little to show for it.

Leslie Lenkowsky is a professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University and a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is llenkows@iupui.edu.