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TODAY Friday 30 May 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Funders

This Website is paid for by grants from foundations, and we're looking for more. I have spent half my professional life as a foundation staffer giving away money and the other half as an administrator of organizations trying to get money. I have written curt rejection letters to some of my best friends and have been treated rudely by erstwhile colleagues from my days in philanthropy. Calluses form. Without them, you become too vulnerable and you make people uncomfortable, on either side of the grantmaking equation. You realize that funders have to say No 95% of the time, and you accept the shoulder shrug as the essential gesture of the game.

Part of the old boy/girl network, I'm sometimes asked to write papers for foundations on grantmaking strategies they might pursue on a given issue of environmental protection. How important is the problem? Can an infusion of philanthropic money affect it? What's the political context? Who are the other funders? Who are some likely grantees?

I've just begun the process of writing such a paper for a new fund sticking a toe into the waters of an issue well covered on this Website. And as I telephone grantors and grantees already involved with the issue, I realize that lots of things have changed in environmental philanthropy since I first started playing the game in the mid-1970s.

The biggest change has been the emergence and near-constant growth of an activist culture within philanthropy. Each year more and more foundations seek to influence social developments with targeted funds, and each year fewer and fewer foundations are content to offer general support to an organization with no pretensions to playing the part of public catalyst. This is largely a demographic phenomenon. Many people who made vast fortunes in the '70s and '80s are either dying or setting up family foundations these days (the rate of growth of philanthropic funds far exceeds the rate of growth of the economy as a whole), and piles of money are coming under the control of boomers weaned on '60s notions of social involvement. This control is exercised by children of the fortune-makers who sit on the boards and, for the larger foundations, by professional staffers who shape and transmit information to those boards.

This predisposition to activism -- activism of both left and right -- quickly leads to involvement in questions of public policy. Sooner or later getting the government to do or not do something becomes a key element of an overall strategy to influence society. And the percentage of philanthropic money that aims at shaping public policy is way up, especially among environmental funders. There are legal restrictions on how much a foundation can give money for "lobbying," but the definition of lobbying is narrow and only the dullest of grantees can't figure out how to describe what they do as "research and analysis" or "public outreach" or the like.

Generally speaking, efforts to change public policy are designed to exert maximum persuasion on a target audience. Usually that audience is a small elite audience, even when it is described as "grassroots." The number of persons actively, doggedly involved in any policy campaign in this country is almost always interestingly low. And to form and motivate your Leninist cells you need organizations and communications designed for the particular kind of people you're aiming to involve. Increasingly these tasks have become the province of professional specialists, and foundations are increasingly willing to pay their invoices.

One thing the specialists will tell you is that the success of an elite strategy depends upon the appearance that the goals and values of the elite are supported by public opinion. "Appearance" is a key word. Often you can simulate public support by running an elite strategy aimed directly at journalists, broadcasters, popular consultants, and other members of the opinion-shaper class. More often than not, public opinion is what they say it is. Opinion-shaper strategies are relatively cheap expedients, and foundations are much readier to support them now than heretofore. Frequently, however, you really do have to affect the attitudes of a significant fraction of the voting population, and that necessity compels a full-fledged public campaign.

Such a campaign needs an information base from which to proceed. What do voters think of Issue X? What happens if you describe X one way or if you describe X another way? Which demographic groups will always be in your corner, which groups will always be against you, and which groups constitute the Persuadeables whose support you warmly covet? These questions require public opinion specialists who will -- depending on your budget and your aspirations -- conduct a variety of surveys and focus groups to assess the current state of opinion and then test messages that can move attitudes in the direction you want. Usually, the people covered in the studies are all the public involvement you will require; reputable evidence that a high and growing percentage of suburban mothers are on your side of a given issue is about all you need to buttress the elite strategy with which you started. But sometimes, God help you, you actually have to go the whole nine yards and get on television and place Op-Eds and stage local news events.

Even if you're lucky and can do your issue just by brandishing poll results, it all costs a lot of money. Which means three things for philanthropists. First, they have to be willing to put unprecedented amounts of money on the table (often to the shock of older board members who remember annual gifts to the local zoo at $25,000 a year). Second, all but the biggest foundations have to be willing to enter into ad-hoc funder coalitions where everybody chips into a pool. And third, they tend to want to oversee their investments (and keep an eye on their partners and their grantees) at a level of detail that would not have been seemly twenty years ago. Sometimes the exercise of this oversight makes for interesting and effective partnerships, between grantors and grantors and between grantors and grantees. And sometimes it quickly degenerates into meddlesome, intrusive micromangement.

None of which applies to Liberty Tree, I hasten to add, for our aims and our subject matter are relentlessly long-term and cultural rather than short-term and political. Besides, we don't cost very much. But the news we offer is frequently and substantially affected by these trends in professional philanthropy; it remains an important, relatively uncovered story.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Time to subscribe, if you haven't already, to The Grove, our free bi-weekly newsletter. Donella Meadows appears exclusively each issue, and you'll get interesting inside stories about the Website and its regiment of contributors. Please give it a look.

 

5/29: Quantification
5/28: Over the Top
5/27: Solar Hippies
5/23: Spiffy Cars, Clunker Bikes
5/22: Petroleum Heresy
5/21: We Irish
5/20: Shallow Backpackers
5/19: Songbirds
5/16: Fat, Fat, Fat
5/15: Our Forthright Administration
5/14: Coral Reefs of the Sahara
5/13: (Life Before) Death and Taxes
5/12: Kids
5/09: Free Trade and Hormones
5/08: Sherry Boehlert, Republican
5/07: Fort Davis, West Texas
5/06: Europe (yawn)
5/05: Divorce, Mothers, Equality
5/02: Killer Grannies and the Highway Bill
5/01: China
4/30: Pity the Mangrove
4/29: Grizzlies off Battery Park
4/28: Mighty Monsanto
4/25: Growth
4/24: Refrigerator Wars
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway

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