Tag Archives: philanthropy

Recently a foundation colleague and I had an email exchange sparked by this Nonprofit Quarterly article about the role of philanthropy and advocacy in ACA implementation.

It sparked my thinking about the importance of implementation, and, hence, the request for more examples of implementation advocacy stories, from all of you.

There are also some really important points about the more technical pieces of healthcare reform implementation, and the roles for philanthropy in making sure that that legislation has the impact on people’s access to health care and, ultimately, overall health status, that was intended. It’s very worth reading.

But I think that there’s also a larger point about the role of philanthropy in advocacy, and about what nonprofits need to think about regarding the disconnect, often, between the strategies we deliver and the types of change we hope to pursue. Because one of the major criticisms from the article, and the primary point of our online ‘conversation’, was about how much ‘advocacy’ by nonprofits–and how much advocacy support by philanthropy–is really more public education, despite the obvious fact that “politics, not information, plays the decisive role in policy decisions”.

It ties back to the advocacy framework, and the reality that we spend a lot of our time in the community information-generation sphere, when what will be required to get to policy change might be grassroots organizing, or direct lobbying, or even litigation. The article largely pins the blame for that chasm between strategy and outcome on philanthropy’s reluctance to aggressively fund advocacy; one source said that “foundations have a higher sense of the impact of their reports and studies on public policies than is actually warranted”, and this colleague of mine was quick to concur that foundations, in general, can shy away from anything that looks like contentious policy debate.

But I think that nonprofits are often complicit in this, in that we may be no more eager to get into heated policy controversies than the foundations that fund us, or no more equipped to take on the long-term work of base-building, either.

So, while, yes, the foundation conference that this article covers reflected a “bias…toward the capacity of philanthropy to publish objective information even though facts are often less influential than hard-nosed politics”, but I have those same conversations with nonprofit Boards of Directors and staff executives, too.

We want to think that injecting really good information into the policy debate will make all the difference, that facts will get us where we want to go.

We want to live there, because we’re comfortable with those activities, and because that vision of how change happens aligns with our hopes for how public policy should be constructed.

But wishing and hoping doesn’t make it happen, and, in reality, neither do really well-researched fact sheets, either. Not alone.

So, my hope, in healthcare reform implementation and in all other policy issues with implications for people’s well-being, is that nonprofit advocates will get confident and capable of playing in all areas of the advocacy framework, that we’ll cultivate relationships with philanthropists ready to work with us, and that, as a result, we’ll win.

A lot.

One fairly influential individual

There are a lot of sort of pop psychology, bumper sticker motivationals out there about the difference that one individual can make…they all sort of run together for me, but you know what I mean, right?

Probably the best known is attributed to Helen Keller, “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

Beautiful, right? And capable of making me feel guilty when I’m, say, on my way to the fabric store instead of a rally.

The belief in the power of the individual is very much rooted in our culture, but much less frequently seen in how we build capacity for advocacy and social change.

Bet you never thought about that while stopped behind someone at a red light, hunh?

See, when it comes to how we invest in building power to make a difference, we tend to focus almost exclusively on networks of people, on the connections that bind us together, and on how we create structures that leverage those relationships for power.

Sure, it’s obvious that no social movements are the sole work of any individual, even those that are commonly associated with one. But isn’t it also just as true that single individuals do, perhaps not as often as we would wish, change the course of history in amazing ways?

So why is the organization, or the community, most often our focal unit, when we think about what we need to develop in order to reach our goals? Why do we sometimes sort of gloss over the individuals who populate those entities, as though they are somehow replaceable, even when history so clearly teaches us otherwise?

I’ve been particularly thinking about this over the past couple of weeks because of the work that I do with The Sunflower Foundation and its Advocacy Fellows initiative. The initiative is somewhat distinct, particularly in the philanthropic world, because it revolves around advocacy, specifically, rather than a more diffuse sense of nonprofit leadership, and yet, unlike many other advocacy capacity-building efforts, individual advocates are clearly the emphasis.

The theory of change animating the Advocacy Fellowship is this: “the Sunflower Foundation believes that increasing the number of nonprofit health leaders who advocate on behalf of their constituents informs public policy and leads to real solutions for those in need. By becoming involved in advocacy, nonprofit leaders are advancing their causes, building public trust, and helping the people they serve.”

Notably missing, then, is discussion about the organizations in which these individuals work (indeed, they fairly frequently move organizations during the Fellowship or quickly following it) or about the sector as a whole. Instead, the idea is to find promising people, who happen to be working in nonprofit health organizations, and to work intensively with them to develop the knowledge, skills, and, yes, relationships they need to be effective advocates themselves. They are the ones held accountable for moving their work forward, and they are seen as the keys to advancing a vision of a healthy Kansas.

We’re still very much in the early stages of evaluation, but the indications at this point are, really, that the model works–that, no, their organizations do not necessarily greatly increase their advocacy capacity, but they as individuals do, and that that makes a difference. They are quoted more frequently in media accounts of related policy debates, they engage in those debates more often and with more influence, they are more respected by a larger circle of potential targets and allies, and they are increasingly sophisticated and outspoken in their advocacy.

It’s a bit of a gamble, this business of investing in individuals. We feel safer, sometimes, with organizations, because of the law of averages, but those same “averaging” tendencies can dilute and stall the radical message we want to convey: that, in the end, justice hinges on you (and me).

Here’s to sparking movements, one soul at a time.