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PART 1
New configurations of power and governance
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TWO
Critical issues in philanthropy: power, paradox, possibility and the private foundation
Erica Kohl-Arenas
Introduction
This chapter is an attempt to take stock in a time of change: it is a reflection on what I have learnt about the politics of philanthropic funding from my community organising experience, and through empirical research and teaching. I propose that this sort of holistic, open biographical reflection is necessary in a moment of such intense political transition. It is important to discuss in a clear way how we move between theory and practice in handling ambiguities and dilemmas of funding. Given the rise of inequality and the resurgence of right-wing politics in the US and elsewhere, many scholars may refrain from critiquing liberal philanthropy. I argue that when faced with complex historical contexts it is important to remain aware of how even the most seemingly progressive philanthropic frameworks can promote common-sense narratives that reinscribe systems of power and control.
I moved to Ivanhoe, Virginia, in 1989 to live and work with Maxine Waller, a charismatic woman caught up in the struggle to save her deindustrialising coal-mining town. Alerted to the proposed sale of Ivanhoeâs industrial land, Maxine, the wife of a former coal miner, launched a campaign to prevent the sale. She initially hoped that, if saved, the town might attract new industry. Raised in the culture of a company town, many miners believe that the land would be sold because they did not work hard enough, that âbetterâ workers attracted big coal to move elsewhere. Despite their original doubts, a cadre of local women joined Maxine, prevented the sale of the land, and embarked on an educational and organising campaign to plan for the redevelopment of Ivanhoe.
I was changed by this brilliant, rebellious woman and by a community that pulled together. As a participant in Ivanhoeâs peopleâs economics classes, I saw locals begin to understand the global economy and their place in the world around them, becoming active participants in planning for a future they shared. Coal miners and their wives studied and received high school diplomas, a group of women organised feminist Bible studies classes, microenterprises were formed, an oral history book was published, and local theatre productions retold the story of Ivanhoe as one of jubilee and renewal. The Ivanhoe Civic League was incorporated to identify future community development problems and plans. All of these things happened on the townspeopleâs own terms.
Living and working in Ivanhoe made me passionate about adult education and the potential of grassroots community development that is directed by poor people and not defined by outside agencies, institutions or funding requirements. Since Ivanhoe, I have not come across a community project so self-directed, so willing to take risks and, most of all, so unconcerned with the constant chase for private foundation funding. Through my work as a community development practitioner during the 1990s and early 2000s and in subsequent doctoral research, I became increasingly critical of programmes that espouse âgrassrootsâ or âparticipatoryâ approaches to social change yet are led by elite institutions fearful of taking on structural inequalities.
Despite the co-optation, professionalisation and bureaucratisation of community development and social movements, I remain committed to the participatory practices that so changed my life in Appalachia. As a result, the tensions and contradictions that emerge when grassroots organisers, leaders, and not-for-profit staff members engage with large-scale philanthropic and development initiatives have become a thread that runs through my research (Kohl-Arenas, 2016). It is also a central theme in my teaching. Creating opportunities for students to learn how to navigate these tensions through experiential partnerships with community-based institutions in New York City has become a central part of my work.
In 2017 I launched a course specifically focused on philanthropy â âCritical issues in philanthropy: Power, paradox, possibility and the private foundationâ. This graduate seminar aimed to engage professional management, policy and international development students in a critical investigation of relationships of power in philanthropic initiatives to address poverty and inequality. Given that my students and I are practitioner-scholars, the course was also designed to explore spaces of possibility and risk that not-for-profit professionals negotiate when brokering relationships with donors. Drawing on my own research and inspired by several new books from an emerging cohort of critical philanthropy scholars, I was eager to use ethnography, cultural studies and journalistic research materials with students more accustomed to management âbest practicesâ and techniques.
The week before classes were to commence in January 2017, something shifted. Despite my magical (delusional) thinking that this day would not come, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States of America. Suddenly, my critique of mainstream funders like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and of smaller progressive funders including the Rosenberg Foundation and Field Foundation as complicit in watering down the radical agendas of the US social movements of the 1960s felt petty. Should we spend a semester analysing the compromised politics of liberal philanthropy while the US President receives counsel from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank committed to the destruction of the welfare state? Instead of assigning ethnographies of failed community development initiatives, should I assign the groundbreaking Axis of ideology: Conservative foundations and public policy (Krehely et al, 2004)? Or the exposĂ© on the Koch brothers, Dark money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right (Mayer, 2016)? And what of the not-for-profit organisations who will need every penny of liberal philanthropic support they can find as they react to the ârolling thunderâ of executive orders targeted at poor people, immigrants, refugees, transgender people, women and children? Was it really the right time to hold the Leftâs feet to the fire?
Then, I was reminded by a colleague that times of political turbulence and crisis are the critical moments when social movement leaders and not-for-profit professionals risk accepting private funding that alters organising agendas and introduces accountability structures that orient âupwardsâ to elite donors and not the people these movements initially aimed to serve. I decided to teach the class as planned. Although studies of right-wing philanthropy are desperately needed, we would instead ask, âWhat risks do current and emergent social movements and grassroots community development initiatives take when partnering with mainstream private foundations during politically turbulent times?â
To proceed, I first draw on my research on farmworkersâ movements in California to outline the approach to studying philanthropy and social change which informed the âCritical issues in philanthropyâ course. I then review a selection of recent literature on philanthropy used to spark critical discussion among the professional not-for-profit management, urban policy and international development students who took the course. I close with conclusions about the importance of studying and teaching philanthropy within the context of the rise of right-wing politics and white supremacy in the United States.
The self-help myth: philanthropy and social change
My research explores the relationship between private philanthropy and grassroots community development and social movements working to address regional poverty and inequality. The critical questions that drive my research concern historical and contemporary patterns of professionalisation, institutionalisation, bureaucratisation and political co-optation that occur when social movements form relationships with large-scale philanthropic initiatives. In recent years, these trends have become of central concern to a growing interdisciplinary body of research across American poverty and social movement studies, critical development theory, and the more traditional not-for-profit and philanthropy field.
Since the rapid growth of the privately funded not-for-profit sector in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, which corresponded with increasing inequality resulting from neoliberal reforms, scholars have presented accounts of private foundations as unaccountable institutions that use wealth generated through exploitation of both labour and the environment, to fund palliative programmes that pave the way for continued capitalist development and structural inequality (Roelofs, 2003; INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 2007). Most recently, critical development and philanthropy scholars critique the âphilanthrocapitalistâ turn where charitable institutions seek new profits through private-sector investments in major social policy arenas including global health, agriculture, education and disaster relief (Arena, 2012; Morvaridi, 2012; Adams, 2013; McGoey, 2015).
The findings of this growing body of critical philanthropy scholarship overlaps with what I have discovered through my research on foundation investments in Californiaâs Central Valley. Here, it is clear that seemingly benevolent programme frameworks, such as self-help housing development and immigrant civic participation, can weaken and redirect efforts to confront long-standing abuses of agricultural fieldworkers and discrimination against undocumented immigrants. Private philanthropy does not always follow or promote clear-cut capitalist agendas. Instead of always enacting top-down âphilanthrocapitalistâ plans, foundation involvement in poor peopleâs social movements and community development is often a piecemeal process where not-for-profit and philanthropic professionals negotiate, translate and adapt the more confrontational strategies of grassroots organisations to fit idealised âtheories of changeâ agreeable to mainstream publics and to the institutions in which they work. In my book (Kohl-Arenas, 2016), I show how foundation and organisational staff struggle to address migrant poverty in Californiaâs Central Valley, simultaneously one of the wealthiest agricultural production regions in the world and home to the poorest Californians. Compromises between foundation staff and social movement leaders, such as Cesar Chavez of the farmworkersâ movement, and modern-day farmworker and immigrant organisers, in the end produce non-threatening, individualised frameworks of poverty alleviation that make poor people responsible for alleviating their own suffering and ensure that critique of or confrontation with industry is avoided.
Within these funding agreements and institutional arrangements, a key contradiction of âself-helpâ philanthropy is revealed. Because asking poor people to help themselves can contain radically different purposes for the different stakeholders involved (from changing behaviour in a family to organising a boycott), such programmes sometimes activate and even politicise the people engaged. Yet, that politicisation eventually upsets funders who find this politics threatening. The aspirations of grassroots organisations are typically derailed by grant agreements and reporting duties that proscribe firm limits and make demands on the time, energy and ideology of newly professionalised staff. For example, a recent $50 million foundation initiative to improve conditions in Central Valley agricultural communities sought to identify where growers and workers can collaborate on regional development issues. Despite worsening conditions and increasing insecurity for undocumented farmworkers, and in keeping with the now hegemonic âdouble-bottom-line developmentâ trend in poverty alleviation, which proposes that which is good for capital is good for the poor, this initiative avoided challenges to the growersâ economic interests. Operating under this model, community organisers who were initially inspired to address rising rates of pesticide poisoning and financial and sexual abuse in the fields were required to busy themselves with professional development, local âasset mappingâ and building consensus with diverse stakeholders. Despite the sincere hopes of the lead foundation programme officer to improve conditions for farmworkers, by the end of the five-year initiative structural issues inherent in the farm labour system had not been addressed.
Sometimes grassroots or social movement actors make small gains through their own negotiations and brokered relationships. More often consensus politics generates consent which favours dominant groups. Antonio Gramsciâs (1971) understanding of hegemony is particularly useful in this context. Cultural hegemony can be understood as a system of ideological power managed through a set of world views, such as double bottom-line or trickle-down development, imposed on poor and oppressed people. As a central part of his theory of cultural hegemony, Gramsci used the term common sense to represent the world views propagated by the dominant bourgeois culture to serve as the commonly held values of all. When successful, people in the working class identify their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, which helps to maintain the status quo rather than catalyse revolution.
Through my research I found that hegemonic framings are not blindly received and immediately embodied; rather, they are constantly negotiated and contested. Beyond clear-cut examples of top-down capitalist imperialism and market agendas (which can be found in much of the new literature on philanthrocapitalism), a Gramscian understanding of hegemony requires that we pay attention to brokering processes and the âstrategic articulationsâ formed in what Gramsci calls a âwar of positionâ between divergent social actors. For example, in the critical philanthropy research the idea of âservice provisionâ is often understood as hegemonic, representing a decline in anti-capitalist social movement organising. Despite the historical accuracy of this observation, the experiences of the California farmworker movement demonstrate that âservice provisionâ is also an active space of contestation. In the case of the farmworker movement, the âservice-centreâ model was strategically rearticulated as funders and Cesar Chavez negotiated the terms of collaboration. For Chavez and other movement leaders, building community-service institutions was originally a long-term strategy for radical economic independence, pride and movement building based on collective ownership, mutual aid and cultural self-love. Archival correspondence between Chavez and the Field Foundation revealed that philanthropic investors were attracted to the movementâs service-centre model because of its potential to build institutions governed by diverse regional stakeholders. Yet through the founding of not-for-profit farmworker service institutions, funders privileged direct social services and education while excluding questions of unionisation, strikes, worker cooperatives, and the conflictual praxis that originally inspired broad-based farmworkersâ mobilisation. Through negotiations with movement leaders and the eventual founding of the not-for-profit National Farm Worker Service Center in 1966, several foundations came to support the social-service tradition while âdisarticulatingâ the radical aspects of the approach and ârearticulatingâ it within the apolitical not-for-profit model. Not unitary or controlling by definition, a counterhegemonic idea is reinscribed on hegemonic terms through the process of negotiating with powerful stakeholders such as foundation programme officers. Thus, never completely foreclosed, privately funded social movements are often, as Piven and Cloward propose in their classic book Poor peopleâs movements (1978), both constituted by, and in resistance against, bureaucratic institutional structures.
On a broader scale, Cesar Chavez contributed to the farmworker movementâs acceptance of foundation grants to incorporate not-for-profit organisations and to its strategic alignment with the American War on Poverty, both of which he and his allies initially thought to be rigid, unaccountable, elite forms of social change (Kohl-Arenas, 2016). The decision to accept foundation funding and incorporate not-for-profit institutions in the last years of the 1960s was partially in line with Chavezâs vision to build the self-sustaining farmworker âmutual aidâ institutions mentioned above, and directly enabled the movement to attract a diversity of resources, catapulting the United Farm Workers onto the national stage. Yet, the not-for-profit institutions formed also presented a politically constrained space of retreat from field organising when the movement faced serious challenges such as violence against strikers on the picket lines, political repression and surveillance from the state, and competition with the more moderate Teamsters union.
Unlike much of the critical philanthropy scholarship, however, my research and classroom discussions often consider how certain framings, positions, identities and interests are never fixed or complete but rather grow contingently â and often strategically â in the course of struggle. In this sense, programmes funded by foundations may control grantees at one moment, yet they may also contain elements of alternatives to the dominant framework they represent, and they may be understood and used differently across a diverse range of organisations and networks at different historical moments. Specific attention is drawn to the role of not-for-profit professionals and non-state actors engaged in poverty-alleviation projects. Reliance on foundation funding alters the very nature of social change. Distracted and bogged down by negotiating relationships with donors and professional management and partnership requirements, short-term foundation-funded programmes replace the day-to-day engagement, listening, relationship building and strategising re...
