When a new competition got underway to offer $10 million to local nonprofits that wanted to experiment with ways to bring together people with different views, organizers expected several dozen applications.
Instead, about 800 applications for the Healing Starts Here grants program poured in.
That was a telling sign for Uma Viswanathan, who heads the New Pluralists, the organization that ran the competition with money it has collected from foundations with widely divergent ideological views, such as Charles Koch’s philanthropy and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Altogether, participating philanthropies, which also include Fetzer Institute, Lubetzky and Klarman family foundations, the Omidyar Network, and the John Templeton Foundation, have put up $47 million toward a goal of attracting a total of $100 million over the next decade to the cause.
And that’s just a start, Viswanathan says.
She’s confident the work New Pluralists supports is so appealing to foundations and donors burned out over the harsh political ads, snide Twitter remarks, and actual acts of violence against people seen as different that the collaborative’s example will help spur a total of $1 billion from other philanthropies to the broader cause of “bridge building” in the next decade.
“The appetite for this is so huge,” Viswanathan says.
Not everyone is convinced.
That division exploded into public view in the past six weeks after six leaders with widely disparate views, including Darren Walker, head of Ford, and Brian Hooks, who oversees Charles Koch’s giving arm Stand Together, wrote an essay in the Chronicle urging an embrace of pluralism and an end to ad hominem attacks.
Critics such as Vu Le pilloried progressive foundation leaders for advancing the notion that “all philanthropy is equal,” when foundations that hew to a conservative line support efforts that put progressive gains at risk.
Viswanathan, however, praised the essay, saying that progress will come only by persuading people to see beyond the simplified “winners and losers” orientation that seems to dominate most debates. In such a mind-set, every stance on every issue is sharpened to its most lethal edge. It is pro or anti, or us versus them, without room for nuance or space for common ground, Viswanathan says.
“When we look at the important strides that we’ve taken as a country around civil rights or women’s rights or any number of issues, it has happened through a kind of radical collaboration across many, many lines of difference,” she says
No Alienating Rhetoric
For that sort of cooperation to be possible, first it is necessary to turn the temperature down on how nonprofit leaders speak about others, Viswanathan says.
In its request for proposals for Healing Starts Here, New Pluralists drew a bold line: no groups with a track record of “alienating, belittling, or rejecting people” with opposing views would receive a grant.
But nonprofits don’t have to leave their political beliefs at the door and be neutral, Viswanathan says. All it takes to be brought into the fold is a sincere curiosity about building connections with people who may be different in terms of race, age, sexual orientation, or faith.
To help achieve its broader $1 billion goal to attract funds to close divides, New Pluralists enlisted two philanthropy groups, Democracy Funders Network and Philanthropy Active in Civic Engagement, to define what bridge-building philanthropy looks like. The effort has produced a Funder’s Guide to Building Social Cohesion, which lays out some of the ways grant makers can support groups that aim to curb divisive rhetoric and help people recognize the bonds they share with others.
The two groups followed up with a self-assessment that foundations can use to determine whether their approach to philanthropy is bringing people together or inflaming existing hatreds.
Often, grant makers can contribute to toxic polarization without realizing it, says Kristen Cambell, chief executive of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. When foundations attempt to respond to hot-button issues, they often do so with a real sense of urgency, she says.
The rush to generate change can be destructive if a grant maker uses “overly virtuous or absolutist” terms in describing its goals. That kind of talk, Cambell says, can make it difficult for the nonprofits they support to reach out to potential partners who may have the same concerns but different backgrounds.
“When every issue is framed as this high-stakes moral battle, it gives people the tacit permission to break social norms because in their minds, the ends justify the means, even violence,” Cambell says. “It can lead to the rationalization of more extreme strategies and tactics, and those can prime people for defensiveness and combativeness.”
A Sense of Belonging
Welcoming America is among several dozen nonprofits that New Pluralists points to as examples of the right approach for grant makers.
The nonprofit, which has received grants from New Pluralists and several of its members, including the Walmart Foundation and Klarman Family Foundation, aims to foster a sense of belonging among immigrants who are new to communities throughout the country. One of its signature efforts is something it calls a Welcoming City certification.
To become a Welcoming City, a town has to adopt policies that open up hiring for government and contracting jobs to everyone in the city; ensure that all residents, including those whose first language isn’t English, have access to city services; and consistently seek input on civic issues from foreign-born residents.
Beyond those requirements, the certification also requires that cities actively work to develop connections between longtime residents and refugees and immigrants who are recent arrivals.
The city of Lancaster, Pa., is one of the 18 localities with the certification. It has seen a big influx of refugees and immigrants over the past two decades. While many residents are proud of Lancaster’s unofficial “America’s Refugee Capital” moniker, the new residents haven’t always been made to feel at home and have been targeted in recent years at anti-immigration rallies.
Leading up to the certification, longtime residents and recent immigrants attended meetings together to share their experiences. The designation became a point of pride, says Rachel Peric, Welcoming America’s executive director, and instead of seeing newcomers as a threat, politicians touted Lancaster’s Welcoming City status.
Often, Peric says, nonprofits working on immigration issues focus their attention solely on a community’s new residents, rather than working to bring immigrants and long-termers together.
“The onus is usually on immigrants to adapt, and there is very little being done to help a community move through this pretty significant change,” she says. “That can create fodder for politicians to throw a match right in and light up people’s emotions.”
Opposition From Liberals
The push to support pluralism comes as many progressive foundations have thrown the weight of their support behind anticorporate, movement-based efforts to strengthen workers rights, fight climate change, and end white supremacy. After years of seeing conservative organizations led by donors like the Kochs as their nemesis, it seems like a difficult moment to start working with them, according to some movement leaders.
Conservative donors can use their participation in bridge-building efforts to soft-pedal their support of issues left-leaning organizations find repugnant, says Mario Lugay, senior innovation director at Justice Funders, a network of foundations and individuals working to promote social justice in philanthropy.
“We have to be vigorous and disciplined about asking ourselves who’s benefiting more from this exchange,” he says.
Getting along isn’t that simple, Lugay says. Before progress can be made, the pain felt by people who have been victimized by racial or social injustice must be addressed, he says. Dialogue with erstwhile foes, he suggests, cannot salve those “open wounds.”
Carlos Saavedra, founder of Ayni Institute, a training organization for progressive movement groups agrees: “Part of having unity in this country is making amends.”
It makes sense that foundations might want to support one side or another of a pressing social issue, says Jenn Hoos Rothberg, executive director of the Einhorn Collaborative, a member of the collaborative. That kind of support, which can pit one group of Americans against another, may be necessary to put out fires or right some immediate wrong, she says. She calls the work of New Pluralists “fire prevention” — a slower, but necessary process that attempts to foster trust and feelings of empathy.
She puts it in existential terms.
“The speed of change is so fast,” she says. “That speed of that change can create a level of fear and distrust and isolation and loneliness that is very difficult for our species to withstand. Our solution in the midst of that speed is to slow down and try our best to live in the analog world.”
Drawing Lines
Working together isn’t always a smooth ride. Before the formation of New Pluralists, the Charles Koch Institute (now called the Stand Together Trust) approached the Hewlett Foundation to see if it wanted to take part in forming a new fund that would promote ideas of toleration and empathy.
The two foundations had established a working relationship over the years and jointly supported a number of projects. But joining forces in a new fund was a nonstarter for Hewlett.
Daniel Stid, who at the time led Hewlett’s grant making aimed at strengthening democracy, said his colleagues at the foundation saw Charles Koch as such a strong political force on the right that any effort coming out of the Koch world to promote toleration wouldn’t be seen as credible.
“There was a lot of hardball and pretty aggressive tactics and messages being deployed on the political side of things that would just swamp and overwhelm anything they might do on the charitable side,” Stid says.
Still, he decided it was worth exploring a collaboration. He and Sarah Cross, vice president of free speech and peace at Stand Together, discussed candidly what was holding Hewlett back.
That sort of dialogue, Cross says, was different than how a lot of other potential partners react.
“We’ve had some flat no’s in the past,” she says.
A problem identified by the staff at Hewlett was that some participants in the broader Stand Together donor network supported a political candidate who was campaigning with destructive rhetoric, Cross says, declining to identify the person.
Since then, Cross says, Stand Together has gone through a transformation. While the group thought the use of hardline political rhetoric was justified by the strong belief it has in ideals like free enterprise, Cross says, “that’s not how we do business anymore.”
By championing free markets and entrepreneurship, Stand Together is at odds with a number of Hewlett priorities, notably its recent $50 million Reimagining Capitalism effort. But, says Cross, the willingness of people in both organizations to be curious about the other’s viewpoints and the ability to forge friendships helped the two grant makers set aside differences and focus on areas where they could work together.
“The tendency to demonize and divide is rampant,” she says. “There’s a tendency in all sectors and from all tribes to entrench and to dig in to their existing perspective and to show commitment to a cause not just by refusing to work with the other side, but actually painting the other side as evil or unworthy of participation in civic life,” says Cross. “We’re not as divided as we seem.”
A few years later, when the New Pluralists came calling with Stand Together as part of the group, Hewlett joined in. The decision came with some fallout. Shortly afterward, some left-leaning foundations pulled out of attending a conference co-hosted by the two grant makers, citing an unwillingness to support anything associated with Koch, Stid says.
Other grant makers in the group, not just Stand Together, have had to rethink how they operate. The Fetzer Institute, a grant maker rooted in liberal theological principles, is actively recruiting conservatives to balance its board of trustees, says its president, Bob Boisture.
The effort to broaden representation on its board, he says, reflects a desire to welcome everyone who shares a desire to be part of a loving world.
The billion-dollar goal New Pluralists has set is lofty, Boisture says. But he thinks a lot of donors, even those who have been heavily involved in politics on one side or the other, are ready for a new direction.
“They can’t do it anymore because they’re frustrated they don’t have anything to show for it,” he says. “And more importantly, it’s just become toxic for them personally. It’s just become poison for people.”
Credit:Source link
