Grantmaker Roundtable
Community Organizing Grantmaking and Community Development

Regina McGraw: Tell us about your experiences with community organizing, why you think it's an important strategy and how it fits with the other grantmaking at your foundation.

Frank Sanchez: I've been doing community organizing grantmaking for almost 18 years at private, public, family and community foundations. I started with a public foundation established by a network of community organizers and activists from around the country. Our mission was to move more community organizing money into the field. I came out of the community organizing movement before that, that's how I came into contact with foundations that were funding community organizing.

I think that community organizations give voice to people's deepest convictions, and when people find their voice, especially in low- and moderate-income communities, they are transformed. They learn that they can shape the world as much as it shapes them. In foundations sometimes we tend to look only at the conclusion or the outcome - not at the story in between. In community organizing, the story is as important as the conclusion or the outcome - that's where deep change is made in communities. The Needmor Fund is a private family foundation whose founders have always been committed to the basic premise that people should be part of the decisions that affect their lives and that there's probably no other one vehicle that does that than community organizing. That's why we are committed to funding community organizing.

Cris Doby: Here at Mott, community organizing is one piece of a larger Pathways Out of Poverty program. What I like about the way we're doing it is that it is integrated into the other two strategies we are pursuing through out Poverty program - expanding economic opportunity and education reform. We take the position that an organized community is the necessary baseline to make and sustain change over time to benefit poor people and distressed communities. It is also "the" piece that we do within the Poverty program for the revitalization of American democracy.

Before coming to Mott I worked for many years in a number of local dioceses as director for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which funds community organizing. I don't know what else I would do in the foundation world if I wasn't doing community organizing grantmaking. I come to work every day excited, because I get to work with community organizations and community organizers. For me, it's not just that it's an important strategy, there's a passion I have for wanting to support this work and be a part of what I really do believe is an effort to revitalize our democracy and provide a voice for people who would otherwise be marginalized from our systems.

Henry Allen: When I came to the Hyams Foundation, I had some background doing community and union organizing and some labor solidarity work. But much of my professional career was in education, as a teacher and an administrator. When I came to Hyams eleven years ago, community organizing was not a major part of its portfolio or grantmaking strategy. But there was a real openness and a commitment to learn how to connect to the community better and to support what was going on there. When I interviewed for my job, there was a lot of discussion about their openness to organizing, so there was a good initial match between my interests and values and commitment to organizing and social and economic justice and the foundation's long history of work in low-income neighborhoods and an openness to do things differently.

The very first project that I worked on at Hyams started off with a focus on the epidemic of youth violence related to the drug trade, which was undermining a lot of good work that was going on in Boston. In talking to the community, we learned that what they most wanted to do was to figure out ways they could mobilize their own neighbors to transform those communities in positive ways. The Foundation embraced the notion of investing in community organizing and leadership development, coalition building and public policy work that had a focus around youth violence. This was really a much broader strategy that had to do with securing resources for the neighborhoods so they could really deal with issues of youth disempowerment. So we got into community organizing around a very specific issue. Once that happened, the Foundation committed major resources, eventually totaling over $2.5 million over an eight-year period, to that organizing effort. Today organizing is very central to the work of the Foundation. We have a mission statement that frames our work - to increase economic and social justice and power within low-income communities. It supports the funding of community organizing, leadership development, and public policy in community economic development, youth development, and all of the areas where the Foundation works.

We also learned a great deal from our colleagues. During my first year at Hyams I got involved with NFG, which is a remarkable learning community of colleagues. They shared their own experiences about community organizing as a strategy for approaching and dealing with youth violence, housing, jobs or economic development. More importantly as Frank and Cris have indicated, these colleagues saw organizing as the critical way in which people find their voice and act on their own values and commitment to their families and communities.

Frank: Something that Henry was saying that's real important in understanding community organizing and why we and a lot of foundations support it is that it's not issue specific. Good community organizing provides a framework for people to work on whatever issue they think is important to them. A community can look at housing or economic development or schools - all through a community organizing framework. There are basic organizing tenets that help you deal with any issue that a community cares to take on and that's really critical to understand why a lot of us fund community organizing.

Organizing and Accountability
Regina: So community organizing brings something to other community development grantmaking and may be more integrated with other strategies than people have been thinking?

Cris: I think that it's far more integrated. One frustration that I experience is my inability to articulate this fact when I'm speaking with other funders. I think that community organizing brings community accountability to other activities. Often programs start with a sincere desire to be connected to what folks will often refer to as "the grassroots." But then they drift from that. Community development is a good example. Sometimes after small community development corporations (CDCs) and other initiatives are started locally, the whole world of development - the funding streams and the relationships that are necessary to build projects and so forth - pulls the groups away from their original grassroots connections. Without some real organizing presence, they can lose accountability back to the community. There are certainly good examples where this hasn't happened, but there are so many others that we can point to where community development initiatives have pulled away from the community. I've been in the midst of some pretty ugly fights, where the community development piece got so big they forgot that the word community was in there and they acted like "deal makers." We ended up with the CDC and the community on different sides. One of the things that organizing brings is an accountability to the community for all kinds of different efforts that are operating economically and socially. Community development is one of them and elected officials are another one and school systems are another. The fight develops when organizations or officials act on communities of people, frequently without any accountability or any enforceable accountability.

Frank: That's been my experience too. What makes community development efforts successful is the community organizing. I've done community development for 30 years with a lot of organizations in my own area and around the state of New Mexico. You can't do one without the other. In Needmor's funding, if the community organization has a sister community development corporation, the CDC is much stronger and more effective. Communities need to realize what they've created; otherwise they won't feel part of it. If community development is separated from an organized base of people, that's what happens. Community organizing offers community development a connection to a larger community base. It continues to weave relationships that are important for that specific community development project and as important, for the long term development and transformation of a community. It's so critical in building the confidence of the community for it to realize that their community organization, representing 1000 people, created new housing or 100 new jobs - it wasn't just the three or four or five smart community development people who wanted more jobs or wanted to develop a clinic or create housing.

Henry: I'd also add that we're all having to be accountable to our own foundations and are looking for the most effective ways we can invest these scarce and critical resources. What organizing can bring to whatever field we're talking about - community development, community building, health, youth, is greater impact, better quality programs, better lasting programs, and the ability to really sustain the work in neighborhoods and communities over a longer period of time.

I think an argument can be made that when community organizing is done effectively, with all of the components in place that we know make for good organizing, it has a very high quality impact in neighborhoods and communities. We need to communicate to our colleagues more effectively than we've done in the past about good strong community organizing and its impact.

Funding Organizing Efforts
Regina: Do you think lack of information is part of what's holding some funders back from grantmaking in this area?

Henry: It's also that we have sold ourselves short on effectively evaluating community organizing's impact. It can be evaluated in a very rigorous way, with very clear criteria and standards. When this is done, it emerges as a better strategy and approach to investing foundation resources than a lot of the other ways we invest our money.

So far we haven't done a good job evaluating the impact of organizing. And when we have, we haven't shared that information with our colleagues even when it shows how effective community organizing is and how it impacts a range of other issues that our colleagues are investing in.

Cris: Henry, you're touching on something that is really important. Ron White [Cris' colleague at the C.S. Mott Foundation] and I commissioned a couple of consultants to do what we called a quick and dirty survey, not a full-fledged evaluation, of the economic impact of community organizing. We expected to come back with some pretty astounding results, but we were blown away with the results. This is something that has got to be addressed if we want more foundations to fund community organizing. We need to demonstrate the concrete economic impact of community organizing.

Another thing that may be holding funders back is a shyness about community organizing because of a fear of controversy - community organizing demands change and change is controversial. There's just no getting around that. Related to that is a general inability to adequately distinguish between advocacy, confrontation and community organizing. While an organizing campaign may use advocacy or confrontation, that is not what community organizing IS, and frequently that is not broken open. And then again, in my experience, some funders would like to fund organizing but don't have a portfolio for community organizing as such. In these cases, I think we can make the case that organizing can be seen as a tool - one of many tools that funders are supporting - to accomplish the goals of the portfolio they are working. Whether that is for education reform, living wage, economic development, expanded health or tax policies, community organizing can be one of the array of funded activities achieving the benchmarks of the funding strategy.

Today community organizing is talked about as if, oh yes, it's really nice, it gets everyone talking to each other, you get a few leaders and people start to feel good about themselves, and the conversation sort of stops there. Not enough funders have had a chance to really experience its power.

Frank: The way we keep connected is that at least once a year we do site sessions with our board of trustees and the organizations that we fund.

Cris: We're doing that too. Our trustees have been curious about community organizing and recently went to a series of site visits in San Antonio, where they were able to see, meet, hear and discuss with local leaders and organizers the transformative power of community organizing. My sense is that they came away excited by our Foundation's commitment to this funding area. As they toured we asked them to look for four things we think make organizing effective - if the organization and the process of organizing are put above the program; if it delivers tangible assets to the community; if it's a democratic process promoting civic engagement; if it leads to personal transformation for those involved. Our trustees seemed to indicate to us that what they saw hit these markers.

Using the Community Organizing Toolbox
Regina: Do you have ideas of how NFG can use the Community Organizing Toolbox to create greater awareness about community organizing grantmaking?

Henry: We should think about a strategy for using the United Way in Boston as a way to reach other United Ways across the country at their national conference and regional workshops.

Cris: We should also think about identifying community foundations who are doing community organizing grantmaking and work with them in a similar way.

Frank: We should think about using the Community Organizing Toolbox over a number of years, using it to effect and impact every network - community foundations, United Ways, local associations of grantmakers, and grantmakers funding in restricted areas. This is a long-term effort to get more foundations to fund community organizing.

Regina: Thank you all for a very thoughtful conversation. Our readers who are interested in the Community Organizing Toolbox can see NFG's Web site for more information about it.

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