Advancing Solutions That Close Disparities

The Challenge

The data are consistent: increasing racial equity and strengthening social justice remain challenges to our society. But closing gaps or disparities in racial equity requires good ideas – ideas that address the underlying causes of a particular disparity, ideas that can be realistically implemented.

Barriers to progress include:

• Many good ideas or solutions have been proposed but collect dust on the shelf or whither on the vine, dying for lack of support or momentum
• Not everyone wants to see solutions. For some, there are real advantages to doing nothing.
• The dominant model of philanthropy – charity rather than development – keeps many agencies busy with addressing the needs of victims one at a time, rather than “looking upstream” to find the root causes of social problems.
• Moving a good idea from conception to implementation can be a long haul, involving many partners and jurisdictions, with resistance, inertia, and inconsistent funding encountered along the way.
• Good ideas coming from the African American community (unlike those coming from the White community) are more likely to be dismissed as “biased” or “self-serving,” if they’re even seen at all.
• The forces that resist a good idea are the same that maintain the disparities. Good ideas that can reduce the mortgage-application disparity, for example, are resisted by those who [think they] benefit from that disparity.
• Creating the community and political base to support promising solutions is insufficiently recognized as an essential step in reducing disparities.
• Too many funders believe incorrectly that advocating for policy change is against the rules.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of energy for creating promising solutions that can close gaps in equity, but they have to be surfaced and advanced, and encouraged to gather momentum to successful implementation and fruition.

Benchmark Practices.  Progress is made when philanthropic organizations get good at these benchmark practices:

Actively learning about how a particular injustice or disparity works

Finding data that expresses how a particular disparity works over time can help you find where best to intervene with philanthropic resources.  Most disparities show up as different rates of admission or advancement (to education, to health, to life without harassment, to careers, to credit, to dignity, etc) for different groups. Data on most disparities are collected by government agencies, academic centers, and nonpartisan and nonprofit policy centers.

Finding explanations for these disparities is subject to many biases, friendly and unfriendly, fair and unfair. Getting perspective from those inside and outside the problem is essential. It’s important to “look upstream” of the problems to see what’s causing them, and to design better prevention or earlier intervention strategies.

Helping your community discuss the problem and solutions and possible indicators of short-term and long-term success allows broader buy-in, political cover, breadth of good advice, and support. Who doesn’t want to be seen as helping along a good idea?

Finding ways to monitor changes in problem indicators that you want to effect with your philanthropic activity

In learning about how a particular injustice works, you’ve no doubt come across published data expressing the magnitude of the problem, and how it has changed for the worse or better over the years.  Hopefully these data exist for the community you’re interested in helping.  Deciding which data you want to influence through your actions is a big step in making your philanthropy more useful.

The challenge of “moving the needle” or “bending the trend lines” suggests you’ve found some external indicators or signs of progress you wish to move or bend.  Such measures, carefully chosen and determined to be fair and reliable, need to be monitored regularly if one is to learn about progress in fixing the problem. Measures are often available to the public from government sources or from higher education, or they can be specially constructed.

Look “upstream” in your search for what causes “downstream” problems, the problems that show up in indicator data.  Creating some reasonable goals is the key. You’re not going to fix the problem by yourselves. It will take some combination of other trusted people, good ideas, money, will, support — and even then, who can tell what will happen?  It’s important to stay focused, adopt a spirit of innovation, to learn while doing, and to keep others informed and engaged.

Getting clear among your allies on “what success should look like” helps to keep everyone rooted in a common goal of moving the particular needle you’ve chosen to represent progress.  Keep each step simple, and for each step there should be a simple outcome or result on which to build subsequent steps. Keeping ambitions within reach of resources available (yours, theirs) is important.

Choosing bottom lines worth measuring or noticing is less of a scientific choice and more of a political one than one might imagine. Just as the framing of problems is important (see Building Trust), so is the framing of success.

Developing the art of moving good ideas into widespread practice

Moving ideas into practice is essential if we’re to get beyond the idea stage. This seems obvious, but we’ve learned how widespread is the tendency to ask for more studies, allowing us to admire the problem rather than actively address it. OK, so we don’t always know what solutions will work, so let’s test the most promising ones, invoking the spirit of R&D and innovation, and actively learning what is likely to work.

If our public systems and private markets are broken — and they are, producing different outcomes for different groups — let’s try to fix them until we get them right. There is a continuum of implementation to be mastered — from conception of good ideas, to trying them out and learning their pros and cons, to making improvements and rolling them out in ways that stand to succeed, to full implementation with monitoring to be sure it’s done right and the intended effects are the actual effects.

Not everything can go from “pilot” to “scale” in one jump. There’s a great deal of important variation in place to place that can affect a promising solution, and we have to learn their importance. Multiple tests in multiple settings or jurisdictions is important. “Beware of geeks bearing formulas,” said Warren Buffet, ruing the blind devotion given to incomplete math models of the economy.

The evaluation questions change as our knowledge of a potentially good idea moves down the line. “Does this seem like a good idea?” becomes “Does this still seem like a good idea, knowing what we know now? Can we improve on it further? How will we decide it adds value, or creates even bigger problems?”

Not all field-leveling or gap-closing happens through legislation or the adoption of an official policy. Not all happens at once at the national level or state level, or industry-wide or company-wide. The Civil Rights acts of the 1960s created big changes, but it didn’t fix everything. The election of Barack Obama was a signal event, but it too won’t change everything. Sometimes change happens in much more subtle, incremental ways that are never mandated by official authority, but seem to originate at the kitchen table, a meeting room, the street, or a dream.  Some solutions are so quietly implemented we don’t even notice for awhile that they’re happening.

Coming to know one’s power to influence change is, as every one who has tried knows, a life-changing awareness. Everyone can play a role, and every organization can play a role. Of course, everyone resists change in their way as well, but ultimately there is flow. The way in which overtly anti-racist talk and behavior has ebbed in the last 20 years is an example of change that’s “in the water” more than something mandated specifically by institutional authority. Its time had come.  Moving toward progress, moving better ideas into place, from kitchen table to conference table to treaty table, is one of the major pathways discovered in this research effort.

Helping your community learn, helping it invest in ever-better ideas, is likely to accelerate positive change and help it triumph over negative resistance.  A message: some investments work, others don’t; let’s learn the difference.

Benchmark Signs of Progress.  Philanthropy gets high marks for progress achieved on this pathway when you can see signs that…

• Promising solutions for furthering social justice and closing disparities or gaps in racial equity are gaining more support.
• The model of philanthropy practiced here is more likely to look upstream in search of good solutions than used to be.
• More people in positions to be helpful are wanting to advance effective solutions to problems of justice and equity.
• Past work intending to address disparities or injustice is being recognized and re-introduced for consideration.
• Resistance or inertia to moving good ideas along is decreasing or less effective.
• Good ideas coming from the African American and other minority communities are more likely to be considered than before.

Examples of Good Practice

Jacksonville Community Council, Inc. utilizes a highly participatory model where many people are engaged in a learning process. The results are then submitted for public discussion.  Data can come from national bodies, such as Kids Count , U.S. Census Bureau , and National Urban League .

PolicyLink provided much of the data for Tavis Smiley’s Covenant with Black America, which details disparities in ten key areas of community life, and presents advice on what individuals can do, what the community can do, and what elected officials can do.

The Heifer Foundation raises money in support of Heifer International’s programs throughout the world, with catalogs that describe their vision to end hunger and poverty, and to care for the Earth by creating projects of just and sustainable community development, accented by gifts of livestock and traditions of stewardship.

Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation (Arkansas) has supported the development of curricula and materials for use in public schools that feature new views of justice as it has and has not played out in the state, and has advocated teaching the history of race relations in Arkansas.

Measures, carefully chosen and known to be fair and reliable, can be monitored to indicate progress in fixing the problem. Measures are often available to the public from government sources or from higher education, or they can be specially constructed. See Boston Indicators Project, Twin Cities Compass, Canada’s Vital Signs 2008 for examples.

Civic engagement and community organizing can strengthen the base of support needed to press for and implement solutions to inequity and injustice. Arkansas Public Policy Panel works at grassroots, low-income levels to create discussions of issues children and families face. Ideas can result in legislative proposals. Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families frames key messages for policy development. Proposals are crafted and supported through the legislative and implementation process. To advocate solutions, both these groups draw on coalitions of citizen groups. To create a program of Individual Development Accounts in the state of Arkansas, the Southern Good Faith Fund helped write legislation drawing on ideas surfaced from numerous community discussions.

A longstanding misconception in philanthropic circles holds that advocacy and lobbying are not permitted by charitable organizations. But in fact, Congress has stated that influencing legislation is an appropriate and legitimate activity for charitable organizations, and in 1976 it passed legislation giving public charities the right to lobby up to defined percentages of their annual expenditures. Advocacy, short of endorsing specific candidates for office, is legal for philanthropic organizations, and necessary to help move solutions along. Several national umbrella organizations, such as Independent Sector and Alliance for Justice provide materials in support in educating philanthropic organizations on the tremendous latitude provided in the law to permit advocacy and lobbying. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy in studying 14 nonprofit organizations in New Mexico, NCRP says, “for every dollar invested in the 14 groups for advocacy and organizing ($16.6 million total), the groups garnered more than $157 in benefits for New Mexico communities.”

The Jacksonville Community Council, Inc ., conducted intensive community-based studies of conditions in Jacksonville and how to improve them. They now work to keep alive the good recommendations from the studies.

The South Carolina Association of Community Development Corporations encourages its members to recognize their rights and their responsibilities to their communities, to step up and participate.

ERASE Racism changed key provisions of Nassau County’s fair housing ordinances.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families , working with a variety of other groups, wrote legislation that reduced the number of uninsured low-income children in the state.

When the budget was cut, Lee County Community Development Corporations , working in the Arkansas Delta, created new ways to offer education to its members.

Alaska Rural Community Health Economic Strategies used new funding streams to create job positions and educational opportunities that support the viability of Native village life.

Minneapolis’ Council for Crime and Justice , supported by The Minneapolis Foundation and others, has helped the community trace the cause of racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes to flaws in the operation of the criminal justice system, and has proposed legislative, judicial, and executive remedies.

Effective Communities produces an awards program – the Effies© – to recognize excellence in grappling with gaps and disparities.

Resources

The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, by Donald L. Grant. University of Georgia Press, 1993.

The Covenant with Black America, Tavis Smiley (ed) with research support from PolicyLink.  Also, The Covenant Curriculum in The Covenant in Action, Smiley Books, 2006.

Hope Unraveled: The People’s Retreat and Our Way Back, by Richard C. Harwood, 2005 The Nonprofit Lobbying Guide, second edition. Bob Smucker, Independent Sector, 1999.

The Nonprofit Lobbying Guide, second edition. Bob Smucker, Independent Sector, 1999.

Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts Of Advocacy, Organizing, And Civic Engagement In New Mexico, by Lisa Ranghelli, National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, 2008.

Worry-Free Lobbying for Nonprofits, by Alliance for Justice.

Evaluation With A Diversity Lens: Exploring Its Functions and Utility to Inform Philanthropic Effectiveness, by Ricardo A. Millett, senior consultant to Diversity in Philanthropy Project, 2009.