The Role of Foundations in Integrating Antipoverty Work into a Broader Systemic Change Agenda

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2 The in Integrating Antipoverty Work into a Broader Systemic Change Agenda By Raquiba LaBrie Raquiba LaBrie is director, Community Advocacy Project, and program officer, Access to Justice Program, Open Society Institute, 400 W. 59th St., New York, NY 10019; RLabrie@sorosny.org. What role can foundations play in advancing an antipoverty agenda? In considering this issue, I feel compelled to begin by reframing the question. As a foundation program officer responsible for civil and criminal justice grant-making portfolios, what I have gleaned from the work of grantees and other thinkers and practitioners whom I respect is that the interconnected forms of racial, economic, and other inequality plaguing communities of color and low-income communities cannot be analyzed in isolation. To begin to dismantle the entangled web of inequality in the United States, an equally intricate and multifaceted approach is required. Thus I choose to consider how foundations can advance a broad-based, systemic approach to social change that extends beyond an antipoverty agenda to challenge the multiple forms of inequality intersecting with poverty. I attribute three distinguishing characteristics to a systemic approach. It adopts race as a lens through which broader inequity can be viewed and challenged. It involves multisector collaboration. And it involves a multiissue analysis of injustice. What follows are minicase studies that illustrate the markers of a systemic approach and highlight how foundations have promoted each. I. Confronting Race In their book, The Miner s Canary, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres identify racial injustice in the United States as a systemic problem affecting us all, people of color and whites. The metaphor of the miner s canary is from coal miners use of caged canaries to test air quality in mines. Just as the canary s suffering warned of poison in the air, racial inequality serves as a barometer for the health of our democracy. 1 The authors argue that confronting racial inequality enables us to see how our present conception of democracy is failing not only people of color but poor and working class whites as well. 2 Guinier and Torres vividly illustrate how racial discrimination exposes, and connects to, other forms of inequality by describing the efforts to unionize the Kmart distribution center in Greensboro, North Carolina. In the Kmart struggle the combined advocacy of black and white workers, local ministers, and union organizers helped the union negotiate its first contract with Kmart. The contract raised wages and increased worker protections. 3 1 LANI GUINIER & GERALD TORRES, THE MINER S CANARY: ENLISTING RACE, RESISTING POWER, TRANSFORMING DEMOCRACY 11 (2002). 2 Id. at Id. at CLEARINGHOUSE REVIEW JULY AUGUST 2003

3 In the early 1990s the Greensboro plant had the double distinction of being the only Kmart distribution center with a majority nonwhite work force and the center with the lowest wages of any in the country. 4 In considering how to mobilize workers and the broader Greensboro community to challenge conditions at the Kmart facility, union leaders and local ministers knew that they had a dilemma. Characterizing the struggle as solely economic risked alienating black workers, who saw the collective unfairness of their situation as directly linked to their status as a racialized minority. 5 Characterizing the struggle as solely an issue of race discrimination risked alienating white workers. 6 They concluded that neither characterization alone adequately described the full dimensions of the struggle. In the end, race was used as a lens through which to view systemic inequity. Leaders of the struggle chose to frame Kmart s refusal to pay a living wage as a broader community issue with labor and race as central concerns and, in doing so, were able to mobilize white workers who had been slow to join the movement. 7 White workers learned that their wages were depressed because of racial discrimination directed at blacks, but affecting all. 8 In fact, the white workers commitment to the shared struggle became so entrenched that when Kmart sued protesters and named only blacks in its complaint, white workers who participated in the same protest held a news conference demanding to know why they had not been sued. 9 I offer this story for two reasons. First, it reveals how racial and economic inequality are often inextricably linked. Failing to confront the racial dimensions of economic injustice is shortsighted. Second, it reveals how race can be instrumental in enlisting new and unlikely allies to support a combined racial and economic justice agenda. In the words of Guinier and Torres, without access to race others are unlikely even to recognize the ways in which many of our civil institutions are undemocratic. 10 The Funders Collaborative for Racial Justice Innovation. Building upon the lessons learned from the Kmart struggle and a number of other recent racial justice struggles captured in Penda Hair s report, Louder than Words: Lawyers, Communities and the Struggle for Justice, a group of funders responded to the call for more support for racial justice advocacy and formed the Funders Collaborative for Racial Justice Innovation. 11 The collaborative provides flexible, multiyear funding to support partnerships between lawyers and community groups tackling structural exclusion based on race, ethnicity, national origin, and language. 12 The collaborative has three primary components: (1) a national grant-making fund; (2) state and regional grant-making funds; and (3) a combined documentation and learning initiative. The national fund s grants support creative, local problem- 4 Id. at Id. at Id. 7 PENDA HAIR, LOUDER THAN WORDS: LAWYERS, COMMUNITIES AND THE STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE 113 (2001) (quoting Rev. Nelson Johnson, statement at a Rockefeller Foundation sponsored event on normative lawyering, May 31, 1996), available at 8 Id. at GUINIER & TORRES, supra note 1, at Id. at HAIR, supra note 7. More information about the Funders Collaborative for Racial Justice Innovation is available at 12 In Louder than Words, Penda Hair defines structural exclusion as subtle and overt forms of racial disadvantage and prejudice including market, political and social mechanisms, that are influenced by gross disparities in wealth, income or value which can be traced to historic racial disadvantage or, conversely, to historic racial advantage. HAIR, supra note 7, at 9 n.3. JULY AUGUST 2003 JOURNAL OF POVERTY LAW AND POLICY 141

4 solving efforts throughout the United States. 13 State and regional funds grants support collaboration within their geographic areas. 14 The comprehensive documentation and learning initiative offers training and technical assistance to grantees and disseminates lessons learned from grantees advocacy. Given the persistent links between race and poverty, the collaborative s attention to racial exclusion necessarily embraces economic justice issues. II. Connecting Sectors, Connecting Issues Progressive foundations are increasingly seen as undermining their grant-making and policy-reform efforts by confining themselves to policy silos. 15 By locking themselves into funding categories, foundations are perceived as lacking an integrated, broad-scale reform vision. 16 Targeted program areas can inhibit foundations ability to see the forest for the trees and can reproduce silo formation in grantee organizations. But many counterexamples illustrate how foundations are connecting old issues in new ways and promoting multisector collaboration in advancing systemic change. Highlighted below are two such initiatives supported by the Open Society Institute. The Baltimore Fund. Open Society Institute Baltimore s Workforce and Economic Development Program recently invested in an initiative illustrating how foundations can leverage their resources to encourage partners from a range of other sectors to support antipoverty work. In 2002 Open Society Institute Baltimore cosponsored the formation of a $15 million venture capital fund to create more than 1,000 new jobs for low- and moderate-income Baltimore residents while generating a financial return for investors. The Baltimore Fund s cosponsors include the Open Society Institute and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, each pledging $5 million. The fund raised an additional $5 million in commitments from Deutsche Bank and the Johns Hopkins Institutions, from an individual investor, and from the following foundations: Baltimore Community; Blaustein; France-Merrick; Fund for Change; Goldseker; Hoffberger; Krieger; Straus; and Thalheimer. The Baltimore Fund is part of a $50 million multistate fund managed by TRF Urban Growth Partners, the venture capital arm of the Reinvestment Fund, one of the nation s leading community development financial institutions. TRF was selected to manage the fund because of its successful track record in community development venture capital and its trademark approach of combining investment activity with human resource and workforce support, resulting in the hiring, training, and retention of a high-quality, urban work force at its portfolio firms. TRF s mission is to generate a financial return to investors while using capital to create jobs, quality housing, community and educational facilities, and other economic benefits on a regional basis. It accomplishes this mission by making loan and equity investments to small businesses, residential and commercial real estate developments, and a variety of community projects. 13 The national fund includes Ford Foundation, Jeht Foundation, Levi Strauss Foundation, Open Society Institute, and Rockefeller Foundation. 14 State funds have been established in California and North Carolina. Donor partners of the California fund include Akonadi Foundation, The California Endowment, Ford Foundation, Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, and James Irvine Foundation. Donor partners of the North Carolina Fund include Warner Foundation and Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. 15 Catherine Samuels, director of the Open Society Institute s Program on Law and Society, first introduced me to the concept of foundations organizing themselves into counterproductive silos. I take the term policy silos from Robert O. Bothwell, The Decline of Progressive Policy and the New Philanthropy: Progressive Foundations and Other Alternatives to Mainstream Foundations Are Created and Become Substantial, But Fail to Reverse the Policy Decline 19 (2003), available at papers.htm. 16 Id. at CLEARINGHOUSE REVIEW JULY AUGUST 2003

5 In the next four years the Baltimore Fund will select and invest in approximately eight to ten growth-oriented companies in Baltimore and the surrounding five counties that promise to offer skilled manufacturing, technology, and service jobs to low-income workers. The fund will work with local work-force providers and specialists to help recruit, train, and retain these workers. The fund will give technical assistance to portfolio companies to ensure their financial viability and growth. Justice Reinvestment. Because the criminal justice system is a repository for many unaddressed social problems, criminal justice reform is emerging as a gateway issue that can simultaneously address multiple social justice issues and engage multiple sectors. 17 Increasingly at the Open Society Institute we are drawing the connections between criminal justice and economic justice. The After Prison Initiative at the institute is developing a project to leverage savings from reducing prison populations to support community development projects in high-incarceration neighborhoods. 18 Called Justice Reinvestment, the project relies on public-private collaboration among state governments, private foundations, nonprofit organizations, universities, and community development financial institutions to strengthen civil institutions in low-income communities and communities of color. It deploys sophisticated technical assistance for states to (1) reduce their prison populations to realize savings in state corrections budgets; (2) set aside some portion of those annual budgetary savings for reinvestment in community development projects that fortify the housing, business, and educational infrastructure of high-incarceration neighborhoods; and (3) increase the amount of funds available for justice reinvestment by combining corrections budget savings with other government funding streams (e.g., Workforce Investment Act and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families money) to promote greater capital investment through community banking loans and other investment strategies. The budgetary shortfalls that states are experiencing today have propelled progress toward establishing a justice reinvestment initiative in states around the country. By working only in places where top state legislators and executives appear serious about pursuing justice reinvestment, the After Prison Initiative intends to build two or three demonstration sites as examples for other states to move toward a national justice reinvestment policy. Already several states have expressed an interest in implementing justice reinvestment projects capable of seeding supportive housing development, work-force development, and small-business creation initiatives. III. What Foundations Bring to the Table The aforementioned case studies show how foundations are developing new responses to chronic problems affecting communities of color and low-income communities and how foundations bring much more to the table than automatic cash payments. The following is a brief sketch of the financial and nonfinancial assets that foundations offer in supporting social change. Foundations seed grass-roots alliances that connect a range of social change advocates, including legal organizations, faith-based groups, and community-based organizations. The Funders Collaborative for Racial Justice Innovation exemplifies how foundations seek to foster this horizontal integration. The collaborative models the collaboration that funders seek to promote in their grantees by bringing together individual, local, state, regional, and national donors and coordinating the deployment of philanthropic resources throughout the country. 17 The quote is from Tanya Coke, Center on Crime, Communities & Culture Report 15 (Nov. 2002) (on file with Raquiba LaBrie). 18 The After Prison Initiative uses the term high-incarceration neighborhood to refer to communities in which a large percentage of the population is either in prison or returning home from prison. JULY AUGUST 2003 JOURNAL OF POVERTY LAW AND POLICY 143

6 Foundations encourage vertical integration by linking grass-roots or local social change demonstration projects to elite state and national policy development as evidenced by the work of the Baltimore Fund and the Justice Reinvestment project. These two examples illustrate how private funders dollars can be leveraged to attract both public and private investment in systemic advocacy. Foundations regularly sponsor gatherings of advocates, academics, policy analysts and researchers, other funders, and the general public to dissect and translate important public policy issues. These gatherings can lead to the drafting of reports that distill best practices and offer solutions to policy problems; the formation of new coalitions and organizations; and the networking of organizations and individuals serving similar constituencies or pursuing common goals. Foundations fund the delivery of technical assistance that enhances organizations capacity to engage in effective advocacy. The range of technical assistance can be very broad. Examples include technology training, communications and media support, consultation with experts (e.g., demographers, economists, or work-force development specialists), and fund-raising. Foundations ultimately can support the development of a robust advocacy infrastructure coordinated systems and networks that pool resources and catalyze and sustain social change work. Multiple, interrelated systems in this country be they legal, economic, political, educational, or social privilege certain groups over others. To dismantle this privilege and achieve systemic change, antipoverty work must be integrated into a multipronged problem-solving approach. As bridge builders, foundations can facilitate this integration by investing in advocacy that unites disparate constituencies and sectors, draws connections between issues that are not ordinarily linked, and exposes the ways in which race is often embedded in struggles for justice in the United States See generally HAIR, supra note 7; GUINIER & TORRES, supra note 1; ANGELA BLACKWELL ET AL., SEARCHING FOR THE UNCOMMON COMMON GROUND: NEW DIMENSIONS ON RACE IN AMERICA (2002). 144 CLEARINGHOUSE REVIEW JULY AUGUST 2003