Philanthropy Winter 2017

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PHILANTHROPY

features

14 H ow Private Givers Can Rescue America in an Era of Political Frustration A roadmap to success, no matter what unfolds in Washington.

By Karl Zinsmeister

34 W hat Next?

Reactions to the roadmap.

By Wilfred McClay, Andy Smarick, Eli Lehrer, Virginia Postrel, Joel Kotkin, John McClaughry, Howard Husock, Bill Kauffman, Fred Smith, David Brooks, Kenneth Weinstein, Peter Augustine Lawler, Naomi Schaefer Riley, Richard Brookhiser, Adam Keiper, and Robert Woodson

A P U B L I CATI O N O F THE

11 I nterview Jacquelline Fuller The head of Google.org on reinventing corporate philanthropy, the culture of Silicon Valley, and the mission that has driven her career.

50 Ideas Succor, Not Salvation Philanthropic rescues from a century ago point the way for humanitarians today.

By Susan Billington Harper

Blue-Collar Banking Against government opposition, early Americans created savings vehicles to boost the working class.

By Evan Sparks

54 Books

42 On U.S. Campuses, Free Inquiry Is Taking a Beating

Donors may be the best hope for making

colleges less one-sided and censorious.

By Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff

departments

When Little Is Big How a $1,000 grant rocked two warring cultures.

By Ashley May

Males Beyond the Pale An invisible army of able-bodied men are not working, and getting away with it.

By David Bass Books in Brief

One man’s dark childhood sheds light on how to transform lives at risk.

4 Briefly Noted

Glittering glass out of the ashes. Unions

block charters. Life-and-death nonprofit work.

Crowdsourcing art.

10 Nonprofit Spotlight Building relationships across economic lines to fight poverty.

58 Letter

to the Editor Ford’s Darren Walker on inequality.

59 Face

to Face National Forum on K-12 Philanthropy.

Adam Meyerson PRE SI D E N T

Karl Zinsmeister

VI C E PR E S ID E N T , P U BL ICA T IO N S

Caitrin Keiper E D I TO R

Ashley May

MA NAG I N G E D ITO R

Taryn Wolf

A RT D I R E CT O R

Arthur Brooks John Steele Gordon Leslie Lenkowsky Christopher Levenick Bruno Manno John J. Miller Tom Riley Naomi Schaefer Riley Andrea Scott Evan Sparks Justin Torres Scott Walter Liz Essley Whyte

C O NTRI B U T IN G E D IT O R S

Philanthropy is a multi-prize-winning magazine (FOLIO awards in 2015 and 2016, American InHouse Design 2016, min 2016).

It is published quarterly by The Philanthropy Roundtable. The mission of the Roundtable, a 501c3 tax-exempt educational organization, is to foster excellence in philanthropy, to protect philanthropic freedom, to assist donors in achieving their philanthropic intent, and to help donors advance liberty, opportunity, and personal responsibility in America and abroad.

All editorial or business inquiries: Editor@PhilanthropyRoundtable.org Philanthropy 1120 20th Street NW Suite 550 South Washington, D.C. 20036 (202) 822-8333 Copyright © 2017 The Philanthropy Roundtable All rights reserved Cover: Graham Jackson, gjacksonphoto.com

60 P resident’s Note The Philanthropy Roundtable at 25.

By Adam Meyerson WINTER 2017

3

4

Tiffany treasures were rescued from the rubble of the master artisan’s home, thanks to an enterprising private foundation.

PHILANTHROPY

the wreckage, retrieved objects, and transported them to their home region in Florida for conservation and reconstruction.

Today, some of Tiffany’s greatest creations can be seen in the museum the McKeans created, and named in honor of Jeannette’s grandfather. Lush windows of stained glass. Mosaics. Wondrous lamps. Some of Tiffany’s ambitious landscape structures, influenced by Islamic and Asian motifs, have been rebuilt as they existed on the Laurelton Hall grounds. And there is a stunning full Tiffany chapel—the one he created for the World’s Fair— now intact in its own section of the museum.

There is also some interesting work f rom Tiffany’s contemporaries and other artists. These treasures are concentrated and shown to particular advantage today thanks to an impressive $5 million addition built onto the museum a few years ago by the foundation that the Hosmer family established. The Charles Hosmer Morse ­Foundation still owns all of these works that it rescued from destruction. And the magnificent museum that makes this art available to the American public is operated by the foundation without a penny of government support.

International Justice Mission

Out of the Ashes When the home of the great American artist and craftsman Louis Comfort Tiffany burned to the ground in 1957, his legacy and reputation almost went up in smoke with it. But along came two admiring philanthropists to save the day.

Tiffany’s residence in suburban Long Island, known as Laurelton Hall, was perhaps his greatest creation. Over a period of years, the artist, who was also a very successful businessman, built up there not only a grand house where he kept some of his greatest masterpieces, but also a freestanding art museum, an art school, a building where he installed the stunning Tiffany chapel he designed for the 1893 World’s Fair, an incredible set of gardens, and more.

This home was Tiffany’s pride and joy, and many of his most interesting stained-glass windows, other art glass, lamps, ceramics, paintings, furniture, and room designs ended up there. When Tiffany died in 1933, he left an endowment so the property could keep operating as a public gallery for his life’s work, and a school for instructing a new generation of artists. But fate intervened, the money ran out, and eventually much of his estate was abandoned. Then a disastrous fire swept the premises. This was a calamitous end to the career of one of America’s greatest designers and visual artists. Preparations were made to bulldoze the rubble. That would have also buried much of ­T iffany’s reputation.

Enter Jeannette and Hugh McKean, who thought it would be a tragedy to let Tiffany’s work be forgotten. So they leapt into action and literally plucked hundreds of gems and nuggets out of the ashes, saving them for future generations.

Jeannette was the granddaughter of the great American industrialist and donor Charles Hosmer Morse, and she was continuing her grandpa’s tradition of vigorous philanthropy. She loved Tiffany’s revolutionary glass and gorgeous decorative work.

Her husband Hugh shared the same admiration, having studied art himself at the Tiffany estate during the 1930s. This couple had private resources, a generous spirit, and a willingness to act.

The philanthropists offered the Tiffany family a payment for the right to salvage whatever they could from the burn. Then they picked through

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida.

briefly noted

International Justice Mission

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida.

If you’re a fan of Americana and great art, swing by the Morse Museum next time you’re in the Orlando area. And as you view the delicate pieces, try to envision many of them encased in black soot and gray ashes. And then say a quiet thank you to the stubborn philanthropists who refused to let these sparkling bits of American creativity be tossed aside. Jeannette and Hugh McKean did us all a public service, with private energy and money.

In the Line of Duty Sometimes nonprofit work is a matter of life and death. Since 1997, International Justice Mission has been helping and prodding governments across the developing world to clean up their police practices, enforce their own laws, and resist judicial corruption. The group has a special interest in battling indentured servitude, sex trafficking, and other forms of exploitation, and says it has helped free 28,000 people over the years from bondage in brothels, factories, or involuntary domestic service—in countries like Guatemala,

The international human-rights nonprofit IJM, which strengthens the rule of law to free the enslaved, recently lost an employee to murder.

Thailand, and India. The organization’s 750 lawyers, investigators, social workers, and support staff have trained 37,000 law enforcement officials in the most effective ways to prosecute wrongdoers, rescue victims, and protect the vulnerable.

But fighting criminal behavior can be dangerous. Last June, an IJM lawyer and investigator named Willie Kimani accompanied his client Josephat Mwenda to a courthouse in Nairobi to pursue a complaint against police brutality. Upon leaving the courthouse, the two men and their driver were kidnapped. Their lifeless bodies, showing signs of torture, were eventually found in a nearby river.

With pressure from IJM, five police officers have been charged with killing the three men, and the first witnesses testified in November in a trial that is expected to last several months. A special government unit that IJM has helped train to prosecute abuse of government power “moved right away and with vigilance,” according to Philip Langford of IJM. “The murder of these three men struck a deep chord with the Kenyan public and civil society,” he notes. “The outrage was fairly unprecedented. There’s a tremendous opportunity for the Kenyan people to come together to demand change” in ingrained habits of extortion and unjust use of violence. That in turn would help Kenya reduce the poverty that is exacerbated by graft, ethnic bullying, and weak rule of law.

PhilAphorism

No one need wait a single moment to improve the world.

—ANNE FRANK

(from The Almanac of American Philanthropy) WINTER 2017

5

briefly noted

Reformers in some states are going to court to advance school choice.

Initial rise in church attendance at 110 congregations in Dayton, Ohio, offered philanthropic assistance in microtargeting their programs and services to nearby residents. * The Philanthropy Roundtable’s Culture of Freedom Project PHILANTHROPY

Harsh Caps on Mass Achievement Over the last five years, numerous studies have shown strong learning gains among low-income students in Massachusetts whose families have managed to enroll them in charter schools. Compared to counterparts in conventional schools, charter students take more challenging academic paths and are 18 percent more likely to attend a four-year college. That’s why 30,000 students in Massachusetts are now backed up on waitlists, vying for a spot in one of the comparatively small number of charter schools. To give needy students more opportunities, school-reform advocates got a referendum on the statewide ballot in November that would have moderately raised the caps currently constricting creation of new charter schools. Predictably, the teachers’ unions spent approximately $14 million in ­Massachusetts to quash even this modest opening, blocking tens of thousands of families from gaining access to superior schools. Now we will see whether Massachusetts lawmakers will meet the strong parental demand for more charter schools by raising today’s harsh caps by legislative means. —Pat Burke

Forced From Home According to Doctors Without Borders, 34,000 people per day fled their homes last year, contributing to a current worldwide total of 65 million refugees. The factors compelling people to flee are varied, from war and political turmoil to natural disasters. Sometimes the hazards they face on the move are as bad as what they left behind.

Elias Williams

30%

6

exhibits some of the most egregious achievement gaps in the nation. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the proficiency gap in eighth-grade math between low-income students and the rest of Connecticut’s student population is the worst among all 50 states. Similar gaps yawn between Hispanic and white students.

Using the judicial system to force changes in sclerotic education policies is a new strategy for philanthropists. Proponents of litigation clearly think they have some momentum today. —Pat Burke

Students Matter

Education Reform on the Docket In an eye-opening opinion handed down in September, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher criticized the way the state government disburses education aid, and gave the state 180 days to adjust how taxpayer dollars are spent on public education. In his 90-page decision, Moukawsher pointedly criticizes the way the state pays for special education, allocates resources to the poorest communities, and fails to require rigorous teacher evaluations. The case is still under appeal, but the opinion caught the attention of lawmakers and state residents.

Students Matter, a national legal advocacy group founded by education philanthropist David Welch, is simultaneously suing the State of C ­ onnecticut in federal court, arguing in Martinez v. Malloy that state limits on charter schools, magnet schools, and open enrollment hinder the education of needy students, and violate their Due Process and Equal Protection rights under the U.S. Constitution.

A few charter-school networks such as Achievement First have been able to establish some campuses in Connecticut, but policy constraints have blocked most would-be charter operators.

Overall, Connecticut’s public-education system

Elias Williams

Students Matter

Business Training for Nonprofits

To help the public better understand today’s refugee crisis, and what philanthropy can do to help, Doctors Without Borders pitched a simulated camp on the National Mall and in several other U.S. cities. In free tours led by an experienced aid worker, entering visitors are given 30 seconds to pack everything they might need before their escape.

What would you bring on short notice— valuables? your passport? a blanket? water? The simulation continues with visitors being forced to surrender the few items they saved, to pay bribes along the way. Visitors then load onto a rubber dingy like the ones used to ferry migrants out into the Mediterranean. It is astonishing how many people can be crammed onto one of these unseaworthy rafts, with little to nothing in the way of flotation devices or protection from the elements.

This perilous passage gives way to the refugee camp proper, with its sheltering and sewage challenges: Imagine walking all day to fetch six gallons of water, the World Health Organization-­ recommended daily minimum for a mother with two children. Picture yourself living with five other people in a small tent in all sorts of weather.

Then respite—a Doctors Without Borders tent with emergency rations and clinical supplies.

And, finally, limbo: a larger tent where refugees await processing and next steps. “Forced f rom Home” transports the public into what for most of us is a distant and hard-to-imagine struggle.

An exhibit that helps visitors imagine life as one of the world’s 65 million refugees.

WINTER 2017

Stand Together, the latest creation of the Koch Seminar Network, is a charity that aims to help Americans at the bottom of the economic pyramid become self-sufficient. Executive director Evan Feinberg recently described some of the group’s work to Philanthropy: We believe the most important work being done in America is happening in communities across the country where volunteer groups, churches, and nonprofit organizations are working together to empower individuals with the necessary tools to break the cycle of poverty.

We’re reinforcing and supporting this work by making direct investments in local communities and local leaders to solve big problems.

One of our efforts is what we call our Catalyst Program. After evaluating 300 programs across the country, we selected ten charitable organizations for the six-month training program. They come in with a business objective to solve a nagging problem they’ve been trying to tackle, and to think bigger about what’s possible for their organization.

We help them reach their objectives through in-person and online education, and provide business leaders to work with them as mentors and coaches, shaping their thinking and helping them deliver on a bigger and better vision.

When they complete the program, they graduate with economic-thinking skills, entrepreneurial approaches to future challenges, and an actionable plan to achieve their objective. We’re also helping these organizations to tell their story with highquality video content and marketing assistance.

In 2017, we plan to add 30 to 40 more groups into our Catalyst Program, bringing our total number to between 40 and 50. Through the Catalyst Program and additional investment opportunities, we hope to amplify effective community-based solutions to the toughest problems facing Americans.

7

t e e ity r Swha C

If asked where the world’s best-attended art event takes place, most people would guess Paris or New York. But in fact, the art show attracting more people than any other in the world—and by far the most passion, fervent discussion, and enthusiasm from the general public—is staged every year in the 123rd largest city in the U.S.: Grand Rapids, Michigan.

It’s a triumph of philanthropy.

The story begins in 2009. Rick DeVos, the grandson of one of the founders of Amway, who must have inherited some of his grandpa’s entrepreneurial instincts, announced that year that he was going to try to marry the creative energy of new art with the competitive fire of national science contests. He founded a national art contest open to anyone.

And any organization in his home city of Grand Rapids that considered itself capable of turning itself into a gallery for a few weeks would be allowed to display a portion of the entries. Thanks to the generosity of his philanthropic family and other donors, this contest would award a half million dollars in prizes.

DeVos suggested that this radically open art exhibition could become the biggest event in city history, a boost to the regional economy, and a milestone in national creative life.

Unsurprisingly, much of the art establishment didn’t like the idea. But when opening day arrived, the scoffers were surprised. Fully 1,262 artists from 8

PHILANTHROPY

An international art contest of the people, for the people, judged by the people—created by philanthropy in our 123rd largest city.

of human hair. There were delicate mobiles that looked like running horses when the breeze stirred them.

It is the democratic aspect of this remarkable art contest, and the people’s ability to register what they like, that explains its power. At this point, almost half a million people pour into Grand Rapids during the short period when the art is on display, and there is a sportschampionship-level of public excitement surrounding each year’s competition.

This is one of those crazy, brilliant ideas that philanthropists bring to life because they’re able to try new things, unproven things, things that no business or government agency could justify taking a risk on. The ArtPrize experiment has paid off in a big way.

(For more stories like this, tune in every week to the Sweet Charity podcast at SweetCharityPodcast.org)

ArtPrize

Crowdsourcing Art

41 states and 14 countries entered pieces in that first competition. And 159 Grand Rapids businesses or nonprofits or landlords offered their buildings to serve as temporary galleries.

Even more amazing, the public turned out—or rather, poured out. In this city of 188,000 people, more than 200,000 individuals showed up to view the art, and 334,000 votes were made by cell phone or computer. By the first Sunday, many Grand Rapids restaurants had run out of food. By the next Sunday there were no more hotel rooms. On the event’s closing day the line to see the winning piece stretched down two full city blocks.

Philanthropy was in Grand Rapids this year for the Eighth ArtPrize exhibition, and we’re here to tell you it is an absolute phenomenon. Not only was the city packed with visitors—wandering around with maps in one hand to find the pieces, and cell phones in their other hand to vote for favorites. But they were talking, and talking, and talking… about art! Sweet elderly couples arguing about the details of a piece. Groups of highschool students excitedly comparing the merits of different entries. Businessmen munching on sandwiches during their lunchtime while peering at paintings and sculptures and electronic installations.

People carefully poring over the descriptive notes and maker biographies.

Pieces of art not only jammed the city art museum, and all the major hotels, and the design institute, and the big stores; creative works were also wedged into coffee shops, and elevator lobbies. The city police station was floor-to-ceiling with fascinating, crazy, colorful pictures and three-dimensional works: Haunting masks of human faces made out of different colors

M A N Y O F T H E MOST REM ARKABLE ACH I EVEM ENTS IN

BUI LDING U.S.

PROSPERITY... entrepreneurial education • science research • family reinforcement • help for the disabled • disaster relief • boosting vets • racial uplift • youth character building • homeless aid • financial education • first-gen college scholarships • anti-violence programs • prisoner re-entry • pension and insurance expansion • settling refugees and immigrants

… ARE PRODUCTS OF PRIVATE

PHILANTHROPY

Learn more at PhilanthropyRoundt able.org/alm an ac/prosperity

nonprofit spotlight Circles USA

10

Circles is built on the idea that relationships are more important than material assistance in defeating poverty.

Circles’ founder Scott Miller realized in the 1980s that too many programs only managed poverty—they didn’t actually reduce it. So he set on finding a long-­ lasting solution. With funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Miller conducted research in Iowa, exploring how local communities could be more directly involved with needy families in their midst.

The model he devised centers on helping people make a personal financial budget and set goals. The most important element, though, is direct human engagement. Although Circles provides information and technical assistance, it is the support and guidance from successful and generous neighbors that makes the program distinctive. As the organization expands, each Circles group is co-­designed by community members to make sure it is able to inspire and mobilize the volunteers needed.

When two volunteer men came to the Ames, Iowa, Circles chapter and asked what they could do to help, participants said they needed better cars—there wasn’t enough duct tape in the world to keep their wheels turning. Within six months, a car-donation program began. Over four years, the community donated 165 cars, PHILANTHROPY

and mechanics gave free inspections. Circle Leaders could then safely travel between home, work, school, and day-care centers.

Today, there are over 70 Circles programs in the U.S. and Canada. A 2004 study by Iowa State University found that Circle Leaders were able to get off welfare in 10 months, even though they had been on assistance for an average of four years before coming to the program. After one year participating, Circle Leaders were earning 63 percent more income. A Circles program costs around $5,500 per participant per year to run. These funds, which mainly go toward training volunteers, are supplied by hundreds of local and national donors, including community foundations, United Ways, corporations, churches, and family foundations.

Earlier this year, the nonprofit committed to a national expansion. Miller says local chapters are constantly learning more about how to support people and keep them out of poverty. And the secret weapon is caring volunteers. “People will do anything,” he states, “if they have a relationship long enough with someone who is helping themselves out of poverty.” —Jen Para

Jennifer Jones Photography

When Danika was 21 years old, she nearly became a homeless single mother. After dropping out of college she was working at McDonald’s and couch-surfing. Eventually, she humbly returned with her infant to her mother’s home in Asheville, North Carolina. Danika’s efforts to improve her job-readiness skills led her to the local Circles program, which gave her the help and motivation to become self-sufficient.

“At Circles they don’t categorize you by your financial state, but as the person you are,” Danika said. “They are always giving a helping hand. They give you tough love and the push you need.”

Like the other 24 Leaders in her group—the organization intentionally calls its participants Leaders to emphasize that they are the drivers of their own ­destinies—Danika first completed a 14-week program that helped her build financial, emotional, and social resources.

She also created an economic stability plan to determine the salary she needed to get off government-assistance programs. Then she was paired with two “Allies,” trained middle- to high-income community volunteers, to have regular discussions about how to overcome the barriers preventing her from escaping poverty. Danika’s Allies listened to her worries, critiqued her résumé, introduced her to potential employers, and encouraged her as she went back to school to become a nurse. Over time, Danika graduated, landed a job, got promoted, and moved out of her mother’s house into her own place.

Danika is just one success story out of more than a thousand at Circles. The nonprofit’s model is based on decades of research that recognizes the power of building social capital and relationships across economic lines. These relationships, more than material assistance, battle and defeat deep poverty.

interview

JACQUELLINE FULLER

Lea Crespi/Figarophoto/Contour by Getty Images

If you do a Google search on Jacquelline Fuller you will find her mapping epidemics, number­-crunching different methods of protecting wildlife, and plotting “moon shots” for disadvantaged high-achieving students. She is the director of Google.org, the charitable giving arm of the tech supergiant. Since its beginning in 2004, Google.org has received 1 percent of its parent company’s net prof it, and currently donates about $100 million in grants, 200,000 employee service hours, and $1 billion in products annually, both locally in northern California and around the world.

She’s also on the board of G ­ iveDirectly, and formerly served on the boards of the ­Eastern Congo Initiative, World Vision USA, ­International Justice Mission, and the ­California Emerging Technology Fund.

Prior to Google.org, Fuller worked at a startup—it really was at that point— called the Gates Foundation. She launched its public-health initiative in India.

Before entering the world of philanthropy, she worked on public policy at the U.S. ­D epartment of Health and Human ­Services, and attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Philanthropy spoke with Fuller about the promise and perils of corporate philanthropy, Silicon Valley’s climate for giving, and what has driven her idealistic career.

Philanthropy: Google’s cor porate philanthropy appears to be pretty wide-ranging. How do you describe Google’s giving priorities? What does and doesn’t interest your team?

Fuller: Google.org is fully a part of ­G oogle. We’re employees of the company and get our funding directly from it. So we think about how we can invest resources where Google brings something unique to the table. That means we lean toward innovation and technology. Topics like education and learning, opportunity, economic impact, and ensuring people are able to participate in society are themes that cut across what we do.

Google.org’s Jacquelline Fuller leads a team tasked with applying Google’s resources to the common good.

Philanthropy: Can you give an example of what this philosophy looks like in practice? What does a quintessential Google grant look like?

Fuller: Let’s take the Zika virus. We have a Google office in Brazil, and we knew that we wanted to provide funding to help fight Zika. In conversations with that office it became clear that what would WINTER 2017

be really useful is if we could help with predictive modeling and data analytics.

Through our relationship with UNICEF, we sent some engineers, product designers, and user interface experts to work with the UNICEF Innovation lab to help build a platform linking data on things like travel and incidence of Zika to think about where the virus might be headed.

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interview Philanthropy: Was giving a priority from the beginning of the company, or has that emerged over time? Did it take the company a while to find its philanthropic niche?

Fuller: In their first letter from the founders before our IPO, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a commitment to philanthropy. They said that Google is not a conventional company, and part of that is devoting 1 percent of net profit each year to Google.org and philanthropy. So this philanthropy has been in our DNA from the beginning.

Philanthropy: Why did you decide to join the Google team?

Fuller: During the eight years I worked at the Gates Foundation I had seen what could be done when two individuals put their hearts and minds and wallet behind making a humanitarian impact. Not only the good that they did directly, but how they raised the bar for all private philanthropy to be taken more seriously, and for achieving high returns on investment in humanitarian projects. I thought to myself, Bill and Melinda Gates have done that for private philanthropy, but I haven’t really seen that in corporate philanthropy. Of the $373 billion in annual giving in the U.S., only 5 percent comes from companies.

I heard that Google.org was starting up, that Google was serious about the level of resources it would put in, and that it would be very experimental and open to new ways of doing things. So I thought, “I want to go down and see what they’re doing.”

Philanthropy: Some people consider corporate philanthropy mostly public relations. What do you think distinguishes smart corporate giving from other efforts that are less effective and more puffy?

Fuller: There are some slippery “corporate social responsibility” programs,

and sometimes when people think about corporate philanthropy that’s what they think about. But there’s actually huge potential if you bring the best of who you are as a company to the table. Doing that can reap huge rewards both in terms of the charitable impact and the health of the company. We’ve seen at Google, for example, that philanthropy is important to the folks that we want to hire. It’s pretty clear that believing in the work that Google.org is doing and having the opportunity to get personally involved is a key factor in people staying at Google.

Philanthropy: How have you seen givers use different financial instruments, like limited-liability companies, program-­ related investments, pay-for-success bonds? Have you seen those grow in popularity in charitable work?

Fuller: There’s some slow growth there.

We have done some investing using pay-for-performance, specifically in our homelessness portfolio. There are Bayarea philanthropists setting up LLCs so they have the freedom to say, “I just want Philanthropy: What’s your take on the to put my money to work to achieve these philanthropic climate in Silicon Valley right outcomes, whether I’m funding a nonprofit now? Do you see a lot of other companies or a social enterprise.” giving effectively? Are there any specific causes that you see gaining popularity?

Philanthropy: I read that you’re the Fuller: There are several leaders stepping child of a diplomat, and I’m curious how forward. There are also several companies your background and childhood affects coming forward. Some other tech compa- your work today. nies work with us on getting more women Fuller: We lived in Germany when I was and underrepresented minorities inter- young, and we spent time in the Soviet ested in computer-science careers. That’s Union before the wall came down, so I grew important to Google because we believe up in a family that was globally minded, and that having computational skills is the new they passed that on to me, along with a love literacy standard for many twenty-first of travel and exposure to lots of different century jobs. That’s something we want in cultures and ways of thinking. high schools nationally, including opportunities for those who want to develop skills Philanthropy: So why didn’t you end up as programmers or data analysts. in diplomacy?

Fuller: I thought I was going to. In fact Philanthropy: Do you think the phil- I was majoring in arms control as an anthropic approach in Silicon Valley is undergrad. But my heart got in the way. different because many of the business I was living in Los Angeles, and I was founders are young and starting philan- volunteering in the neighborhood with thropy young? a community group, and I saw the issues Fuller: Maybe in older generations there of urban poverty. I thought, “there are a was more of an attitude of “I’m going to lot of powerful people trying to figure out work really hard and build my business issues like nuclear disarmament, and I’m and then I’m going retire and think about more confident that will get solved.” But charity.” Some of today’s young founders in impoverished communities I didn’t see are saying, “Actually, I want to do both a swell of people or money or thought or at the same time.” Some are even saying, creativity or technology aimed at solving problems. So I decided that might be a better use of my life.

I saw what could be done when two individuals put their hearts and minds and wallet behind making a humanitarian impact. The Gateses raised the bar for all private philanthropy.

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“Actually, I want to contribute through the social enterprise that I’m starting.”

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Philanthropy: You also worked for Kay Coles James. How did that connection happen? What was it like working for her?

Fuller: It was actually my first job out

of c­ ollege. I graduated from UCLA on a ­Friday, and I started at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the following Monday. Kay Coles James was the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the time in the first Bush administration, and she had been appointed to the National Commission on Children. I’d applied for a job at HHS and someone thought, “oh, this person could help Kay on the National Commission on ­Children.”

So I got hired.

Philanthropy: Then you worked with Louis Sullivan?

Fuller: Right. Dr. Sullivan was the S ­ ecretary of Health and Human Services when I joined HHS as the most junior person that you can possibly be. But I really cared about urban poverty, and I kept sending stuff up the food chain. I was 1,800 levels down, but I would write memos and somehow they got to the Secretary. At one point he said to someone on his team, “Who is writing this stuff? Who is this? Bring her in, I want her to do some research and writing for me.” And so I became a speechwriter to the ­Secretary after my first year there.

Philanthropy: What were you writing about that caught his attention?

Fuller: Well, for example there were these public-health documents called MMRs— Morbidity and Mortality Reports. From one of them, I compared the number of kids who die in youth homicides on our streets to the death rate in the Gulf War. We were losing more children in an average 100 days in American cities than the fatalities of that entire war. But where were the yellow ribbons?

Philanthropy: It appears that you’re a person of faith—how does that affect what you do?

Fuller: I’m definitely a believer. I wasn’t exposed to a lot of religion in my youth, and became a Christian a little later in life—late high school, early college. I remember reading the Bible when I first became a Christian, from Genesis all the way through, and I came away thinking, “one, there is a lot I don’t understand in

this book, and two, God loves the poor and we have a responsibility to ensure that we’re never the oppressor, and that we’re taking care of strangers and widows and orphans and the fatherless.” It made me think that this is something I should do as a Christian. That really started the journey.

Philanthropy: We hear stereotypes that being a person of faith in Silicon Valley is rough. Have you encountered anything strange about living and working there as a Christian?

Fuller: Something I love about Silicon Valley is that people are really interested in understanding the science and the data behind any phenomenon. I find that people are open to talking about all sorts of things and open to different viewpoints, but they do want to ensure that you are coming from an intellectually thoughtful approach, that you’ve considered obvious challenges or questions, and don’t just say “the Bible says it, I believe it, that’s final.” There are some big hearts here, and many people care about making the world better, and are open to conversations about spirituality regardless of what tradition you come from. People are curious and like hearing from different spiritual and faith perspectives. But they are going to expect you to come with that same respect and curiosity toward them.

Philanthropy: Between the Gates ­Foundation and then Google, you seem to have a knack for picking a startup that’s goes big—what’s your secret?

Fuller: Oh, I had no idea the Gates Foundation was going to succeed. I had read a piece on Bill Gates somewhere in a magazine, before the foundation had really started, and he was asked about his fortune and he said, “I’m going to give the vast majority away. I’m going to give it to help the poorest of the poor.” And I said, “Hire me! I’ll help you.”

So thank you for giving me credit for having foresight, but it was more of a response of “yes, that’s a mission I can get behind.” P WINTER 2017

Sir John Templeton.

Roger Hertog.

Charles Koch.

Eli Broad.

John Walton.

Who’s the next exceptional philanthropist whose charitable work strengthens our free society?

The Philanthropy Roundtable is now accepting nominations for the 2017 William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership.

To recommend a donor, e-mail ESmethurst@ PhilanthropyRoundtable.org between now and February 17.

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How private givers can

Rescue America in an era of political frustration

By Karl Zinsmeister

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were tested and proven by previous philanthropists. We need only follow their blazes to find our own successful routes to culture change and social refinement. I’m going to take you in this essay to eras that were crucial in setting up our country for its great success, eras that have a huge amount to teach us today about our problems, and how we might solve them.

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ots of Americans have grown discouraged over the last decade or so. Discouraged about social fractures that seem to be erupting everywhere. Discouraged about rising disorder—drug epidemics, racial unrest, murders up 11 percent in one year.

Discouraged that some citizens are lagging economically. And discouraged about the prospects of government or politics improving any of this soon.

For some time now, seven out of ten respondents have been saying our country is on the wrong track.

The reality is, it could be many years before we feel good about our public-sector institutions.

However dismayed patriotic Americans are about government, though, they don’t want to sit on their hands. They don’t want to pull back into their shells and give up on improving their nation.

Yet they’re unsure how to proceed. Are there examples or roadmaps that can guide public-spirited donors and volunteers and philanthropists who want to carry out constructive reforms even while government remains frozen tundra?

The answer is yes. There are paths out of today’s wilderness that

Been there, done that I’ll begin by painting a little picture for you.

Demagogues and pundits have abandoned serious discussion of principles and stooped to slanders, falsehood, trickery, and the “scalping and roasting alive” of opponents. These cheap tricks have aroused “low passions” among the public, and “wild, blind reckless partisanship” is overtaking reason and individual judgment. Scholars say that no other era was more politically fractured and obsessed with ideology.

Many Americans are shocked by the crudeness of public discourse, and unprecedented eruptions of vulgarity in daily life. Substance abuse is on the rise, particularly among the working class, which is thought to be under serious stress due to national economic dislocations. Racial antagonism and scapegoating have resulted in violence and street clashes with authorities in places stretching from Ohio to New York to Missouri, plunging some cities into what observers call “mobocracy.”

All very familiar, right? Well, what you have just heard is a description, taken from mournful contemporary reports, of our country in the first

half of the nineteenth century. Many Americans felt there was something going profoundly wrong. Millions pined for thoroughgoing reform.

One impressive young attorney warned a Midwestern audience in 1838 that “There is something of ill-omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of sober judgment.” That young lawyer was named Abraham Lincoln.

Welcome to Jacksonian America.

Its new party system included the idea that winners of elections earned the right to stuff the government with their cronies, and often their pockets with silver. From the national capital to Tammany Hall, this was an era of fraud, embezzlement, and self-enrichment at the public trough.

Elections turned into circuses.

Votes were openly traded for booze, jobs, or favors. One South Carolinian observed that “civilization” retreats more in one month before an election than it can advance in six months afterward.

A Presidential election was “a national calamity” in its effects on public morals.

A key tussle in the Presidential election of 1828 was whose wife was more shameful: Mrs. Jackson or Mrs. Adams. During Jackson’s inauguration, observers were amazed at the number of men who ended up with bloody noses incurred in fistfights. At the White House reception, the crowd broke much of the official china and glassware while pawing their way to the whiskey punch and cake. Destruction of the mansion was relieved only when stewards placed tubs of liquor on the front lawn to draw people outside.

Sensitive citizens decried “the evils of party spirit” that tore through our politics. Many retreated to quirky alternatives like the Anti-Masonic Party or the Liberty Party. If you think we live in a partisan world now, consider this description, by a Tennessean, of U.S. life in the mid-1800s: “The hotels,

Karl Zinsmeister is creator of The Almanac of American Philanthropy. This essay is adapted from his new short book What Comes Next? How Private Givers Can Rescue America in an Era of Political Frustration, just published by The Philanthropy Roundtable, and available on Amazon.

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Andrew Jackson’s inauguration was a festival of drunkenness, fistfights, and disorder. Much of the White House china and glassware was destroyed as visitors clawed at the food and drink. The President-elect was nearly crushed by the rowdy crowd at one point, and to draw the mob out of the mansion, stewards had to position tubs of whiskey punch outside on the lawn.

times today’s level. Drunken brawls, street persecutions, and riots were common, and there were many violent pastimes.

Matches pitting a terrier against 100 starved rats were a favorite among gamblers of that day. A streetfighting style called “gouging” was a problem.

Brawlers grew their fingernails long to make it easier to pop the eyeball out of an opponent’s head; some filed their teeth to assist in biting off appendages during frequent imbroglios.

So if you think we’re the first Americans to face serious cultural problems, and dispiriting political dysfunction, think again. We’ve been here before. In fact, we’ve been in worse places in times past. And guess what:

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government entities were not effective at turning any of this around.

Fighting back But here is the exciting other half of that history. Middle-class Americans and principled leaders who were dismayed by this ugliness didn’t just retreat or throw up their hands. Nor did they partake of the blood-sport politics of the day. They fought back against cultural crudity and dirty politics—but they fought back through philanthropy and civic action.

The problems afflicting Jacksonian America were not the kinds of things that politics and policy changes can do much to cure. So savvy cultural leaders,

Louis S. Glanzman, image courtesy of the White House Historical Association

the stores, and even the shops, were regarded as Whig or Democratic, and thus patronized by the parties. There was scarcely any such thing as neutrality.

Almost every one—high or low, rich or poor, black or white—was arrayed on one side or the other.”

Ethnicity and social class were sore points as millions of new immigrants started to flood into the U.S., bringing patterns of religious practice, family structure, alcohol use, work, and home life that were unfamiliar and often unwelcome. This was exacerbated by the surge of rural men and women pulled out of small towns by industrialization and urbanism. Farm boys poured into cities “looking for work and mostly finding crime, slums, whiskey, and poverty,” comments one historian.

Baleful influences were corrupting the character of individual citizens.

Consumption of alcohol was three to four

businessmen, preachers, and even wise government officials increasingly turned away from policies and government programs and elections as panaceas.

And they started looking for deeper ways to fix what ailed America.

Solid citizens decided they had a duty to help create a better and more orderly nation, so they went to work at fixing and elevating our society. At a time when it was almost impossible to make progress via our electoral system, men and women poured their energy and money into repairing our culture through charity, voluntary associations, mass movements, business innovations, and grassroots action.

And I don’t just mean clubs that bought flagpoles for the town square. Many of the most consequential reforms ever accomplished in America—inventive fixes to problems that cast dark shadows over our future, problems that had stumped all levels of government— were the products of direct citizen action. Thousands of spontaneous private efforts took the raw edges off nineteenth-century America, and positioned us to thrive among nations. These included campaigns that:

Louis S. Glanzman, image courtesy of the White House Historical Association

•B rought literacy to the half of our democracy that was locked in ignorance.

• Moderated our terrible national drinking problem.

•T urned American public opinion against the stain of slavery.

•T amed the cultural fractures, crime, and community breakdown produced by massive immigration, industrialization, and dislocation of small-town residents into big cities.

•E levated individual character through religious revival and self-improvement crusades that defined what we now think of as the quintessential American values.

Q ualities like sobriety, neighborliness, modesty, thrift, self-discipline, and truthfulness that we think of as classic American virtues were actually far from universal in Jacksonian America. It was civil-society campaigning during the nineteenth century that turned them into widely admired and practiced norms.

The social reformers of this era recognized that self-discipline is the foundation for success, happiness, and good citizenship. What happens in our hearts, in our families, and in our interactions with our neighbors, they insisted, is far more important in shaping our future prospects (and the collective course of our nation) than most of what happens in politics, policy, or law. These reformers wanted to help Americans refine their souls, and then take interest in the success of other citizens, so all could work together to build a better country.

The short book What Comes Next? from which this article is excerpted contains many astonishing, and encouraging, details on how they accomplished this. They used all the tools of civil society and grassroots action: New technologies that enabled mass persuasion via journals, newspapers, lecture campaigns, and other means of communication.

Music and novels used to grab people’s hearts.

Passionate young-adult volunteers recruited by the hundreds of thousands to develop role-modeling and mentoring relationships with needy youngsters.

Our nineteenth-century philanthropists launched powerful legal interventions to establish new precedents in the courts. They created thousands of schools, churches, and fraternal clubs in barren spots. They cleverly wooed reporters, and ministers, and merchants.

All of these things were successfully achieved, not so long ago, through strong leadership from donors, volunteers, and social entrepreneurs of all stripes.

Similar things can be done today. To give you ideas and inspiration, let’s go time traveling and look at some of their accomplishments in a bit more detail.

Second Great Awakening During the first half of the nineteenth century, a great moral movement rose and peaked in our country. Historians call it our Second Great Awakening. It arose spontaneously, but was then extended by philanthropic support. Protestant church membership grew twice as fast as population

It’s a reality that U.S. politics is likely to be a source of frustration for some years to come.

But even if Washington, D.C., remains frozen tundra for people who want to improve America, there is no reason to doubt our nation’s ability to make progress.

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French artist Jacques Milbert drew this image of a Methodist camp meeting in 1819. Clergy, evangelical donors, and millions of reborn believers powered dramatic change in personal behavior and social life in what historians call our Second Great Awakening.

over the multidecade course of the awakening. This paved the way for dramatic changes in both personal behavior and social practices.

For an amusing glimpse of the strong internal restraints nurtured within Americans by the Second Great Awakening, consider these motherly instructions mailed to an unmarried daughter while she visited a friend in a nearby city during that period: • Be cautious of speaking about any person.

(That’s good Christian counsel discouraging gossip.)

• P ut your trust where it can never be disappointed.

( For those of you who didn’t have evangelical mothers—this is code.)

• Don’t go out in the evening.

(Blatant code.)

• Keep near your friend Miss Smith.

(More strong code.)

• Write me immediately if you have been dancing.

( Foundational dogma of both the Methodist and Baptist churches.)

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Reformers of the day did much more than encourage careful personal behavior, though. They also built an astonishing array of philanthropic organizations to change the way society operated. Look beneath their sometimes ornate nineteenth-century titles and you will get a sense of the breathtaking ambition of these associations, which quickly numbered in the thousands: the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, Provident Society for Employing the Poor, Society for the Promotion of Industry among the Poor, American Education Society, Philadelphia Society for the Establishment and Support of Charity Schools, American Temperance Society, Sons and Daughters of Temperance, American Bible Society, American Tract Society, Prison Discipline Society, Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York, American Female Guardian Society, Home for the Friendless, American Seamen’s Friend Society, American Home Missionary Society, Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, American Sunday School Union, American Anti-Slavery Society.

Collectively, this remarkable ecosystem of volunteer societies became known as the Benevolent Empire.

And empire is not too strong a word. By 1834, when the voluntary wave was still in its early days, the total annual

income donated to the major Benevolent Empire groups rivaled the size of the entire federal budget of that day.

Funders and volunteers produced orphanages, old-age homes, houses for delinquent children, hospitals, job-training programs for former prostitutes, new or expanded churches, shelters for the poor, legal defense for Indians facing removal from their lands, anti-alcohol self-help groups, Sunday schools, seminaries, new colleges, schools catering to girls and blacks and Native Americans, advocacy for the rights of wives whose husbands had abandoned them, clubs that discouraged profanity among children, groups that pushed businesses to close on Sunday and let their workers rest and worship with their families, visiting nurses, milk stations for children, hostels to protect new arrivals from the countryside from urban corruptions, you name it. These creations were crucial in bringing cohesion, order, decency, fairness, and stability to jam-packed cities and rough frontiers where many virtues had leaked away.

Awakened citizens gave money and raised it from their friends. And they volunteered their time and labor in vast quantities. The organizer of one charity created to teach children wrote that “Members were not to attempt to do good merely by pecuniary contributions, but especially by personal exertions and labors. Every member of the Society was to be ‘a working man.’”

One important sociological benefit of this was that it got millions of middle-class businessmen and housewives and students into direct contact with the poor, slaves, drunkards, lonely seamen, abandoned widows, and disenfranchised minorities. The helpers thus developed real understanding and expertise in what was going on in our tenements and docks and servants’ quarters.

Charitable activists tinkered with a vast range of new weapons for fighting problems. “Early nineteenth-century evangelicals did not possess extraordinary vision or wisdom; they merely experimented with various

In the first half of the nineteenth century, only about 50 percent of American children were given formal schooling. Many youngsters worked all day —like these Delaware newsgirls. Volunteer schools set up on the day of rest, Sunday, changed the lives of these children.

solutions to the problems they saw and then focused their energies on those that seemed to work best,” reports historian Anne Boylan.

Sunday schooling Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, fully half of all American children were not given formal schooling. Many of these children missed an education because they were sent out to work. Trudging off to a job six days a week, they had no opportunity to pick up reading, writing, and arithmetic. So at an

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accelerating pace from the early 1800s on, a large group of volunteers and donors went to work to compensate for that—by offering free literacy lessons (and much more) on the one day when almost everyone had free time: Sunday.

Sunday schools were formed where children were first taught the alphabet, then how to read and write, and sometimes arithmetic. The Bible was used as a main text, transmitting religious knowledge while providing the tools of communication. Children were also taught valuable techniques

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of memorization, and public speaking skills, and offered extensive moral instruction and character training.

Concerted effort was made to keep the instructional materials broad enough to include all Christian denominations, and the schools were surprisingly successful at avoiding religious battles.

These schools tapped into deep hungers in the U.S. population, and became wildly popular. Parents were enthusiastic. And Sunday school

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became a highlight of the week for lots of American youngsters.

Many children picked up more of their literacy, and their moral compass, at Sunday school than they did in our uneven, inadequate, and often nonexistent public schools. “As an agency of cultural transmission,” concludes the leading historian on this topic, the charitable Sunday school “rivaled in importance the nineteenth-century public school.”

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Chronicle / Alamy

Thousands of talented young volunteer Sunday-school teachers were the Teach For America cadre of their day. They not only provided literacy instruction and Bible training but also intensive mentoring that changed many children’s lives (and deepened the convictions and talents of the volunteers).

The founders of Sunday schools were especially concerned about poor and working-class children, blacks and Native Americans, newly arrived immigrants, and other youngsters facing disadvantages, and began their efforts there. But middle-class children soon flocked to classrooms as well.

Adult Sunday schools were also formed so laborers could get instruction outside of working hours. Organizers placed schools in factories, homes, shops, and other public buildings in addition to churches, to make sure they reached those in need.

Thanks to energetic organizing, steady contributions, and large expenditures of time by volunteer teachers, Sunday-school growth was meteoric. When the American Sunday School Union was founded in 1824 as a coordinating body, it attracted 723 local schools as members. Just eight years later, the ASSU represented 8,268 schools. At the time of the Civil War there were more than 60,000 schools, and by 1920 there were 200,000 Sunday schools in the U.S. Tens of millions of young and old Americans received instruction every year.

The Sunday-school movement’s most potent asset was its cadre of volunteer teachers. Most were enthusiastic young adults just a decade or so older than their students. Think of them as the talented Teach For America recruits of their era. Teachers became mentors and role models, not just instructors.

Sunday schooling also became a force in publishing. Not only study plans and Bible lessons but also popular magazines, children’s stories, novels, and morality tales that were avidly absorbed by millions of adolescents and young adults flew off presses, with funding and energy from philanthropists. As early as 1829, the American Sunday School Union was printing hundreds of thousands of pages every day of the year.

At a time when fiction was dismissed by many Americans as useless or even harmful, a new genre

Chronicle / Alamy

of Christian fiction for children was created and distributed through Sunday schools. Movement leaders were wise enough to understand that stories that pull children to the printed word both train their brains and open opportunities to inform appetites and values.

Sunday-school fiction was crafted to make reading fun, even addictive, while inculcating wholesome ideas.

Sunday schools also built up remarkable lending libraries with donor funding. By 1832, there were about 3,500 Sunday schools with libraries that children could borrow from, and the average collection contained around 100 books. Libraries became even commoner, and larger, as the years passed, and these helped prepare many children for life in a nation where reading was becoming essential to success.

A whole culture of reading grew out of Sunday schooling, and historians report that this was a prime factor in making American laborers the most literate in the world. Sunday schools also transmitted a large complex of Protestant virtues, personal disciplines, and moral perspectives that equipped poor children to move quickly into America’s burgeoning middle class.

Abolition The most consequential social reform of all in America—the movement to abolish slavery—was fueled entirely by philanthropists. To get a sense of how important donors were in repairing this Achilles Heel of our otherwise free country, consider the life works of Arthur and Lewis Tappan. Forget about Wilbur and Orville Wright, or the Kennedys, or the Kochs.

These two men did more to shape America than any other brothers in our history.

The Tappans were successful entrepreneurs, working just off Wall Street in lower Manhattan. And they were among the most potent philanthropists ever to operate in America. They combined their business, their faith, and their philanthropy in almost everything they did.

To give you a taste of their business skills, Lewis invented the industry of credit

reporting. Until his time, when a merchant from St. Louis or New Orleans showed up in New York wanting to fill a ship with goods to bring back to his trading area, there was no way to know if his credit was good. Lewis recruited a network of correspondents all across the country who reported on the character and economic trustworthiness of local merchants. This allowed credit to flow, and sparked an economic boom. It also “purified the air in American business” as Lewis put it, rewarding people who kept their word, and punishing those who walked away from responsibilities. This firm evolved into today’s Dun & Bradstreet.

On the philanthropic side, the Tappans were even more influential.

Arthur was known as the most generous donor in New York City, and he inspired many other Manhattan merchants to become much more open-handed. Through heavy giving and brilliant organizing, they built up a huge number of charitable organizations that worked on the nation’s problems.

And the Tappans had courage to go with their convictions. Culture change is not for cowards. Abolitionists were bullied from the moment they first stuck their heads up.

In 1832, Arthur and Lewis converted a rundown old circus hall in lower Manhattan into a church called the Chatham Street Chapel.

The premises were used for worship, education, concerts, charitable meetings, and public discussion among New Yorkers of all races. The brothers organized the New York Anti-Slavery Society there, in 1833. And before that new charity was two hours old, a riot broke out.

When they heard that an anti-slavery association was being created, a group of opponents gathered a crowd for a counter-meeting. It turned violent. The Tappans were not cowed, however. Arthur immediately provided grants to set up anti-slavery societies in other states, and funded a new abolitionist newspaper called The Emancipator. Then he and Lewis helped organize the first national convention of abolitionists.

As prominent merchants, famous backers of benevolent groups, and now chief donors and organizers of slavery-fighting charities, the Tappan brothers developed a high profile.

Vicious rumors began to be spread in New York City about their aims and practices. On a hot July 4 seven months after the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Lewis Tappan opened the Chatham Street Chapel to a racially mixed congregation for a special worship service. He gave a “forcible and impressive” presentation of abolitionist principles. Then white and black choirs began to sing a new

American philanthropists engineered a range of popular campaigns that exposed slavery as an ugly, immoral, and sinful activity, utterly incompatible with life in a free land. This was demanding and dangerous work.

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The great mailing campaign The final accounting from this riot included seven churches and a dozen houses wrecked, and fires smoldering across southern Manhattan. Scores of private citizens had been beaten, and many police and members of the 27th Regiment of Infantry had been clubbed, stoned, or stabbed.

New York’s political establishment, and pro-slavery elements of the press, tried to airbrush this violence. The destruction of Lewis Tappan’s home was described in the Courier and Rose Street. Lewis had been warned Enquirer newspapers as a peaceful anti-slavery hymn written for the that trouble was on the way and he and demonstration by some gentlemen, occasion by John Greenleaf Whittier. his family fled. The rabble broke down in the course of which a window was But slavery apologists had infiltrated his front door and dragged all of the broken. To put the lie to this false the balcony, and now they rained down family’s personal possessions into the reporting, Lewis announced he was prayer books and hymnals from above. street, and then set them on fire. going to leave the ruined shell of Stomping, hissing, and fighting, they The next day they were out again, his house, strewn with his destroyed drove the worshipers away. smashing black and white abolitionist personal possessions and those of The pro-slavery press celebrated churches, beating blacks on the street, his wife and children, exactly as the the action, and published more slander and threatening to destroy Chatham attackers left things, to serve as a “silent about what the Anti-Slavery Society Street Chapel, the offices of abolitionist anti-slavery preacher to the crowds who and its backers were up to. A few charities, and homes of donors will flock to see it.” days later, bullies were back at the and leaders. They roared up to the This became national news. chapel, throwing benches, trashing the three-story warehouse and store run Descriptions of how white and black premises, and beating bystanders. The by the Tappan brothers on Hanover advocates of ending slavery were being next evening, a mob of several thousand Square, where they beat police trying violently persecuted spread across the people began to maraud. to guard the premises, pummeled the country. The same stories outlined A well-dressed man on a horse led building with rocks, and attempted the principles of the new national and the crowd to Lewis Tappan’s house on to batter in the front door with a state-level Anti-Slavery Societies.

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PHILANTHROPY

Granger, NYC ­— All rights reserved

Brothers Lewis (top) and Arthur (bottom) Tappan were pioneering businessmen, and even more remarkable as philanthropic organizers of both personal transformation and social change. They pioneered a “comprehensive” style of civic action that left deep imprints on America in numerous sectors.

street pole. But it was a heavy granite building, and Arthur Tappan had holed up inside with clerks and friends to whom he handed out 36 muskets.

When a watchman told the attackers as he was being stabbed and beaten that the building was full of armed men, the invasion halted.

By now the Tammany Democrats who had fomented the anti-abolitionist uproar were concerned that the violence was out of control, so they belatedly called in cavalry troops and infantry and placed the city under martial law. Police and soldiers were told to deal leniently with the ruffians, though, and most of the 150 leaders of the multiday violence who were arrested got quickly released by political authorities.

Granger, NYC ­— All rights reserved

Despite their several narrow escapes, the Tappan brothers recognized that their personal misfortune offered an opportunity to advance their charitable cause. In the aftermath of the riots, one ally observed that Arthur Tappan’s “whole soul never seemed so enlisted.” Lewis too was invigorated by the danger.

In the weeks after the biggest riot, the two brothers and their abolitionist allies fought back.

They wielded words rather than battering rams and stones. They devised a plan to flood the U.S. with anti-slavery mailings.

These philanthropists founded, expanded, and subsidized a host of weekly and monthly publications devoted to popularizing arguments against enslavement. These included high-circulation newspapers, a children’s magazine (which Lewis Tappan headed up himself as it was being created), a more philosophical journal, and a heavily illustrated monthly. These publications were churned out in volume on new steam-powered presses, and then staged at New York City post offices to be hurried across the country. The campaign was powered by $30,000 of personal donations pledged to the American Anti-Slavery Society.

The abolitionists called this their effort in “moral suasion.” The National Postal Museum has described it as America’s first-ever direct-mail campaign. It was certainly one of the most ambitious polemical blitzes ever conducted in our country. The main targets of the mailings were ministers, local legislators, businessmen, and judges living all across the country, including in the South. Over a period of just ten months, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s publications committee, headed by Lewis Tappan, mailed out more than a million pieces of anti-slavery literature.

Speaking and authoring At the same time, the American Anti-Slavery Society launched special efforts to woo ministers. Anti-slavery materials were printed up for use by the Sunday schools beginning to burgeon across the land. And Arthur Tappan spearheaded a program that hired gifted lecturers to go on public-speaking tours across the country presenting the case against slavery.

S oon, a carefully trained cadre of 70 lecturers was roving across the nation. These 70 orators— described at the time as “he-goat men…butting everything in the line of their march…made up of vinegar, aqua fortis, and oil of vitriol, with brimstone, saltpeter and charcoal, to explode and scatter the corrosive matter”—soon became famous

Philanthropists who fueled the abolitionist charities recruited highly talented activists to run their journals, organize their societies, and create inspiring art. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was one of these creative masterminds. Here is the first publication of his poem “Our Countrymen in Chains.” The violence at the Chatham Street Chapel that grew into the 1834 anti-abolition riots was sparked by hymn-singing of some of Whittier’s verse.

for stirring up listeners and bringing this first bloom of abolitionism to a climax.

This moral-suasion campaign absolutely maddened apologists for slavery. In particular, the circulation of abolitionist arguments through the federal mail hit a nerve. Anti-slavery mailings began to be methodically pulled out of post offices and burned.

Threats were floated against anyone who subscribed.

The U.S. Postmaster General gave aid and comfort to local postmasters who abetted these acts of censorship and intimidation, and U.S. President Andrew Jackson actively urged postal authorities to suppress deliveries of all abolitionist documents, or at least look the other way while others did. In his 1835 message to Congress, Jackson called for a national censorship law that would shut down the charitable mailings of “incendiary” writings, and severely punish the men organizing them.

Faced with a well-funded mass charitable campaign that informed people and mobilized volunteers, defenders of slavery lashed out. Arthur Tappan was hung in effigy in town squares, as

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important legal-defense efforts. By this means they were able to protect pioneer activists. They established vital precedents in courtrooms. And violence by slavery apologists—these they used high-profile proceedings actions turned large chunks of public to educate Americans on the realities opinion firmly against slavery. of slavery and get them involved in The rioters and mail burners who righting the wrong. were hoping to suppress the American First Arthur paid the fines and Anti-Slavery Society and intimidate court costs for jailed anti-slavery its charitable backers had exactly the journalist William Lloyd Garrison. opposite effect. In the year after Lewis Then he defended a Connecticut Tappan’s home was invaded, 15,000 schoolmistress who enrolled a black girl Americans bought new subscriptions in one of her classes. “Consider me your to AASS publications. Anti-slavery banker. Spare no necessary expense. societies began to spread like wildfire Command the services of the ablest all across the country. There were 200 lawyers,” he wrote her. chapters in 1835, then 527 a year later, The most dramatic Tappan and 1,300 just two years further on. In courtroom drama began to unfold in an era of difficult communications, the 1839. Rogue slavers were continuing American Anti-Slavery Society had by to run Africans into the Americas— then enrolled 250,000 paying members—a sometimes protected by corrupt full 2 percent of our national population. government officials. Several dozen In comparative terms, that made the Africans kidnapped from the nation AASS bigger than today’s Boy Scouts, of Sierra Leone managed to take over or National Rifle Association, or U.S. a ship called La Amistad, killing the Chamber of Commerce. For the first time, captain and ordering the remaining philanthropists had turned abolition into crew members to sail them back to a major popular crusade, and slavery was their home. Instead, the navigators now a subject no American could ignore. landed the ship near Long Island. The Africans were taken into custody and Legal defense charged with murder.

A final piece of the Tappan As soon as he heard of the case, philanthropy was their marshaling of Lewis Tappan leapt into action. He

torches were put to piles of newspapers and magazines. Lewis was mailed a slave’s ear, a hangman’s rope, and many written threats. A Virginia grand jury indicted him and other members of the Abolition Society of New York. Offers of $30,000 and $50,000 were made for delivery of Arthur’s or Lewis’s head to Louisiana. A South Carolinian raised the bid to $100,000 for Arthur. After hearing of these prizes, Arthur was reported to have said in an uncommon moment of humor that “if that sum is placed in a New York bank, I may possibly think of giving myself up.”

A boycott of the Tappans’ business operations was launched. This was one of the first organized attempts to damage a national business because of the moral and political convictions of its proprietors. It would not be the last.

Amidst this struggle, the hearts and minds of many Americans were won by the anti-slavery forces. The attacks on the New York City homes and churches, the violation of the mail, the suppression of speech in American precincts, the attempts to have the Tappans and other advocates extradited to the South, the many acts of thuggish

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PHILANTHROPY

Hale Woodruff, The Trial of the Amistad Captives, 1939.

Collection of Talladega College, Talladega, Alabama. © Talladega College. Photo: Peter Harholdt

The leader of the Amistad uprising, Cinque, stands in court while Arthur Tappan listens to whispers from one of the lawyers that he and Lewis Tappan engaged to defend the kidnapped Africans.

many of our communities. In 1830, the average adult American imbibed more than seven gallons of pure alcohol each year. San Francisco hosted one saloon for every 58 residents in 1890—and that counted men, women, and children. A similar tally in Manhattan that same year found that just in the area south of 14th Street, which was packed with poor Triumph of the immigrants, there were 4,065 liquor and temperance volunteers beer shops. Journalist Jacob Riis described Another triumph of American civil society was the Temperance movement. how drunkard parents would send their Powered by charitable donations and children to bars with a tin pail to have it filled with beer. They coated their buckets volunteers, it organized local groups with lard on the inside to keep the and mutual-aid programs to temper foam down so they could maximize the drinking and stop drunkenness. quantity of drink received.

Consumption of alcohol was Plenty of propaganda and dramatically reduced, and American exploitation went into building up social life was transformed. engaged a first-rate legal team, then this level of drinking. Advertisements I realize today’s common view launched a savvy journalistic and pushed the idea that booze was is that alcohol prohibition was public-relations effort. He used the case nothing but a puritanical flop. healthful, invigorating, and good for as a teachable moment for informing calming children. But in practice, But the late-in-the-game flop of a Americans on the realities of slavery. law-enforcement effort by the national America’s high rate of alcohol consumption brought domestic It took two years for the case government obscures a much deeper violence, damaged health, family to wend its way through the courts, success. Encouraged by a powerful drawing banner headlines over turmoil, workplace costs, and other ugly charitable effort, huge numbers of many months. As in their great social fallout.

Americans voluntarily stepped away mailing campaign a few years earlier, Stepping up to battle the from booze. the Tappans had to battle a U.S. problems that resulted from heavy One historian described our President and the weight of the federal pre-temperance nation this way: drinking were a series of volunteer government—spurred by Southern “Americans drank from the crack of dawn and charitable organizations: the interests, President Martin Van Buren American Temperance Society, the to the crack of dawn.” Hard numbers appealed lower-court verdicts all the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, prove that an alcoholic haze hung over way to the U.S. Supreme Court. At that point, Lewis Tappan convinced former President John Quincy Adams to join the all-star legal team for the final appeal. Our highest court ultimately ruled that the Africans were kidnap victims, not property, with a right to defend themselves. They were declared wholly free.

Lewis Tappan had almost single-handedly orchestrated this defense and engineered the communications and reporting that transfixed many Americans. And all across America, the courtroom struggle aroused new disgust with human bondage. Thousands of people started donating money to abolitionist charities, and subscribing to their

Hale Woodruff, The Trial of the Amistad Captives, 1939.

Collection of Talladega College, Talladega, Alabama. © Talladega College. Photo: Peter Harholdt

journals. Abolition turned a huge corner toward a wide popular following.

The most consequential social change in the history of the United States had begun. And two philanthropist brothers were at the center of it.

Though conventionally viewed as

a flop, the temperance movement

actually reduced alcohol consumption dramatically—to just 29 percent of the level that prevailed when reformers first went to work.

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the Anti-Saloon League, and many others. As early as 1833, more than 700 separate Temperance Society branches had been organized in our largest state (New York), and 12 out of every 100 New York residents had signed a pledge of alcohol abstinence, shutting down 133 out of 292 distilleries in the state.

The popularity and success of the anti-alcohol charities continued to grow.

By 1909 the secretary of the United States Brewers’ Association was warning his membership that “we have to reckon with” the Anti-Saloon League, which “has over 800 business offices, and at least 500 men and women on its regular salary list…. It employs large numbers of speakers on contract, from the governor of Indiana down to the local pastor of the Methodist Church.”

Temperance philanthropists believed that alleviating problem-drinking would require individual transformation. But they also thought it required social betterment. They wanted to speed both kinds of change. And they created all sorts of charities to make that happen.

For many decades before it turned into a Constitutional amendment, the civil-action portion of the anti-alcohol campaign was built on persuasion. It

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became a multimedia effort, propelled by millions of published words, the most popular public speakers of the day, a flood of instructional material for schools, prominent blue-ribbon commissions, celebrity endorsements, and popular entertainment.

There were essay contests on the damage done by alcohol, with substantial prizes. Doctors were recruited to sign statements on the unhealthfulness of distilled spirits.

Early anti-alcohol societies were launched at colleges like Amherst, Williams, Union, Andover, and Colgate. Temperance activists stirred up voluntary boycotts which convinced the New York Tribune, Boston Record, Chicago Herald, and other newspapers to stop accepting liquor advertisements.

Fraternal organizations were created to offer social life, mutual support, and benefits like insurance to Americans who favored temperance.

Songs were written and performed to catch people’s hearts. A little ditty called “Blue Monday” mourned wasted pay checks. This was a people’s campaign, though, not a guilt trip. So temperance “glee singers” also made merry with bouncy singalongs like

PHILANTHROPY

“Close Up the Booze Shop,” and “Girls, Wait for a Temperance Man.” The campaign against bondage to alcohol involved one of the widest coalitions ever assembled for social change—running from unionists to manufacturers, political conservatives to avid progressives, rural pastors to urban settlement-house activists, very rich to very poor. There were charitable groups working to change conditions at every level: nationally, in states and counties, within workplaces, through individuals by asking them to sign personal pledges.

And all of this civil organizing eventually told. Drinking was throttled back from our frontier-era average of 7.5 gallons of pure alcohol per adult per year all the way down to 2.6 gallons in the years before prohibition. During prohibition, drinking was slashed even further, and even after repeal, drinking levels remained at 1.5 gallons per adult for a decade.

So what about today? Well, American alcohol consumption is now about 2.2 gallons per adult per year.

That’s a 71 percent whack off the levels that prevailed when the temperance activists first went to work.

And historians point out that the temperance movement did more than

Kean Collection / gettyimages

America’s heavy consumption of alcohol didn’t just happen. Booze was heavily promoted by brewers and distillers, even to the young in startling ways.

During the nineteenth century, the temperance movement relied most of all on persuasion, peer support, and voluntary pledges to moderate or stop alcohol use.

Kean Collection / gettyimages

just reduce binge drinking. It “profoundly influenced American values”—popularizing the idea of self-improvement, and strengthening our attachment not only to sobriety but also to frugality, work, and middle-class respectability.

This transformation was driven by volunteers and donors—men and women pursuing the national interest, but more often through philanthropy than politics.

More recent successes So in earlier eras where American society desperately needed reform that our political system was unable to deliver, many necessary culture changes came through civil action fueled by philanthropists. Do we have any reasons to think those successes could be repeated today?

The fact is, philanthropists have continued in much more recent years to step into breaches in performance by public agencies, offering vital alternate repairs through private action.

• I t is philanthropy and civil society that provided the most helpful new ideas for improving American schooling over the last generation, sparking real and desperately needed education reform.

Examples include charter schools, Teach For America, hard-headed teacher assessment and accountability, value-added pay, potent new STEM programs, widened access to school choice, revived religious and private schools for needy children, enriched digital-learning options, and much more.

•D onors jumped obstacles to improve the management of many neglected or

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mishandled medical conditions like autism, breast and prostate cancer, Ebola, Huntington’s disease, and schizophrenia.

•G ivers inaugurated the Green Revolution, attacked tropical diseases, invented and spread microlending, promoted individual land ownership for peasants, and shielded developing-world entrepreneurs from government stultification—the most effective series of moves of the last generation to reduce misery in poor countries.

•A midst gross underperformance by government job-training programs, philanthropy is demonstrating effective ways to move hard-toemploy Americans like the homeless, released prisoners, disabled persons, recovering addicts, and so forth into the labor force for the first time.

•P hilanthropy has revived hundreds of ill-maintained urban parks that millions of Americans depend on to refresh themselves (beginning with Central Park in New York City), and is creating many dramatically new and popular parks in underserved areas of Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Tulsa, Dallas, Memphis, Louisville, and other cities.

• I t is philanthropy and civil society that recently invented new approaches to chronic problems in the U.S. like foster care and adoption backlogs, drunk driving, health relapses among elderly patients just released from hospitals, addictions to smoking/drugs/alcohol, various stall-outs in medical innovation, and so forth.

•A t research universities, donors have been crucial in birthing important new fields like biomedical engineering, computer-assisted learning, gerontology, character and leadership education, systems biology, and so forth—frequently after battling through serious resistance from government and other bureaucracies.

•E ven when it comes to getting government’s own house in order in the form of repairing today’s dangerous trillion-dollar underfunding of public-pension

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Dallas’s new Klyde Warren park—spearheaded by private donors—has changed its city by becoming a magnet for social interaction. In cleverly decking over a below-grade highway, it provided missing common space that links formerly isolated portions of the arts district.

Donors mustn’t feel like only grand national projects improve our society. There are millions of ways to make America stronger, better, and more lovely.

new mechanisms such as charitable limited liability corporations, fresh methods like investing as a supplement to grantmaking, and so forth. These are increasing the bandwidth and culture-changing power of philanthropy.

This is not a call to give up efforts to improve In addition, there is room today for us to our government and political process. Patriotic increase the long-stagnant share of our national Americans will always work for a better public sector income devoted to charitable reform. If Americans half a century ago were able to put 2 percent of their and healthy politics. But efforts at government improvement proceed at glacial rates—and regularly income into philanthropy, with today’s much greater retreat backward. While those back-and-forth standard of living and level of discretionary income attempts at good government unfold, philanthropy we should be able to touch 3 percent or more can make many real-life improvements in America. without discomfort. That would represent hundreds of billions of additional charitable dollars every year.

And there are reasons to expect that the kind of philanthropic assists to governance described above can be multiplied in the future. New entrepreneurial tools are A wish list for next steps coming into use in philanthropy. Things like randomized Where might a social entrepreneur make a control trials that improve assessment capabilities, contribution today? Many exciting initiatives

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PHILANTHROPY

The Office of James Burnett

systems, it is philanthropists who have led the way to constructive win-win solutions for locales ranging from Rhode Island to Detroit to Utah.

The Office of James Burnett

are already incubating and could be expanded quickly by enlightened philanthropists. Others are ripe for the founding. Here are some practical suggestions on where leaders of civil society willing to put their minds, shoulders, and checkbooks to the task could be enormously helpful to America over the next decade or so.

•A n urgent attack is needed on drug addiction using modern tools of science, pharmacology, social reinforcement, faith, and economics.

Donors could also inaugurate sophisticated new campaigns against the precursors that lead to addiction among vulnerable populations.

•S peaking of new, what’s preventing tech-oriented philanthropists today from launching a large collaborative crusade to reduce today’s dire weaknesses in cybersecurity?

Many of the ugly privacy breaches and worrying security holes in our computer webs are just a result of out-of-date procedures and tools, and a shortage of understanding. As can be attested by anyone who has seen the antique technology on display in Social Security offices, FAA control towers, or police stations, government is usually the last sector where advanced computer standards arrive.

But a mix of nonprofit organizations and private companies could research this yawning problem, establish consensus on common standards, and lead the way toward less hackability and fallibility in the IT networks on which so much of our personal and national lives now depend.

•A merica desperately needs a bloom of creative services that can stop the rocketing rise of single-parent childrearing—which is seriously damaging the well-being of our next generation of American children, and feeding the tumorous growth of many secondary social pathologies. Unlike a generation ago when Americans sensed this was a problem but had no idea of how to reverse it, we are now getting research and embryonic field

experimentation, including from The hundreds of thousands of threatened Philanthropy Roundtable’s Culture of boys and girls.

Freedom Initiative, that donors can •A nother sector where civil society has build on to find lasting solutions to proven it can make progress (and where family decay. government is utterly disqualified from • Energetic Americanization efforts even trying to help) is in rebuilding the that provide immigrants with religious participation of Americans. accelerated language training, Within the last decade or two we computer literacy, higher job skills, have entered onto a steep and slippery family coaching, and citizenship downward slope when it comes to the instruction could speed the practice of faith—with many negative success and integration of this last ramifications for community intactness, generation’s large bulge of new mutual aid, generosity to others, rates arrivals—many of whom live and of volunteering, and the inculcation work with awkward separations from of healthy habits that help individuals other Americans, creating unease on resist destructive personal behaviors. all sides. This is work that thousands The sky is the limit on ways donors of philanthropists energetically threw could help. How about bolstering themselves into in previous American today’s most effective seminaries eras—with enormous success—so (just as donors have expanded our we needn’t wonder whether this is most effective K-12 teacher-training an undertaking that lends itself to programs)? How about rotating capital civil-society solutions. It does. funds to help burgeoning churches •W e need new approaches to that often now perch in rented homelessness that treat the sanctuaries, suburban office parks, whole person, combining material high-school auditoriums, or strip malls and therapeutic supports with a buy the inspiring but nearly empty tough-love approach that expects and and moldering buildings of ghost requires from the beneficiary personal congregations in cities, creating exciting investment and change. physical campuses where muscular •T he pioneering work that has been religious practice and healing can be done in Colorado, Georgia, and other revived where they are most needed? states showing that backlogs of children How about just doing a better job of languishing in foster care can be letting people know what religious radically reduced needs to be transferred supports are available? to scores of other states and expanded, •O ne of the most troubling trends in with philanthropic investment, bringing our welfare state today is the soaring much more wholesome family life to rate at which prime-age individuals

When we take direct action to improve the life around us, instead of waiting for officials to descend as saviors, we become producers of governance rather than just consumers of government.

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are enrolling in permanent disability programs. Millions are dropping out of the productive workforce to depend on easy but dribbling public payments that often leave them not only economically hand-to-mouth but also socially disconnected and personally depressed. Over the last generation we’ve undergone medical, technological, and legal revolutions that make it possible for almost anyone to contribute to society—it’s just a matter of finding the right match of job, abilities, needs, and accommodations. But so far we’ve wasted these new opportunities to integrate the disabled into mainstream self-support.

Inventive philanthropists could have an enormous influence in rolling back today’s troubling surge of Americans languishing on disability. Some donors already are, like those backing the Independence Project now being run by HireHeroesUSA to transform injured veterans into proudly independent workers instead of government dependents. There is an enormous upside for more work like this.

•M ore generally, the nonprofit sector needs to lead a push to train and

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re-train the large number of Americans who are stuck in jobs that can’t support their families, are clinging by their fingernails to positions likely to disappear in the future, or have already dropped out of the labor force.

Our modern economy requires a culture of lifelong learning and regular skill-burnishing, yet government agencies have a dismal record at these tasks. Nonprofit organizations, however, have showed real verve in figuring out how to train and inspire economic strugglers, as documented in two recent guidebooks from The Philanthropy Roundtable (Clearing Obstacles to Work, and Learning to Be Useful ). An expansion of these tailored job-training efforts, which transform the lives of men and women missed by state programs, would be an enormous public service— allowing some workers to support their family at a middle-class level for the first time, while simultaneously building technical and service skills that are badly needed by our economy.

•T oday’s nascent efforts to provide mentoring, job services, family

PHILANTHROPY

The Pueblo Chieftain

Fred Cuny was a larger-than-life Texas engineer and charitable entrepreneur who used money donated by George Soros to save lives in Bosnia more effectively than all the material assistance offered by national governments plus the U.N. combined.

A new bloom of microgovernance Our country was set up on a “federalist” basis so that each state would have its own identity and many of its own peculiar ways of governing itself.

Important social responsibilities like education, welfare payments, and transportation links were pushed even further down to county, city, or village governments. Our founders insisted on letting many flowers bloom, with confidence that people would migrate to the loveliest scents while leaving behind those that turned ugly.

Throughout our history there have been periodic attempts to reinforce the federalist quality of our nation. The 1980s, for instance, brought concerted efforts to shift some authority from officials in Washington to state and local governments. Nothing wrong with that, but what I am proposing here is much more thoroughgoing— lots of tasks should be shifted out of government altogether and handed off to the organs of civil society.

We should encourage a social marketplace of micro-experiments in culture, social organization, family healing, moral teachings, economic incentives, and so forth. Rather than pretending we all share the same assumptions, want the same end results, have equally worthy goals, and are willing to put equal effort into realizing our goals, we need competing local laboratories—ranging from regional alliances, to subcultures based on shared principles—where ideas can be developed in daily practice so we can see which nostrums are actually good for human flourishing over an extended period, and which are snake oil.

Judy Walgren

bolstering, church support, and housing help to individuals who are leaving prison need to be scaled up dramatically. Millions of convicted persons will be returning to our communities over the next decade.

Whether they become assets, burdens, or predators is to some considerable degree up to us as neighbors.

This is not wishful thinking.

Localized responses to human needs are what philanthropic entrepreneurs create all the time. The last two or three decades brought an explosion of private solutions to public problems, resulting in many triumphs. The thousands of dispersed social reforms documented in the recently published Almanac of American Philanthropy occurred in almost every sector of U.S. society, at a pace that accelerated during recent years.

Localized service is now sweeping American business as well. The Marriott company, for instance, has spawned more than 30 separate lodging operations that can provide different customers with what they need, where they are, in personalized ways. Not just Marriott Hotels, but Fairfield Inn and Suites, Courtyard

by Marriott, SpringHill Suites, Ritz-Carltons, Renaissance Hotels, ExecuStay, Westins, Four Points, Aloft, Le Méridiens, W Hotels, and many more. The Internet revolution, wikis, crowdsourcing, and other bottom-up mechanisms have demonstrated the inventive power of dispersed authority

Many effective nonprofits like Goodwill (which provides billions of dollars of training and work experience every year to hard-to-employ Americans) are highly decentralized. The Goodwill network is made up of 163 autonomous regional affiliates, each with its own board, and funding, and methods.

and resources, and the problem-solving capabilities of small actors linked in networks. Philanthropy—with its longstanding tradition of local, custom,

The 1980s brought efforts to shift some authority from Washington to state and local governments.

Nothing wrong with that, but what I am proposing here is much more thoroughgoing—lots of tasks should be

The Pueblo Chieftain

Judy Walgren

shifted out of government altogether and handed off to the organs of civil society.

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personal solutions—is now closely in step with wider trends in American society, technology, and economy.

Curing alienation and anger And devolving authority to groups of Americans so they can chip away at problems in their backyards in ways they think best can do more than just make our communities function better.

Micro-governance will yield a stronger sense of having a voice and active role in the direction of our communities. It will reduce the feeling among Americans of being bossed or coerced.

Letting a thousand flowers bloom, instead of trying to do everything in one standardized way, could turn one of today’s most worrying weaknesses— our polarization—into something useful. Let all of those very different Americans try different ways of fixing problems in their own communities.

Then look hard at which work and which fail. Expand the successes and walk away from the disappointments.

Philanthropic change generally comes with much less friction than politically

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Americans want more localism, more philanthropy, and more social invention

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PHILANTHROPY

Alex Wong / gettyimages

Recent Polling:

of all Americans now consistently say our country is on the wrong track. The deepest and most understandable complaint of angry voters today, argues writer Andy Smarick, is their feeling of powerlessness, their sense that their concerns and perspectives are not represented in government, that their values are rarely enshrined in public policies.

“The straightforward solution,” he suggests, “is to give more people more power.”

Allowing people to vote every couple years on whether to change a few members of a class of full-time politicians ruling over us is not American-style self-rule. Thomas Jefferson called for a society “where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic…and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.”

When Alexis de Tocqueville studied America’s thousands of charitable groups almost 200 years ago, what impressed him was not just their ability to meet practical needs, but also the way they allowed citizens to govern themselves, solving local problems through the actions of local civil society.

An American “teaches himself about the forms of government by governing.… It is fair to say that the people govern themselves.” Empathy for other citizens also grows out of the personal contact of civic association. “Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another,” says Tocqueville.

That’s our history. What about now? Writer John McClaughry warns that today “we are steadily reducing the scope of local civic responsibility.” When we insist on professionalizing and centralizing all social problem-solving in government, we fall into the trap that Jefferson warned against: “concentrating all cares into one body.”

“This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” That was how Ronald Reagan put it in one of his classic speeches.

When we transfer responsibility for strengthening our communities away from the direct-democracy of civil society and charity and voluntary action, and toward bureaucratic agencies instead, we don’t just get clumsier, more impersonal services—we shrink the arena of American citizenship, as McClaughry puts it.

That is a crucial reason so many Americans now feel alienated from government and politics.

Sources: 2016 and 2015 national surveys by Allstate/National Journal and Independent Sector.

driven change. As one social entrepreneur has put it, philanthropy relies on “the social dynamic of addition and multiplication,” while government action often comes via “subtraction and division.” Philanthropic/voluntary solutions will be gentler and more respectful of dissenting perspectives than even the smallest-scale government/ mandatory monopoly fixes.

Dispersed governance through civic action can thus help cure the popular unrest seen in the political candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and today’s wider frustration with politics. It’s not healthy that more than two thirds

Alex Wong / gettyimages

Sources: 2016 and 2015 national surveys by Allstate/National Journal and Independent Sector.

And for all of this, philanthropic action is a perfect antidote. You can think of the millions and millions of private givers and volunteers in our country, and the hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations, as a kind of matrix of private legislatures.

They define social ills, set goals and priorities for attacking them, then methodically marshal money and labor toward solutions. And philanthropic Americans do all this spontaneously— without asking the state’s permission.

When we do these things we become producers of governance rather than just consumers of government. We take direct action to improve the life around us instead of being dependent citizens who wait for officials to descend as saviors.

We need a blizzard of local philanthropic campaigns today that attack societal problems in a range of ways. And those of you whose philanthropic passions are unrelated to deep social reform shouldn’t feel like there is less purpose in what you do.

Don’t imagine that only philanthropists who support think tanks, heal wounded soldiers, restore the Lincoln Memorial, fight Zika, or sponsor other grand national projects are improving our society. There are thousands of ways to elevate America. Simple charitable comforts, direct personal assistance, support for local education, art that inspires, soothing parks, spiritual faith that brings healing, underwriting for local pillar institutions—these traditional charitable priorities are vital contributions to making our nation good and healthy and unified.

So don’t feel limited by rigid boundaries when pursuing social improvement and culture change. The key is just to take a part. To contribute directly. To act—rather than waiting for some distant, divided, impersonal agency to solve our problems for us.

Philanthropic micro-governance is a practical way for us to uncover new paths to progress and solve cultural ills that are gnawing at our national fiber.

The deepest and most understandable complaint of angry voters today is their feeling of powerlessness, their sense that their concerns and perspectives are not represented in government, that their values are rarely enshrined in public policies. The solution is to decentralize power and let people govern themselves much more locally.

It can answer even the stiffest social challenges, as donors and volunteers have demonstrated over and over in the past.

And at the very same time, grassroots civic action will reduce the toxic feeling among many Americans that they have

no say in how their communities are run.

Muscular, inventive philanthropy can serve as a desperately needed antidote to today’s political alienation—which could otherwise leave many of our citizens feeling hopeless and angry for years to come. P

In addition to uncovering new ways of solving social problems, competing experiments in micro-governance would give citizens a deeper sense of being involved in the community, and less feeling of being bossed or coerced.

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What Next?

Reactions to Zinsmeister’s argument from Wilfred McClay, Andy Smarick, Eli Lehrer, Virginia Postrel, Joel Kotkin, John McClaughry, Howard Husock, Bill Kauffman, Fred Smith, David Brooks, Kenneth Weinstein, Peter Augustine Lawler, Richard Brookhiser, Naomi Schaefer Riley, Adam Keiper, and Robert Woodson

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Wilfred McClay professor of history at the University of Oklahoma

An Idea Whose Time Has More than Come Karl Zinsmeister’s book comes at precisely the right moment. We’ve just had a contentious and vexing presidential election in which the severe limitations of political activity as a vehicle for social improvement have been made evident to us all. We are just as divided afterward as we were before.

We are ready to consider another way.

People who have been materially blessed have often used their wealth to support political candidates and movements that promise dramatic changes.

But it is no longer clear that the financial support of candidates even makes much of a difference in their electability. The myriad donors who contributed lavishly to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and to well-funded Republicans like Jeb Bush, have come away with nothing to show for their largesse. If this leads well-intentioned donors to reconsider their priorities, and explore other avenues to social improvement, that will be valuable.

When they are ready for such a reconsideration, they will learn a great deal of what they need to know by reading Zinsmeister’s book. It explains the virtues of vibrant local institutions and direct civil action as alternatives to overreliance on national government.

This longstanding American approach to national improvement was pushed aside by a variety of factors, including the shock of the 9/11 attacks, but above all by a mistaken insistence, coming from Republicans and Democrats alike, that decentralist and private-sector ideas overestimated the capacities of the private sector to meet our country’s challenges and undercut vigorous national governance.

Local action was deemed by some to be too parochial, too unambitious, too lacking in comprehensive purpose.

Well, after several polarizing Presidencies, Congress running the federal government for decades without a serious budgetary process, Washington careening from fiscal cliff to fiscal cliff and ballooning

the national debt to $20 trillion, what do big experts that are illusory. We need to we have to show for the D.C.-centered have the courage to invest our resources approach? A deteriorating culture and a in the things we can see, and touch, and demoralized, fearful, impoverished, and evaluate for ourselves. We need to recover divided citizenry, in whose eyes nearly the principles of self-rule and self-trust every formerly respected institution and which are the beating heart of republican occupational group in American life stands government. This fine book is a very good profoundly diminished. way for us to begin thinking about what is Something went wrong with us in the entailed in this reorientation. years since we stopped talking seriously about civil society and localism. It’s high time to speak of them again.

Andy Smarick Zinsmeister’s argument makes Philanthropy contributing editor and resident fellow at AEI more sense today than ever. And he gives us four very compelling case A Patriotic studies drawn from the American Playbook past to show how non-governmental reform movements can effect profound transformations of American life. We Some of the most interesting American need to relearn these lessons. political and policy writing of the last So what tasks should philanthropists year or so has touched upon the need for apply themselves to in twenty-firstdecentralization, a sense that we need to century America? One crucial insight of redistribute authority from controlling Zinsmeister’s book is that we must use elites to citizens and communities. Much our own eyes and intuitions and draw of that writing has been one part concept, on the knowledge we already have— one part advocacy. Karl Zinsmeister’s local, grounded, experience-based—to masterful short book invaluably adds guide our reforms of society. This may history and details to the mix. sometimes mean greater modesty in The biggest contribution of What formulating our goals. But it will yield Comes Next? is how it frames local, plans we can actually accomplish. non-state action as the essential civil My friend Michael Cromartie was enterprise. Voluntary cooperation unites addressing a college audience when he was communities and enables them to queried by an earnest student searching for differentiate themselves; it empowers his “calling” in life. The student approached individuals and ties them to larger causes; it the question with all the touching allows us to act together rather than being grandiosity of which youth is capable. acted upon.

Should he go to Africa and provide clean Decentralization isn’t just a water to impoverished peoples? Should way of creating immediate social he run for office and change the world solutions; it’s a strategy for nationlegislatively? Should he enter science and and community-building. This book invent a carbon-neutral form of energy couldn’t come at a better time. America production? Where should he begin? is suffering on many fronts. We have Mike responded bluntly: “That’s easy. too little trust, too much resentment, Begin by cleaning up your hall.” too much uncertainty. What Comes There was laughter, but it was a real Next? explains why imposed national answer. The greatest good, William Blake solutions to tricky social problems must wrote, is done in minute particulars, but be avoided. They seem well-intended those who loudly seek to change society but are actually emasculating—merely often ignore the minute particulars begging empowering the state while “shrinking for their attention—the things that they the arena of American citizenship.” know, but regard as too lowly to amount to As a diverse pluralistic society, a calling. we have many different visions of the We need to look at what is right good life, many different priorities, and in front of us, and get a handle on our multiple levers of influence. Civil society addiction to big ideas, big agencies, and offers a “vast variety of experience-tested WINTER 2017

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operations of all complexions—secular and religious, material and moral, ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal,’ national or local.” We must use these valuable mechanisms.

Zinsmeister’s latest offering provides perspective on the past and optimism for what’s over the horizon. Most importantly, it presents a compelling philosophy and practical playbook on how to improve America in the future.

Zinsmeister describes genuinely diverse in approach and participation, they were messy. Central-command models were absent, and even the great philanthropists The solution isn’t to make the nonprofit intent on starting their own organizations sector just like the for-profit world. Rather, were careful to support the parallel efforts philanthropists should inculcate some of of others. People fixed on a crucial social the “best practices” seen in What Comes goal worked with (and even for) people Next?, such as these: with whom they disagreed on important Invest for the long term: Lewis Tappan questions. The Sunday-school movement, never came close to seeing the full racial although deeply Christian in its roots, equality he so passionately supported. provided services to people irrespective Frances Willard died more than two of their faith. Anti-slavery activists didn’t Eli Lehrer decades before the peak of the movement all have the same view of racial equality. president of the R Street Institute she helped create. But like good business Differences are important, but principled leaders building great organizations, they people can put them aside to work for Wanted: Social weren’t deterred by long timelines and lasting social improvement.

Entrepreneurship gradual progress. They invested time, America already has the money, money, and entrepreneurial energy to the generosity of spirit, and the talent What Comes Next? isn’t primarily about achieve goals that seemed distant and to confront major social problems kindness, generosity, or even social change. almost impossibly ambitious. through philanthropic means. Actually Rather, it’s a story of entrepreneurship.

Consider new business models: There solving our deep social problems is The men and women who reinvigorated were plenty of educational institutions going to require vision and, above all, American faith, created Sunday schools, before Sunday schools, but the idea of entrepreneurial ability. crusaded against drinking, and built a moral voluntary schools that were privately consensus against slavery created new funded and had a religious base was enterprises to carry out their work. America a new one. Immoderate consumption Virginia Postrel has never been short on associations, but of alcohol has been a social problem columnist and author of The Power of Glamour these citizens working toward social change since the dawn of civilization, but saw the need for new ones, and formed independent groups led by women Finding a New them to meet the demands of their times. mobilizing citizens to change their own National Story In the world of for-profit business, behavior were an innovation of the this would be taken for granted: people temperance movement. The fact that with big, bold ideas rarely take them to an existing charitable business model The sheer variety of American existing firms but instead tend to strike out accomplishes good things at reasonable philanthropy is one of its glories. By on their own. These new companies often costs doesn’t necessarily mean the model tapping the power of decentralized out-compete old ones to become industry should be left alone. There may be other knowledge and entrepreneurial leaders. America’s modern charitable sector ways of operating that work even better. imagination, charitable action can needs to revive the entrepreneurial energy Embrace messiness and differences of repair both individual problems and and drive it has shown in previous eras. opinion: Not only were the movements civilizational threats. As for what should come next in our civic life, I have two suggestions.

First, we must counter the culture of disrespect. Tribal politics and cultural isolation have encouraged a poisonous atmosphere in which we attribute the worst possible motives to those who disagree with us. The first step in reversing this dynamic is to stop feeding it. Don’t engage in or reward rhetoric and behavior that treats fellow Americans as cardboard villains. Seek to understand people’s actual motives rather than assuming bad intentions. Follow the Golden Rule.

Local action is the essential civil enterprise.

It unites and distinguishes communities; it empowers individuals and ties them to larger causes.

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This doesn’t mean giving up on one’s own convictions or values. It can in fact make you a much more effective adversary and advocate. It can also permit cooperative efforts on some things while agreeing to disagree on others.

Beyond encouraging personal respect, supporting common interests across political and cultural lines can help improve our society. Groups that bring together people from diverse backgrounds around shared enthusiasms self-organize all the time, generally without significant outside funding.

What philanthropists could do is facilitate gatherings among enthusiasts who wouldn’t normally encounter each other because of geographic, ethnic, religious, or other differences. Familiarity and friendship breed empathy.

Second, we must find a new national story. Cultures are held together by the stories they tell about themselves.

The story of America that I learned in high school, where history culminated gloriously in the New Deal, Great Society, and civil-rights revolutions, has turned into a dangerously corrosive argument that American history is a long train of abuses and usurpations. Can a more nuanced, accurate, and resilient view of what America is emerge?

Creating new national narratives takes time, and cannot be controlled in simple ways. Smart actors, however, can change the culture, as What Comes Next? demonstrates. Supporting historians, anthropologists, critics, teachers, authors, filmmakers, advertising copywriters, and storytellers who are able to accomplish this is one way donors might help.

John McClaughry vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute

the case that we have seen political ugliness before, and that even in the darkest times, individuals have risen up to meet major challenges.

Given the parlous state of most governments, it will be increasingly critical for localities to tap the ideas and resources of philanthropy.

Philanthropists fuel new ways to improve education, the arts, job training—often with greater efficiency than governments. But the most important contribution of philanthropy, as Zinsmeister suggests, is to boost citizen engagement.

We put far too much emphasis on elections, particularly for President.

The key to better governance is more citizen involvement and local control.

The federal government is a blunt tool, one that is used in ways that don’t fit into the realities of many communities.

Policies that work in New York or Los Angeles may not be so useful in places like Peoria or Bismarck.

Localized policymaking will allow for a diversity of ideas—very different from the phony surface diversity that Zinsmeister skewers. If America is to be great again, as has been recently suggested, it won’t come primarily from the Oval Office, Capitol Hill, the government bureaucracies, or the academic Ivory Tower. Our greatness will be restored because Americans decide to put energy, time, and money directly into improving the lives of their fellow citizens.

Avoiding Despotic Centralism For generations, ordinary Americans willing to act directly and cooperate with their neighbors have achieved great and noble things, as What Comes Next? explains in fascinating detail. Each of the four movements used as case histories in the book started with the view that “We are not helpless subjects! We don’t need to wait for governments to define and order our lives! We can band together, conceive a better way, marshal our talents and resources, and produce positive change.” This volume—and The Almanac of American Philanthropy, with which it should be read in parallel—makes it very evident that this kind of voluntary action for beneficial purposes remains powerfully alive in America today.

The greatest danger we face is the same one recognized as a threat by Tocqueville—a suffocating, paternal government that “covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform….

It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”

Joel Kotkin fellow in urban studies at Chapman University

Forget Elections, Get to Work What Comes Next? sets out a new agenda for an increasingly divided country. Karl Zinsmeister rightly makes

There is no headquarters for protecting grassroots action. Philanthropists should fill that pressing need.

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There is no headquarters or active network for protecting and promoting grassroots action. So an ever-advancing tide of government intrudes on what ought to be the province of thousands of civil institutions. Will centralized control creep ever further into our communities? Or can citizens reverse the diminution of their liberties and strengthen our civil society?

If they will take their cues from What Comes Next? and The Almanac of American Philanthropy, philanthropists (and that means anyone willing to give and invest time to better our country, not just the rich) may fill that pressing need.

For the sake of an America with a bright future of enterprise and happiness, let us hope donors and volunteers provide the much-needed leadership.

Howard Husock vice president at the Manhattan Institute

Fewer Governments = Poorer Governance As Americans, we must not lose sight of the fact that our traditional, federalist approach to governance can, and historically has been, a vehicle to encourage, not dampen, civil society.

President Woodrow Wilson observed that American communities are not governed but rather “govern themselves.”

Municipalities were largely responsible for their own affairs—and accountable to local citizens for their performance.

Bill Kauffman author of Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette

Smaller communities encourage friends and neighbors to join together and start organizations that address local problems. But changes in our governing structure pose a threat to these local attachments and activities.

Thanks to the consolidation of school districts and the regionalization of local governments, we’ve seen a sharp decline in the overall number of governing jurisdictions in the U.S. In 1942 we had 155,000 units of government in the U.S. By 2012 that number had fallen to 90,000, even though population more than doubled.

Government consolidation was driven by a false premise: that larger units of governance would be more efficient and effective. That has not borne out. Meanwhile, communities now face diktats on education, building and development, environmental questions, and many other issues that they once decided on their own (often through the help of volunteer-based boards that build social cohesion and foster new ideas).

We don’t need more government to foster a more robust civil society. But allowing more bodies of government, operating closer to the people, could help.

The trend toward more expansive and expensive government in the U.S. and away from locally accountable government should be resisted and reversed.

I was warned against being dazzled by the desire to do grand things with big players.

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Charity Begins at Home As Karl Zinsmeister puts it in his very fine and hopeful book, What Comes Next?: “Decentralize power and let people govern themselves much more locally.” Let Utah be Utah, and let San Francisco be San Francisco.

My late friend Barber Conable, for many years the ranking Republican member of the House Ways and Means Committee and the winner, on multiple occasions, of various “most respected congressman” polls, did not shun national affairs in his retirement; he chaired the executive committee of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. But his labors and charity and heart were mostly given to local affairs: the county historical society, the living-history museum, the planting of dozens of flowering crabapple trees throughout his little village of Alexander, New York.

Be Conablian. Participate in larger ventures in those rare cases where you can make a genuine contribution.

But focus your energies—and your charitable gifts—on matters homely.

Give to the symphony. The local Scout troop. Sponsor a Little League baseball team. Plant trees. Tend the graves of your ancestors. Subsidize the publication of local histories. Find performance space for a grassroots theater troupe.

Every four years you throw an ort into the ocean by casting a vote in a national election. So do I. But every time we open our wallets or write a check or volunteer, we’re marking a more gravid ballot, putting our resources where our heart and soul and family reside. Choose home instead.

The revolution starts with you.

depend on moral feeling to motivate people to behave as good citizens, and shared Fred Smith moral understandings to form the basis for president of The Gathering community. Government doesn’t produce those things. It is up to private citizens to Start in Your Community create moral cultures.

David Brooks New York Times columnist I fear that philanthropy has recently become more utilitarian, more I am probably better off not reading the value-neutral, more like government. Many Philanthropic Muscle on annual issue of Forbes on giving. Stories foundations and donors shy away from the Governmental Skeleton of people like Bill Gates, Bono, and spiritual content. As a result, the nation’s Paul Tudor Jones—who are, in essence, moral capital suffers. Vocabularies of honor displacing corporations and governments in Karl Zinsmeister’s fabulous book really got and shame, sin and grace, good and bad, are finding answers to complex problems—can me thinking. It’s not only an encyclopedic no longer in use. People are given food and make you wonder if anything you are doing tour through the history of heroic housing, but their yearning for dignity and makes any difference at all in comparison. meaning is unmet and even unrecognized. philanthropy, it’s a vibrant and spicy vision That is an illusion.

People have no language or models about of the different roles for government and John Gardner, who brought the sound character-building, no context in private giving. Zinsmeister has this great Carnegie Corporation back from concept that by giving and serving, people which good character is cultivated. So years of mismanagement, and also are not only consumers of government, they they find it harder to resist short-term founded Independent Sector, was an temptations for the sake of long-term goals. become producers of governance as well. international figure, but I once heard Social trust is declining today.

But that raises an issue: How should him say something surprising about Relationships, especially across different we envision the interaction between these philanthropists being attracted to solving two spheres? I am, maybe more than groups, are fraying. These problems, global problems. He expressed concern which undergird issues like family Zinsmeister, a believer in the essential that it distracted people from the vital breakdown, suicide, and drug abuse, are not role of government. As Michael Gerson core of American philanthropy—local fundamentally material. They are problems has put it, not caring about politics is the and small-scale giving. He warned luxury people who live in well-run societies of character and connection. against being dazzled by the attention Souls, as Emerson said, are not saved have. If you are afraid of getting shot in of the media and the natural desire the head or if you have to pay bribes every in bundles. They are saved one at a time. to do grand things with big players.

And every transformed life is unique and day, you do not have the option of being He emphasized the importance of the incomparable. That’s where emboldened apathetic about government. Moreover, if thousands of modest funders who work government is not effective, there is only so philanthropy is needed today. in their own towns in simple ways. much private philanthropy can do. There The relationships we build by serving are thousands of charities in Haiti, but so at volunteer organizations, civic boards, long as the government is dysfunctional Kenneth Weinstein church committees, and other places that nation can only rise so far. president of Hudson Institute where we must interact and sometimes So government is necessary, but it challenge our neighbors are what John is utilitarian. It can create the skeleton Sturdy Religious Culture Gardner urged us to focus on. That can of a good society, but it is not good at Undergirds Social Progress be challenging. “Community,” Wendell creating the spirit, which is essential Berry once admitted, “is made through for a healthy nation. The philanthropic a skill I have never learned or valued: programs Zinsmeister describes are about When political leadership has failed in the ability to pass time with people you providing spiritual muscle to fill out the America, Karl Zinsmeister shows, “direct do not and will not know well, talking governmental skeleton. Democracies citizen action” has brought about some about nothing in particular, with no end in mind, just to build trust, just to be sure of each other, just to be neighborly.

A community is not something that you have, like a camcorder or a breakfast nook. No, it is something you do. And you have to do it all the time.”

This is not always visible, and rarely given prizes, or cover-story treatment.

But it is the best way to alter the human trajectory. And it can be the most satisfying work in the world.

The best way to understand and solve cultural problems is from up close.

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of the most consequential changes our country has ever seen. Will this continue in the future?

Most of the earlier movements Zinsmeister cites drew upon a culture that was deeply religious, one that heeded the “thou shalt nots” of the Bible and was willing to pass judgment on those who trespassed against them. The older American culture was Christian, but tough and distinctly “Old Testament” in its roots; the new American culture, even on the right, is increasingly soft and post-Christian. Popular and high culture alike are now shaped by a relativism that refuses to pass judgment (except on those who transgress against what is politically correct). Lacking the wellsprings of religious belief, civil society seems less capable of the profound transformations achieved in the past to address vexing social problems.

I do agree with Daniel Patrick Moynihan that “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” Our culture has been corrupted. And the task of restoring it is Herculean.

Peter Augustine Lawler professor of government at Berry College

Puritanical Philanthropy, Then and Now Karl Zinsmeister has brilliantly reminded us of the philanthropic antidote to the excesses of individualism in the American political tradition: the thought and

Naomi Schaefer Riley deeds of our first founders, the Puritans.

Our Puritans were the most serious of philanthropists. They became pilgrims not in the service of a get-rich-quick scheme, as did the first colonists in Virginia, but to make real an idea: the equality of all citizens under God. Their political actions created a new liberty balanced with a philanthropy that reduced the distances in wealth, power, and status that freedom can bring.

The successors to our Puritans are the social reformers Zinsmeister describes. Like the Puritans, they were fervent, serious, and dogged in pursuing their causes. In their spirit, I recommend two philanthropic projects for today’s philanthropists.

The coming apart of Americans into two distant classes is especially clear in the lives of men who have been detached from work and family life.

My first target would be to minister to these wounded and vulnerable men who are experiencing the loneliness of being superfluous. Our churches need to function as homes for these socially homeless souls, because government cannot fill that role.

Second, we must protect our remaining moral and religious conviction. As part of this we should use philanthropic money to help our religious schools wean themselves from any dependence on government.

It’s our religious schools—such as the Catholic parochial schools—that have most devoted themselves to the gentle egalitarianism of our original Puritans.

We must recognize a new kind of neighborhood authorities, instead of looking for saviors in government agencies or the ranks of certified professionals.

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New York Post columnist

Who Can Save the Addicted?

When Rhonda Pasek and James Acord were pulled over by the police earlier this fall, they became the faces of the heroin epidemic that is sweeping the nation. A photo of the two passed out in the front seat of their car while Pasek’s four-year-old grandson in the back stares out the window went viral. When police were criticized by some for releasing the photo, the local government responded, “It is time that the non-drug-using public sees what we are now dealing with on a daily basis.”

There are indeed Americans who need documentation to understand how addictions can blast social functioning.

Karl Zinsmeister’s window into drinking in the nineteenth century is a reminder that Americans’ problems with intoxication didn’t begin with drugs.

And also a reminder that the effects of intoxicating epidemics are always felt most severely by children whose parents neglect their care.

A broad coalition of churches, businesses, and civic leaders eventually significantly curtailed alcohol abuse.

Can Americans recreate the success of the temperance movement in fighting our current drug epidemics? The biggest obstacles are the weakening of religious institutions and marriage in America, particularly in the places where our drug problems have hit hardest.

Most drug addicts have weak connections to family and faith. The people Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart or that J. D. Vance remembers in Hillbilly Elegy hover so far out on the fringes of society that it will not be easy to bring them back. They have no spouses trying to keep them off drugs, or preachers offering strength beyond their own resources.

A lesson of the temperance movement is that government cannot fix people’s deepest disruptions.

Whether the civic fabric of this country remains strong enough to transform lost citizens instead is an open question.

Richard Brookhiser historian and senior editor at National Review

The Power of Habits Karl Zinsmeister’s book interested me, as a Lincoln and Washington biographer, for resurrecting the Washingtonians, the society of reformed drunkards founded “in admiration of the self-discipline shown by the father of our nation, and with the idea that just as Washington had defeated political oppression,” they could beat “the ‘tyrant’ alcohol.”

The Washingtonians knew the dominating pull of booze, from the inside.

They knew the solution had to be cultural, not political. Their self-help methods anticipated those of Alcoholics Anonymous.

What A.A. crucially added to their recipe of mutual reinforcement was a formalized program of steps and goals.

Recalling the Washingtonians now can remind us of the power of habits—bad ones, and good ones. It should also remind reformers that finding and applying the right cultural approach is as important as the impulse to reform.

Adam Keiper editor of The New Atlantis

There’s No Substitute for Personal Contact The enterprising, self-controlled Americans that Karl Zinsmeister describes are still recognizable in many parts of our society. But twentieth-century innovations that liberated us from old constraints— ranging from the automobile to the

birth-control pill to television to the Internet—have profoundly altered families and communities, and our moral and political lives. In particular, the screens on our walls, on our desks, and in our hands can give us a misimpression of intimate knowledge of social problems.

We might feel that we can offer social solutions with a well-placed swipe of a finger—“liking” a video, adding our name to a petition, donating to an urgent appeal. This’s fine as far as it goes.

But as What Comes Next? makes clear, unsnarling knotty social problems usually requires intimate human contact.

The best way to understand and solve cultural problems is to be involved up close—seeking out the needy and lost where they reside. This is slow work, and not practical for everyone.

It has little to do with the instant gratification of clicktivism. But if we don’t do it, we’re unlikely to fix the deepest problems that bedevil us.

Robert Woodson founder of the Woodson Center

A New Brand of Experts In the recent Presidential election, the discord between the American electorate and the governing elite was on full display. “The power of the elites to persuade us has evaporated,” writes blue-collar political pundit Salena Zito. “The public no longer has faith” in big government or big companies or controlling experts.

One of the most important points made by Karl Zinsmeister is that the principles of the market economy—“the creative energy of entrepreneurship, and the cool discipline of investment strategy”—should be applied to the social economy. And like economic entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs should be supported on the basis of the

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outcomes they produce, regardless of the credentials they hold or lack.

The brave philanthropists and committed community activists who risked all to wage campaigns to eliminate slavery and devastating alcohol addiction took it upon themselves to attack huge, widespread, and deeply rooted ethical problems. It was against seemingly insurmountable odds that they pursued their vision and prevailed.

In my work over four decades with neighborhood leaders ministering to seemingly hopeless individuals, I have witnessed similar victories against great odds. It’s true that the poverty and social problems that stem from bad choices like substance abuse and criminal behavior are deeply rooted.

No amount of income distribution, safety nets, or government programs will make a sustainable difference in the status of people ensnared in these behaviors. To reclaim their lives they need new vision, character qualities, and values.

That kind of internal transformation is possible, but it can only be engendered by community-based (often faith-inspired) personal relationships. The good news is that hundreds of committed, indigenous neighborhood leaders are providing this kind of life-transforming outreach. Once grassroots leaders have sparked an internal conversion, even men and women who had virtually lost their lives can emerge as responsible employees, spouses, and parents.

To fully harness the power of transformative neighborhood healers requires that we recognize and support a new brand of “experts”—operating in civil society rather than government agencies or the ranks of certified professionals.

America is ripe for a revitalization of values. But this must be led by mentors and healers who personally understand the problems they address and have a stake in their solutions. What Comes Next? can speed the arrival of this critically needed renewal. P

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On U.S. Campuses,

Free Inquiry is Taking a Beating

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C

olleges are the second-favorite charitable cause in the U.S. (after religious organizations). So donors have major opportunities to influence what happens in higher education.

In a freewheeling session at The Philanthropy Roundtable’s 2016 November annual meeting, two of the most piercing observers of college life today—Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff—updated attendees on the latest trends on campus. They discussed the new threats to open inquiry and intellectual freedom at colleges and universities, and the sources of the latest violations of independent thought.

They also talked about solutions—and the power of private givers to promote intellectual diversity, free expression, and competition of ideas within the institutions educating the next generation of Americans.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University and author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People

Donors may be the best hope for making colleges less one-sided and censorious are Divided by Politics and Religion. Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Greg Lukianoff Freedom of expression is under serious threat on campuses, and has been for some time. You may have heard of the phenomenon of free speech zones at colleges. These are tiny areas, such as a 20-foot-wide gazebo, which students are told are the only places they can exercise their free speech rights. About a fifth of universities maintain such restrictions.

Take one of California’s public universities where we recently became involved—Cal Poly Pomona. We sued to protect a student who was not only told that he had to get permission two weeks in WINTER 2017

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advance to use the campus free speech zone, but also that he had to wear a badge saying that he’d been granted the right to engage in free speech at Cal Poly Pomona.

Then there are the speech codes that now exist on most campuses. We rate them, at thefire.org, using a green-, yellow-, or red-light system. Redlight colleges have codes that are very bad for free speech, yellow means some problematic codes, and we give green lights to schools that have no policies that threaten free speech. Sadly, very few universities earn green lights. Red-light codes are generally laughably unconstitutional codes, and would be thrown out of any court if someone was willing to

of the longstanding “reasonable person” standard, meaning that anyone who subjectively experienced “unwelcome” speech has been harassed.

That opens the door to miscarriages of justice like the case of Laura Kipnis. A feminist professor at Northwestern University, she wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education saying that Title IX has become too expansive and is patronizing to women. She mentioned (without names) a sexual harassment claim then underway at Northwestern.

And for writing this article—engaging in free speech in the country’s most popular higher-education journal—she was charged with violating Title IX and officially investigated.

She was not allowed to know who was accusing her or what the charges were. She was not allowed to write anything down in her hearing, or have a lawyer present. After a few months of inquisition, she decided to write about her Kafkaesque experience in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Only after this unwanted publicity did the university halt the investigation.

This problem is not limited to sexual harassment cases. In most jurisdictions, the federal proscribing of unwelcome speech is automatically expanded to other categories. At the University of Montana, for instance, the ban included unwelcome political opinions. If any speech you subjectively choose not to welcome counts as harassment, there is literally nothing that is safe to say on campuses.

One reason so many people are concerned about free speech on campus today is the rise of what Jon Haidt and I call “vindictive protectiveness.” For most of my career, students who were minorities, poor, not the usual age, or otherwise untraditional were our best allies in protecting freedom of speech. But that’s changed.

Now we have this concept of microaggressions being used against minorities. For example, at UCLA and several other California public universities, microagressions include statements like: “America is a land of opportunity,” “America is a melting pot,” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

At the University of New Hampshire, administrators decided that “Arab” was an inherently offensive word, and that the politically correct terminology is “Western Asian, Northern African people.” It reminds me of a moment on “The Office” when Michael Scott asked one of his employees, “How do you self-identify?” and Oscar says, “Well, I’m Mexican.” And Michael Scott goes, “Ooooh, is there a less offensive way to refer to you?” Which is of

invest time and money to challenge them. The code promulgated by the University of Connecticut, for instance, banned the use of “derogatory names, inconsiderate jokes, and inappropriately directed laughter.” Be careful where you laugh. Though ruled unconstitutional, knockoffs popped up at other schools as well, most recently at Drexel University, where it took more legal intervention on behalf of students to get it suspended.

Why are college administrators trampling on free expression? One reason is federal overreach.

The U.S. Department of Education under the Obama administration has made things much worse. It provided a new definition of harassment that is completely stripped of the safeguards the U.S. Supreme Court had earlier put in place to protect freedom of speech. Instead of a standard of harassment being a pattern of discriminatory behavior that is “severe, persistent, and pervasive,” the Department of Education bureaucrats decided to define harassment as any unwelcome verbal conduct or speech. And the department explicitly got rid 44

PHILANTHROPY

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We represented a student who was told that he had to get advance permission to use the tiny campus “free speech zone,” and wear a badge saying that he’d been granted the right to engage in free speech.

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course the most offensive thing you could possibly say. ­­­This past year, someone at Emory University wrote in chalk on a sidewalk, “Trump 2016.” Some students on campus responded that they feared for their physical safety as a result of this slogan written in chalk. The university president immediately said that whoever chalked the slogan would be punished. Thankfully after the national media noticed the overreaction the president quickly changed his tune and said he supported free speech.

Of course, controversies over things like Halloween costumes and speakers being blocked from presenting on campus have been problems for years. FIRE got involved in a Halloween-costume controversy back in 2010, when the director of public safety at Syracuse University announced that students wearing offensive costumes would be stopped and asked to disrobe.

Disinviting speakers from campuses in response to protests is a longstanding method of keeping conservatives off campuses. We keep a database of these disinvitation attempts at FIRE. But around 2014, prominent liberals like IMF director Christine Lagarde and Cal Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau also began to be blocked for alleged violations of liberal orthodoxy. That got more people thinking. Are we actually at the point where people who are considered political or intellectual blasphemers are not allowed on campus? That’s terrible for the marketplace of ideas.

There’s something called pluralistic ignorance, where essentially everyone thinks that everybody agrees on certain issues, but when you survey people individually, it actually turns out that the group is more intellectually diverse. But the illusion makes people feel they have to conform. We’re having a breakdown in production of interesting new ideas today, partially because of this perception that 99 percent of people agree, so I better not go beyond the pale and be controversial.

A concerted effort to sanitize the public sphere has resulted in a situation where people are only talking to folks who they already agree with. We’re polarizing, and becoming more certain of what we believe, without good reason. And this can lead to isolation of different groups, because people are afraid to talk across lines of difference.

Sometimes critics will say I’m just protecting hate speech.

It’s easy to overwhelm this with counterexamples. One of the best known cases in FIRE history is from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where a student was accused of racial harassment because he was reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan. Even though the book was about a KKK march on Notre Dame that was thwarted, he was chastised because the book had the word “Klan” on the cover, which made some people uncomfortable.

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Jonathan Haidt I’ll add a story from this week to Greg’s pile. At many top schools in America, the president felt obligated to send out a letter about the national election.

Some letters were partisan—explicitly stating that a trauma or tragedy has just happened. Others tried not to be clearly identified as being on one side.

The president of UVA did what presidents of UVA always do, which is quote Thomas Jefferson. He has words of wisdom about everything. So Teresa Sullivan quoted Jefferson’s confidence in the ability of young Americans to deal with complex and difficult challenges. And what happens? Four hundred faculty members and students write a letter asking her to stop quoting Jefferson. The inclusion of Jefferson quotations undermines any message of unity, equality, and civility, they said, because Jefferson owned slaves.

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Telling the president of UVA to stop quoting Jefferson would have been unimaginable until a year or two ago.

There are increasingly two visions of the purpose of a university. One holds that the point of a university is to understand the world. I believe American universities rose to the top, globally, because they instantiated John Stuart Mill’s insight that “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” We don’t really absorb something deeply until we are challenged. People point out things we didn’t think of, and we have to defend our arguments. Criticism makes us all wiser. The university is an institution in which the way we engage with each other brings us closer to truth.

There’s another view, though, captured in a currently popular saying PHILANTHROPY

that paraphrases Karl Marx: “The point is not merely to understand the world, but to change it.” This is a very different way of thinking about what a university is up to. When I arrived at Yale in 1981, veritas was written in stone above Phelps Gate. We were told, “This is an institution committed to truth.” But since the 1990s, increasing numbers of universities seem to be chiseling out “truth” and inserting “change.” And not just any kind of change, but social justice in particular.

The aims of social justice are laudable.

But when any goal becomes a passionate goal shared by a group, it is likely to interfere with the pursuit of truth.

There is a basic finding in social psychology called motivated reasoning.

If I want to believe proposition X, I search for supporting evidence. If

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These kinds of cases are one reason we’re now getting more professors coming to us at FIRE. They are scared of their students right now. They realize how easy it has become to say the “wrong” thing.

Students and professors were asked in a 2010 study if they think it’s safe to hold unpopular points of view on campus. Only about 17 percent of professors strongly agreed with the statement that it is safe to hold unpopular views on campus.

Researchers discovered that the longer students are on campus, the more they fear openly expressing themselves, and the more they censor themselves. And that information was collected back in 2010—a comparative golden age for free speech on campus.

One of the most recent campus surveys I know of was conducted at Yale. It asked students, “Is Yale a welcoming environment for conservative opinions?” Three quarters of all students said no, it is not.

I find some, I can stop thinking. On the other hand, if there’s something I don’t want to believe, my inclination will be to search for disconfirming evidence. We’re terrible at saying, “Reason: go out and bring back all the evidence on both sides, and then we’ll weigh it up.” That is very hard for most of us.

For example, in one classic study, students come into the psychology lab and are given an article that looks like it’s from a scientific journal. It seems to show that caffeine consumption is associated with breast cancer. And then they’re told, “Critique the article.

Evaluate it. What do you think of the research?”

Who do you think finds lots of flaws in that research study? Coffee drinkers! But not just any coffee drinkers. Female coffee drinkers are the most critical. They are asking, “Must I believe it, and thus perhaps change my behavior in difficult ways?” And so they find lots of flaws with the study. Everybody else, facing no motivational threat, just says, “Oh, okay, I guess caffeine causes breast cancer. I didn’t know that.”

Scholars are the same as these students. All of us engage in motivated reasoning, and few of us believe we are biased. Is there an institutional fix for this? Yes there is: Make sure that people don’t all share the same motivations and biases, then let them challenge each other.

That used to work for politically charged topics, but it doesn’t anymore—because campuses have become far more homogeneous since the 1990s.

As recently as 1995, around 40 percent of faculty identified on the left, and around 20 percent on the right. Two to one, across the entire university, although it was higher in the humanities and social sciences. But even three or four to one is okay with me; that’s enough to be pretty confident that somebody in the room holds a contrary bias.

But between 1996 and 2011, as the Greatest Generation left the stage and the Baby Boomers took over leadership, the left-right ratio swelled to five to one, and in the humanities and social sciences it went far higher. In my field—psychology—it is now around 17 to one, according to a study

published in September. This has potentially existential implications for the universities. Can they still do their job when on some of the most important and hotly debated questions of our time, there is nobody on campus to challenge the dominant position?

This means that whatever views are politically orthodox among the professoriate are likely to be embraced by the students. Many of these views will be strongly held but only weakly supported— because, as Mill warned, people who never get challenged don’t examine their views deeply, or learn to defend them when challenged.

Students are at risk of becoming intellectually fragile because their core beliefs have rarely been challenged. And that’s why it’s threatening if a speaker like Christina Hoff Sommers comes to campus, or, God forbid, Milo Yiannopoulos. For many students, it’s not enough to just avoid such presentations. It’s deeply threatening to them that such people are even allowed to speak.

In real life, children learn by falling down, scraping their knees, and getting back up. We can’t learn to navigate complex arguments in social and intellectual

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The U.S. Department of Education now defines harassment as any unwelcome verbal conduct or speech.

If any speech you don’t like counts as harassment, there is literally nothing that is safe to say on campuses. life without sometimes falling. To develop and become strong intellectually, people need to be exposed to a great variety of ideas, including ideas that are wrong.

They need to learn how to argue against things. If they’re not exposed to a variety of ideas, they will find all new ideas threatening.

There’s a widespread human desire to live in moral communities that cohere. We’re moral creatures, and we want everything about our community to reflect our values. The genius of liberal societies is to say no to that—to say that there is room for a variety of values; we can and must find ways of living together despite our differences.

Group loyalty is a deep part of human nature; it’s very valuable in war and sports, but it is destructive to reasoning. If scholars and scientists are expected to express group loyalty, then there are certain kinds of thinking that are betrayals. If a professor investigates questions that nobody wants investigated, that’s a betrayal. If a professor finds WINTER 2017

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Lukianoff Tenure is supposed to protect professors and empower them to speak out. I’ve actually been really disappointed that very few professors have used their tenure protections to act boldly in defense of important principles on campus. Perhaps one reason is because in the past two years, even tenure hasn’t been enough to protect the free speech rights of professors. Marquette University is in the process of firing a professor for writing a blog post about students who were told they couldn’t debate same-sex marriage, because that would be “homophobic.” The professor asked, how can it be forbidden at Marquette University, a Catholic institution, to discuss and debate ideas that are official positions of the Catholic

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results that are unsettling, that’s a betrayal. Some findings must not be published. Some ideas must be attacked rather than evaluated.

In the hope of counteracting this, a number of other professors and I created a site called Heterodox Academy. It’s the opposite of the Orthodox Academy.

We’re from all over the place politically, but we all agree we need more viewpoint diversity on campus. We started with 25 professors, and now have over 300.

The project I’m most excited about is what we call the Heterodox Academy Viewpoint Diversity Reading List.

Recently we came out with the first edition of the Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges. If you’re sending your kids to school, you probably consulted the U.S. News list of colleges, where you can read summaries of class size, endowments, those kinds of things. If you want your kid exposed to a diversity of ideas, you can go to HeterodoxAcademy.org to find out where to send him or her. We rank the top 150 schools. We take the rating from FIRE on speech codes, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s rating on how welcoming places are to conservatives. We look at news events that indicate an openness to debate, versus a commitment to orthodoxy.

Thanks to the work of Greg and his colleagues at FIRE, the trend on speech codes is actually in the right direction. But when you look at the social norms and the moral views that are being enforced on campus, the trend is worrying. Four or five years ago, almost nobody had heard of a microaggression or a trigger warning.

But then they started spreading. It was only in late 2015 when most of the country was exposed to these concepts, after the wave of campus protests.

The underlying trends, though, have been building for years. The gradual political purification of the faculty. The rising polarization of the country.

People hating the other side far more than they did 10 or 20 years ago. Social media bathing citizens in rivers of outrage.

The helicopter parenting that became the norm in the 1990s also has something to do with our problem. More than prior generations, many of today’s college students were sheltered by parents and other adults from risks, challenges, and social jostling.

They were always under adult supervision. Younger millennials were taught that the proper thing to do when someone says something that offends you is to call in an authority. This creates a state of moral dependency. Many young people didn’t get enough practice in working things out for themselves.

That is not an environment conducive to free speech and open inquiry. If there is always the risk that things you say could trigger a complaint to a legal authority—perhaps even an anonymous complaint—then everyone begins walking on eggshells. Students, and even faculty, become less daring, less provocative, less honest. Education doesn’t work if everyone is playing it safe.

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faith? He’s currently fighting for his job. So even tenure won’t necessarily protect professors against the censures of political correctness.

And then there’s the reality that the vast majority of college instructors don’t have tenure anyway. When I looked at this a couple of years ago, 79 percent of professors were not on a tenure track.

They’re adjuncts like me. And they are very worried about being fired over very small things.

A lot of times administrators won’t even tell you why you weren’t rehired. If you’re in that situation and it’s pretty clear that it relates to your speech, by all means contact FIRE. We do win those cases sometimes. But it’s hard to fight back when the university won’t even explain why you were let go, as is too often the case. I think there’s cause for seeking some kind of solution to this. I’d like to see all professors, regardless of tenure, get seven-year contracts promising academic freedom and free speech.

There is another thing that could help lower the temperature. As I mentioned earlier, under President Obama, the U.S. Department of Education put heavy pressure on colleges to expand, ease, and encourage the filing of harassment complaints and litigation without normal protections of due process.

This federal pressure has been an engine that makes everything crazier on campuses. Hopefully the Trump administration is going to recalibrate that.

I have no illusions that the activists I know in places like San Francisco and Stanford are going to become more moderate—quite the opposite. Many social-justice activists are going to double down on these race and gender sensitivity issues. For them, the election results are a call to man the barricades.

Haidt I agree. Since passions drive reasoning for all of us, the 2016 presidential election results are going push many people to extremes. There is going to be a lot more polarization. On campus, this will mean a lot more pressure on university presidents to implement policies that will further chill speech, such as hotlines encouraging students to report even a “microaggression,” and “bias response teams,” which are bureaucratic innovations that act as investigators, create a case number, contact the alleged perpetrator—leaving everyone tense and inclined to self-censor and speak only safe conventional banalities.

Alumni and donors can be extremely important in balancing other forces and encouraging colleges to

stand up for free inquiry. As far as I can tell, alumni are strongly against these movements toward “safety culture.” Whether they are on the right or the left, the older generation believes strongly in free speech.

If alumni would mention their concerns about these issues to college presidents, administrators, and development officers, and mention it often, I think it would go a long way toward addressing the problem.

University presidents face strong political forces from many constituencies. They have a very difficult job to do. I don’t envy them. But some of them might actually need some counterpressure before they can effectively stand up to the illiberal forces growing stronger on so many campuses.

Lukianoff FIRE is very happy to help.

Some time ago we were contacted by a hundred-dollar donor to a major university. We kept his name confidential, but wrote to his university saying, “One of your donors doesn’t like the fact that you have a red light from FIRE. You should make reforms.”

The university freaked out. It got rid of all of its restrictive speech codes right away. Dumping your codes is not enough by itself, but it’s a crucial step in the right direction.

We thought, “They must be assuming this is much more than a hundred-dollar donor we’re talking about!” We weren’t going to tell them that, of course.

I’ve watched many good results come out of even small-dollar donors writing an angry alumni e-mail. So speak up. Don’t just hand over checks without checking to see if your alma mater is good on freedom of speech. P

If there is always the risk that things you say could trigger a complaint to a legal authority, then students and faculty become less daring, less honest. Education doesn’t work if everyone is playing it safe.

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ideas Succor, Not Salvation

Philanthropic rescues from a century ago point the way for humanitarians today

BY SUSAN BILLINGTON HARPER

Millions of Syrians have been traumatized by violence and privation due to fighting in their country. U.S. foreign policy has been ineffective in stopping either the carnage or the exodus of refugees. What can philanthropists do to help?

The past provides some perspective.

A century ago, these same territories in the Middle East were also the scene of war and atrocities. One in four inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire died of famine, state violence, or disease between 1914 and 1923. Millions more became

$2.5 billion in today’s dollars. NER pioneered now-­c ommon fundraising methods like child sponsorships. Partner organizations representing over 73 million Americans promoted “Golden Rule dinners” in which guests ate simple meals like those served in orphanages and made donations in solidarity with victims. Saving the “starving Armenians” became a common household refrain. The money raised funded medical care, emergency food distribution, ­agricultural supplies, and other lifesav-

charge of the world’s largest orphanage, where she battled trachoma, favus, scabies, typhus, smallpox, and other diseases afflicting 25,000 displaced children.

Another refugee crisis was developing in the Aegean Sea—in the same waters where immigrants are drowning today.

In 1922 Turkish soldiers pushed Allied forces out of Asia Minor, and an exchange of populations by religion was negotiated.

About 1.5 million ­Christians fled Turkey.

About half a million Muslims escaped in the other direction from Greece.

refugees. The genocide against Armenian Christians alone resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million people. Photos of young victims shocked the world then, as they do today.

America responded to this distant catastrophe with unprecedented generosity. Charitable, business, and religious leaders provided valuable humanitarian assistance starting in 1915. Key backers included real-estate investor and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau and copper magnate Cleveland Dodge.

By 1919, the organizers received a ­Congressional charter to operate under the name Near East Relief.

NER electrified and mobilized the American public by emotional appeals for victims in “Bible lands.” Volunteers ranging from Sunday-school students to ­Hollywood stars chipped in. They raised an astonishing sum of approximately 50

ing services to millions of victims of many ethnicities in the Near East.

NER sent more than a thousand relief workers to the region. At least two dozen of its agents died in the line of duty. By 1930, it reported saving a million lives and rescuing 132,000 orphans.

Philanthropic heroines Dr. Mabel Elliott, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s Rush Medical College, was one of the NER aid workers. She accompanied several thousand refugees as they escaped on foot through the Taurus Mountains in blizzard conditions. She barely escaped alive. Elliott cared for refugees in the coastal city of İzmit while “bullets were zipping across our compound and striking into the plaster of the walls…. We put patients on the floor, out of range of the windows.” Moving to Armenia, Elliott took PHILANTHROPY

Much of the region was overwhelmed with hungry, exhausted, sick refugees.

Another brave American charity doctor, Olga Stastny of Omaha, Nebraska, stepped into the breach. She established a system to register and temporarily care for refugees on the tiny barren Greek island of Macronissi. Within four days of her arrival, 5,500 refugees disembarked from the SS Ionia. Smallpox and typhus were rampant among the passengers. They had no water or food on board. Stastny and her staff assisted over 12,000 refugees in the next five months. All arrivals were bathed; vermin-infested hair was shaved then burned to stop typhus; remaining clothes were steamed and sterilized.

Susan Billington Harper, a scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes and lectures about American humanitarianism in the Middle East.

Near East Foundation’s historical archives (www.neareast.org)

There are now more refugees and displaced persons than at any other time in history. As in the past, philanthropy plays a vital role in reducing war-­related suffering.

Near East Foundation’s historical archives (www.neareast.org)

Refugees waited in long lines to receive a 1,000-calorie daily diet. “­Cooking for 6,000 people is no joke,” Stastny wrote. Stastny contracted malaria, and her chief assistant died of typhus fever. “By the end of June we had buried 796 in graves at one end of the island and passed the rest on to the cities of Greece,” she reported. Elliott and Stastny eventually returned to medical practices in the United States, disillusioned by the unwillingness of Western governments to protect Armenians and other victims of ongoing conflict in the region.

A replay today There are now more refugees and displaced persons than at any other time in history.

Though the process of international relief has been bureaucratized to a considerable degree, it’s not hard to find today’s equivalent of Elliott and Stastny. Not-for-profit organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, the White Helmets, and Speed School Fund support many heroic first responders, physicians, and teachers. Near East Relief operates today as the Near East Foundation. Private philanthropy still plays a vital role in reducing war-related suffering. Likewise, the inability of governmental authorities to end the chaos that is killing and wounding frantic innocents continues to be a tragic, but not surprising, reality.

Writer David Rieff counsels aid workers not to expect or seek utopian outcomes of “perpetual peace, the universal rule of law, or…a fairer world.” He urges, “Let humanitarianism be humanitarianism.”

Charitable aid can still save lives, lift up victims, and relieve at least some of the misery that tyrants and failed politics often create. When relief workers imagine they can banish evil altogether, the result

Photos of individual children appealed to viewers and rallied support for relief.

is often just to distract from humanitarian efforts, m ­ uddling outcomes.

Today, donors can provide muchneeded help to people fleeing nightmares of war and suffering. A humble humanitarianism freed from “mission creep” is worth donor support. History teaches that those who brought aid and care for survivors generally did more good than those who imagined they could banish cruelty

altogether by remaking the world into a progressive American paradise. Political failures have tormented the angry lands of the former Ottoman Empire for more than a century. Throughout those upheavals, tough, fearless, and dedicated humanitarians, including many Americans, managed to care for the hurting in spite of the worst kind of obstacles. That suggests possibilities for lifesaving good that still exist today. P

When relief workers imagine they can banish evil altogether, the result is often just to distract from humanitarian efforts, muddling outcomes.

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ideas Blue-Collar Banking

Against government opposition, Americans created savings vehicles to boost the working class

BY EVAN SPARKS

A cool November day in 1816 Philadelphia found Condy Raguet strolling down Chestnut Street, reflecting on ideas he had just read about the “friendly societies” and mutually owned savings banks popping up all over Great Britain to promote thrift among the poor.

A handsome, well-traveled, wellread 32-year-old merchant, Raguet bumped into a few friends and asked if they had heard of the concept.

“Would you unite with me,” he asked, “to establish one?” ­­­­The friends—one of them a scion of Philadelphia’s wealthy ­B iddle family—had indeed heard of the savings-bank concept and wanted to cooperate with Raguet. They decided to call their new institution the ­P hiladelphia Savings Fund Society.

On December 2—less than two weeks from conception to operation—the fund opened for business at the office of one of the founders. Deposits were accepted on Mondays and withdrawals paid out on Thursdays. Raguet’s African-American servant Curtis Roberts became the bank’s first depositor, bringing five dollars.

Meanwhile in Boston, merchant James Savage had read similar reports from ­London and decided that a savings bank would be of value in the Bay State. By an odd twist of history, Savage and Raguet had much in common. Savage was also 32 and, like Raguet, had cut his teeth in Caribbean trade. He sold blocks of New England pond ice to tropical islanders. Both men were intrepid local philanthropists who married their business careers with civic service and charitable entrepreneurship.

Like Raguet, Savage sought to help Boston’s poor help themselves “by supplying to the industrious poor a place of safe deposit for their savings,” as one biographer relates. “In this way, habits 52

of economy would be gradually formed and encouraged.” Savage spread the word among his peers, and not two weeks after the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society opened for business, 48 leading Bostonians incorporated the Provident Institution for Savings in their own town.

New York philanthropists Thomas Eddy and John Griscom had also gotten word of the friendly societies in Britain.

They sought to establish one in their hometown. The banking-skeptical legislature took its time in approving a charter, though. Eddy and Griscom had to wait until 1819.

After this, a savings-bank wave swept through the cities and towns of the young republic, especially in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Savings banks were established in ­Baltimore and Salem, ­M assachusetts, in 1818; in ­H artford, ­Connecticut, and Providence and N ­ ewport, Rhode Island, in 1819; and Albany, New York, in 1820. They collaborated often; the Baltimore bank founders essentially copied the founding documents of the P ­ hiladelphia bank. The mutual savings bank was a perfect fit for the America of its time, and it would fundamentally transform the way ­Americans thought about their money.

To make the dollars contributed by trustees and the pennies accumulated by depositors stretch further, most of the staffing was by volunteers. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that banking professionals started to take charge—and, in smaller towns, savings banks were often volunteer-run well into the twentieth century. To prevent conflicts of interest and maintain their focus on their provident mission, most banks were prohibited from lending money to trustees.

At the Bank for Savings in the City of New York, the trustees took turns “attending” at the bank each month, taking deposits and keeping the books—which helped them get to know their clientele, built up confidence in the bank, and gave depositors access to the trustees’ free advice and counsel. Trustees took their duties quite seriously. In Philadelphia, Savings Fund Society treasurer George Billington is said to have sometimes slept with the deposits and a revolver under his pillow.

The mission of savings banks was clear to their founders. James Savage noted that the Provident in Boston did its “greatest good” in affording laborers, servants, and artisans, “who constitute two thirds of our population, a secure disposal of their little earnings.” Leaders of the New York Bank for Savings said the habits built by saving “inspire a spirit of independence…encourage industry, frugality, cleanliness, and self-respect.” New York Governor DeWitt Clinton ranked savings banks with schools and orphanages, which “prevent or alleviate the evils of pauperism,” contrasting them to almshouses and soup kitchens which remove “incentives to labor.”

The first “philanthrocapitalists” Although they aimed to be self-sustaining from deposits, the first savings banks were philanthropic enterprises, initially capitalized by contributions from leading citizens for the benefit of the less well-off. In Philadelphia, each of the bank’s 25 incorporators paid $10 to cover administrative expenses; those who wished to contribute more gave to an auxiliary fund. These first savings banks were mutually owned Evan Sparks is editor-in-chief of the ABA by depositors—the trustees held no own- Banking Journal and a Philanthropy contributing editor. ership and took no dividend.

PHILANTHROPY

Rising immigration to East Coast cities elevated the importance of savings banks. Irish immigrants established the Emigrant Savings Bank as a mutually owned institution in 1850. In 1911 ­W illiam Knox of New York’s Bowery ­Savings Bank described his bank’s depositors as a “tower of Babel,” but noted that “from whatever race they spring, they have one common motive in this land of ours, and that is the pursuit and capture of the elusive American dollar.”

The business of savings When banks were only available to the well-to-do, as in our nation’s early years, the broader public was suspicious of them.

The controversy between Federalists and Jeffersonians over the Bank of the United States deepened the idea that banks were not friends of the common man. When the financial panic of 1819 arrived there were heavy foreclosures amidst high unemployment. And during our period without a central bank, low-quality banknotes issued at the state level, and bouts of inflation, did nothing to make Americans fond of banks.

Savings banks were a first step to building trust. Today we tend to take the security of money for granted, but 200 years ago, few people had a safe place to store wealth—­ especially city dwellers who owned no land, and where thievery could wipe out a life’s savings. Cities were also full of ­institutions— from theaters to taverns to gambling houses—designed to separate unwary laborers from their money. As managers at the New York Bank for Savings observed in an early report, “particularly in large cities, the difficulty of procuring the reward of labor is not so great as the power to preserve it.”

The earliest savings banks focused entirely on the working classes. To maintain this focus, the bank in Baltimore capped total deposits at $500. They generally paid annual interest of around 4 to 5 percent. Answering a pressing need, these institutions grew fast. By 1840, the first Baltimore savings bank counted 10 percent of the population as customers.

The managers of the New York bank optimistically expected $50,000 of deposits in their first year, and were shocked to attract three times that in just six months. After six years, 9,000 depositors were holding $1.4 million at the bank.

Mutual savings banks inspired other mutual efforts. In 1831, the first building and loan was chartered near Philadelphia and quickly spread through Pennsylvania and across the country to match the need for new housing stock. And the first credit unions took mutual banking to an even more micro scale.

Money and morals Savings banks had moral effects as well as practical value. In addition to encouraging thrift and responsibility in individuals, historians credit them with infusing the broader U.S. banking sector with an emphasis on moral rectitude and good habits. James Manning wrote a century ago that “banks are abandoning their traditional attitude of mere passivity and are becoming active, effective stimulators of thrift among all classes of the people, thus fulfilling an educational function of the utmost importance.”

The mutual savings bank legacy is also a reminder of the power of the human touch in banking. “Despite all our vastness

them, has been embedded in banks of all charter types. Today, most banks—­regardless of origin or size—offer savings products for people of small or middling means. The nearly 350 officially designated savings banks remaining look very similar to other community and midsize banks, but that’s in large part because of other banks taking on the spirit of savings banks.

The philanthropic tradition of the savings bank lives on as well. As savings banks became professionalized and less reliant on charitable backing, they turned the tables and became pioneers of corporate philanthropy. Boston-based Eastern Bank—America’s oldest and largest mutual institution—practices a tithe, putting 10 percent of its net income into its charitable foundation. “As a mutual, we have no shareholders, so this is our sort of dividend,” chairman and CEO Rich H ­ olbrook says.

And while the savings bank is no longer as distinct a form as it once was, today’s savings bank leaders cherish the legacy. In many cases, it’s embodied in bank names like the

The first savings banks were philanthropic enterprises, capitalized by donors and staffed by volunteers.

In places, savings banks continued to be volunteer-run well into the twentieth century. and the intricacy of the apparatus we have devised for the transaction of business, whether it be that of a savings bank or of a merchant prince,” wrote Manning, “the human factor—the individual personality in contact with other individuals—still holds the reins of power.”

The twentieth century brought changes to savings banks. Customers who started out poor had become middle-class.

Regulation and tax changes reduced distinctive features of savings banks, pushing many mutuals to convert to stock banks and diversify beyond their original missions. Deposit insurance, introduced in the 1930s, cut into the unique security of savings banks.

But the message of thrift remains embedded in savings banks and, through WINTER 2017

Dime Community Bank in Brooklyn or the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank.

“Some people allege that it was because it took five cents to open an account,” says Cape Cod Five president, chair, and CEO Dorothy Savarese. “Another more common theory is that it was to encourage thrift, and that they were encouraging the fishermen and the cranberry farmers here to put five cents a week into their savings.”

Cape Cod Five is today a full-service community bank offering deposit and payment products, mortgages, commercial loans, and wealth management. But the 161-year-old bank is sticking to its old-fashioned name. “We’ve maintained the name even though some people think it’s an anachronism,” says Savarese. “To us—it’s a reminder.” P 53

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When Little Is Big How a $1,000 grant rocked two warring cultures

BY ASHLEY M AY

Much writing about charitable work today is focused on “big.” How to make a “big bet.” Making bigger footprints by replicating your program. Attracting bigger partners to good causes. It’s enticing—who doesn’t love a larger splash? And don’t huge problems require huge solutions?

It’s with these eyes that I recently read M ­ oscow Nights by Nigel Cliff, a narrative of the life of concert pianist Van Cliburn. With the trill of a key, he became the Elvis Presley of the U.S.S.R. at the height of the Cold War. Cliff describes Cliburn’s journey to master Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, then bring their deeply Russian music back to the Russian people. In the process, he brought classical music to the masses. And some timely philanthropy propelled him along this journey.

Harvey “Van” Cliburn was born in 1934. His father was a railroad-station agent who became an oil buyer, moving his young family to Kilgore, Texas, in the process. The boy’s mother was a piano teacher whose dream of becoming a concert performer had been hampered by parents who didn’t approve of women as public entertainers. She had studied with a prominent Russian teacher and was a time capsule of a particular style of piano playing no longer in vogue. She would entrust this lost knowledge to her son—who at a young age declared his interest in playing piano for a living, and practiced long enough to back it up.

Mrs. Cliburn sent her son to play at any venue for any audience, starting with hymns at the nearby funeral home before he knew how to read letters on a page. At 12, Van had his first “major” performance: memorizing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and performing for the annual Texas State Music Contest. He won the $200 prize, and played with the Houston Symphony Orchestra. After his brief flirtation with operatic singing was thwarted by puberty, the tracks were laid for him; he would focus on piano, and only piano, for the rest of his life.

After high school his mother escorted him to New York City, where she left him with ­Russian-born Juilliard teacher Rosina Lhévinne. She was, in Cliff ’s words, “America’s foremost link to the golden age of Russian Romanticism.” She and her husband, pianist 54

Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story: How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War

By Nigel Cliff

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Josef Lhévinne, were classmates of Rachmaninoff, and had immigrated to the U.S. after losing their savings in the Russian Revolution.

A boyish Baptist Texan in New York City drawn to Russian music at a time when it had very little cachet, Cliburn was an anomaly. He had a brush with fame when he won the philanthropically funded ­Leventritt Award and toured the United States for a few years. But after the dew wore off his fresh baby face, and he grew professionally hesitant and anxious, he began to struggle. After his mother took a hard fall, he moved back to Kilgore to keep an eye on her. He took on her students, and began to play for the local Lutheran church. He awaited a draft summons from the Army, which eventually excused him from service because of a long history of nosebleeds and allergies.

Today, we might say Cliburn was then in the “valley of death”—that period between the end of formal study and the confident establishment of vocational credibility. His agent was trying to arrange a European tour, but Van was reluctant to commit. “It was the lowest ebb of his young professional life,” writes Cliff.

Then a series of small philanthropic acts began to accumulate. Rosina Lhévinne heard of a new International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and through sheer will nagged Cliburn into agreeing to participate. Then Juilliard dean Mark Schubart went in search of someone to sponsor the penniless pianist. (Van was known for being generous to a fault. After a piano broke during one of his performances, he immediately bought the hosting church a new piano, taking on debt akin to the size of his car payment.)

After rebuffs from government administrators of the foreign-exchange program, Schubart finally convinced the Martha Baird Rockefeller Aid to Music Program to subsidize Cliburn’s participation in the competition with a $1,000 grant. The reluctant Van had to be convinced to accept the donation.

While Cliff is telling this story, he also describes the rise of Nikita Khrushchev and his spiraling Cold War with the United States. Amidst the late-1950s jousting between the superpowers, the Union of Soviet Composers suggested that a high-profile music competition on Russian soil would be the perfect propaganda opportunity, because “classical music had become prime evidence in the Soviets’ triumphalist case that their political system was the perfected culmination of everything that had come before.” The Soviet state then employed 900,000 arts workers under the Ministry of Culture, and ­operated

Males Beyond the Pale 503 theater companies, 314 arts middle schools, 48 high schools, and 43 advanced conservatories. A young phenom pianist named Lev Vlassenko was expected to win this inaugural music battle.

But Lev didn’t win, and not because he crumbled.

Instead, the Russian people unexpectedly swooned for a sensitive young American who came to their homeland and played their music in a lush style their own performers had forgotten. Van was described as an “American Sputnik” who completely reoriented expectations of what the “philistine nation” could do. After his performances were broadcast across the Soviet Union, Cliburn became a national sensation, with even a teenage following that rivaled rock ‘n’ roll groupies. Khrushchev himself had to give permission to award Cliburn the competition’s first prize.

“Vanya” returned to the U.S.S.R. several times, to ever-increasing and more-excited crowds. His career in the United States skyrocketed as well. He experienced the first—and so far only—tickertape parade staged in New York for a classical musician.

He popped up regularly in the White House, including for a summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987 where he told the world leaders that “I love my home country…but in addition to that…I love the Russian people, and your culture and your art… and it is for both my beloved president and for you that I am so happy to do this.” The night ended in an impromptu singalong with hugs and kisses and applause. Then-Vice-President Bush said, “I’ve never seen anything like it in this house.”

Today the performer’s legacy is continued by the Van Cliburn Foundation, which was organized not by the man himself but by admiring volunteers. The National Guild of Piano Teachers created a $10,000 international competition named in his honor and held in Fort Worth. Now in its sixth decade, the competition is still organized and run entirely by private money and volunteers, and it has launched many sterling careers. The foundation also brings classical artists to Fort Worth for concerts, hosts competitions for amateur pianists, and leads a music-education effort in elementary schools.

Thus did a humble Texan, his driven mom, and a timely philanthropic gift nudge world affairs.

Somehow, people adoring the same piece of art, in two very different countries, helped thaw hearts that could have frozen. The Rockefeller grant was a miniature investment with outsized results.

An invisible army of able-bodied men are not working, and getting away with it B Y DAV ID B ASS

Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis

By Nicholas Eberstadt

Ashley May is managing editor of Philanthropy.

WINTER 2017

I’ve recently authored two guidebooks for The ­Philanthropy Roundtable, Clearing Obstacles to Work and then Learning to Be Useful, about how thoughtful donors can help economic strugglers become gainfully employed and self-sufficient. The reasons for these books are self-evident—too many Americans today are unemployed or lack the skills to thrive in our modern economy. Many of these individuals rely on welfare or disability payments instead of earned income. ­Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work reveals the depth of this problem, and warns that the pattern of prime-age males fleeing work can no longer safely be ignored.

Eberstadt uses stark words to describe our current situation. Unemployed males today make up “a sort of invisible army, ghost soldiers lost in an overlooked, modern-day depression.” The facts back up his rhetoric. By 2016, more than 7 million men between the ages of 26 and 54 were idle and not seeking to enter the labor market. That’s up from about a million counterparts in 1965. In 2015, work rates for U.S. prime-age males were worse than during the Great Depression.

This non-working brotherhood doesn’t include the unemployed worker who is actively seeking a new job. This is a cohort with deeper pathologies. They have dropped out, unplugged, and given up on work altogether. They depend on wives, girlfriends, older family members, and government support (particularly disability payments) to survive.

Eberstadt begins his case by providing a brief statistical history of tumbling labor force participation. Male work rates began a steady decline decades ago, but really fell off a cliff over the last 15 years. Eberstadt notes that a full 10 million more male workers would now be in the labor force if the employment patterns of 1965 simply held true today.

The only reason this hasn’t damaged the U.S. economy more badly is because of the increase of female labor. Women have partly offset the declines in the male work ethic, with the percentage of women in the labor market more than doubling between 1948 and 2015. “For two full generations, the upsurge of employment for women disguised the steady decline in work for men,” Eberstadt writes.

H e also describes a tectonic cultural shift regarding marriage. As marriage rates have declined, 55

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many males do not have the responsibility of supporting a wife and children financially. Males can choose to not seek employment at all, and be supported by social safety nets and the indulgence of benevolent females or parents. “A life without work (or the search for work) has become a viable option for today’s prime-age male—and ever-greater numbers of them seem to be choosing this option.”

E berstadt also dives into the consequences of not working. The annual time-use survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows how non-working men spend their ample free time. Most of their activity falls into the category of “socializing, relaxing, and leisure”—to which they devote an average of eight hours per day more than their working brethren (the equivalent of a full-time job). What specific activities filled this time? Gambling, tobacco and drug use, listening to the radio, arts and crafts, and watching TV were the top results.

M en pursuing such activities aren’t even contributing to their households in non-­incomeproducing ways like caring for children or elderly family members, doing household chores, or participating in religious and charitable causes. “To a distressing degree, these men appear to have relinquished what we think of ordinarily as adult responsibilities not only as breadwinners but as parents, family members, community members, and citizens,” notes Eberstadt.

To address this problem, he suggests a welfare overhaul focused on men, equivalent to the reforms of the 1990s that helped many single mothers transition to the workforce. But even if public-policy reform cuts off enabling payments, these nonworking men will also need something else—training to fill the jobs of the twenty-first century. Public-spirited philanthropists will be important here. By funding work-readiness nonprofits, innovative high schools, and high-­performing community colleges, donors can play a key role in bringing about a renaissance of male work in the U.S. The decline of well-paying blue-collar jobs likely plays a role in the male flight from work. But an estimated 29 million “middle-skill jobs” will open in the U.S. over the next two decades, presenting abundant

Most of the activity by non-working men today is socializing and leisure, to which they devote over eight hours more per day than their working peers.

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PHILANTHROPY

opportunities for male workers to rise again and command middle-class wages. The key for an applicant is to obtain the right mix of training that combines technical knowledge with the soft skills and “language” of work—which men who have been unemployed for years must re-learn. This training must be closely tied to real jobs that exist in the economy. There are real jobs in our economy available for men with this background, but struggling men presently lack the necessary attitudes and skills to hold them.

Despite doom-and-gloom pronouncements on the decline of U.S. manufacturing, the sector is actually experiencing a shortage of qualified knowledge workers—to the tune of 2 million advanced manufacturing jobs expected to go unfilled in the next decade. Machines may have replaced the routine tasks once accomplished by the hands of men, but competent workers are needed to run the machines.

And there simply aren’t enough laborers today, creating a yawning skills gap.

If advanced manufacturing is going to be among the keys to widespread reintegration of men into the workforce, philanthropy will have a crucial role to play to train, support, and encourage these men to pursue these opportunities. Government job training programs have been notoriously ineffective. There are many exciting philanthropic models, however— as chronicled in the two Philanthropy Roundtable guidebooks I mentioned earlier. And a renewal of male work needn’t be limited to the manufacturing sector. Many service occupations could be well filled by today’s aimless males.

Beyond the immediate training and placement of men in jobs, philanthropists can help chip away at this toxic problem by encouraging a culture of self-sufficiency, moving men away from dependence on family members and transfer payments.

The notion of able-bodied men failing to work was unthinkable two generations ago. Today, it’s quietly accepted. Society’s mediating institutions have urgent work ahead of them to revive expectations of economic independence and self-reliance. “ It is high time for American citizens and policy­makers to recognize the American male’s postwar flight from work for what it is: a grave social ill,” writes Eberstadt. “It is imperative for the future health of our nation that we make a determined and sustained commitment to bringing these detached men back—back into the workplace, back into their families, back into our civil society.”

David Bass is the author of the Philanthropy Roundtable guidebooks Learning to Be Useful and Clearing Obstacles to Work.

{books in brief }

The Art of Being There: Creating Change, One Child at a Time

BY DU N CAN CA M PBEL L A N D CRAIG BORLA S E

At any given moment, Duncan Campbell will suddenly grab a scrap of paper, a napkin, a Post-it note, anything nearby, and start scribbling ideas racing through his head. As a classic entrepreneur, he has lots of them. Once they’re on paper, he groups and staples them together, sticks them into file folders and then into boxes, and takes it all to a storage unit. Here, cabinets and more boxes, organized alphabetically and by year, constitute his library of thought.

Campbell’s brainstorming habits illustrate one theme highlighted in The Art of Being There, his story as told to author Craig Borlase—how created order can become a path out of disorder. Born into disastrous circumstances, Campbell found peace in his life by building regimens and structure into his days. These include methodical efforts to help other people, particularly children.

The story begins in Portland, Oregon, where Campbell grew up in a welfare family. His parents were both alcoholics, prone to binge drinking on the weekends; and he would sometimes find strangers passed out in his room overnight. His father was imprisoned twice. Neither was violent, but nor were they affectionate. And they never said “I love you.”

Generally neglected by his parents, Campbell took initiative and went to church alone, enrolled himself in the Cub Scouts,

and joined the football team. He found relief in school, doing his best; and from his grandparents, whom he lived with for weeks in the summer. From age ten, he always had a job.

In his teens, he started to stray, shoplifting with friends and venting a sharp temper. But the people who cared—his older brother, the brothers and fathers of his friends, his high-school football coach, and a school counselor—course-corrected the young Campbell. Eventually, he graduated with degrees in finance and law, from the University of Oregon.

After college, Campbell did a variety of jobs: supervising condo construction, working in the juvenile court system, and tax work. Running through it all was his desire to help children with childhoods similar to his. “No child should have to be raised the way I was.” Looking at the immensity of the problem, he wanted more financial resources to put toward a solution. So he turned to entrepreneurship, creating a timber-­ investment firm called The Campbell Group, now Campbell Global. Its success made him millions, and enabled him to exercise his dream of helping at-risk children, whom he thought of as “the little Duncans.”

Orin Bolstad, a clinical child psychologist, advised Campbell that consistent, positive influences could help children through difficult childhoods, and the two agreed that this needed to start early.

Research showed that age five or six is when many youngsters begin to make wrong choices in dealing with problems, unless they have guidance. Duncan and Bolstad tested their ideas in a $25,000 pilot study funded by Campbell, conducted with early-­elementary-school students at three schools in Campbell’s old neighborhood.

The findings held, and two more projects confirmed they were on to something.

Together Campbell and Bolstad formed the Campbell Children’s Institute.

From the latter’s visits to other programs WINTER 2017

around the country for at-risk children, he and C ­ ampbell arrived at several conclusions. Long-term relationships with responsible adults are important. These adults can effectively manage about eight vulnerable students each, spending about four hours per week with them. The endurance of the relationship is key to building the child’s resilience. To keep these relationships in place over the long haul they should be paid positions, Campbell and Bolstad believed. They put these conditions into practice in Portland, bracing themselves for criticism about the high price per child.

In this way, Friends of the Children was founded, in 1993 with $2 million, aiming to break the cycle of generational poverty, low educational attainment, teen parenting, drug and alcohol abuse, and criminality. The organization selects from school classrooms only the most challenged children—the ones no one wants. And the earlier the better. Friends of the Children promises kids a 12-year commitment, from the end of kindergarten through high-school g ­ raduation­—no matter what—from a full-time, salaried, and trained professional, or “Friend.”

In 2010, Campbell left Campbell Global to devote his full effort to Friends of the Children, with the goal of expanding to 20 cities over the next 20 years.

The organization is now in Seattle, San ­Francisco, New York City, Boston, and Tampa Bay, ­Florida, as well as Cornwall, England.

The organization says 83 percent of participating children graduate from high school or get their GEDs, more than double the rate of their parents. Mere teenagers gave birth to 85 percent of these children, 98 percent of whom are avoiding early parenting themselves. While 50 percent have a parent who’s been incarcerated, 93 percent steer clear of the juvenile justice system.

In addition to learning about ­Campbell’s life in The Art of Being There, we get to know several of the children his program serves. Their stories of domestic abuse and neglect will darken your imagination. But this book reminds us that birth isn’t necessarily destiny. —Claire Sykes 57

letter to the editor

In our Summer 2016 issue, Philanthropy published an open letter to Ford Foundation president Darren Walker—“Beware of Blind Spots” by Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner—as Ford launched what it promised would be a major crusade against inequality.

Below, Mr. Walker responds.

Michael and Peter: Thank you for your thoughtful letter.

Clearly, we agree on many things—from the threat of inequality, to the need for social mobility, to the importance of strong institutions. Above all, we share a firm conviction that, as you phrase it so well, “the worst gaps in our society are not measured in income or wealth.”

What’s more, you are right in your appraisal of some of the key contributing factors to rising inequality—whether it’s families in crisis or gaps in our education system and community institutions—and these factors are deeply interrelated. Your observations are necessary in our approach to fighting inequality, but, in and of themselves, they are insufficient.

We know that economic inequality is the form of inequality most hotly debated, but it is only one form of the inequality we see—and are seeking to disrupt—at the Ford Foundation.

Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to deny that many prevalent, pernicious forms of inequality plague our society—including systemic, institutional racism, sexism, and ableism. The fact is, these different forms of inequality often compound on one another, producing and reinforcing conditions for economic inequality.

Given this confluence of factors, and the complexity of these challenges, we need to capture the fullest picture of inequality in order to develop the most comprehensive, and effective, solutions.

Consider, as an illustration, the intersection of racism, economic inequality, and social mobility. Recent research shows that, on average, white households hold seven times more wealth than black households.

This wealth gap is not merely a product of current income inequality; it stems, in part, from segregation and discriminatory housing policies like redlining, which set conditions for these outcomes to persist over decades. If homeownership allows one to build wealth, 58

rise into the middle class, and pass that wealth onto your children, many families of color were delayed—or excluded entirely—from their pursuit of that possibility. These kinds of systemic imbalances leave their mark across generations, and we cannot wait for time to heal these divides. The authors of this study have reasoned this racial wealth gap would take 228 years to close at current growth rates.

To deny intersecting and longstanding realities is to manufacture a set of ultimately harmful blind spots, and to unnecessarily separate issues that are actually closely related.

Instead, we can have a more deep and fruitful conversation about addressing economic inequality that includes the many other forms of inequality at work.

I understand, of course, how difficult this can be, especially coming from a position of privilege. My most recent annual letter was about how our own privilege can create and encourage ignorance—especially of those dimensions of inequality that do not touch or affect our own personal lives. One of the key tenets of the New Gospel of Wealth I proposed last year involves tackling root causes, and asking how and why our present circumstances came to be. Engaging in difficult examinations such as these will allow us to bring about lasting change, rather than short-term interventions.

One area calling out for this kind of exploration is the breakdown of families.

You are right to call out this trend, and, with this wider lens, we might ask, why have these families separated?

For starters, many young men from the communities you describe do not have the opportunity to take on meaningful work, or become stable providers. Our economic transformation has resulted in what sociologist William Julius Wilson has called “the disappearance of work,” and it has not only taken away good paying jobs from these communities, but also their aspiration and hope for social mobility.

At the same time, it’s clear that another major factor in this dynamic is our national mass-incarceration crisis, which disproportionately affects black and brown men. We can easily infer the relationship between the fact that black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men, and the fact one in nine black children has a parent in prison.

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No doubt, some of these parents have committed serious crimes, and should serve time in jail. Many, however, have been subjected to overly harsh mandatory sentencing for non-violent crimes. Either way, too often, after serving their time, many people with arrest or conviction records continue to be shut out from our society, unable to reintegrate because they are denied meaningful employment, housing, or even the ability to participate in civic life.

Given this context, strengthening families (particularly in minority communities) is inextricably tied to making progress on employment and criminal justice reform.

We can no longer afford to keep these conversations separate, or ignore the dramatic role that race plays in the larger story.

In every instance, our country’s interconnected challenges require an inclusive, intersectional view of inequality. By limiting ourselves to unnecessary, and often unhelpful, binaries, we create division where we need dialogue.

One way to continue breaking down barriers between and among us is by opening our eyes and ears to those most affected by the problems—rather than pretending we know what’s best—and working with them to develop the most effective solutions.

For example, when we listen to people of color, it becomes much more difficult to say that our communities are unequivocally safer based on recent trends in policing, especially when so many people no longer feel safe.

Rather than denying the lived experience of minority communities, we might work with local leaders and law enforcement to bring people together and bridge existing divides.

Together, we can restore trust between these two groups that are very often placed in opposition by preprogrammed (often hyperpartisan) responses.

Ultimately, the only way we will make serious progress toward eliminating the myriad gaps in our society is by coming together ourselves, sharing our knowledge, insight, resources, and perspectives to arrive at comprehensive, compassionate solutions.

To this end, I look forward for more opportunities to work together, to continue this dialogue, and to confront inequality in all of its forms.

Sincerely, Darren Walker, President, Ford Foundation

face face TO

1

2016 National Forum on K-12 Philanthropy

left to right: 1. Jamie Jo Scott, J.A.

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and Kathryn Albertson Foundation; Sal Khan,

On September 13-14,over 200 donors attended the 2016 National Forum on K-12 Philanthropy in Redwood City, California. Donors visited p ­ ersonalized-learning schools including Summit Public Schools and Design Tech High School. In addition to reflecting on 25 years of charter schooling, the group discussed the importance of parental engagement, federal K-12 policy’s impact on philanthropy, the increasing importance of social-emotional learning, and the challenges facing students in rural areas.

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Khan Academy 2. John A. Sobrato, Sobrato Family Foundation 3. Mel Kaplan, Harry Singer Foundation; Sam Pearl, Design Tech High School 4. Lisa Sobrato Sonsini, Sobrato Family Foundation; Michelle Rhee, StudentsFirst 5. Marc Sternberg, Walton Family Foundation; Jim Shelton, Chan

3

Zuckerberg Initiative

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5

59

president’s note The Philanthropy Roundtable at 25

This has been a year of historic and sometimes surprising victories, and this should be an inspiration to all of us. If the Chicago Cubs can win the World Series, then we should raise our sights and think more boldly about how we can strengthen our free society through charitable giving.

As some of you may have noticed, our country recently held an election. Whichever side of this bitter contest you were on, you are welcome at The Philanthropy Roundtable.

Unlike presidential politics, philanthropy is not a winnertake-all activity. It is not either-or, but both-and. Donors with different world views, and different passions, can channel their energy and resources into different organizations. This pluralism is diversity in the truest sense of the word.

President-elect Trump promises to make America great again. Well, charitable giving is central to American greatness. Americans are the most charitable country on earth. Philanthropy is part of our character as a free people where citizens step up to solve problems without waiting for government to act. To preserve this tradition, the Roundtable calls on the new president and Congress to preserve the full scope and value of the charitable deduction in their tax-reform proposals. Since 1917, the charitable deduction has been a lifeline for communities across the land, and a guardrail protecting civil society from government intrusion.

I would like to say a few words about the principles that have guided The Philanthropy Roundtable for the past 25 years and will continue to guide us for the next quarter-century.

We believe that a vibrant private sector generates the wealth and income that makes philanthropy possible.

President-elect Trump said in his victory speech that one of his top priorities will be to double economic growth.

If he and the new Congress can achieve this objective, a recharged economy will provide more jobs, more tax revenues, and yes, more charitable giving.

We believe that excellence in philanthropy is measured by results, not good intentions. Education reform offers a shining example of the kinds of results we seek. Twenty-five years ago, conventional wisdom was that low-income and minority children were doomed to failure in school. Now, thanks to charter schools, school choice, and other reforms made possible 60

by philanthropy, we know that children of all races and income levels can achieve high performance when they have great teachers and when parents can select the best learning environment for their kids.

We believe that voluntary private action offers solutions for many of society’s most pressing challenges.

Over the next 25 years philanthropy can play a crucial role in reforming dysfunctional public systems—from health care to pensions to the Veterans’ Administration.

Smart philanthropy can strengthen job opportunities, help curtail opioid abuse, improve public understanding of economic and constitutional principles, and address countless other crises facing our country. And as Karl Zinsmeister writes eloquently in this issue, philanthropists can play a lead role in transforming our culture, building on the remarkable achievements of the anti-slavery, temperance, Sunday school, and religious revival movements of the nineteenth century.

We believe that a respect for donor intent is essential for philanthropic integrity. One of the tragedies of philanthropy is that so many foundations ignore and sometimes violate the most cherished principles of their founders. If you are writing a mission statement, evaluating who to put on your board, or thinking about how to structure your foundation, donor-advised fund, or other giving vehicle in order to safeguard your intent, my colleague David Riggs is at your service.

And we believe that philanthropic freedom is essential for a free society. Independent private giving guarantees the independence of private institutions. It sustains our churches and synagogues and mosques, our colleges and universities, the arts and sciences, great think tanks of left, right, and center. Philanthropic freedom is also an indispensable engine of innovation. It makes possible entire new fields of research and inquiry, and enables social entrepreneurs to experiment with unconventional ideas and programs.

For the past dozen years the Roundtable and our legislative arm, the Alliance for Charitable Reform, have defeated multiple efforts by political leaders in both parties to restrict or take away your freedom. I promise you: We are never going to give up on this. As we move into our second quarter-century, the Roundtable remains committed to protecting your right to choose how and where to give away your charitable assets.

Adam Meyerson, President The Philanthropy Roundtable

PHILANTHROPY

I work 4 jobs to provide the best opportunities for my daughters.

I rely on Georgia’s tax credit scholarship program to send them to a great school of my choice.

But the program is under attack from those who say I shouldn’t have that choice.

I will fight for my daughters’ education and I will win.

I am IJ.

Robin Lamp Stockbridge, Georgia

www.IJ.org

Institute for Justice National Law Firm For Liberty

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