Volume 1, #3: Spring/Summer 2002
Welcome to Zest!—a periodic email update intended to give you a dash of current Rural Development Philanthropy (RDP) flavor with easy links to additional information on the RDP Learning Network's website...
In this edition of Zest, you'll find:
Emmett Carson's Recent Chronicle on Philanthropy Article Explores The Community in Community Foundations
What is the RDP Learning Network?
JOIN THE LEARNING NETWORK TODAY! What's free to join, connects and celebrates rural leaders and friends, and disseminates valuable tools, ideas and strategies for building philanthropy in and for rural communities?? The Rural Development Philanthropy Learning Network—that's what! Learn more... |
Building Rural Livelihood
Rural innovators lend talents for peer exchange workshop!
Nationally recognized champions of rural development philanthropy will serve on the resource team for the second in a series of three RDP Learning Network Peer Exchange Workshops—Building Rural Livelihood: Using Community Foundation Program and Grantmaking to Improve Rural Community and Economic Development Outcomes—which will be held at the Washington Jurys Hotel in the heart of vibrant Dupont Circle, Washington DC, July 24 to 26th.
The impressive list confirmed resource team members includes, among many others:
- Elouise Cobell (pictured above), executive director of the Blackfeet Reservation Development Foundation (Browning MT)
- Terry Holley, Vice President for Programs and Rural Development, East Tennessee Foundation (Knoxville TN), and peer consultant to many rural community foundations in the United States, Australia and Africa
- Tom Deans, Senior Vice President, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation (Concord NH) and President, Northern New Hampshire Foundation
And that's just a start! Building Rural Livelihood will be an engaging and highly interactive workshop bringing 40-75 participants together with their peers in the community foundation, rural development and community economic development fields to address a key question: How can community foundations better use their program and grantmaking tools to enhance the economic security and vitality of rural families and communities?
The current rural funding climate requires community foundations to make tough choices to determine the best, most sustainable role they can play in rural CED efforts. As community foundations and other grantmakers experiment with ways of building strong rural communities and influencing the economic well being of rural families, it is critically important to share and learn from program and capacity-building strategies, pitfalls and achievements of others—to move the field toward greater effectiveness and impact.
Building Rural Livelihood will provide just this opportunity. As a participant, you will explore a framework that helps you design and tailor your rural community and economic development program and grantmaking strategies, share the lessons learned from those efforts, and advise one another on the RDP and CED challenges currently facing you. You also will learn the trial-by-fire models, methods and lessons already developed by community foundations to make positive, lasting impacts on the community and economic well being of rural, low-income individuals, families and regions.
To learn more about Building Rural Livelihood, the design of the Peer Exchange Workshop, or to view the draft agenda and speaker list, click here. Registration closes June 26th! So register today!
Strengthening Rural Families
RDPLN questionnaire gauges community foundation efforts
In early May, the Rural Development Philanthropy Learning Network asked Learning Network members to help us conduct some rapid research being undertaken with the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF). AECF asked us for help in understanding the range of program and grantmaking activities being carried out by rural-focused community foundations aimed at increasing family economic success in rural areas.
For the past three years, the Casey Foundation has been working to advance this key premise: Children do better when their families are strong, and families do better when they live in supportive communities. They believe that any serious effort to improve outcomes for children must help families fulfill their child-rearing roles, and that families need access to many forms of support in their own neighborhoods and communities to do the best job of raising their children.
Since 1999, AECF has established grantmaking and program efforts advancing this premise in its Making Connections: A Neighborhood Transformation/Family Development Initiative, focused on 22 urban sites. Through Making Connections, they are mobilizing a broad cross-section of constituencies to improve the odds for families in tough city neighborhoods.
This year, AECF is working in several ways to gauge how what it has learned about improving family economic success might be similar or differ in rural areas. To help get some rural perspective, AECF asked Aspen CSG to query rural-focused community foundations in the Network, since community foundations are one active institution present in many rural areas. (Of course, we agreed—especially since, as members of the Learning Network, you care about enhancing the economic security of low-income rural families and the vitality of rural communities.)
CSG fielded a Making Rural Connections Questionnaire to the Rural Development Philanthropy Learning Network via e-mail in early May, with responses requested by May 24 in order to develop the quick analysis the Casey Foundation had requested. By the end of May, CSG had received a healthy 32 responses from 31 foundations (two responses were from different regional divisions of the same foundation).
The Questionnaire asked Learning Network members to consider whether and how their foundation's program and grantmaking had been aimed at increasing rural families' financial assets as well as rural families' ability to work to earn a decent living, to develop close ties to friends, neighbors, kin, faith communities, and civic groups and to connect to reliable and responsive social services close to home. Respondents were also asked how their program and grantmaking efforts are used to invest in and increase the economic viability of rural areas or communities as a whole.
The questionnaire also asked how each responding foundation prioritizes this type of program and grantmaking work and of the percentage of the foundation's overall program effort that is currently aimed at strengthening rural families. Finally, we asked community foundations for examples of other rural organizations that are playing a significant role in improving the lives of rural families.
The respondents range from several small-region start-ups (younger than five years) who have yet to undertake significant grantmaking, to several decades-old statewide foundations with several hundred million in endowed assets. Even in this small sample, it is clear that many rural-focused community foundations deeply care about and are quite active in funding and/or developing supporting family economic success supports. As an organization type, community foundations certainly are among the most consistently active in rural areas in the entire range of issues that AECF is addressing.
Our sincere thanks go to each of the RDP Learning Network members that thoughtfully and speedily submitted their questionnaires by the May 24th deadline. A summary of questionnaire answers will be presented to AECF this summer for comment and follow-up, and made available to the entire Learning Network soon after via the RDP website.
Community foundations earn fee waivers for RDP workshops! As an incentive to encourage foundations to respond to the Making Rural Connections Questionnaire by the May 24th deadline, we held a drawing from all the submissions to select three foundations that would receive fee waivers for an upcoming peer exchange workshops. At the end of May, we mixed the names of the dozens of responding community foundations in a hat and drew three winners:
Each foundation has been offered one waiver of the registration fee (worth at least $285) for one of the two upcoming RDP Peer-Exchange Workshops. |
RDP Baseline Survey
Linking RDP to rural poverty and rural diversity
The Rural Development Philanthropy Baseline Survey is the first attempt to quantify and compare levels of rural community-focused philanthropy among community foundations—from rural service areas to rural board representation to grant dollars awarded in rural communities.
For nearly a decade, CSG has helped to document strategies, develop peer learning opportunities and share an understanding of the role community foundations might play in building stronger, more economically stable rural communities. Despite an increasing commitment to and practice of RDP, we found that broad, field-wide data remained limited in both scope and availability. To add to philanthropic and community development field knowledge, we designed a survey that would reach every community foundation—whether rural, suburban or metro—in the U.S. Last August and again in December 2001, the RDP Learning Network surveyed the entire community foundation field (685+ foundations) seeking a "snapshot" of rural development philanthropy efforts throughout the United States.
CSG shared preliminary results of the Baseline Survey at the 2001 Fall Conference for Community Foundations in Vancouver, and also online. Since last fall, however, we have received scores of additional survey responses—bringing our current response pool to 240 respondents (about 35 percent of the community foundation field). Responses from rural, suburban and metro foundations represented 46 states and 897 counties throughout the United States.
In a second phase of survey analysis, we took into account excellent suggestions from Network members about what you wanted to learn about rural development philanthropy in the U.S. We also correlated survey results with recent Year 2000 census data concerning poverty, population and minority statistics. Consequently, we have re-calculated the initial results with the larger pool of respondents and have studied the data in ways that can help us better understand the relationship between philanthropic activity and rurality, poverty and diversity. While the details and updated analysis from the Baseline Survey will be presented on the RDP website soon and in its entirety, we are offering below a preview of some interesting insights gleaned thus far.
Rural Poverty & RDP
We first researched the rurality of every county that responding foundations identified as part of their service regions. Rurality was measured using census and USDA data measuring county-by-county rurality. Having identified the rural counties covered by respondents, we then researched county-by-county poverty levels, based upon 1997 census data. Using this data, we were able to isolate the ten community foundations (from the entire response pool) that serve counties with the highest rural poverty rates—a rate of between 25.5 to 38%. In the same way, we were able to isolate the ten responding community foundations serving rural counties with the lowest poverty rates.
It is important to note that respondents were asked to consider their service based on rurality alone—not based on rurality and poverty (or diversity). So, we cannot say for sure that within a single community foundation's service territory, service to the poorest rural counties lags behind service to wealthier rural counties. Nevertheless, when we more broadly compared the activities of the group of community foundations serving the lowest poverty counties to the group of community foundations serving counties with the highest poverty levels, a clear pattern is revealed:
Community Strategies Group of The Aspen Institute—reuse by permission only
Community foundation respondents that serve counties with the highest rural poverty indicated that the levels of rural development philanthropy did not keep pace with the size of their rural service area nor with respondents serving counties with the lowest levels of rural poverty. While it is not at all surprising that the foundations serving rural counties with high poverty might not have many rural donors, board members or even endowed funds, it is significant that these foundations indicated that the levels of rural grantmaking and program are also very low. This could result from several causes. In deeply rural and poor regions, the nonprofit infrastructure may not exist to accept grants or to convene other non-grant program activities. Moreover, metro communities may be headquarters for regional nonprofits that serve surrounding rural areas, so while a grant might officially be awarded to a metro community, it benefits a rural community. Still, the startlingly lower percentages of rural activity among the respondents that serve high poverty counties suggests that the areas in greatest need may not be receiving the philanthropic attention of their metro and borderline rural/metro counterparts.
Conversely, the extremely high levels of rural development philanthropy by respondents that serve rural counties with the lowest poverty rates is also notable. Among these ten community foundations, the percentage of RDP elements averages over 70 percent across the board. These results indicate that the presence of RDP activities are not related to rurality alone, but rather correspond to levels of rural poverty and wealth. When rural poverty is low, RDP activity not only comes close to matching the percentage of rural service area, it sometimes exceeds it! In general (and again, not surprisingly), community foundations in this group displayed the highest levels of rural service among the entire response pool.
Rural Poverty: Community Economic Development vs. Rural Endowment Building
Among respondents serving rural counties with the highest levels of poverty, the activity element (among those listed above on the charts) that averaged the most attention was grant numbers and dollars committed to community economic development at 24 and 33% respectively. Considering the lack of attention rural communities have tended to receive when it comes to economic development of any kind and the need for effective community economic development as a response to persistent poverty, this may indicate a promising starting point for rural-focused community foundations serving poor regions.
What may not be surprising, but nevertheless deserves attention is the subsequent column indicating an extremely low level of endowed resources committed to rural, high poverty counties. Respondents serving the counties with the highest poverty reported levels of "donors" and "endowments" to be much lower for rural communities than borderline or metro communities—even when a foundation's rural service area far exceeded its borderline and metro service areas.
One challenge for community foundations—it would appear—is to translate the positive CED grantmaking occurring in rural areas into donor relationships and permanent, endowed resources from which these communities can draw now and in the future. That is, community foundations must connect rural donors (or any donor, for that matter) with the potential and impact of rural community economic development. Developing strong programs is one thing. But telling the stories of these grants to donors who may become passionate about building permanent resources for rural communities is another thing altogether.
These results suggested to the RDP team at Aspen CSG that we add a session on connecting donors to rural grantmaking and program to our July Peer Exchange Workshop—Building Rural Livelihood—on rural program and grantmaking for community and economic development. And so we did! In this session, called Making the Rural CED Case to Donors & Funders a panel of community foundation leaders will discuss the methods they have used to engage a range of donors and private foundations in rural community economic development programs and grantmaking.
Rural Diversity & RDP
It would appear that rural is not the key challenge to rural development philanthropy—poverty is. And, according to our baseline survey, so is diversity. To develop the chart below, we again tracked the counties that each responding foundation claimed as part of their service region. From that set of counties, we matched census and USDA data measuring rurality and, this time, non-white population (which we have called diversity for this discussion) to each county. Again, we isolated the group of respondents serving rural counties with the least diversity and the respondents serving rural counties with the most diversity. Having gathered these two sets of respondents, we then compared rural service levels.
Community Strategies Group of The Aspen Institute—reuse by permission only
The levels of rural development philanthropy generated by foundations serving rural counties with lesser diversity proved considerably higher than that of foundations serving communities with greater diversity. In fact, across the board, community foundations with the most diverse rural populations indicated that the only element that matched (and in fact, slightly exceeded) the percentage of its service region that is rural was grant dollars awarded for community economic development (a 29.9% rural service area compared receiving 34% of rural CED grant dollars awarded).
Because both endowed funds and donors within the most diverse rural communities are so much lower than CED grant dollars awarded, one might guess that these dollars may likely have been generated by pass-through or special initiative funds, rather than from the communities themselves. In this analysis of extremes, it seems that the most diverse rural counties appear to be utilizing community foundations as a philanthropic vehicle to a lesser degree than their less diverse counterparts.
It is hoped that by repeating the RDP Baseline Survey every several years, the field might track both incremental and long-term change in the development of philanthropic vehicles and resources for rural communities.
To review an updated and expanded analysis of the RDP Baseline Survey, click here. (Note, we may be adding additional analysis over time, so you might want to check every once in a while.)
RDP at the Fall Conference for Community Foundations!
For those planning to attend the Council on Foundations Fall Conference for Community Foundations, September 22-25, 2002, in Atlanta, Georgia, be sure to attend the following RDP events:
- WORKSHOP ONE: Variations on a Theme: The Role of Affiliates.—Tuesday, September 24, 2:00-3:30 p.m. This session will highlight the three most common affiliate structures, and examine how three community foundations have addressed the pros and cons of each structure. Presenters will include Karen Zerhusen of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, and RDP Learning Network members Carla Roberts (Arizona Community Foundation), Elizabeth Fentress (North Carolina Community Foundation) and Aspen CSG's Janet Topolsky.
- WORKSHOP TWO: Covering Rural Territory: Structural Models for Serving Rural Areas—Wednesday, September 25, 10:00-11:30 a.m. In the first half of this session, community foundation leaders will briefly detail the four leading structural models community foundations are using to better serve rural areas. In the second half, participants will break into peer groups to explore the model of most interest to them. Presenters will include RDP Learning Network members Lew Feldstein (New Hampshire Charitable Foundation), Jeff Yost(Nebraska Community Foundation), Ben Johnson (Greater New Orleans Foundation), Terry Holley (East Tennessee Foundation), and moderator Janet Topolsky (Aspen CSG).
- RECEPTION: Rural Development Philanthropy Learning Network Reception—Tuesday evening, 6:30-8:00 p.m. Save this timeslot to come join your RDP colleagues and friends for informal networking—and to see what's new with the Network!
RDP Learning Network Takes Advantage of Special Services
South Carolina Community Foundations Seek Ways to Serve Entire State. On May 9th, RDP team member Janet Topolsky ventured forth to Camden, South Carolina, to facilitate a retreat of leaders from eight existing community foundations that serve South Carolina. These community foundations are attempting to collaborate to address a key question: How can the South Carolina community foundations work together to build philanthropy to improve the quality of life in the entire state of South Carolina? They are especially interested in collaborating to ensure that every county in South Carolina has access to a community foundation. Not surprisingly, many of the 19 South Carolina counties that currently go unserved are the most rural, diverse, and persistently poor counties in the state.
The May retreat, which involved nearly 40 South Carolina community foundation staff and board members, built on a planning and discussion session RDP hosted last January in Washington, DC, for representatives from the Community Foundation Serving Coastal South Carolina, Central Carolina Community Foundation, Community Foundation of the Low Country, and Spartanburg Community Foundation. Together, this group brainstormed the challenges and opportunities of a collaborative effort, meeting goals for the May convening, and the community benefits that would result if philanthropic opportunities and resources could be expanded to the entire state of South Carolina.
The result of the May meeting is a six-month Exploration Task Force and specified task list to further refine and advance recommendations on the strategies South Carolina's community foundations and philanthropic community can pursue together to better cover the state and achieve community-level quality of life improvements for all South Carolinians—including rural!
Council of Michigan Foundations. The RDP Team is in talks with the Council of Michigan Foundations to work with the Council on a special session for Michigan's rural community foundations prior to the annual CMF meeting in late September.
California League of Community Foundations. RDP Team member Janet Topolsky is helping design and will help facilitate a special session for rural members of the California League of Community Foundations in October 2002.
Southeastern Council of Foundations. RDP Team member Janet Topolsky has been invited to join Madeleine McGee in leading a pre-meeting session for rural community foundations at the Southeastern Council of Foundations annual meeting in West Virginia in mid-November.
RDP Learning Clusters Convene for Spring Learning Institutes
Cluster A Learning Teams representing Humboldt Area Foundation (CA), Nebraska Community Foundation, West Central Initiative (MN) and CREATE Foundation (MS) met at Coolfont Resort in Berkeley Springs, WV, in March to report progress on and update the Learning for Action Questions and Plans created at their first Learning Institute in October 2001. With the help of the Resource Team and their peers, Cluster A explored the topic of marketing and publicity for rural community foundations and delved into the challenges of being both a community development and a donor service institution.
 | Ford Foundation Program Officer Linetta Gilbert engaging with Cluster A foundations last March in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. |
Cluster B Learning Teams representing the Foundation for the Tri-State Community (WV-KY-OH), Foundation Northwest (WA-ID), North Carolina Community Foundation and Wyoming Community Foundation joined forces at Aspen's Wye River Conference Center on the eastern shore of Maryland to report progress on and update their Learning for Action Questions and Plans. Cluster B explored an organizational learning tool called the Emergent Learning Map™ with the help of the tool's inventor, Marilyn Darling of Signet Consulting Group. Emergent Learning Maps—currently being used by organizations as diverse as the World Bank and the Boston police department—provide just enough structure, rhythm and discipline for a team to orchestrate its own learning by focusing on its most pressing upcoming challenges and by using the team's regular work activities as the vehicle for ongoing innovation, learning and improvement. For more information about Emergent Learning Maps (an RDPLN favorite), go to www.signetconsulting.com.
News YOU Can Use
Useful info & goings-on around the world of RDP…
- Millions of Children in Poverty in Rural America. Off the press just this month, Save The Children has published a new report: America's Forgotten Children: Child Poverty in Rural America. Its key findings include:
- Rural America is home to 2.5 million children locked in deep poverty. (And the rural poor are falling further behind.)
- Child poverty is greater in rural America than in urban areas. (Of the nation's more than 200 persistently poor counties, 195 are rural. In them, child poverty rates often exceed 35 percent.)
- Rural poverty is heavily concentrated in six regions of the country.
- In the last decade, rural child poverty has begun to mirror urban poverty...but the reasons behind rural poverty are dramatically different from urban poverty.
You can access more details and download the complete report online. You can also read the June 19 New York Times report of the news. - RDP Learning Network Director Janet Topolsky was one of 30 practitioners invited to participate in the Cluster-Based Community Capacity Building Conference, June 4-5, 2002, in Omaha, Nebraska. This conference gathered leading practitioners from different sectors of the United States that engage in community-based capacity building, particularly through community clusters. Together, the group shared insights regarding the strengths, weaknesses, impacts of community capacity building as well as how to develop programs, step-by-step approaches to successful community-based capacity building and the follow-up that is most effective for long-term community effectiveness. The session lessons will contribute to the design of a research project to test basic hypotheses about how working in clusters can improve community outcomes. Project progress and findings will be made available on the website of the conference convener—the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development—which is worth checking out in any case!
- Check out Nonprofit News Online. We all have way too much to read and absorb in a day, so we wouldn't suggest a journal unless we found it absolutely useful! Nonprofit News Online is the kind of non-jargon-laden and useful on-line journal you add to your "favorites" list and check out to get caught up and linked to critical nonprofit issues and new thinking.
- The documentary film THE RURAL STUDIO celebrates the work of the late MacArthur Fellow Samuel Mockbee and Auburn (AL) University's Rural Studio, as it re-imagines what architecture means in the strongest sense of the term, striving to meld professional achievement with social change. The film chronicles three student projects from concept to completion: "the Sanders-Dudley Home" built for a young family of seven; a "Farmer's Market" in the economically challenged town of Thomaston and "Ora Lee's Chapel" the first public space in the tiny hamlet of Mason's Bend—population eighty. Check out both The Rural Studio and the documentary.
Community Foundations Facing Crossroads
Editor's note: In the May 16, 2002, edition of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Emmett Carson made the most eloquent case the RDP team has seen or heard to date for the value of the community-building services that distinguish community foundations from commercial gift funds. Since most RDP members care deeply about community building, we offer this in case you missed it. (It might be great reading for your board members, too.)
Community foundations are facing a profound identity crisis because of the recent emergence and rapid proliferation of commercial gift funds. Historically, community foundations have seen their role as raising permanent, unrestricted endowments to meet community needs within a specified geography. The phenomenal asset growth of commercial gift funds, however, has led community foundations to question their role in the charitable landscape.
Commercial gift funds and community foundations compete mainly for donor-advised funds, in which donors receive the tax benefits of giving to a charity-the community foundation or commercial gift fund-yet may "advise" the fund manager on subsequent disbursements to nonprofit organizations.
Facing competition from a wide range of institutions now offering donor-advised funds, traditional community foundations are reevaluating their purposes and functions.
At the heart of this crisis lies a choice between two different approaches—one that focuses on catering to donors' needs, the other that focuses on community needs. How foundations resolve this crisis will have important implications not only for philanthropy in the United States, but also for giving in countries in Eastern Europe, South America, and Africa, where the U.S. community foundation model is being adapted to different cultural, political, and economic contexts.
Sharp differences exist between these two approaches. Donor-focused foundations see their missions as responding to the needs of individual donors. By contrast, the mission of community-focused foundations is to build unrestricted endowment assets to meet community needs. Both institutions, however, are increasingly relying on donor-advised funds, but toward very different ends.
Donor-focused foundations view acquisition of donor-advised funds as the end result, while community-focused foundations view such funds as a means to develop a relationship with donors, the objective of which is eventually to acquire unrestricted assets from those donors.
How will foundations resolve this tension? The management expert Peter Drucker has identified five questions that every nonprofit group must ask itself: What is the nonprofit organization's business (mission)? Who is the organization's customer? What does the nonprofit group's customer consider to be value? How does the nonprofit organization define results? What is the nonprofit group's plan?
Mr. Drucker's first four questions bring into sharp relief the differences between donor-focused and community-focused foundations, illuminating the crucial role that community-based foundations play in promoting civil society and building social capital. Of course, not all community foundations will have a community-based focus, but national foundations, which have played a crucial role in nurturing and sustaining community foundations thus far, can and should focus their support toward strengthening community-based community foundations.
For commercial gift funds, the question of who is the customer has a simple answer. The customer is the individual donor who opens a charitable account, and the mission is to serve that customer's needs. To the extent that customer-focused community foundations cater and respond to individual charitable interests, they differ little from commercial gift funds. The mission of community-focused community foundations is to build unrestricted assets, and the customer is the community as a whole rather than individual donors. A sense of community lies at the heart of this paradigm.
Historically, community foundations have relied on a geographic focus to help define and reinforce a sense of community. More recently, ethnic, women's, and religious community foundations have employed other definitions of community. Commercial gift funds, on the other hand, have no pretense of creating any shared sense of community. Their success-nearly 100 are awaiting IRS approval-has profoundly challenged this community-based paradigm, spurring community foundations to reconsider geography, start-up costs, and the value of social capital.
For community-focused community foundations, the customer is the general public. The issue for these foundations, however, is what economists refer to as the free-rider problem. Because everyone benefits, no one feels a singular obligation to underwrite the public good. If someone else pays for it, the free rider still benefits. Consequently, community-focused community foundations often have trouble persuading individual donors to contribute to the larger social good.
Commercial gift funds and donor-focused community foundations do not have to grapple with the free-rider problem. They provide a service to individual donors who have established donor-advised funds. The individual donor customer is neither prohibited from doing nor encouraged to do things that contribute to building the larger civil society. The donor is interested in the level of personal service and in meeting his or her charitable interests rather than serving the needs of the larger community.
But a downside exists: Donor-focused community foundations will likely avoid controversial topics for fear of alienating potential new donors or discouraging existing donors from adding to their donor-advised funds. Even if a commercial gift fund or donor-focused community foundation has an unrestricted grants pool alongside its donor-advised funds, it is less likely to support projects that might hurt its image with donors.
Commercial gift funds have, without a doubt, forever changed the charitable landscape. The questions are: What is the relevant lesson for community foundations, and what role, if any, might be played by national private foundations? By their very names, community foundations are more than a charitable bank account for individual donors. If they weren't, commercial gift funds and donor-focused community foundations would be distinctions without a difference. If donor-focused community foundations represent the future, they will be eclipsed by commercial gift funds, which are more efficient and offer more investment choices.
The real lesson to be drawn from burgeoning donor-advised funds is that the community-building roles of traditional community foundations have enormous value-a value that commercial gift funds and donor-focused community foundations are incapable of replicating. National private foundations cannot afford to remain neutral as community foundations go through this period of introspection. Over the years, private foundations have invested significant resources to help community foundations expand their capacity, investments that are at risk if community foundations move from a community-focused to a donor-focused approach. National foundations would help ensure a continuous crop of local partners and collaborators long into the future if they expand grant programs aimed at building unrestricted assets and encourage local grant-making efforts that dealt with difficult community issues. For better or for worse, commercial gift funds have raised donors' expectations for a wide range of services.
If they are to compete with gift funds, community foundations must improve their marketing, donor services, and technological capacity. National foundations should explicitly support community-focused community foundations in all three areas. To help strengthen market presence and lower costs, private foundations might encourage mergers among community foundations in close geographical proximity. Efforts to develop new relationships with financial institutions could be strengthened with an infusion of philanthropic venture capital from national foundations. Such efforts are worthy of support and should be pursued, not because such partnerships will circumvent or undercut the growth of commercial gift funds, but rather because they may help to expand the long-term unrestricted assets available to benefit the common good of cities and towns across the globe.
Emmett D. Carson is chief executive officer of the Minneapolis Foundation. This article was reprinted in its entirety with permission from The Chronicle of Philanthropy. The original Chronicle of Philanthropy article was excerpted from "The State of Philanthropy 2002," published by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
Rural Development Philanthropy is the process and practice of creating and strengthening locally controlled endowment, grantmaking and community programs to improve rural livelihoods, economies and community vitality.
The RDP Learning Network is a diverse group of community foundations and philanthropic organizations learning from one another innovative strategies to improve RDP practice and outcomes.
With support from The Ford Foundation and other philanthropic partners, The Aspen Institute's Community Strategies Group (CSG) manages the Network and collects and disseminates RDP tools, stories and strategic lessons to the community foundation and community development fields.
The RDP Team includes CSG staffers: Janet Topolsky, Elizabeth Myrick, Diane Morton and Mridulika Menon, as well as a cadre of national and international peers and consultants equipped with hands-on RDP expertise.
Email us with suggestions and questions about anything RDP. Or write or call us:
Community Strategies Group
The Aspen Institute
One Dupont Circle, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 736-5804
JOIN THE LEARNING NETWORK TODAY!
More than one hundred leading practitioners of Rural Development Philanthropy (RDP) in 38 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Kenya, South Africa (and very soon, Australia) are already benefiting from membership in the RDP Learning Network!
Membership in the Learning Network is free and open to any organization or individual committed to learning with peers about the most innovative strategies aimed at improving RDP practice and outcomes.
Members receive first notice for Learning Network peer-exchange events, can create their own on-line peer-learning exchanges with other members using the Talkin' RDP discussion forum, access creative and informed technical assistance from RDP staffers, and link to opportunities for learning and funding—not to mention a network of RDP expertise and tools developed from the collective learning of Network members and made available to all!
Zest is produced and published for the Rural Development Philanthropy Learning Network (RDPLN) and its friends by The Aspen Institute's Community Strategies Group (CSG).
Look for our next issue in Autumn 2002!
