Big Thinking on Small Grants

I've Moved!

2016-05-26T13:30:00.000-05:00

Here's where I'm blogging now:

A Hopeful Skeptic

Commentary on the Creative Intersection

of Philanthropy and Resident-Centered Investing

www.janisrichardson.com

Please visit!

Stepping into a New Chapter

2014-04-03T13:06:00.003-05:00

I'm back from the unannounced blogging sabbatical that I began in 2013 by first slowing down my regular blogging and then hitting "pause" late in the fall. I saw a friend recently who gave me a hug and asked if I was okay - worried that my blogging silence meant that I've been dealing with illness or some other awful personal problem. Thankfully no. It was just time for an energy break after pedaling uphill for a while.

I'm still in a self-designed period of down-hill coasting with just a few gentle hills to keep things interesting. The big change that I am navigating involves stepping away from the position that I have held for 10 years as Executive Director of Grassroots Grantmakers. I'm working now with a very capable board of directors to lay some stepping stones for the future, and am confident that these stepping stones will lead to a fascinating new chapter for the organization. I am excited to see what comes next.

I am also excited to see what emerges for me. I am using the word "retire" but only mean "retire from leading an organization". I can't imagine retiring from the world of people who think big about small grants because the way this world thinks, imagines and breathes is how I think, imagine and breathe. In this new still-emerging chapter, I am hoping to see something about a closer connection to my home community in rural Texas - something about growing a tradition of hospitality that welcomes new people and connects people as neighbors. I am also hoping to explore what and how family, friends and neighbors teach us about forming community together - and spot ways that we can keep those teachings alive when we are at work in places like place-based philanthropies where building community is a desired outcome. And I'm hoping to dig deeper into what supports people coming together as co-creators of the future that we want in ways that don't feel, look or taste like strategic planning.

I want to be more intentional about writing that is about discovery - for me the writer and you the reader - and is about practical ways that we work our ways through dilemmas. With that desire in mind and this blog as my primary vehicle, you'll be seeing me show up here again on a regular basis, writing about whatever has the wheels turning at the moment about people in community and the institutions that are committed to the places that we call home.

As this new chapter for me begins to unfold, I would love to hear what you would like to see me dig into in this blog and to hear what from the last chapter has been especially helpful - so I'll know to keep that on the menu. You can either comment here or contact me via email or a phone call.

Looking forward to the next chapter and happy to be back!

Credentialing Informal Groups

2013-11-11T10:27:00.003-06:00

How do you size up a group? As people in the world, we have a lot of experience with that question. We may not think about our sizing up criteria, but we probably have them. Is this a group of people that I want to hang out with? Will going to the meeting of this group be worth my time? Do I want to step forward and get more invested in this group? Do I like the people? Will hanging out with this group be fun? Are our values in sync?

As funders we have our own ways to size up the groups that want to get on our "groups that matter" list, crossing the first hurdle in the path to receiving funding. And how we size up group does indeed matter in the big thinking on small grants world.

It matters because we may be using a sizing up yardstick that just doesn't work for grassroots groups. When groups don't measure up according this yardstick, they may not make it onto the "groups that matter" list. Or we may offer them technical assistance or make grants with strings attached to help them measure up. Or as a program officer, you are not equipped to answer questions that your distribution committee or board members might asking in a way that assures the most risk-adverse members that the grant that you are proposing isn't fraught with danger.

I have had an ear to the ground recently about how funders regard groups that have not been recognized by the IRS as public charities - listening because so many grassroots groups don't have (and don't need) this status. A survey that Grassroots Grantmakers conducted earlier in 2013 surfaced some interesting perceptions about funding non-501(c)(3)'s - such as providing grants to non-501(c)(3's is not permitted by law or that grants to non-501(c)(3)'s can never count toward a foundation's payout requirements. These are simply perceptions that are not based on accurate information.

Providing accurate information should take care of that, right? I don't think so. I think there is something about using the 501(c)(3) status as an entry-level mechanism of credentialing that is at work here. Since funding non-profit organizations is the main-course type of funding that most foundations do, it is understandable that taking away a basic tool in a program officer's credentialing toolkit might cause some uneasiness, especially if you're not sure what other tools (or yardsticks) to use.

We all know that even for established non-profits, having a 501(c)(3) is not sufficient as a stand-alone seal of approval. And that's why normal funding due diligence processes go along with checking on an organization's 501(c)(3) status. We can all probably tell a horror story an established non-profit that has had a 501(c)(3) designation for decades and completely bombed with a project looked great on paper. But there is indeed some comfort in knowing that a group that is new to you has persevered through the process of requesting 501(c)(3) status.

Without the 501(c)(3) letter of determination as a starting point, how DO you begin to credential an informal citizen sector group of community residents - a group that most typically has no staff, no office and possibly not even a bank account? I invite you to join me here in what you do, but here's a few thoughts from me as a start.

Since we're talking about everyday people moving an idea into action together, each contributing their time, talent and treasure to the effort - look for "group-ness". For me that means that the idea has been developed by more than one person and that more than one person has some skin in the game. One person might serve as a spokesperson, but when you did just a little deeper, you should be able to easily find at least two more people's energy, creativity, passion, and commitment to this effort.

When you're beginning to credential an informal citizen sector group for funding, I think that three signatures on the grant proposal form is more important than a 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS.
I also think that paying attention to who is speaking and how they speak is an important indication of "group-ness". Do you hear I and my or we and ours? Does the same person always show up to represent the group? And if different people show up, are they knowledgeable about the idea or mainly there as moral support?
Can you spot some fun? When people are voting with their feet (vs. being involved because it's their job), and when they launching into something that is just at the tip of a bigger ice-burg question (as is usually the case for first time projects, right?), it's really important for fun to be somewhere in the picture.

What else would you add to this list for your credentialing toolbox when funding informal citizen sector groups? Let's build this list and provide appropriate alternatives to the 501(c)(3) as a credentialing tool for funding informal groups.

Dinosaurs and the Next Generation: The Tough Work of Institutional Change

2013-10-14T12:40:00.002-05:00

When I look for the seeds of change in the big thinking on small grants world, I most often see them in the next generation of grantmakers - the newest (and often youngest) people on a funding organization's staff. Because small grants programs are not typically big budget operations, they are often assigned to the newbies. And it is these people with their fresh eyes, new ideas and energy that become internal champions for breaking open the assumptions and processes that are masking new opportunities for co-production and community change.

That's why White Courtesy Telephone blogger Albert Ruesga's post - What the Next Generation of Grantmakers Wants to Accomplish - caught my eye. Albert shared this list that younger people in philanthropy produced when asked what they want to be remembered for in philanthropy:

Being an ethical partner in community transformation
Collaborating with others in and outside the field; inspiring collaboration especially with nonprofits
Addressing the problem of the capitalization of nonprofit organizations
Making a meaningful difference on some difficult, complex issue; helping to achieve justice, beyond charity
Bringing about systemic change
Keeping the field honest about what it has accomplished
Keeping inalienable rights in focus; addressing the structural barriers to social change
Redistributing philanthropic dollars to native communities; helping to empower these communities
Focusing on accountability and governance; being accountable to the people we ultimately aim to serve
Empowering people to “stir the pot” of philanthropy; remaining accessible to stakeholders

Albert shared that list with the same feeling of humility that I feel when I witness the courageous internal change-making role that some of the big thinking on small grants staffers assume within their organizations. He also pointed to two inter-related challenges that I have seen (and personally experienced):

What can we do to avoid simply turning newer (and I'm using newer instead of younger on purpose) practitioners into older practitioners - sucking out their aspirations to be replaced by those that are more aligned with the status quo?
How can we encourage and support newer practitioners to continue to give voice to these life-giving ideas - in a way that makes change but doesn't cost them their jobs?

Albert concludes by telling younger people in the field to take heart - that we narrow-minded dinosaurs will someday go extinct and their ideals will eventually have find more fertile soil to take root. I agree in part, but think there's more to it than that.

I think this is somewhat but not mainly generational. I think there is something about what happens after people come on board as staff - how they find their way, how their aspirations find a place to take root and grow, and how they see (and are seen) by the institution. I think the hope that shines brightly in Albert's column can only be realized if we acknowledge and get smarter together about what it takes to advance change inside our philanthropic institutions.

When I came to philanthropy more than two decades ago, my wish list would have been very similar to the younger generation list that Albert shared. And, to my surprise, my steepest learning curve was about the work that was needed inside the foundation to make the room for a different type of work out in the community. It was that internal work that kept me up at night.

I know that I am not unique in that experience. There are those of us oldies who have experienced times when we had to decide if we were going to let go of our ideals in order to keep jobs - and know people who went both ways. There are those of us who found encouragement to hold tight to our ideals and keep going - primarily through association with others who were or had been in internal change making positions. There are those of us who learned through success and failure about pacing - when to be quietly persistent, when to push and when to pull back. And also how to take care of ourselves so that we do not find ourselves in the pit called burn-out.

There is a a cyclical part of this process that comes from naivete about what change requires and the powerful institution-preserving, hard-wiring that contributes to the power of institutions and systems to resist or slow-down change. When we talk about what it takes to shift an institution - especially ones that have a noise-cancelling mechanism (aka an endowment) that tunes-down messages from the outside world - we can probably find more stories of hope and earnest intentions than real change. Isn't it because our intentions are so earnest, our hope is so real, and our experience has shown us how hard it is to overcome institutional resistance to change that we find the stories of remarkable institutional shifts to be so inspiring?

So besides waiting for the dinosaurs to die off, I am wondering what more can we do to prepare people who have the vision of philanthropy that Albert described to be the most effective internal change agents possible? What can we dinosaurs who have been around a while do to give the new staffer who is coming on board to staff a grassroots grantmaking program (which contributes to at least 8 or the 10 aspirations for a new philanthropy that Albert listed) a clearer heads-up that the change-agent job is just as much about what happens inside the foundation's walls as it is about what happens in the community? And what are the tools that we can offer them to help them be effective as internal change agents, keep their jobs, and use the progress they see as fuel to keep going?

I welcome your thoughts on these questions.

What's Complicated About a Pocket Park?

2013-09-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

What could be complicated about a pocket park? I am digging into that question to explore some of the ways we can over-think, over-judge, over-complicate and get in our own way as big thinkers about small grants - unaware of how our own world view and personal perspective impacts what we see, hear and interpret.

I was with a group of funders and community change-makers recently for Grassroots Grantmakers' 2013 On the Ground learning exchange in Milwaukee. One of our community visits was with a group of neighbors in the pocket park that they had created in their neighborhood. This was a tiny sliver of a park on a narrow resident lot with a fence down one side, a house on the other and some sitting areas sprinkled with mulch and dotted with benches that the neighbors had built. We heard that this vacant lot had been a problem in the past, how the idea for the pocket park was hatched, what it took for the neighbors to get their idea going, and what difference they thought it was making. We heard from the director of the local CDC who had helped the neighbors find some resources to help with the vacant lot to pocket park transformation, and from a woman with a project that connected neighborhood kids with local artists to create some modest public art installations in the park. We heard quotes from the kids about what that experience meant for them.

This project is a classic grassroots grantmaking project. It took a modest amount of money that was spent only on supplies and neighbors working together to move an idea that neighbors had hatched into action. This simple project had provided the opportunity for people to work together, experience success together, and strengthen their ties as neighbors. I was happy to be there, reminded again about how something as simple as a pocket park could do so much.

That was my perspective. As we began walking away from the park, I began to get wind of different perspectives - and was fascinated that we had been all standing right there together, hearing the same stories, but came away with different meaning.

I heard that someone was deeply concerned because one of the steps in process of creating the park was dealing the problem neighbor who had lived next to the vacant lot - and that the neighbor had moved away. I heard from someone who had wandered down the block a bit to talk to another neighbor and was told that no one uses the park, making her conclude that we were being led down a primrose path with a fairy tale that was constructed to make the funder involved look good. Another person commented about the social engineering that was going on - with neighborhood institutions creating opportunities to put people together and do things that they (the institutions) thought were important. Someone else criticized the city because they had not been more forthcoming with mulch, and thus must not be such good partners after all. And someone else commented that spending time and energy on something like a pocket park was needless diversion from focusing on the "questions behind the problem" questions that were the at the root of the problems facing that neighborhood.

What we didn't build into the pocket park experience was time to sit down together and pour out all of these different perspectives and make sense of what was going on. Lesson learned.

But if we had, here's what I wish we could have unpacked - possibly exploring these questions.

How can we be more self-aware of our personal perceptions and learning journey experiences that are coloring how we understand what we are hearing and seeing?
What questions can we ask that come from a place of curiosity versus a place of judging - and how do we keep ourselves in a place of active listening versus active judging?
How do we connect our real-world experiences as people who live in neighborhoods of some sort with our work as professionals whose business it is to fund/organize/train/coach groups of everyday people who are at work in their neighborhoods in their spare time?
What is our understanding of the journey that institutional players are traveling as they are learning how to be good partners with residents - and when is it constructive to move from patient encouragement to more forceful nudging to encourage those players to stay in the path?
How do we most constructively use each other as co-unravellers for the tangled story string that showed up in this situation and shows up so often in the big thinking on small grants world?

As I think about these questions, I'm reminded of a webinar, Program Officer as Coach, that I moderated for Grassroots Grantmakers several years ago that focused on the second question - what questions do we ask that come from a place of curiosity rather than judging and how do we keep ourselves in a place of active listening versus active judging? Pamela McLean, a master coach and president of the Hudson Institute of Coaching shared her perspectives about leading from behind in coaching and pointed us to Marilee Adam's powerful book, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. There were so many light-bulbs that Pam's remarks and tools that she shared from Marilee's book that we have included one of Marilee's charts - Moving from the Judger to the Learner Mindset - with basic tips on the practice of grassroots grantmaking.

I'm sharing this not to dismiss the perceptions that were shared about the pocket park in Milwaukee - but as a reminder to myself and big thinkers everywhere of three things: 1) we all bring our own life stories and journeys into every situation - even those that appear to be quite straight-forward on the surface, 2) reality is relative - depending on who you are, and 3) if we aspire to work effectively from a "we begin with residents" perspective, we must continually swim upstream, with as much self-awareness and group-awareness as possible, to stay in a learning mindset and approach conversations with curiosity. I hear myself often saying that big thinking on small grants isn't rocket science - but is also not as easy as it might appear. What we experienced in the pocket park in Milwaukee is what I'm talking about.

Seeing, Not Watching

2013-07-16T18:20:00.003-05:00

I have been working on a blog post that I'm putting aside for another day in light of the events of this past week. It's about neighborhood associations and what we do as funders and institutional actors to grow the group behaviors that turn us off down the road.

Today I'm thinking also about neighborhood watch groups - the dark side of neighborhood watch groups and neighborhood associations.

I spotted this poster this morning that got right to the heart of the question that I have been pondering. When did neighborhood watch groups get to be more about watching than seeing? And when did neighborhood associations get to be more about controlling than associating?

I am willing to look at myself and the work that I do professionally with eyes that see some uncomfortable truths about what we do with the best intentions that push people away from neighboring, friending, associating, and seeing. I know that those of us in the institutional world have a part in this.

But what really troubles me is what people sometimes do in the name of being a good citizen - being responsible, going the extra mile, showing that they care. And, I must admit, what I have done myself when I was a zealous neighborhood association leader - cataloging and reporting code violations without talking to people as neighbors or offering to help as one embarrassing example.

I appreciate the spirit that moves people to connect, mobilize and act out of concern for their neighborhood. Without implying that I think that every neighborhood association or neighborhood watch group has gone over the ledge of vigilante-ism or suggesting in any way that I think we would be better off without these groups, I do have a wish. My wish is that every neighborhood association and every neighborhood watch group would gather for a conversation about this poster, with eyes that let them see - and confront - any uncomfortable truths that may come up. And then begin again - this time with a pledge that whatever they do will reflect their strong commitment to really see and not watch.

Knocking at the Door of Community Philanthropy

2013-06-21T14:34:00.000-05:00

I just spotted this new report - The Case for Community Philanthropy: How the Practice Builds Local Assets, Capacity, and Trust - and Why It Matters. This is a follow up to Barry Knight's February 2012 report, The Value of Community Philanthropy: Results of a Consultation. Spotting this new report was funny since I very recently pulled out Barry's report again to take a look - and was once more struck by the congruence between what we describe in the United States as grassroots grantmaking and what Barry describes as community philanthropy. That's why the map that appears just inside the front cover of this new report was particularly interesting to me. Under it's banner - A Local Practice, Spreading Globally - is a map of the world that shows hot spots for community philanthropy. With North America conspicuously missing.

Yes, yes - I know. The focus of the conversations that have resulted in these reports has been elsewhere. It is truly exciting to see the energy and new forms that are springing up EVERYWHERE that share the characteristics of what is now being described as community philanthropy. But what a shame that the true scale of this global movement isn't being represented in these conversations.

I want to go back a bit to Barry Knight's definition of community philanthropy because I believe how he framed that definition is really important - and frankly, quite brilliant. Barry captured the spirit of many conversations involving people from around the world in shaping a definition of community philanthropy - and instead of a carefully wordsmith-ed, dictionary type of definition, Barry compiled a set of qualities that, in combination, add up to community philanthropy. This is also so in sync with how I think about grassroots grantmaking - not easily defined in one sentence, and impossible to separate from the core values that under-gird practice. Barry listed the following characteristics of community philanthropy:

Organized and structured
Self-directed
Open architecture
Civil society
Using own money and assets
Building an inclusive and equitable society

And he underscores that the fifth characteristic - using own money and assets - as the essential component, bringing in an asset-based approach that relates to both attitudes and to the accumulation of monetary assets. "On the development of resources, it is an essential component of community philanthropy that local people put in some of their own money to develop long-term assets for a community".

If you have read my blog over time, you know how much I fritz over language - not because I especially love fritzing with language, but because I have the seen the power of language to limit thinking. You have probably gathered that I don't particularly love the term "grassroots grantmaking" and have come to accept using it as a practical step forward out of the boxes that "neighborhood small grants" had built around the work that I write about in this blog.

So I'm wondering if it's language that's once again limiting our thinking about the full scope and energy of this growing community philanthropy movement - by not realizing the parallel world here in North America that in some circles identifies as grassroots grantmaking.

With Barry's definition in mind - especially the "using own money and assets" characteristic as an essential component - I can see how grassroots grantmaking could be overlooked as a core mechanism of community philanthropy. After all, the very word "grant" implies that people are receiving money and not using their own money and assets, doesn't it? It suggests that there is a benevolent grantor - with money that comes from donors or private wealth - and that the collecting and distributing sides of the grantmaking equation are separate. And then there's the problem with grassroots - often a code word for "marginalized", "poor", "disadvantaged" or everyday (not individually important) people. So put together, grassroots grantmaking could be construed to mean powerless people who are receiving money from powerful (wealthy) people and organizations so that they can learn that they too can be powerful.

But it's not that. If it was, I wouldn't be in this seat writing this blog. Instead what I see is a flexible, practical, powerful vehicle that more and more people and organizations are discovering as a way to connect monetary giving with the first investors in a community - the people who experience the community every day and are putting their ideas, their time, their talents, their relationships, their personal reputations AND their money on the line for community benefit. It puts money in the mix as just one important ingredient, casting aside two very naive assumptions - 1) that money doesn't matter and 2) that there is a direct correlation between money and impact. Using Barry's words, it does this:

"Having local people involved as donors (I would use the word first investors) us a game-changer in efforts to build civil society and enhances the prospects of sustainability of external funding when the program ceases. If successful, community philanthropy also leads to more lasting, entrenched outcomes by increasing local ownership and local accountability."

Even more important is that when there is an organization in the mix such as a foundation, it requires a changed relationship between the organization and local citizens - a relationship that requires reflection, learning and internal culture shifting on the part of those in the organization. It requires a shift from reliance on experts to co-learning with local citizens - walking along-side or even behind rather than leading or directing.

I believe that grassroots grantmaking is a place where the values and characteristics that Barry says add up to community philanthropy mesh with grantmaking practice. My belief is that where you see grassroots grantmaking, you're going to see and feel community philanthropy.

This seems so obvious to me - so obvious that I'm can't help but wonder why we can see community philanthropy with one set of eyes when we look at what is happening outside of the United States, but when we look within the United States, grassroots grantmaking sits at the margins of the silo-ed worlds of civic engagement, social justice grantmaking, and neighborhood capacity building, and community philanthropy is seen as an organizational form - most commonly a community foundation. The exciting world that I see what I look at what is happening in the United States is that it really mirrors what is happening internationally - with some (not all) community foundations fully embracing the characteristics of community philanthropy that Barry describes, and community philanthropy bubbling up in more and more places through many different organizational forms. This is such a hopeful landscape - and grassroots grantmaking, because of the values that embraces, its flexible form and its do-able scale - is adding energy and an easy on-ramp into that landscape.

The problem with failing to recognize the growing grassroots grantmaking sentiment in the United States and Canada as part of this international movement - recognizing it in spirit and not as a narrowly defined grantmaking tactic - is that we are missing out on a huge opportunity that has field building implications - missing opportunities to further a shared identity and invigorate learning, and spread the practice.

The latest report ends with a call to action:

"Community philanthropy has proven to be effective and compelling across a variety of geographic and cultural contexts. It is time to help it become a mainstream development strategy........With the practice poised to improve and grow, now is the time to take action."

And some possible questions that should be explored, including:

What kind of international infrastructure could fund experiments, develop tools, raise
funds, map assets, convene leaders, create networks, and strengthen practices?
How can we build a global movement for community philanthropy?

So with this call to action and these questions (along with the others that are raised in the report), I'm here knocking on the door - not knocking the authors or sponsors of these reports, but knocking on the door for what comes next. Knock knock, community philanthropy. It's time to let grassroots grantmaking in and take the next step of making this a global movement.

What is community?

2013-06-18T11:25:00.000-05:00

So often in the funding world, when we talk about "community", it's all in our heads - an intellectual construct instead of something we feel and experience on the sidewalks of our neighborhoods and around our kitchen tables. When we talk about small grants that build community, we think of what we can measure and how those things link with other things we can measure - how connectedness leads to less crime and better schools.

I stumbled on this beautiful expression today that jolted me right out of that "head space" and back into another reality of community that is calling to me. I'm sharing this with you in case you hear some singing in this too.

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been - a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time.

Community.

Somewhere, there are people
to whom we can speak with passion
without having the words catch in our throats.

Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us,
eyes will light up as we enter,
voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.

Community means strength that joins our strength
to do the work that needs to be done.
Arms to hold us when we falter.
A circle of healing.
A circle of friends.
Someplace where we can be free.

- Starhawk

I believe that the what keeps us all coming back to this very challenging conversation about building community is because we have all seen or felt glimpses of of this - "strength that joins our strength" - either in our own lives or in those that we have witnessed. "Voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power" as people act boldly to move their ideas into action with those around them. And "arms that hold us when we falter in a circle of healing - a circle of friends" to help us be courageous.

And, that in addition to work that tries to reverse big trends like those that Living Cities just identified in their State of the City report, we absolutely must not forget about the work that is done with this understanding of community.

Community means strength that joins our strength.

It's Not Just Cicadas

2013-05-19T18:40:00.000-05:00

I'm fascinated by all the buzz about this being the year that the cicadas come back. But what really fascinates me is something else that isn't getting nearly as much buzz but is a much bigger deal. It's the re-emergence of active citizenship.

I recall a conversation at a Grassroots Grantmakers' Board of Directors retreat just 8 years ago when we were brainstorming about this question: "What surprising thing could happen that would change the landscape for Grassroots Grantmakers dramatically?" After a dozen very thoughtful responses were added to the flip chart, I offered my out of the ballpark (and intentionally flip) response - "a citizen revolution". In the years that I felt alone on the edge and found courage and support from the connections I made through networks like Grassroots Grantmakers, a citizen revolution felt like a preposterous idea.

But here we are. Everyday I spot active citizenship energy emerging everywhere:

In the going-wild proliferation of micro-granting activity for citizen-sourced ideas that is coming from every place imaginable. Eight years ago the micro-granting landscape included some innovative place-based foundations, a handful of United Ways, some local governments (with Mayor's Matching grant programs, spread by the Johnny Appleseed of that work, Jim Diers) and a few community-based funders. Today the landscape includes more happening from all of these groups, spurred on by the crazy energy coming from crowd-funding vehicles (see ioby), soups/dishes and other events, contests and competitions, giving circles, Awesome Foundation chapters, national groups such as Project for Public Spaces (see Lighter, Quicker Cheaper), Generations United (see Youth Jumpstart Grants), and a tidal wave of innovative mico-granting outside of North American that are contributing innovation in this arena.
In the focused attention that civic and philanthropic organizations are giving to community engagement. We're clearly over the hump of community engagement as a necessary evil and into the new territory of community engagement as a core value and competency for place-based institutions (see CFLeads' recent work on on community engagement, Georgia Council for Developmental Disabilities' Real Communities, and Bright Spots on Community Engagement), with sincere exploration of the "what do we do tomorrow/how do we do our work differently" questions that come with moving values and theories into practice.
And, most exciting for me, what people are inventing, initiating and growing unprompted. I've heard some "tired of waiting/no help is coming" explanations for this new energy, but personally, I don't want to spend my energy exploring why. I just want to be part of this new energy and let it fill me up with hope and joy - and do whatever I can to fan the flames and build some firewalls that will keep it from well-intentioned efforts from the institutional side of the fence that could tamp it down in the name of building capacity or making it sustainable.

My thoughts are now with Grassroots Grantmakers, during this citizen revolution. What's our most important role?

It's obvious to me that people everywhere are making the case for people powered solutions for our community's futures - and that the hardest part of our job from the previous era - the case-making - is getting easier. We need to listen, document and join with others to share with a big loud voice all of these creative case-making messages.
I also see that the institutional trail-blazers in the big thinking on small grants world - those who started early and kept at it with small grants for block clubs, neighborhood groups, youth groups, and other groups who were thought to be risky bets - have enabled us to have treasure chests full of practical wisdom, applications, final report forms, technical assistance approaches and "what not to do" guidance that gives that can be shared with those who want to activate community engagement by using small grants to invite more citizens into the action. We need to make sure that people can spot and open these treasure chests of documents, wisdom and practical information, and spot more good stuff to add to the treasure chests.
This is a wonderful time - what we've been hoping to see! But, we've had glimmers of this before - when community building was all the rage, when we were just learning about importance of social capital, and when big dollars were flowing from public sector and national philanthropic partners for community development and community change. I think the most important thing that we can do is limit how much this time has in common with cicadas! I can't stand the thought that the wonderful hum of active citizen energy that we're now hearing might go silent again and we'll have to wait another 17 years to hear it again. I want to hum to become a buzz. I can't wait to see what happens in our communities when we are so accustomed to that buzz that everyone notices when it's not there and hungers to get it back.

So here is my question for you. How do we - all of us - keep this going? I have some ideas about case-making, and have experience sharing what's in the treasure chests of practical wisdom and information. But I'm not too sure about how to steer around our short attention spans and love of the next new thing to ensure that this active citizen energy doesn't go underground for another 17 years.

I anxiously await your help with that question!

Using Small Grants to Get It Going

2013-05-10T16:55:00.000-05:00

I was so excited this week when I spotted info about the City of St. Louis' Sustainable Neighborhood Small Grant Competition and can't wait to tell you why.

The City of St. Louis adopted its first Sustainability Plan in January of 2013 - with 50 specific objectives and 317 detailed strategies. This plan includes more than 1,000 ideas for what can be done at the individual, neighborhood, city, and regional level to make St. Louis a more livable and sustainable place to live, work and play.

I am sure that the work that went into the developing this plan was huge and probably even exhausting to both staff and community participants. And so many plans that I've seen like this - maybe because the work that is required is so huge and exhausting - get to be ends in themselves as the classic plan that sits on the shelf.

I have been asked over the years about next steps for plans like this in a question that goes like this: "We have had hundreds of people participating in this planning process, and we have done our best to incorporate all of the amazing ideas that people have put forward into this plan - but now that the community convenings and planning sessions have wrapped up, what do we do?"

Hooray for St. Louis! You have the perfect answer to that question. I'm sure the Neighborhood Small Grant Competition isn't the only "what next" that's on your list now that the plan is completed, but my hunch it will be one of the most fun, most rewarding, and most important things that is on that list.

Here's what I love about this particular "what next":

It's a competition! I think this is a great way to frame a 1-time opportunity that uses good small grants program basics but is designed for a particular 1-time purpose. And, what a great way to invite people into the action in a way that feels safe, fun, and not as a commitment for life.
It's open but specific! This is a competition that is especially for the types of groups that I talked about in my last post.
There will be more than 1 winner! Instead of setting this up so that there is a super grand prize winner and a mostly losers. This competition will have 7 winners and hopefully, lots of gold star runners up who get their good ideas acknowledged by being included in the bank of ideas that will be generated.
There are 3 pre-deadline help sessions in community settings! Not 1 but 3. Love it. We know from the years of experience that members of Grassroots Grantmakers have with small grants programs that what you do before the deadline - specifically getting out there in community settings with information, and positioning the opportunity to apply as an invitation - is essential to getting good energy in the applications that come in.
There is an expectation that projects will be different! While examples are shared about projects that jive with sustainability plan, there is recognition that different neighborhoods are different - via their strengths, character and history, and needs. My hope is that what the City of St. Louis is really saying is that they hope to be wowed by the creativity of the ideas that come in, and that they will use these ideas to grow the list of 1000 ideas that are already included in the plan.
I love that the application begins with questions about why the project is important to the neighborhood, how it engages the people who live there and what team members bring to the project. These questions are SO appropriate for resourcing grassroots groups, aren't they?

I could put a few things on my wish list (like wishing that groups were not required to have a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor as a group member or that the application could skip over some of the long-term impact and evaluation lingo that almost automatically ends up in every grant application) - but I'm just being picky here. Overall, I just love this. Can you tell?

Who else out there followed a planning process with a customized small grants opportunity? If this is you, let us hear about your experience by posting a comment.

Funding Grassroots Groups: The Square Pegs and Round Holes Challenge

2013-05-08T15:57:00.000-05:00

Some things are clearly one thing or another, and others are hard or even impossible to classify. One of the challenges I spot in the big thinking on small grants world is that grassroots groups fall into the hard or impossible category. And that classifying, whether intentional or unintentional, gets to be a challenge for both the funder and the group.

The Grassroots Group Spectrum:

From what I see, some grassroots groups wouldn't event recognize themselves as a group at all - no name, no regular meeting time, no clear leaders, nothing but people together doing something at this moment in time with no plan about stretching this one time into ongoing. Other groups have all the boxes checked - name, by-laws, regular meeting time, continuity over time, and possibly even 501(c)(3) status with some money in the bank and someone that is paid to help facilitate the work of the group.

Some groups are in-between, with just enough of a structure so that they can activate quickly when there is a desire or move in and out of a dormant state on a regular basis. I'm thinking about groups like the one here in my town that comes together every year to plan the Relay for Life - hyper-active at Relay for Life time with some people from previous years and some new ones added in each year, but mostly dormant otherwise.

John McKnight describes most of the groups along this spectrum as associations. Others describe these groups as networks. Still others use community-based organizations. I see these names as important steps towards creating understanding and differentiating these citizen's groups from business-oriented groups.

What grassroots groups have in common - no matter where they fall on the informal/more formal spectrum - is that they are vehicles that allow people to move their shared agenda forward that depends on their collective commitment, energy, passion and skills. Most of the work is done not only for the people involved by also by them, with little or not paid staff, often without credentialed expertise, and usually without big budgets or other large resource reservoirs. They provide the mechanism for individuals to discover and bring forth their individual gifts to their community.

The Square Peg/Round Hole Challenge:

Grassroots Grantmakers, the network that I staff as Executive Director, is organized to grow a field of citizen sector investors - and by that we mean creating some identity around investing in the grassroots groups side of the organizational spectrum and growing the number of investors who see value in hanging out there, at least part of the time. The first and most important investors are the people who are forming and fueling grassroots groups - and we want these first investors to claim their unique niche in the community well-being and change world instead of feeling that they need to model themselves after professionally staffed non-profit organizations. The next set of investors are those that provide money and other things that grassroots groups can use to advance their work.

For even the most savvy big thinkers on small grants, how we do what we do - and most importantly, how we measure what we do - can plane off the corners of grassroots groups to make them fit into to the round holes that work for more typical non-profit organization grantees. (For a fun reminder of what that's a problem, remember the blobs and squares video). Planing corners off comes with how we size up the organization and it's capacity to deliver on the grant, and how we think about what comes next. We look at their operations from a business perspective - have they done their market research, are they employing best practices, and do they have the qualified staff and systems in place to deliver, to be stable and to attract resources they need to maintain and grow their services?

For grassroots groups, I think that those are round hole-square peg questions. At this risk of sounding like I'm advising to never to ask those questions, here are some I think are a better fit with grassroots groups, especially those on the more informal end of the organizational spectrum:

How does this idea use the commitment, passion, energy and skills of the people in the group and others in their immediate community?
What experience do people in the group have with moving an idea into action that they can bring to this project (regardless of whether it is with this group or another)?
How is the group reaching beyond their inner circle to make room for the involvement and ideas of more people?
How will the group share the story of their work together so that it can inspire others to move their idea into action?
What support does the group need to be successful with their idea and to maximize their learning together about organizing to move an idea into action?
And - adding one that I've heard members of Neighborhood Connections grantmaking committee ask - Who is driving this bus? Who has ownership of this idea?

I could add more that I've learned about this challenge through my experience with Grassroots Grantmakers, but invite you to share your perspectives on this. How do you spot when you're trying to get a square peg into a round hole - and what questions have you learned to ask when you're talking with grassroots groups? You can share your comment here or contact me directly.

Find and Replace: Muscle Memory for Sustainability

2013-04-22T08:22:00.000-05:00

Jargon is a fact of life. I think it can be handy as a verbal short-hand when we're talking shop with insiders. But I also think that it's a good idea to step back now and then to ask if our jargon words have become so comfortable that they are masking some assumptions that might deserve a second look.

Sustainable and sustainability are twin brother jargon words that deserve a second look. I heard sustainable and sustainability so often at a recent philanthropic conference that they became distracting. I began to listen for them and keep score of how many times I had heard them, and became so preoccupied with listening and scoring that I zoned out on the presentation. I wondered if it was just me. But when I checked out the Communications Network's Jargon Finder, there it was, with an interesting discussion of the journey of sustainable from the domain of environmentalists and economists to the philanthropic jargon world.

Suddenly, no one wanted a sturdy or durable program any more, they wanted a sustainable one. Expenditures could no longer merely be affordable, they had to be sustainable. Skills taught in school couldn’t just be lasting, they had to be sustainable. Anything, in short, that made it past autumn’s first frost was now sustainable.

As I was listening and keeping score, I was thinking about the implications of sustainable for the big thinking on small grants world. Each time sustainable or its twin showed up, what I heard was something about "permanence". And often "permanence" was about something that was fixed and was expected to stay fixed - or about an organization that was good at fixing and was expected to keep fixing, whenever fixing is needed.

I do indeed appreciate the question behind the question that is being asked when people ask about sustainability. What is the investment that we are making setting up that will continue into the future - in a way that at least maintains the change that has been achieved with the investment? And, I also appreciate the critical role that a staffed presence - a backbone organization - can play. But what I don't get is how these interpretations of sustainability jive with my experience of community and the energy that I see at the community level when I am looking through my big thinking on small grants lens.

When I think about community and the places I've lived over my lifetime, I think about ebbs and flows, comings and goings. People moving in and out, people more present and less present because of family obligations, job demands or personal burdens such as addictions or depression. I think of a dynamic environment where change is the norm. I also think about ways that communities welcome people, what the new people who are entering bring, and how community traditions make their way into community culture - that invisible "way of doing" that people learn from each other.

When I think about the big thinking on small grants world - investing in groups that people form to move an idea into action in their own community - I don't think about the anything as steady or permanent except the "way of doing" that involves people who feel powerful and have the experience of acting together. I don't think of the same people always acting together or the same groups always in the forefront. I think about people being invited into the action by friends and neighbors, learning what to do and seeing what is possible in themselves and with others. I think about people who have experience with one group taking that experience to another, new or existing - inspiring action and leading the way. I think about my own experience, comparing how things work in my personal-life world versus the world I imagine when I'm around tables with professionals.

I want to suggest that instead of striving for sustainable, we should think about helping people and communities build muscle memory for working together so that when the opportunity arises, people know how to surface ideas, form groups and move the best ideas into action using the resources that they have and can find. Our friends at Wikipedia say that muscle memory involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition, and that when a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems. Imagine a community where people have strong active citizen muscle memory and value it enough as part of their "way of doing" that they keep it strong. That's a community where I want to be. It's a place where I can live my life with the peace of mind that we can handle the ebbs and flow, that there are built-in ways for new people to grab on and feel that they belong, where we understand that we need everyone - especially those who are often invisible - and where we understand the power that we have to challenge injustice and have a voice.

If we scan our language and do a search and replace - replacing sustainability with building community muscle memory, what does that really mean for how we think about our work? What do people, groups and communities need to build their active citizen muscle memory? Here's the beginning of a list of ideas with an invitation for you to add your ideas:

Opportunities to work out - moving ideas into action together. Small grants programs that are designed with a patient money, long-distance running approach rather than a time-limited quick spring approach, are great tools for expanding opportunities for people to work out in a way that builds community muscle memory. For those who poo-poo those first small grants that support a group of neighbors with their first project - asking about the impact of this micro-investment in the big world - you might think about the importance of making the commitment to go to the gym, and actually going. That's huge.
Some personal trainers who inspire people to work harder by exposing them to real life stories of what is possible with a little more exercise, and provide some tip for building muscle. These trainers could be known as friend, neighbor, teacher, young person, pastor, grassroots leader, technical assistance provider, and even program officer.
Storytellers who come in many shapes and sizes who provide regular reminders of who we are, how we do things, and how powerful we are when we are together so that people don't forget and that new people can learn. Storytellers might be artists, historians, photographers, poets, and journalists also known as neighbors, friends, young people, the strangers among us and people who work at powerful, permanent institutions who do their work in a way that uses stories to strengthen community muscle memory.

Join in with a comment and more ideas to add to this list. Heading to the gym.....

Friending in the Big Thinking World

2013-03-11T16:07:00.000-05:00

One thing that I have noticed in the big thinking on small grants world is how we sanitize the language of community. We talk about building community, various types of social capital, individual, organizational and community capacity, social networks, associational groups, grassroots leadership, and community change. The word we don't use very often is "friend" or anything related like "friendships" or "friendly".

I am experimenting with podcasting as a way to share the conversations with amazing people that I get to have as Executive Director of Grassroots Grantmakers, and am now quite fascinated with how often that word - friend - has been showing up. Especially when I'm not talking with funders. I'm actually getting a bit obsessed with this. So much so that when I was listening to NPR this morning about the post-Katrina New Orleans, I began to talk back to the radio when the commentator mentioned the importance of social networks: "Why don't you just say that people with friends are doing better than people who are isolated?"

Mark Hopkins believes so much in the power of friends that he has invited people over to his apartment in Calgary every other Sunday afternoon for FIVE YEARS - just so they can get to know each other. His "We Should Know Each Other" campaign began with the realization that people in his various social circles didn't know each other, and a curiosity about what would happen if he could help people make connections. A simple invitation, a few swipes of the dust rag, and some simple refreshments is all is all it took to get this started - and the ripple effect has been tremendous. So tremendous, that it extends way past Mark at this point. Friendships, dating relationships, job connections, people helping people out - all that stuff that comes with more social capital - is growing from Mark's simple idea and gift for connecting people.

De'Amon Harges, Broadway United Methodist Church's "Roving Listener", spends his time in Indianapolis listening, watching and appreciating what is already there in the neighborhood around his church, building and nurturing friendships that bring economy, community and mutual delight - weaving together the strands of community that are there waiting for someone with an eye for connecting.

Dave Runyon, co-author of The Art of Neighboring: Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside Your Door, works from a faith-based perspective, trying to make "love your neighbor as yourself" real in a day to day world. Dave acknowledges how hard it is to get to know neighbors as people. He talks about the importance of learning (and remembering people's names, and has developed the most ingenious tool - a refrigerator magnet that looks like a tic-tac-toe board with "my house" in the middle" - that he hands out for people to use to help people learn and remember the names of the people who live around them. Reminding people about the continuum - stranger > acquaintance > friend - he encourages people to be intentional about turning strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends.

Eric Jacobson, Executive Director of The Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, is challenging conventional approaches to helping people with developmental disabilities have better lives through his agency's Real Communities work - investing in ideas involve people who have developmental disabilities WITH others in their local community. The simple genius of the Real Communities approach is that people - and not disabilities - are the focus, with a recognition that people to people relationships are always about the mutuality of friendship.

Jan Thrope, photo-journalist, author of Inner Visions: Grassroots Stories of Truth and Hope (here's my earlier post about her work), founder of Inner Visions of Cleveland, and wonderful imaginer and possibility thinker, talks about "friending" as a way of investing in people in Cleveland. When I was talking with Jan, she mentioned times when she and others on the giving side of the equation learned about something that was going on with someone on the receiving side of the equation - something that crossed the line between "business" and "personal" - and jumped in the way friends would do to lend a hand. She also talked about "friending" coming the other way, and times that people shared their gifts with her - like creating a play around her book and using the play as a platform to share an amazing array of community talents that had previously been invisible.

My conversation with Jan made me think about friending in the big thinking on small grants world. I thought about the importance of structuring grant processes so that they are friendly - designing out the intimidation factor as much as possible. Tom O'Brien with Cleveland's Neighborhood Connections puts "friendly" at the top of his list for how he wants the small grants experience there to feel for people, and goes so far as to coach grantmaking committee members on how to bring "friendly" into the picture. This is so important. I love that he does this.

My point of sharing these random stories is to say that it is really powerful if we allow ourselves to connect our personal and professional brains - our right and left brains in the big thinking on small grants world - and remember that when we are using the professional, sanitized words for community connectivity we are talking about what happens when people move down the path from strangers to acquaintances to friends. We are talking about the "doing together" that generates community gardens, more things for kids to do after school and expressions of local culture like festivals and murals - but most of all, works to help the people who find each other through that idea move along the path from stranger to acquaintance to friend. We are talking about people around and with people who will provide the moral support needed for people to take on new roles, exercise their personal power and take the risk to get their personal skin in the game. We are talking about growing friends.

If you have a story that involves intentional "friending" - as a community member or as a funder - I would love to hear about it! You can share it hear or email me to set a time to talk.

Building a Strategy for Resident Engagement

2013-01-21T12:35:00.002-06:00

I had the opportunity to hang out with some of the best thinkers in the community foundation world last week, and the topic of the day was resident engagement. How it is thrilling that more place-based funders, with community foundations in the lead, are seeing resident engagement as central to their work!

As our discussion moved from resident engagement in the ideal world to resident engagement in the real world, someone told a story about some bumps in the resident engagement world they encountered when their organization was asked by local government to expand community engagement on a topic that was rapidly becoming divisive - providing the safe space that was needed for people to work together to develop a solution that could work for everyone. Perfect so far. They brought a group together, only to discover that they had a room full of leaders who did not have any followers - people who were better at gate-keeping than gate opening. You can probably fill in the next part of the story. I bet you have lived through that story in your own community. I have. It's so common - even when people are acting with the best of intentions and the belief that the extra time and messiness that inviting more people into a process requires is always worth it.

So for the place-based funders - especially community foundations - who are thinking more about resident engagement, here's one thing I think you can do to avoid going down this very common road: anticipate the opportunity and get ready. If you think about resident engagement in the same way that you think about donor engagement, and develop a strategy to build relationships with residents that you take as seriously as you do expanding your donor base, you will be ready when the phone rings or when you want to expand perspectives on your own work. Just as you think about who knows who and how to get know people you want to know, with the hope that one day they will become donors, think about who you know and how you can get to know more people in more places - especially those who are the strangers in your community.

There are a lot of things you can do to get to know people. Make a list. And be sure that you have being a big thinker about small grants on your list. Small grants programs, at their heart, are about resident engagement - residents actively engaging with each other, and, if staffed appropriately and hosted by organizations that really value resident engagement, funders expanding the real relationships that they have with more people in their community.

It's that second part that is really important here - staffed appropriately and hosted by organizations who really value resident engagement. By staffed appropriately, I mean enough of the right people - people who can see a way to use the mechanics of the small grants process to build relationships and understands that their work is only beginning when the grant checks go out. People who really believe in people - and not just the idea of people - and who know in their hearts that everyone is important with something to offer. People who are as comfortable in a church basement as they are in a foundation board room, and who are natural translators and connectors.

Those special people, however, are just part of the picture. They need to be planted in resident engagement friendly soil - in an organization whose culture values people over programs, and where timelines, workloads, and internal reward systems are geared to encourage and support listening, learning, relationship building and connecting. When planted in organizational soil that is resident engagement friendly, the best small grants program staffers have the internal cover to be out of the office as much as they are in, and the permission to bring the relationships and perspectives that are gaining into internal conversations, planning and strategy development. In organizations who see small grants programs as core to their resident engagement strategy, planning tables, committees and yes, even boards, look different - with people beyond the usual suspects there, comfortable in their relationship with the funder and confident that they have something to contribute that is valued. And when the call comes to bring people together around a tough issue, you are beginning at a very different place - with relationships you already have and with people who, by virtue of their relationships, can help expand the circle.

It's about relationships. And the good news is that for those community foundations who think they don't have much experience with resident engagement, this is a reminder that you do. If you do the same thing on the community side that you are doing on the donor side of your business - build a strategy for continuously expanding and building relationships you have with residents - and embrace a time-tested, affordable tool as part of your resident engagement strategy that is well known to the community foundation field - small grants programs - you will be on your way.

If you need some pointers or a sounding board, get in touch and I'll do 3 things. I'll listen as carefully as I can and share all that I know, I'll point you to info on Grassroots Grantmakers website (and send you an advance copy of the soon to be released, "Short Course on Grassroots Grantmaking"), and, perhaps most importantly, I'll connect you to someone else who is a little further down the road that you want to travel. And, make a note to stay in touch so I can share what you are learning and how you are making resident engagement real here on this blog in the future.

Changing Personal Narratives as an Outcome

2013-01-09T16:17:00.001-06:00

What is more important? Process or products and outcomes. This is a question I'm frequently asked by people who are curious about citizen sector investing, with the expectation that I'm going to say process - and the assumption that in the small grants world, there can't be much "there there" when it comes to tangible products or outcomes.

Here's how I think about this question:

Ultimately, the product or ultimate outcome that we are looking for in the big thinking on small grants world of citizen sector investing is vibrant, resilient and just communities. But on the way to that destination - because of the process part of the equation - there's another outcome. It's people who see themselves and their neighbors through different eyes - as powerful, resourceful, and joyful. And people who know how to get things done, have experience initiating and acting, and are confident that most if not all of what they need is already right in the room - especially when the room is full of people just like them. It's a stronger citizen sector with people who see themselves as powerful - not because they are told that they are powerful, but because they have experienced themselves as powerful.

And here's what comes to mind when I think about the change in how people see themselves - changing their personal narratives - as an outcome:

I remember feeling initially horrified when a young woman from a community I was visiting stood up and said to the group of funders in the room, "I am an outcome". She was standing with a nonprofit staff member who was beaming with pride - pride that I interpreted as pride in her agency's ability to successfully fix this young woman. I couldn't imagine embracing the idea that I am an outcome - that I went into an agency's door broken and came out fixed because of the skilled mechanics inside, like a bum car that went into the shop and came out working.

But as I thought about this more, I realized that I - yes me, personally - am an outcome - the type of outcome that is sometimes invisible in the funding world but is absolutely essential to the community outcome that we're really after. How I think of myself has been profoundly changed by the experiences that I have had others in my community through the years. I have discovered personal gifts that I never suspected were there and were only revealed when I was in relationship with other people who valued what I had to offer and was in a situation that required me to give and grow that gift. Yes, required. Possibly because I was the one in the room with a missing piece of a bigger puzzle, and that doing something I cared about meant that I needed to move to the edge of my comfort zone and do something that I didn't think I could do. The imagining, planning, organizing and leading up to the product part - what some would describe as the process part - was where a lot of the growth happened for me, with the importance of the product - the cleaned up park, the community event, the neighborhood newspaper, the success at the City Council meeting - as fuel the reward at the end.

I have also been changed because I have seen people reveal amazing gifts that I never suspected were there because I was not aware of the judgements about who they were or what they could do that were clouding my vision. Again, more learning about myself as I was learning more about others.

And, I have been changed by the joy that has helped manage the growing pains of becoming who I am supposed to be - joy that was only there because I was in relationship with others.

I don't think of myself as a confident person, perhaps because confident, to me, comes close to cocky. But I know - only because of my experiences with my neighbors - that I have something to offer in spite of my flaws, that I don't have to have all of the answers, and that any moment might be the moment when I will discover something thrilling about the people around me. I know how to get something going and how to join in when something is already going - and, using my grassroots grantmaking jargon, see myself as an active citizen and someone who has power that is magnified when I connect with others who share the space that I call community.

As I think more about the young woman who announced herself as an outcome, I can say "yes - you go girl!" instead of "oh no". Even though she might have gone in one door to have something fixed, she came out with something else - a fire inside that ignited her courage to be in that room with us and stand up to proclaim that she is powerful in words that she thought we would appreciate and understand - "I am an outcome". She was on another path but we ended in at a similar destination.

So when you ask me about product or process, let me ask you:

Are we starting from the same place, with the shared belief that the ultimate product that we are after is community vibrancy, resiliency and justice?
How do you think about yourself as an outcome? And what experiences (or processes) along the way have been really important for shaping how you think about yourself?
If you're a funder, are you thinking about the learning by doing part of what you are funding as product-generating, or looking for what you consider to be shorter routes to your desired end?
If you are investing in fixing people doors, how are you also looking out for changing people's narrative opportunities that may also be inside those doors but are hidden away - just because people think that you're not interested in that type of product?

And, as always, I welcome your comments both on and offline. Weigh in here or connect with me directly via email.

Hey, Giving Circles

2012-09-13T14:52:00.000-05:00

Hey, giving circles, this post is for you. I love what you're about, and what is happening along side you in the fascinating and very promising new giving world. I'm looking forward to swimming in some very exciting giving circles water next month in Birmingham at the Community Investment Network's 2012 conference. If you're with a giving circle and you'll be there, please say hello!

While my work in philanthropy began as a staffer with a community foundation, my community work goes back to circles of neighbors, connecting around shared interests and getting the job done with time, talent and treasure resources that we contributed ourselves. We grew our circle through connections with people around their time, talent or treasure. And we kept a constant eye out for people who had gifts to give (even if they didn't see themselves that way). We also had welcome mats and on-ramps out everywhere to help people find us and make a connection that was about contribution.

You might not work exactly like that, but my hunch is that you are working with that same spirit in your giving circle. My hunch is also that the energy you feel when you come together around giving together is the same energy that we felt that kept us going, tackling big issues that others thought were too big for us to tackle. And, this is the same energy that fuels the citizen space groups that the big thinking on small grants world is all about. We may have on different jerseys, but my hunch is that we're all on the same team - the team that is about the possibilities that open up when everyday people connect around a shared interest and get something going together.

Here's a question and a proposition for you, giving circles.

When you meet with money on the table to give, are you finding and funding groups of everyday people that are not on the more typical funding radar screen? When you are making decisions about where to invest your giving circle dollars, are you looking for groups that are operating with the same time, talent and treasure spirit that gives you energy? I'm asking for 3 reasons:

1) I know that it is hard to find these groups - even for foundations with paid staff. These are groups that aren't seasoned grantseekers or show up on Guidestar or even in a phone book. Hard to find - yes. But findable and worth finding - also yes.

2) I've been surprised the power of money to change the conversation - even when neighborhood residents are making decisions about funding that is specifically designed for community projects, specifically in their neighborhood (with their neighbors as the do-ers). I'm fascinated at the moment with how easy it is for people to embrace, with the most noble "do good with this money" impulses, a hard-line approach about who should be trusted with money or who can deliver on a project. It's almost as if people become different people when they put on a funders hat. I'm not saying that this is you. I'm just saying that I've seen this happen so often that I'm really curious now about what people would do if they didn't have a preconceived notion of what to do to be a good funder. Would the conversations be more like neighbor to neighbor conversation "time, talent, treasure conversations" than the bottom-line bank finance officer to customer trying to take out a loan conversation?

3) I'm intrigued by the new possibilities that you are creating, giving circles, and the change you could create as part of the big thinking on small grants movement. And, I can imagine how much fun it would be for you if you could see and feel your role in building bridges between the funding world and the energy and efforts of everyday people who are connecting for mutual aid and collective action right on their own block in their home communities.

Here's my proposition:

I am inspired by what I hear of the relationship that one giving circle - Cleveland Colectivo - has developed with Neighborhood Connections, one of the grassroots grantmaking funders in our network. Cleveland Colectivo has gotten to know Neighborhood Connections in easy ways that help them spot the types of groups and projects that they might not find otherwise - and as a result of these easy connections, have funded some of these groups and projects. Just easy connections - opening up the list of possibilities for Cleveland Colectivo to consider for their giving circle conversations.

I'm interested in what Grassroots Grantmakers might be able to do to help create or nurture other easy connections so that other giving circles can also have citizen space groups on their list of possibilities. We're happy to share some quick "what to look for" tips to giving circles who are curious about supporting groups of everyday people who are pooling their time, talent and treasure to make a difference on their own blocks. We're also happy to see what we can do to help you create some easy connections like Cleveland Colectivo has made with Neighborhood Connections.

I'm mostly interested in hearing if there is anything we can do to provide an easy on-ramp for you to the big thinking on small grants world of resourcing citizen space. I have an eager ear to the ground on this question and am looking for people to join me as on-ramp co-creators. Connect with me via a comment here or an email. Or if you're in Birmingham, say hello and let's see what we can cook up.

Citizen Space is Relationship Space

2012-08-17T12:44:00.000-05:00

I was in Syracuse last week for Grassroots Grantmakers' 2012 On the Ground learning exchange, working now with batteries recharged by the amazing people and wonderful work that I had a chance to experience.

There is so much to stay, but I want to start by sharing something that connects to a common theme in this "big thinking" blog - the challenge of language when it comes to describing the "what" and "why" of work in citizen space that is about what people do together in their own communities in a spirit of mutual aid and collective action. The default language that we're skilled at using is about programs or projects that are conceptualized and managed by people associated with an organization. It's the language of business. A challenge that I face, and I bet many of you face, is how to distinguish work that is intentional and strategic, has some sort of organizational home, but grows from and is fueled more by community relationships that are based on mutuality than business oriented organizational structures and processes.

That's why I was really intrigued to hear how Nicole Watts, Founder and Executive Director of Hopeprint, described her work. Nicole shared her story - a story that began with connecting as friends with refugees and "having people over for dinner" and led to Nicole moving from the suburbs into Syracuse's Northside neighborhood, connecting with four others to establish the first Hopeprint home. Nicole described her work as relationship-based and talked about the opportunities that working this way open up - opportunities that would not be there if they viewed their work as programs or projects. If you take a look at the Hopeprint website and peruse the menu of things that are described there and the stories that are shared, you will see relationships everywhere and see what she means. You will also spot some things that could easily show up in a more traditional social service organization. But my hunch is that if you could be a fly on the wall in the tutoring, life skills training or youth activities that happen here, you would know you are in a very special place where relationships are driving the activities.

When I think about situations when I've needed help (or most recently, when I've found myself in institutional settings with my sweet mother), I can only dream about finding myself in a place where people approach their work as relationship-based, personal in ways that could actually lead to being invited over for dinner. The promise of work that we describe as grassroots grantmaking - focused on helping to resource and support what people do together as citizens - is that it is inherently relationship-based. The work that people do together is about who is there, what everyone can contribute, and the relationship bonds that they have and grow through working together. Effective "resourcing" of these groups also requires funders to work in a relationship-based way, letting down their professional guard and opening up new ways for their institutions to foster community engagement. What is frustrating to me is that when we look for outcomes, we only count programmatic outcomes and overlook the relationship-based outcomes - or often ignore how important the relationship-based orientation is to achieving the outcomes that we desire.

I want us to get over that hurdle, and get as comfortable with and trusting of relationship-based approaches as we are with programmatic approaches. Join me for thinking about what we can do together to make that happen.

The Two World Views of Squares & Blobs

2012-07-02T15:24:00.003-05:00

It is so easy to make things so hard - and so hard to make things easy. That's what I love the video that I'm sharing here today, No More Throw Away People, by Edward Cahn (author of the book, No More Throw Away People: The Co-Production Imperative). This ingenious video uses cartoon-like blobs and squares to illustrate the different contributions that institutions and people can make in solving problems, and - most interesting to me - paints a good picture of the relationship that I see most frequently when institutions try to solve problems through the most typical paths of community engagement.

In my experience, community engagement for most institutions (governments, foundations, established non-profits) involves people in institutions (squares) talking to people (blobs) to understand a problem and get their advice on how they should solve the problem. Institutions talk to people individually (surveys) or collectively (focus groups or forums or via other community engagement processes. They sometimes ask the most enlighted people they find to serve on a committee or even their board so that they can get a continuous stream of problem-interpretation or advice. And sometimes, they might even give grants to community groups so that they can work on the problems directly. Too often, when they give grants to community groups, they do that without understanding what they are doing to them by forcing them into a non-profit organization mold by their requirements or expectations.

It also shows what happens to the grassroots groups that people in a community form for mutual aid and collective action become more like squares than blobs - most often, when they are trying to gain legitimacy or find resources in their quest to get something done about a big problem in their community. They gain something (capacity to do things that squares are good at doing) but they lose something (capacity to do what blobs are good at doing).

This video, like Cahn's book, calls for co-production - a way of working together that allows squares to do what they do well and blobs to bring their unique gifts, perspectives and talents to the table. This is one of those things that sounds easy but apparently (because it happens so rarely) is really hard. I think that one of the things that makes it hard is that we - all of us - have a love-affair with squares and a dismissive attitude about blobs. Our love affair with squares has made us forget that we all are also blobs in some hours of our day or that the world of blobs even exists.

Check out this video, but do more than that. Begin your love-affair with blobs by using this video to launch a conversation that includes both squares and blobs about how people and institutions connect to get things done in your community. And let me know how it goes.

The Parable of the Blobs and Squares from James Mackie on Vimeo.

Yes! Democracy is for Amateurs

2012-05-16T13:47:00.001-05:00

I'm sharing a recent article by Eric Liu, co-author of The Gardens of Democracy and creator of the Guiding Lights Weekend, a conference on creative citizenship that appeared in The Atlantic. Eric was formerly a speechwriter and deputy domestic policy adviser for President Bill Clinton. Please read and pass on. I feel and see what Eric is talking about, and know that vibrant communities and effective local democracy will happen if more people agreed that democracy is for amateurs and saw themselves as citizen citizens.

Check out the four forces that Eric says need to be activated to revive a spirit of citizenship - and let's share thinking on these via comments.
Janis

Democracy is for Amateurs: Why We Need More Citizen Citizens

by Eric Liu

This year I'll wrap up a decade as a trustee of the Seattle Public Library. Our board of five citizens has unusual authority. Appointed by the mayor, we are an independent operating body. The city council gives us a line in the budget, but how we spend those funds, on what programs, in what allocations across which neighborhoods, with what kinds of popular input, and under what policies -- all such decisions rest in the hands of our citizen board.

There's something very American about such a volunteer body. We celebrate the "citizen scientist" or "citizen diplomat" or "citizen soldier" on the idea that while the job -- scientist, diplomat, soldier -- requires professional expertise, amateurs who care can also step in and contribute. Indeed, this is something of a golden age for amateurs. With big data and social media amplifying their wisdom, crowds of amateurs are remaking astronomy, finance, biochemistry and other fields.

But not so much the field called democracy. The work of democratic life -- solving shared problems, shaping plans, pushing for change, making grievances heard -- has become ever more professionalized over the last generation. Money has gained outsize and self-compounding power in elections. A welter of lobbyists, regulators, consultants, bankrollers, wonks-for-hire, and "smart-ALECs" has crowded amateurs out of the daily work of self-government at every level. Bodies like the library board are the exception.

What we need today are more citizen citizens. Both the left and the right are coming to see this. It is the thread that connects the anti-elite 99 percent movement with the anti-elite Tea Party. It also animates an emerging web of civic-minded techies who want to "hack" citizenship and government.

Why is government in America so hack-worthy now? There is a giant literature on how interest groups have captured our politics, with touchstones texts by Mancur Olson, Jonathan Rauch, and Francis Fukuyama. The message of these studies is depressingly simple: democratic institutions tend toward what Rauch calls "demosclerosis" -- encrustation by a million little constituencies who clog the arteries of government and make it impossible for the state to move or adapt.

This tendency operates in an accelerating feedback loop. When self-government is dominated by professionals representing various interests, a vicious cycle of citizen detachment ensues. Regular people come to treat civic problems as something outside themselves, something done to them, rather than something they have a hand in making and could have a hand in unmaking. They anticipate that engagement is futile, and their prediction fulfills itself.

So how do we replace this vicious cycle with a virtuous one? What does it take to revive a spirit of citizenship as something undertaken by amateurs and volunteers with a stake in their own lives? There are four forces to activate, and they cut across the usual left-right lines.

First, we have to develop what filmmaker Annie Leonard calls our "citizen muscle." As Americans we have hugely overdeveloped consumer muscles and atrophied citizen muscles. When we are consumers first, our elected leaders sell us exactly what we want: lower taxes, more spending, special rules for every subgroup.

Having a citizen muscle means thinking about the future and not just immediate gratification. It means asking what helps the community thrive, not just oneself. It means observing social change like a naturalist, and responding to it like a gardener. It means learning and teaching a curriculum of power -- in schools, and in settings for all ages -- so that we can practice power, even as amateurs.

Second, we need to radically refocus on the local. When the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson launched the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, he broke down that city's many paralyzing problems into human-scale chunks of action -- turning an empty lot into a park, say, or organizing faith communities -- and then linked up the people active in each chunk. Localism gives citizens autonomy to solve problems; networked localism enables them to spread and scale those solutions.

Third, think in terms of challenges rather than orders. One of the best ways to tap collective smarts is to set great goals and let diverse solutions emerge -- to be big on the what and small on the how. This is a lesson ecologist Rafe Sagarin emphasizes in his work: challenge grants like the X Prize motivate people to participate and innovate far more than top-down directives do. How can government behave more this way?

Fourth, create platforms where citizen citizens can actively serve. Code for America plugs software developers into city halls for a year so they can help government work better and spark decentralized citizen problem-solving. It's a great program -- and a template for other kinds of talent-tapping for the common good. How about Write for America, or Design, or Build?

So what are the obstacles to the cultivation of "citizen citizenship"? One is the assumption that only the privileged can afford the time to participate. There's of course truth to that. But the rising immigrant rights movement and the emergence of domestic workers as a civic force, to name but two recent examples, suggest that where there is will to make time there's a way.

A cynic might also say that the well educated and well connected will always have an edge in the game of civic participation. Maybe. This is the benefit of a robust ecosystem of nonprofit citizen organizations that can circulate that expertise and the power of those contacts to people with fewer advantages. Think of it as progressive taxation of social capital: the more connected you are, the more obligated to pay that social wealth forward.

A final fear is that when amateurs get organized they can get coopted by the powers of the status quo. But if so, reconstitute: Mark Meckler, who co-founded the Tea Party Patriots as a political amateur and an independent, found that his original network was hardening into a rigid GOP interest group. So he left and started Citizens for Self-Governance, which has a conservative bent but is dedicated to getting people from left and right to address issues like criminal justice in more creative, orthogonal ways than our politics typically allows.

Recently I came upon a billboard by a congested highway. "You're not stuck in traffic," it said. You are traffic." We aren't stuck in sclerotic government and extractive politics. We are these things. Our actions and omissions contribute to the conditions we decry. Or, to put it in positive terms: if we make the little shifts in mindset and habit to reclaim civic life, they will compound into contagion. We are the renewal of self-government we yearn for. That may sound like Obama '08 -- but it's also Reagan '80.

Citizenship, in the end, is too important to be left to professionals. It's time for us all to be trustees, of our libraries and every other part of public life. It's time to democratize democracy again.

Now Trending: Resident-Led Grantmaking

2012-05-10T07:00:00.003-05:00

I'm in Cleveland, wrapping up two days with teams from 7 organizations who are plowing new ground in the grassroots grantmaking world on resident-led grantmaking. I've been watching resident-led grantmaking take root over the past few years and am ready to say with certainty that this approach is now trending, with a growing number of funders now heading in the resident-led grantmaking direction.

When I say resident-led grantmaking, I mean grassroots grantmaking - funding that is designed to support work that happens in the citizen sector via groups that everyday people form as vehicles for mutual aid and collective action - where everyday people are making funding and program design decisions vs. funding professionals or posiitonal leaders. In the grassroots grantmaking universe, resident-led grantmaking is just one of the five decision-making approaches that funders are using (look here a chart that shows all 5 options with pros and cons). Each approach has value and can be the right approach. But resident-led grantmaking is the one approach that transforms the grantmaking process itself into a powerful and authentic vehicle for activating and elevating citizen engagement.

Grassroots Grantmakers will be generating and sharing information and tools on resident-led grantmaking over the next few months, but I want to quickly share some "what we've learned so far" insights from the people who were together in Cleveland this week - all everyday people who have deep experience as grantmakers via resident-led grantmaking commimttees in their communities.

The question posed was "what is the most valuable thing you've learned so far" insight about grassroots grantmaking. Here is a sampling of what was shared:

This work is simple but not easy.
Advancing citizen-led work is a marathon and not a sprint. It requires you to be patient but to work with a sense of urgency.
Sustainability is not about sustained money. Sustainability is about more people in the action - but not necessarily always the same people. It's about creating a sustainable culture of participation and citizen action.
Established non-profits can see this work as threatening. It challenges their good-intentioned work by saying in tangible ways that non-profits are not the ones to lead community change and community building. It's challenging because it's about a shift in the traditional power structure - especially when it comes to who gets funded.
This work isn't about the money - it's about citizen voice and action. But then again it is about the money, because having money can elevate citizen voice and action. It's just that the money is the vehicle, not the focus.
Getting the word out is especially important in this type of grantmaking, and it's relationships and personal contact rather than more traditional marketing processes that are needed to reach the people and groups that you want to be in the mix for this type of grantmaking.
Who sits on the grantmaking committee matters. This work needs people who have credibility in their community and strong belief in people.
There is a difference between an idea and a plan. People come forward with an idea, but often need help developing the idea into a plan.
It's important to remember that we are hearing about dreams and passion - about an idea that is as important to people as their own baby. The grantmaking process should be respectful of those babies.

This is an amazingly insightful list, isn't it? Watch for more to come on resident-led grantmaking in the coming months, and please be in touch if you are involved in resident-led grantmaking or want to get involved - I would love to connect and help get you connected into this fascinating conversation.

Signing On with Copernicus

2012-04-30T14:36:00.000-05:00

Do you remember Copernicus? He was the Renaissance era scientist/revolutionary who shook up conventional thinking by demoting Earth from center of the universe status to one of many planets rotating around the Sun. I'm signing on with him now, rearranging things in my big thinking on small grants universe - moving funders from the center of my universe and moving everyday people and the groups they form for mutual aid and collective action into the center. My telescope might still be focused on "Planet Funder" as it makes its way around my citizen sector sun, but it will also be focused on the other planets in my new universe - planets representing the people, places and non-monetary resources that citizen groups find helpful for moving their ideas into action and contributing to the vibrancy of their local communities.

This is not such a big deal in one way, since the big thinking on small grants world that I have been describing for several years is a world where funders strive to work from a "we begin with residents" point of view - leading from behind or by stepping back, investing in what everyday people identify as important and are willing to get behind with their own time, talents and resources. But it is a big deal in other ways.

For one, this new Copernian universe puts the role of funders, and especially the grants that they make, in the right place - secondary not primary, in the back seat and not the front seat. It also has the heat and energy to get things done originating from the right place - the citizen sector - instead of a foundation board room. It's about a core set of assumptions about how change happens and what contributes to community vitality, with people connecting and moving plans into action around things that matter to them more important than a carefully detailed theory of change or a blue ribbon panel meeting of 30 people who have prestigious positions. For those who believe that strengthening the nonprofit sector is the answer to addressing the challenges that our communities are facing, it is indeed as revolutionary as Copernicus' suggestion that the accepted picture of the universe at the time (earth in the center) just might be wrong.

What this means for this blog is that some changes are in the works. I'm waiting for inspiration for a new name that is not so grant or funder-centric (and appreciate all suggestions!) and better reflects post-Copernian thinking, and will be moving to a new blogging platform that more easily allows others to join in this conversation with me. In the meantime, I will be opening up the aperture on my blogging lens to catch and share thinking about questions such as:

What new language will help advance understanding about citizen space and what goes on there, and free us from using using inappropriate nonprofit language and models to describe and interpret a world that is fundamentally different from the nonprofit world?
How are citizen groups immunizing themselves from being hypnotized by visitors from Planet Funder and others who arrive with the better way or today's new tool? And once immunized, what are they learning about building working relationships that make sense for everyone?
What are other "joining with Copernicus" people doing to build constructive bridges between the institutions and organizations where they work - funding organizations, schools, libraries, hospitals, governmental entities, businesses, non-profits - and citizen space. And what are these inventors learning about resource sharing between citizen groups and their organizations?
What new pathways are opening up that are or have the potential to change the relationship dynamic between Planet Funder and those on the other planets in this new universe and citizen space?

I hope you will join with me in this exploration by adding on to the questions that might be worth exploring together. Comments from co-explorers are welcome.

On Target Commentary: Philanthropy's Responsibility to Democracy

2012-03-30T13:45:00.008-05:00

I'm sharing this on commentary on philanthropy's responsibility to democracy, offered by William Schambra as the closing plenary of the recent Grant Manager's Network Conference in San Antonio. I'll offer my thoughts on Schambra's speech in a follow up post.

Philanthropy's Responsibility to Democracy
by William Schambra

My marching orders from the conference organizers went something like this: be provocative, but try not to be offensive. I’ll certainly aim for the former, but I suspect, for some of you, I’m going to be the latter, and for that I apologize in advance.

Your conference theme for this year is, I see, “The Sky’s the Limit.” And your opening plenary, featuring John Colborn from the Ford Foundation, promised that he would tell you why – and I’m quoting here — “grant managers are central to philanthropic effectiveness and (perhaps) the future of civilization.”

I’m going to talk a bit this morning about the role philanthropy might play in the future of American democracy – I’m not quite sure I can quite reach all the way up to the civilizational level. And – fair warning, for those of you who are thinking you might want to slip out early to catch your flights — I’m going to be a bit less optimistic than Mr. Colborn about philanthropy’s role in that future. So your conference began on a theme of “the sky’s the limit,” and I’m afraid it may end on the theme of “this guy’s the limit.”

To ease into this rather large theme — the role that philanthropy can play in preserving American democracy — I’m going to describe an experience I had about twelve years ago, while I was a program officer at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee.

One very cold, wet, dismal, blustery spring evening in Milwaukee — those of you who have been in the upper Midwest in early spring know that there’s a lot of redundancy in that description — I was invited by a community organizer to join him and a group of a dozen or so parents and teachers in a cold, dismal, unheated field house in a park on the city’s south side. They were parents and teachers who had just learned that the school superintendent had targeted their school for significant changes in curriculum, and they were very unhappy about it.

In most American school districts, that would have been the end of the story — the parents would have had to just sigh and take what was dished out. But Milwaukee has a pretty expansive choice and charter school law. And with the help of the organizer, these parents were going to do something unthinkable and outrageous. They weren’t going to just take what was coming down at them from on high. They were going to start their own school.

For four hours that evening, these citizens discussed every aspect of what they wanted out of their own school — what was to be taught, how it was to be taught, who they were going to hire to teach it. At first, they were pretty timid and shy about it — as if they were trespassing on forbidden ground. After all, they had been told all their lives that education is an incredibly difficult and demanding thing, requiring all sorts of credentialed teachers and principals with PhDs and professional curriculum specialists.

They didn’t have any of that. They didn’t even know who to contact to turn on the heat in the field house.

But slowly, as the evening went on, they became less reserved and timorous, more engaged and vigorous, more expansive about what sort of school they wanted their own children to attend — and what sort of school they were even at that very moment designing for their children. By the end of the evening, they had established the outlines of what came to be known as the IDEAL school — IDEAL standing for Individualized Developmental Approaches to Learning. A dozen years later, it’s still going strong and enjoys a productive partnership with the YMCA in Milwaukee, with upwards of 200 students and a waiting list.

But even today, on their website, they recount the story of their humble and unpromising origins. As they say, “We started with no building, no students, and no name. What we did have was a vision.”

I came away from this evening feeling incredibly energized and excited, and I wasn’t quite sure why. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and I’ve come to realize that it inspired me so deeply because I had been fortunate to witness the great and central act of American democracy. It was the act of everyday citizens coming together around a shared vision and forging their own community to embody that vision.

From nothing except a shared purpose — and in the face of all sorts of obstacles, ranging from the bureaucratic charter application process to the hostility of the teachers unions to the scorn of the education professionals telling them that parents know nothing about teaching children — they nonetheless created a nonprofit organization to solve their own problems their own way.

Now, I knew about this particular American quality in theory because I, like many of you here today, had read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. We learn therein that Americans are particularly gifted at establishing their own local organizations to solve their own problems, unlike Tocqueville’s French compatriots, who, as he puts it, tend to fold their arms and wait for government to show up to solve problems for them.

But he warns us that getting citizens to pay attention to the larger affairs of the community is very difficult, even in America. The science of association or of community-building, he warns us, is rare and difficult to sustain. First, because we democratic individuals tend to be selfish and materialistic and prone to pursue our own immediate self-interest without regard for others. Second, because narrowly self-centered individuals are all too willing to surrender to others the fuss and bother of governing. The experts in governing, in turn, would just as soon do without all those independent and obstreperous civic associations that only clutter up the orderly, top-down delivery of services.

Well, all that I knew by way of theory. But it didn’t prepare me for how awe-inspiring it would be to witness first-hand the essential Tocquevillian act of citizens gathered in a community to take back the power from centralized bureaucracy and become masters of their own future once again.

Don’t mistake this for “volunteering” or “service.” This was not nicey-nice giving blood at the Red Cross. On the issue of utmost importance to these parents — the future of their children — they were able to act, for the first time in their lives, as genuine citizens of the great American democracy.

A friend of mine who’s a labor organizer described it well: in this field, there is nothing quite like seeing citizens coming into the first realization of their own agency, and living into their ability to control their own lives.

American civil society has over the centuries been the arena within which everyday citizens come to realize their own democratic agency, no matter how marginal, neglected, or oppressed they may otherwise have been in this imperfect democracy of ours. By forming associations within civil society — what we would later call nonprofits — despised religious sects organized their own self-supporting communities. Abolitionists organized against the slave trade.

Freed and self-liberated slaves established their own churches, lodges, and burial societies. Powerless and voteless women came together in powerful reform movements to reshape the workplace for women and children, and earn for themselves the right to vote. Fraternal and ethnic associations formed among poor laborers to insure provision for their own widows and orphans. The African-American church worked to undermine and finally to topple Jim Crow.

When we in philanthropy make grants to nonprofits, it’s essential for us to remember that we hold within our grasp — we play a part in the fates of — the groups that Americans have formed over two centuries to give form and substance to the precious and rare act of self-governance. This is an awesome responsibility indeed.

Now, we don’t often think of our grant-making that way, because the nonprofits we typically see in our everyday work don’t look like passionate, self-governing democratic communities. Or rather, they don’t look that way, given the way we look at them.

What we tend to see, no matter the specific subject area, are organizations designed to deliver professional services to clients — health care to patients, jobs to applicants, artistic performances to audiences, and so forth. And when it comes to service delivery, we tend to have certain very firm notions of what’s good. Delivery should be efficient, effective, best-practice, up-to-date, professional, comprehensive, systematic, streamlined. These are all adjectives, incidentally, that I gleaned just from the first few pages of your conference program.

Now, this is hardly a new state of affairs. It was inaugurated by the first large American foundations — Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Russell Sage — at the turn of the twentieth century. In the view of these donors, we needed to get away from the piecemeal, partial, parochial approach of mere charity, which just sought to put Band-Aids on problems, and turn instead to the systematic, efficient, wholesale solution of public problems once and for all, by getting at their root causes. The way to do that was to take our public affairs out of the hands of everyday citizens, and put them instead into the hands of professional experts. They were being trained in the new natural and social sciences, which would allegedly enable them to reach and alter root causes. Our problems would now be addressed not by citizens clumsily working out superficial remedies with each other in local association, but rather by credentialed experts, smoothly delivering therapeutic services to passive, grateful clients. In other words, our first major foundations seemed to encourage precisely the short-circuiting of democracy so much feared by Tocqueville — the displacement of the everyday citizen from democratic self-governance by centralized bureaucratic service providers.

In recent years, this displacement has been further encouraged by the nonprofit sector’s enthrallment to the corporate model. You’re all familiar with this powerful urge to make nonprofits more business-like. We say that a nonprofit needs a business plan; it should consider contributions “investments;” it needs to be more entrepreneurial; it needs to focus on generating fees for service; it needs to describe outcomes with clear, concise measurements, just like the profit and loss statements of the business world.

This approach to philanthropy has only been reinforced over the past few years by the entry of so many newly wealthy entrepreneurs into the world of philanthropy.

Consider this comment by Charles Bronfman and Jeffrey Solomon in their recent book The Art of Giving, which captures perfectly this new philanthropic attitude. As they put it:

[These new] donors . . . are ready to make use of the sophisticated management instruments they have developed in their business life to achieve greater performance in this new, more challenging arena. . . . . .[T]hey give purposefully, think strategically, rely on measurements and regular monitoring.

Nonprofits should be run just as crisply as for-profits. Meetings should start on time and end on time too. They should not be social gatherings that drag on endlessly for no purpose.

I particularly like that last comment — about the crisp conduct of nonprofit meetings — because it captures perfectly the two contrasting ways to look at a nonprofit. Are nonprofit meetings just obligatory calendar entries, occasions to clip through an agenda briskly and efficiently, glancing at the performance dashboard, digesting data, and peering at PowerPoints? Or are they not in fact sometimes precisely social gatherings — leisurely opportunities for citizens to come together and socialize, to form deeper personal bonds of friendship and trust, to create a community, as well as to conduct business? Is a nonprofit just another business, or is it not also often an instrument of democratic self-governance?

Beginning with Robert Putnam’s monumental volume of research, entitled Bowling Alone, published a decade ago, philanthropy has been concerned about the issue of civic disengagement in America — the fact that citizens are becoming far less involved with each other in the sort of social and political undertakings that Tocqueville once described as the very essence of the American character.

Indeed, there’s even a thoughtful foundation affinity group, Philanthropy for Active Civil Engagement, or PACE, the purpose of which is to attempt to reverse that trend.

But the irony is that philanthropy itself may be contributing to that very disengagement from civic life. That is precisely the cost of regarding nonprofits primarily as efficient and effective service-providers, rather than as instruments of democratic self-governance.

When citizens undertake to do something for themselves, it can of course be amateurish, time-consuming, sloppy, contentious, and clumsy. But in the final analysis, what they’ve achieved is likely to endure and to succeed, because it’s rooted in the opinions and values of the citizens themselves, those whom the programs are meant to serve.

More important, as Tocqueville told us, no matter how awkward the outcomes, this approach also serves to draw people out of the isolated, individualistic shells into which they’re likely to retreat in materialistic times. It engages them in the always messy and tumultuous processes of self-government. It may be frustrating and exasperating to those who prefer crisp, business-like meetings. But this grittiness and tumult are ultimately essential ingredients of the humanizing and democratizing process of self-government.

If we’re only interested in efficiency, then indeed it may be better to resort to professional experts, who have a neatly organized menu of standard operating procedures to deliver services smoothly and quickly. But all too often, without the engagement of the citizens affected, those services come to be resented and resisted as outside impositions, rather than native-grown products of self-government.

Furthermore, and more important, by employing experts to undertake the tasks of democratic government, we’ve relieved citizens of the need to engage with each other and to work out their differences in their own messy and amateurish ways. That can only spell the end of democratic self-governance.

Now, consider all the standards and practices that philanthropy increasingly demands of the nonprofit world:

Ever longer and more elaborate application processes;
Ever more burdensome reporting requirements;
Ever more complicated ways of describing goals through logic models and theories of change;
Ever more sophisticated modes of measuring outcomes;
Ever more elaborate ways to evaluate results.

All of these foundation demands flow naturally from the view that nonprofits should be more businesslike. And they flow naturally from the view that foundations aren’t there just to assist nonprofits in putting Band-Aids on problems, but are rather driving scientifically toward root cause solutions of those problems. And these demands are perfectly amenable to the large, sophisticated nonprofits whose primary purpose is indeed to deliver professional services to passive clients. We’ll hear no complaint from them about this state of affairs. As part of their elaborate expert apparatus, they employ professionals whose entire purpose it is to address the needs and desires of other professionals employed by foundations.

But for the smaller nonprofit launched by everyday citizens who urgently need to solve some immediate problem in their own backyard — for the organization that would serve to convert passive clients into active citizens — all of these requirements put out of reach any hope for a grant, thereby ruling out philanthropy as a solution to the problem of civic disengagement.

So the nonprofits that we foundations see do indeed all tend to look like efficient service-deliverers, because that’s precisely what our own requirements and procedures encourage or even demand. At the same time, they serve to discourage or even filter out altogether non-professional, amateur, self-governing democratic associations.

Now, the sad thing is that all of this is so unnecessary, in the world of philanthropy. For government, of course there must be strict requirements for soliciting and reporting on grants, because it’s the taxpayers’ money. If a nonprofit runs a business or sells its services, of course we expect certain corporate-like practices, to avoid fatal mismanagement. But for the foundation, there are no such strictures.

Philanthropy has extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled, freedom to do with its resources whatever it wishes, within some legal boundaries that are pretty generous and undemanding. It would be entirely possible for a foundation to announce today that it was not going to fund delivery of professional services anymore, with all the burdensome requirements that entails. Instead the foundation could announce as its purpose the cultivation of self-government among democratic citizens. It would not put out RFPs or delineate narrow program areas or create its own nonprofit subsidiaries to carry out its own programs. It would rather announce that funding is available for whatever efforts citizens come up with in the give and take of immediate civic deliberation.

The application process would be brief; the reporting requirements kept to the legal minimum; and the grant would be for general operating support, renewable for as many years as the foundation and the nonprofit see fit to cooperate. As I say, foundations have the freedom to undertake this sort of radically free-form and democratic grant-making.

But as with Steve Martin in the old “Saturday Night Live” sketches, at the end of this exuberant thought experiment, I’m afraid the answer of philanthropy will be — “nah.”

Short of that, I ask all of you, as you leave this conference armed with lots of new information and skills in grant management, to remember this: the organizations you deal with every day once were, and potentially still can be, the vessels by which Americans have tried to govern themselves for more than two centuries.

As Tocqueville argued, democratic self-governance is a rare and precious thing, all too readily surrendered by citizens to professional experts who are only too happy to take charge. Given the institutional requirements of government and business, they aren’t likely to care too much about, or to tend to the preservation of, the democratic heart of the nonprofit sector. Only philanthropy has the freedom and the mandate to do so. In that sense, you may very well hold within your hands the future of American democracy, if not civilization itself.I particularly like that last comment — about the crisp conduct of nonprofit meetings — because it captures perfectly the two contrasting ways to look at a nonprofit. Are nonprofit meetings just obligatory calendar entries, occasions to clip through an agenda briskly and efficiently, glancing at the performance dashboard, digesting data, and peering at PowerPoints? Or are they not in fact sometimes precisely social gatherings — leisurely opportunities for citizens to come together and socialize, to form deeper personal bonds of friendship and trust, to create a community, as well as to conduct business? Is a nonprofit just another business, or is it not also often an instrument of democratic self-governance?

Grace Lee Boggs On "Becoming Detroit"

2012-03-20T14:06:00.001-05:00

Here's a powerful way to spend an hour. Tune into "Becoming Detroit", a recent episode of Krista Tippet's On Being podcast. Krista's interviews with civic rights legend Grace Lee Boggs and others who are reinventing Detroit are inspiring. They also get to the heart of why it's so important for funders to think big about small grants and invest in everyday people who are re-discovering, re-imaging and re-spiriting their communities - without using the awkward, often de-humanizing language that we use in philanthropy.

I've been thinking about language alot recently - reminded again recently about the limitations of the language that we're using to describe grassroots grantmaking. I find it discouraging that the language that is most easily digestible by philanthropy is about professionalized solutions delivered by organizations and not about people. It was thus so refreshing to listen to the conversations shared in this podcast - so refreshing that I jotted down some of the phrases that caught my attention.

You have to make a way out of "no way".

Activism is often more about rights when we need to be talking about advancing humanity.

There's something about people who are doing something for themselves - creating the world anew.

People have been seduced by size - by the idea of the mass media. They haven't realized that by creating solutions to everyday problems, they are creating movements.

The disintegration of neighborhood and community makes it difficult for us to know how to care for each other; we are now relearning how to do that.

What does it mean to be a human being? In America, you can't be successful unless you can consume or produce - but you still have value as a human being.

It's not just a warm and fuzzy garden; its about people becoming part of an ecological system.

Progress comes about via something new or rediscovering something old - and reinventing what you discover for today's world.

It's important for change-agents to know the difference between "necessary" and "possible"; it's possibility that demands the most of us.

Detroit as the City of Hope - where people are creating hope for themselves.

Our right and our duty is to shape the world with a new dream, and to rebuild, redefine and respirit our city.

Check it out, and join me in working on this gnarly problem of language by sharing what this sparked for you or another resource that you have spotted that brings humanity into the center of the discussion about big thinking on small grants.

Finding a Grassroots Grantmaker

2012-03-01T12:54:00.003-06:00

I had a conversation with a small group of great people earlier this week I've had way too often. I was wrapping up a short talk on grassroots grantmaking and the network, Grassroots Grantmakers, when a young man raised his hand to share his story about trying to find someone - anyone - who is interested in what he and his neighbors are doing and could help them get connected to the modest resources they need to work on their next idea. He really identified with my "big thinking on small grants" perspective and was surprised to learn that there are funders out there who actually open their doors to people like her. He asked where he could go in his community to find one of those funders and what he needed to say or do to open the door. I answered him with the what I have to say way too often. In terms of funders who thing big about small grants and are interested in ideas like yours, there's no one at home in your community.

I was thinking about this and the disconnect I see between people with energy, passion and the will do work that could be described as the work of active citizens and place-based funders who have connections, resources and mandate to acknowledge and strengthen the contribution of such work to community vitality and viability when I spotted Rich Harwood's recent blog post about the importance of community anchor institutions. I was thinking about how many people would read Rich's blog and then identify a funding organization as a community anchor institution that felt welcoming, and a place that had the confidence of everyday people to help to spark and lead change, convene and connect others, and focus on the community (rather than programs alone).

My hunch is in most places, funding organizations are thought of as mysterious places - where money is stacked up and given out in mysterious ways. And I've seen funding organizations that seem to actually cultivate that impression. But the good news is that I have also seen funding organizations that work really hard to be accessible, transparent community anchor instituions. And I'm with Rich - when that happens, the moon and stars line up to open up a new environment of possibilities.

What I would add, however, is that when it's funding organizations we're talking about as community anchor institutions, grassroots grantmaking is almost always there - increasing the funding organization's reach, legitimacy and breadth of intellectual capital that changes the equation from mysterious community institution to powerful community anchor institution.

While I try to keep my focus on the full part of the glass and the possibilities that the entrepreneurial funders that I know about are creating, I must say that I'm more than a bit perplexed by the few places that grassroots grantmaking is showing up - especially considering that in the United States alone, there are:

650 community foundations (and these are defined as tax-exempt, nonprofit, autonomous, publicly supported, nonsectarian philanthropic institutions with a long term goal of building permanent, named component funds established by many separate donors to carry out their charitable interests and for the broad-based charitable interest of and for the benefit of residents of a defined geographic area, typically no larger than a state);
89,000 private foundations - with at least some specifically focused on the vitality of a local community;
more than 1200 local United Ways;
and countless community-focused public-sector and non-profit organizations.

And, considering that grassroots grantmaking is a low cost/high return proposition, I just have to ask why more funders are not including grassroots grantmaking in their portfolio of grantmaking strategies. I've been poking around on that question recently, and have some hunches that range from big boulder obstacles to things that should be easily swept aside - many that I've written about from time to time on this blog and others that I'm still exploring.

Nevertheless, if I had my way, I would be able to say "call here" whenever I'm asked about what funding organization in a particular community is the go-to, big thinking place for groups of everyday people who have skin in the game when it comes to their community. And when people showed up at the door of that funding organization, they would find places where what Rich Hardwood is describing is happening, but they would also find places that feel good - like places of possibility.

So now I'm asking you. Do you know of a funding organization that meets the criteria that Rich describes as a community anchor institution and, for everyday people, feels like a place of possibility? If so, please share a story about that place or some thoughts about what makes it stand out for you. We need more real-live examples of a boulder-breaking funders - an important step in making it easier for all of us to find a grassroots grantmakers in every community.

Inner Visions and the Power of One

2012-02-16T16:05:00.000-06:00

Do you ever feel overwhelmed with the bigness of the problems that you are trying to address and wonder what difference you can possibly make? I do. Often. That's why I find so much inspiration in people who find a way to make a difference, one step at a time, in the most surprising ways. And I'm inspired now.

Imagine that you are living in a city that was just awarded the dubious honor of "Poorest City in the United States" and you are just one person, volunteering with a transitional housing program and tutoring a young boy from one of those neighborhoods that always show up on lists that include words like "poor" or the more politically correct "challenged" in their title. What more than you are doing could you do?

I talked with a woman who was in exactly that position this morning. I first met Jan Thrope last winter when Grassroots Grantmakers organized a special training for delegations from Cleveland and Denver in Lawrence, MA with Lawrence Community Works. I saw Jan again this fall in Atlanta as Grassroots Grantmakers' most recent On the Ground learning gathering. But this morning was the first time that we really talked. I contacted Jan because I had heard about the Good News Tours that she is now doing and was curious. As Jan shared her story, I quickly went from curious to inspired.

Jan talked about the discouragement she felt when Cleveland was named Poorest City a few years ago and the new determination she felt to be part of something that made a difference. She isn't a native of Cleveland but has lived there long enough to have deep roots and the ability to see a different side of Cleveland than that distinction suggested. A man who spoke at a poverty summit that she was attending brought the conversation about big plans and big programs back to the ground for her - saying that what he really needed most was some underwear. Who in that room was thinking about real people like him, in very real situations like his?

Jan had that in mind as she was working with the young boy she was tutoring, and began to listen to this young boy in new ways - hearing what he thought about his neighborhood and then taking pictures of what places he described. She also heard dreams in what he was telling her - not just despair. These conversations and these photos resulted in an amazing book - Inner Visions: Grassroots Stories of Truth and Hope - on sale now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and, hopefully, your local bookseller, with all profits going to support community work in Cleveland.

So that's Chapter 1 - and Chapters 2 and 3 get even better. Jan has now established Inner Visions of Cleveland, an organization that is dedicated to transforming Cleveland and East Cleveland neighborhoods into thriving communities by supporting community improvement projects that are initiated and led by residents. Jan describes Inner Visions as a non-profit but then goes on to say that she was intentional about not seeking non-profit status for the organization, saying that the red-tape in obtaining that status and the responsibilities that go along with having the status felt more like a barrier to doing what she had in mind. She wondered if there was another way, and is indeed finding that way. Working with a commitment to using all donations and proceeds from books sales to fund community projects, and a belief that "small bucks can bring about big change when neighbors work towards shared goals and contribute their talents to projects", Jan is focused on getting things done by creating connections between people who are on journeys from pain to passion to purpose - a journey she says all people share, regardless of their economic situations.

As one way to do this, Jan has been experimenting with Good News Tours - relationship-building excursions that are designed to challenge the perception that poor neighborhoods are devoid of hope and possibilities and plant relationship seeds that can grow into purpose-driven connections. This weekend she will taking 15 people - including an 11 year boy who wants to get other kids excited about giving back to their community, people of wealth who are open to a new way of giving, and people from a church in a neighborhood they will be visiting - on a Good News Tour. And good news is abundant on this tour, with these stops along the way:

Breakfast prepared by a woman who offers healthy cooking classes for community residents, using organic, locally grown food;
A visit with a powerful woman who has been at the forefront of responding to the foreclosure crisis in Cleveland and is now working on creative ideas to put vacant houses back to good use for community purposes;
Another woman who is establishing a new business, making organic beauty products;
A visit with an entrepreneur who has a green dry cleaning business (and teaches a class on entrepreneurship to neighborhood youth) and dreams of using the heat generated from the dryers to warm a greenhouse that can house a new youth-led business, growing and selling produce and flowers;
A visit with a printer and bookmaker who is creating journals of hand-made paper produced from the fibers from military uniforms for returning veterans to use to share their stories.

So think about it. Imagine the connections that are about to happen, the stereotypes that are about to be challenged, the possibilities that are about to turn into realities. Now imagine what would be lost if this all had to happen within non-profit organizations on both the giving and receiving side of the equations. And think about - and be inspired by - the power of one. Kudos to you, Jan!