Update: Can Philanthropy Be Citizen-Centered?

Last fall, I raised this question in a blog posting on the Case Foundation's website, and it generated quite a bit of response. That's hardly surprising, given the veil of secrecy that has long surrounded philanthropic institutions. But I suspect that this question stirred people's interest for another reason: It reflects a slow, but simmering, movement away from expert rule to citizen-driven efforts that are bringing wide swaths of communities together to decide what's important and what to do about it.

Lifting up these "citizen-centered"¹ efforts was the focus of the Case Foundation's Make It Your Own Awards grants initiative. The program was inspired by a concept outlined in Citizens at the Center: A New Approach to Civic Engagement, which suggested that civic renewal isn't going to happen unless there are civic spaces and cultures that encourage all people -- not just the experts or those who are volunteering and voting -- to get involved in solving public problems.

But implementing a strategy wasn't the program's only goal. The other was testing a new model of citizen-centered philanthropy that would involve "real people" in the development of the program's guidelines, the application process, and grant decisions.

That process involved three citizen-centered phases. First, the foundation held several meetings of diverse groups of residents in several cities to solicit their input on a rough draft of the guidelines. Second, the foundation recruited nearly 100 people not associated with philanthropy to score applications and winnow down the list of 5,000 applicants to the "top 100."

Recognizing that citizen-centered approaches are not just "bottom-up" or "top-down" but a convergence of the two, the foundation brought in a small group of leaders in the civic engagement field to help select the top 20 applicants out of a final list of 30 that had the highest scores. That led to the third citizen-centered step: posting the top 20 -- all of whom received $10,000 each -- on the foundation's website and asking the nation to vote on which four should receive an additional $25,000.

The program was one of several experimenting with a participatory approach to philanthropy at the same time. The Knight Foundation, for example, added a public participation component to its journalism grant program, the News Challenge. American Express's Members Project asked cardholders to post proposals on a website and vote for those most worthy of support. And Grassroots Grantmakers -- a group of philanthropic institutions that champions resident-led efforts in urban and rural neighborhoods -- has long been committed to participatory philanthropy.

These and other philanthropic institutions are laying groundwork for what many hope is a full-scale trend across philanthropy -- one in which foundations move from being the arbiters of what gets done to serving as facilitators of a process in which they partner with other community institutions and residents in designating priorities and crafting actions.

So why is this important?

Some argue that inviting more public participation helps philanthropy honor its civic mission and build stronger communities with a more embedded sense of social efficacy. Others maintain that philanthropy has a responsibility to involve the public in its decision-making processes because it derives significant tax benefit from that public. And still others assert that it's simply "the right thing to do" because civic participation is the hallmark of a democracy in which the nonprofit sector plays an extremely important role in promoting.

Others, however, want more than values-based arguments. They want evidence that public participation leads to more effective investments, and in turn, successful initiatives and stronger communities. They want to see if such approaches are more cost-efficient and can help meet strategic goals. And they want to learn how participatory philanthropy can be measured, which requires moving from seeing results as "how many houses were built" to whether the larger community has the capacity to work together to prevent homelessness.

These are legitimate issues that warrant more discussion -- and in public forums. Perhaps we could start by asking: What is the role of the public in philanthropy? And does philanthropy owe the public a role in decision-making?

These questions raise significant and thorny issues that are rarely touched on in philanthropic-focused forums and when they are, it's usually under the aegis of accountability or transparency -- issues that may be related to, but are not necessarily synonymous with, public responsibility. Or, they drift into discussions about the tactics of participatory philanthropy such as online voting, which should be viewed as a means to a greater end, not an end unto itself.

Given what I see as an increasing animosity between grant seekers and grant makers, however -- and a parallel increase in the amount of public suspicion bubbling up about what foundations do and whether it makes a difference -- it may be time for the philanthropic community to throw open the doors and explore these questions. In the meantime, philanthropic institutions interested in public participation can take small steps to implement that ideal and, ultimately, to develop stronger partnerships between them and the "real people" they are trying to support.

Like the programs we've been watching closely in the past year, they can ask people to vote on grant award dollars. They can recruit people in communities to help advise in developing grant criteria, application processes, and overall programs. They can ask the public to engage in their priority-setting when they do their periodic assessments, hold occasional meetings for the public, and bring in practitioners and outsiders to brief staff members on a regular basis.

Are these efforts worth it? You bet.

Even if they fail, they're at least an attempt to nudge the philanthropic community toward a mind-set that considers ways in which it might be more responsive, real, and respectful to the public it purports to serve. That's a real stretch from the way in which many foundations operate, which raises the hackles of nonprofits that feel there is too much talk about transparency and not enough "do."

No one is arguing that philanthropic institutions don't have the right to decide what to do with their money. Nor are they suggesting that there is no role for experts and intermediaries in making decisions, especially in processes that threaten to dovetail into popularity contests or politically motivated shortcuts.

What's needed is more of a balance between the professionals and the public, as well as more discussion about how to achieve that goal. Let's hope that philanthropy makes it a goal worth pursuing -- now and in the future.

¹ The word "citizen" is used inclusively, i.e., it assumes the inclusion of both current and future citizens and is not an attempt to exclude any person or group based on their legal status.