Nonprofits, Foundations, and the Future of American Democracy

The persistent yearning to construct and live in small, self-governing communities has come as a great surprise to many modern public policy experts. After all, isn't the world today dominated by vast, irresistible social and economic forces like globalization and mobility and transience and constant change?

In the recent book Applebee's America, authors Doug Sosnic, Matt Dowd, and Ron Fournier contend that those grand forces that push people apart in the modern world only make people try that much harder to come together within self-governing communities. A similar argument can be found in Matt Leighninger's The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance...and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same.

This trend has an immediate bearing on nonprofit organizations. If Americans are turning away from expert rule and toward more immediate, local self-governance, how will they learn those skills and talents?

We find the answer in yet a third book, but one that's almost two centuries old. It's titled Democracy in America, and it was written by a visiting Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. Americans learn the art of self-governance, he argued, within local civic associations -- by forming and joining and administering organizations such as nonprofits.

Tocqueville feared that, in the new age of materialism and individualism, people were all too inclined to retreat into the privacy of their own lives, to have less and less contact with others. So some means must be found to draw individuals out of their isolation, into mutual civic engagement. And a primary means to accomplish this, for Tocqueville, was local civic association. Here, individuals would come together with their neighbors and learn to deliberate, to reason, to argue, to compromise, to organize, around matters that were of immediate concern to them.

Tocqueville embraced this vision of self-governance even though he knew that the public works coming out of the process were often pretty crude and amateurish. And he knew that in the future, democratic citizens would be tempted to imitate the centralized French system of his day, administered by trained bureaucrats or professional managers.

Today, the nonprofit sector is under enormous pressure to become ever more efficient, more cost-effective, more streamlined, more professionalized and expert-driven. And as civic associations or nonprofits strive to meet those pressures, the citizen is shoved aside.

Consider, for instance, the way we have increasingly incorporated the language and techniques of the business world into the nonprofit sector. We all need a business plan. We should call contributions "investments." We need to be more "entrepreneurial." We need to focus more on generating revenue. All of this is fine, to a point. But if it means that the nonprofit sector comes to view its function simply as delivering goods and services more efficiently and less expensively to customers, then we've lost our way.

Another pressure in this direction comes from the growth in government funding for the nonprofit sector. Again, much of this is understandable. It's an important way to finance the services provided by nonprofits. But it too comes at a price -- more rules, more regulations, more emphasis on licensed, certified, professional service delivery rather than on problems raised and addressed by self-governing, democratic communities.

But the truly sad thing is that a lot of the pressure toward efficiency and away from democratic engagement comes from foundations. Foundations should be prime supporters of civic associations as Tocqueville described them, and some of the smaller, more localized foundations are. But that's certainly not the prevailing attitude.

From the founding of the first large foundations at the beginning of the 20^th century, philanthropy claimed to be interested in getting at the root causes of problems, rather than just dealing with symptoms, like charity did. That's still the way foundations talk about what makes them different from -- and better than -- charity. Getting at root causes, though, requires the expertise of professionals.

For example, when a foundation wishes to take on a new problem, its first step is to collect all the latest social science data describing it. The foundation then scans the scholarly literature and consults with other experts in search of the latest experimental models for attacking the problem.

Next, a request for proposals is issued, which elicits pledges from various nonprofits that they will faithfully execute the program as described in the foundation's specs. Other than the initiative's "community in-put" phase, there's not a citizen in sight.

Americans learn to be self-governing citizens through the gritty, messy, unpredictable process of democratic engagement, hammering out solutions to pressing, concrete problems using their own common sense and everyday wisdom. The nonprofit sector is where American self-government was born, and where it must be forged anew with each generation.