by Tom Watson
Earlier in this roiling election cycle, I found myself in a heated political discussion — shocking, I know — and faced this snappy dismissal: “Oh, I get it. You’re one of those nonprofit people.”
Why, yes — I am. What my antagonist meant to suggest, though, is that I am a card-carrying member of the philanthropy establishment and therefore of The Establishment, the bane of so many angry voters across the political spectrum.
To these would-be revolutionaries, organized philanthropy must indeed seem like a fortress stuck in time. Grants are made. Budgets are set. Results are recorded. We continue to donate the equivalent of about 2 percent of the nation’s GDP on nonprofit programs and institutions year after year, in good times and bad.
Slow-moving and inward-looking, the social sphere stands in stark relief in a time of populist hot takes. Incrementalism is decried as the compromise of the weak. From both left and right come clarion calls for a kind of purity of thought and ideology that frankly disqualifies most of the organizations I work with and the nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs I meet.
But there’s good news for nonprofiteers saddled with the “establishment” tag, though it might not make for a T-shirt slogan or trending hashtag. Citizen movements constantly challenge conventional wisdom on social change, and the wood-paneled boardrooms of Big Philanthropy have consistently been open to new models, new causes, new methods — and new money. That shift continues and provides several reasons the philanthropy establishment is well worth preserving.
The establishment is permeable.
American philanthropy will never be mistaken for a form of pure democracy, but the foundations and nonprofits I know are very attuned to the national mood and to insurgent forces in their issue areas. The change might seem slow, in programmatic terms, but grass-roots demand for it gets through. I don’t know anyone working on overhauling criminal justice or civil rights who doesn’t pay attention to Black Lives Matter. I don’t know anyone working on feminist issues and gender equality who is unaware of or untouched by the evolution of the women’s movement. I don’t know a single nonprofit leader working on immigration issues who is not connected to the Dreamer organizers. The same goes for philanthropy involving gun control, the environment, LGBTQ rights, and so on.
