This year’s Alliance for Nonprofit Excellence conference features some of the county’s wisest and most accomplished leaders in nonprofit fundraising and philanthropy. Rick Cohen is among these leaders. Cohen, the former Executive Director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), is a powerful voice for enhanced foundation accountability and increased social justice grantmaking. 

Cohen has been a leading advocate for increased levels of foundation grantmaking (“payout”) requirements, changes in accountability laws and regulations concerning conflicts of interest and other aspects of foundation and nonprofit governance, protections for nonprofit free and advocacy rights, controls on the foundations and nonprofits established by members of Congress and Washington lobbyists, and other high-profile public policy issues. 

A NonProfit Times Power and Influence Top 50 list for the last five years, Cohen is a contributor to many newspapers, such as the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as sector publications such as the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the NonProfit Quarterly.  He has appeared on CNN, ABC News, CBS News, PBS, NPR, Fox News Channel, and the British Broadcasting Company, and on numerous local radio and TV shows, addressing current issues in charity and philanthropy.

Cohen left NCRP in the fall in order to spend more time writing on larger issues of public policies affecting low-income communities and the nonprofits that advocate for social justice causes. His talk at the annual conference is on the “philanthropic divide,” an issue of critical importance to the Mid-South. The philanthropic divide describes what happens to regions, both urban and rural, that have very minimal philanthropic resources. Manager of Training and Evaluation Melissa Hanson interviewed Cohen about the divide, including its implications for metro areas like Memphis, as well as rural states like Mississippi.

Melissa Hanson (MH): What exactly is the "Philanthropic Divide"?

Rick Cohen (RC): Simply put, a philanthropic divide exists when a community, region, or state not only possesses a disproportionately small share of philanthropic assets, and receives a disproportionately small per capita amount of philanthropic grantmaking, but also possesses few philanthropic institutions that are near enough and open enough to local nonprofits for them to approach, build relationships with, and obtain needed foundation grant dollars.  People too often assume that philanthropic assets and philanthropic grantmaking are much more evenly distributed across the U.S. geography than they are.  Even when people remember that the major centers of philanthropy are in New York and on the West Coast, they sometimes forget that philanthropic grantmaking is geographically discontinuous: some areas get lots, some areas get surprisingly little, some areas get unsurprisingly little.  In public policy terms, it means that inducements and incentives that increase foundation grantmaking don’t necessarily benefit all communities and regions in need.  

This is a story that many people in the foundation world are extremely uncomfortable addressing, because in some ways there are no easy answers.  Just this past year, the “divide” question landed on the laps of foundations in two significant events -— significant at least for foundations.  At last May’s Council on Foundations conference, Senator Max Baucus of Montana addressed the COF members and laid out his concern that there is a philanthropic divide affecting rural areas.  He didn’t call for legislation or anything like that as a solution, but he called on foundations to double their grantmaking to rural areas in five years—and report to him with the results.  Truth is, he was right about the divide for rural areas:  there are 10 significantly rural states that don’t have much in the way of foundation assets and don’t get much in terms of philanthropic grantmaking.  The result is that the foundation sector is heading to a rural divide conference in Montana in August to discuss how to overcome the divide.  

Perhaps more relevant to the circumstances of some Memphis nonprofits, late last year a California-based nonprofit called the Greenlining Institute issued a report with its research demonstrating that most large foundations give relatively little to nonprofits that are minority-led (staff leadership and board composition).  Greenlining called for this philanthropic divide affecting race and philanthropy to be overcome, but unlike Senator Baucus’s “jawboning” approach for rural issues, Greenlining got the minority caucuses of the California state legislature to hold hearings or briefings on the topic, eventually leading to one member of the legislature submitting a bill requiring large foundations in California to report on the racial/ethnic composition of the organizations they support with their grants and the racial/ethnic composition of their own executive leadership and trustees.  Suddenly, the philanthropic sector’s ongoing discussion of “diversity” got much more serious, with the Council on Foundations creating a new senior-level staff position on diversity and several foundations funding a new effort on how to increase racial diversity in the foundation world.  

The divide operates in urban areas too and among metropolitan areas.  There are some metropolitan areas that are hardly overendowed in philanthropic assets and usually poorly represented as recipients of major foundation grants.  This is sometimes exacerbated by corporate philanthropic issues.  Metropolitan areas without many Fortune 500 corporations are often in tough shape for corporate giving, since a few hundred corporations in the U.S. account for as much as four-fifths of all corporate grantmaking, and the bulk of corporate grants goes to headquarters communities and the communities around the corporations’ major plants and facilities. 

MH: Which nonprofits does the "divide" have the greatest impact on, and how can these organizations succeed in fundraising?

RC: The philanthropic divide is fundamentally a question of access.  In “philanthropic divide” communities, nonprofits of some size and heft that can get on the radar screens of non-local foundations will be in the best shape.  Those nonprofits that cannot get noticed by funders, can’t get access to their program officers, and aren’t seen as good grantmaking opportunities for foundations will face difficult sledding.  In divide communities, the data shows that the bigger institutions, particularly in higher education and health, appear to do best in overcoming—or perhaps merely surviving—the philanthropic divide challenge.  Smaller, grassroots organizations frequently find the philanthropic divide to be a philanthropic chasm.  

MH: Do you think that the divide will widen or shrink over time?

RC: The nonprofit sector is fundamentally a sector of activists, of people who basically look at impregnable and insoluble problems and say to themselves, we can overcome that problem.  This is not a sector that would look at the philanthropic divide and take a social Darwinist approach, that the divide will inexorably widen and leave some swaths of nonprofits and communities in the lurch.  The philanthropic divide will widen only if nonprofits are passive.  However, it is not a problem open to individual nonprofit solutions.  It takes a community of nonprofits, a nonprofit trade association, a nonprofit MSO (management support organization) network, or some other collection of nonprofits to come up with strategies that speak to in-state and out-of-state foundations and lead to resource flows more commensurate with local needs and opportunities.  So will the philanthropic divide —- or the philanthropic divides —- widen or shrink over time?  It all depends on which divides, which geographies, and how active or passive the nonprofit sector in those communities chooses to be.  

MH: What impact do you think that the growth of electronic communications - and fundraising - will have?

RC: It may be communications rather than fundraising that has an impact on the philanthropic divide.  One reason the divide exists and persists is that foundation trustees, executives, and staff in foundation asset-rich communities don’t know and don’t see the nonprofits in the divide communities. They know the nonprofits in the communities that they themselves associate with, they don’t know the nonprofits in the communities that they typically rarely if ever visit, much less interact with.  With a strong communications strategy, the nonprofits in a region can promote their visibility in a way that gets them, en masse, onto national (or at least non-local) radar screens, helping overcome the self-imposed isolation of major foundations in the nation’s major megalopolises. 

MH: Can you give an example of a fundraising effort that has really impressed you as overcoming the "Philanthropic Divide"?

RC: You have to give great credit to some of the players in rural America for vaulting rural concerns close to the top of the national philanthropic agenda.  In Montana, a statewide nonprofit TA (technical assistance) provider (staffed variously by 1-3 people, depending on fundraising) generated a bunch of data documenting the existence of a philanthropic divide affecting a number of states, including the Dakotas, West Virginia, Mississippi, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska, and Wyoming.  They worked with their senator (Baucus) to raise the issue in public settings.  They built coalitions with leaders in the other “divide” states to serve as allies in a philanthropic divide state network.  And they’ve been designing strategies for funders to invest in divide states where there are great grantmaking opportunities, particularly to build the capacity of the nonprofit infrastructure of state TA providers and trade associations.  Within the divide states, they are working on strategies that position local foundations to be partners with non-local foundations for divide state grantmaking.  One can’t say it has “succeeded” yet, but it is generating a response that tells others that the divide can be confronted.  The message is being heard.  Elsewhere, there are other groupings of nonprofits -— sometimes with the more or less active involvement of local politicians, such as members of Congress, organizing to present their cases for the existence of a philanthropic divide affecting their communities or their interests and for foundations to begin fashioning bridges over the divide.