Tag: Philanthropy

D.C. schools attracted record amounts of philanthropy in recent years

Washington, D.C., became a magnet for philanthropy after 2007, when former mayor Adrian Fenty took control over the schools and appointed Michelle Rhee as chancellor.

In 2010, the District brought in more than $31 million from national foundations, according to an analysis from Michigan State University of grants by the 15 largest philanthropies funding kindergarten through 12th grade education that year. The total represented an extra $705 per student — far more than any other school district in the country.

More than two-thirds of the funds raised went to the D.C. Public Education Fund, which was created in 2007 to support reform efforts in the public school system. At least $ 7 million went to specific charter schools or to organizations, including the New Schools Venture Fund, that support charter schools.
Fundraising has picked up again, with about $11 million raised so far this year, said Jessica Rauch, executive director of the D.C. Education Fund. She said the mood among foundations remains “positive.” National foundations are enthusiastic about D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s leadership and progress in the city’s schools, she said, as well as in some new programs, including the chancellor’s Empowering Males of Color initiative that aims to invest $20 million in private funds for support programs for black and Latino male students and in an all-boys college prep high school scheduled to open in 2016-2017.

The fund also announced a $4 million investment by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation to support more rigorous lessons in all District classrooms tied to Common Core standards.

D.C. public schools also gets direct contributions — in-kind and cash — from individuals, businesses or community groups that often go directly to schools. For fiscal 2014, the schools received about $3.1 million in contributions on top of funds received through the DC Ed Fund, according to D.C. public schools officials. Such funds include dictionaries donated to every third-grader by the Rotary Club, or a library redesign sponsored by Heart of America and the Washington Redskins at Leckie Elementary School in Southwest Washington, which included about $52,000 in services and materials and technology.

Not included in the total is PTA funding, which brings a significant additional stream of funds to some schools in more affluent communities. The PTA at Maury Elementary School in Capitol Hill increased its fundraising dramatically in recent years. Its budget for this school year is $157,000, up from about $15,000 in 2009-2010.

The PTA asks families to make a contribution at the beginning of the year, and it hosts fundraisers, including a yard sale and an auction. The funds go toward school supplies and professional development. The largest share goes toward funding instructional aides, said PTA President Elsa Huxley. The school system provides extra staffing in the youngest grades, but the parents think it’s important for all grade levels, she said.

The 2016 Philanthropy 50

Last year was hard on megagift donors. Uneasiness about the country’s growing inequality revved up the criticism that often follows philanthropy by the wealthy: The gift does nothing for the common good; or it’s a pittance of the donor’s wealth.

In the Philanthropy 50, such critics will find ammunition. Ten of the billionaires on the list gave away less than 1 percent of their wealth. And more than $2 billion went to major American universities and colleges, many of which have enormous endowments.

Still, the Philanthropy 50 also offers a more appealing story. Many of 2015’s biggest gifts aim to drive social change, and several emerging philanthropists are making gifts to the needy.

Crossing the midpoint of the decade, big-gift philanthropy seems at a crossroads.

UCF Tri Delta to host Texas Hold ‘Em philanthropy event

UCF Delta Delta Delta sisters are trading in their signature triangle hand symbol for spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds at Tuesday’s Delta Hold ‘Em event.

From 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., guests can travel to Las Vegas without leaving the UCF campus. The casino-themed night will be at the Tri Delta house on Greek Park Drive.

For parties who want to play Texas Hold ‘Em at the event, there is suggested donation of $100, and entry into the event itself is a suggested donation of $10.

The event, which is a first of its kind for Tri Delta, will benefit St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital, the sorority’s official philanthropy.

Admission includes appetizers and a night of family-friendly casino-style games, including a closed-door Texas Hold ‘Em competition that will be professionally run by The Party Corp. to create a real-life poker atmosphere.

All guests will have the chance to win a trip to Las Vegas or four-night stays at a variety of hotels.

Stephanie Bratic, a senior nursing major and the Tri Delta philanthropy chair, expects 300 to 400 attendees at the event.

“We want to get the whole community involved, not just UCF Greek life,” she said.

The sorority has promoted the event on social media, a few local radio stations and by word of mouth.

Bratic said each philanthropy event the sorority does throughout the year earns around $16,000, with an average total of $60,000 annually raised as a chapter to benefit St. Jude’s.

“Typically we do our Delta House of Pancakes, we do our spaghetti dinner, but we also have Sincerely Yours, which is our letter-writing campaign, and that’s specifically in our chapter,” Bratic said. “We write letters to our families and anyone that we know, and we ask them [for] donations. And that usually brings in the most amount of money.”

Bratic said she’s excited the sorority is hosting this new event to continue to make a difference in the community.

Arnall Family Foundation Awards $4.8 Million to Youth Villages

Youth Villages has announced a $4.8 million commitment from the Arnall Family Foundation in support of its programs in Oklahoma, including a public-private partnership with the Oklahoma Department of Human Services to provide youth aging out of foster care with a comprehensive set of services.

The gift from the foundation of Sue Ann Arnall includes $2.8 million to launch Youth Villages’ YVLifeSet program, which will connect teens in foster care with specialists who work one-on-one with them as they age out of state custody to develop the skills they need to be independent adults and access programs and services. In Oklahoma, about three hundred teens age out of the foster care system every year without being reunited with their families or being adopted. The first coordinated, statewide approach to helping youth aging out of foster care in Oklahoma, the program is expected to cost $12.7 million over the next five years, of which private funders will contribute 36 percent and DHS, using targeted federal funds, will provide the remainder.

“This is an opportunity to help the most vulnerable people in our society, youth without a family support system,” said Arnall, who joined the Giving Pledge in 2011 with her then-husband, billionaire oilman Harold Hamm, and re-joined on her own earlier this year. “By supporting programs such as YVLifeSet that have demonstrated positive results, I know that these young people will receive the mentoring and support that they were denied through circumstances beyond their control. It is very exciting to see the many ways the YVLifeSet program helps kids who age out of foster care and are suddenly on their own as they try to navigate life as adults.”

Walton Foundation’s new education investment strategy: Scary or what?

The Walton Foundation is one of the biggest players in the education philanthropy world, having poured some $1.3 billion in K-12 education over the last two decades largely to support charter schools and fuel the “school choice” movement. But foundation honchos aren’t exactly satisfied with the results of their work and now they are using a new investment strategy to make a broader impact. For people who like the foundation’s philosophy, that’s good news. For those who think the foundation works against public education, it’s scary.

[Why are out-of-state billionaires putting big money into Louisiana’s board of education elections?]

A paper recently released (see below) titled “Investing in Change: The Walton Family Foundation Charts a New Course” looks at what the foundation has — and hasn’t — accomplished in its effort to fulfill what foundation K-12 Program Director Marc Sternberg calls its “moral obligation” to provide families with high-quality school choices. It quotes Walton Family Foundation Executive Director Buddy Philpot, who wrote in the foundation’s 2014 annual report released this year:

We know that empowering parents and students with options works, but now we want to do more. We have learned that while choice is vital, it is not enough.

Choice isn’t enough? So what is? Apparently dismantling traditional public school systems and creating collections of charter schools across cities.  The report, written by Michelle Wisdom and published by Grantmakers for Education (a national network of hundreds of education philanthropies) says:

There are a lot of similarities between the Walton Family Foundation’s approach and what has come to be called a “Portfolio Strategy”— a concept researched and supported by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). Portfolio Strategy identifies the entire city as the unit of change with respect to school reform, and tasks education and civic leaders with developing a citywide system of high-quality, diverse, autonomous public schools. These systems prioritize school autonomy, parental empowerment, and system leader oversight and responsibility for accountability.

Wisdom’s report points to Walton’s involvement in cities with big charter presences, including New Orleans, where nearly all of the schools are charters, and D.C., where nearly half of students attend charters. These are hailed as successes in school reform. In the section about D.C., the report goes so far as to credit charter schools with contributing to  “dramatic improvements” in the traditional public school system, a statement that doesn’t take into consideration how demographic changes have improved D.C. school results. D.C. schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson contests the notion too.

There’s another part of the report that begs parsing. The report notes that the foundation realizes that it has not engaged communities as it has pushed school choice on them. It says:

One area where the foundation has received criticism is in the area of community engagement. It has been accused of  having a top-down approach that does not adequately address the needs and desires of parents, local advocacy groups and community groups. This is an issue the foundation is grappling with. “The provision of choice, and the publication of data on school performance, has sometimes had little impact, especially in districts where reform lacks adequate local ownership, community and wider civic involvement, and parent engagement,” Bruno Manno notes. He identifies two levers in engaging local partners and communities more thoroughly: 1) building an active coalition of supporters, and 2) cultivating local advocacy partners. “We need a local and civic base of support for the work that’s going on. The work we support requires a stable constituency to be advocates for schools over time. There is a political dimension as well, the community and families need to understand what options are available.”

Let’s review: After 20 years, the foundation realizes that its top-down approach doesn’t adequately address the needs and desires of parents, local advocacy groups and community groups. Now it wants to engage local partners and communities — not, apparently to ask what they actually want in their communities but to build “a local and civic base of support for the work that’s going on.”

Another surprising finding in the report is that the foundation actually considers itself to be a  neutral party in the school reform battles. It says:

The Walton Family Foundation theory of change has led it to support innovative and autonomous traditional public schools, new and existing individual charter schools and charter management organizations, private schools, locally-based education nonprofits and national advocacy and school reform groups across the United States.

The foundation sees its strategy as agnostic with regard to sector (public charter schools, traditional public schools, private schools). “The foundation’s investment strategy is clear: Schools thrive when they have autonomy, are chosen by parents, and are embedded in systems of good governance and accountability,” says Senior Program Officer Fawzia Ahmed. “When we invest in citywide systems, we invest regardless of sector.”

The foundation’s funding history includes a significant amount of support for charter schools, however. In fact, roughly two-thirds of the Education Program’s investments support the growth of a high-quality charter sector in some way. This seeming preference for charter schools is in line with the foundation’s theory of change that requires change agents, like new, high-quality charter schools, to increase competition in citywide school systems and to raise community expectations of what is possible in high-need areas and with students who face significant challenges.

Why Rural Philanthropy Should Ensure Access to Quality Back Office Services

Does every nonprofit need a separate, fully functioning back office capable of handling all of the accounting, HR, and regulatory requirements that are now a part of day-to-day nonprofit survival? Perhaps not. If your nonprofit is new, small, or has proven itself to be less than agile or consistent in such matters, one choice may be outsourcing some of this work to a trusted administrative partner. The question is, do such partners exist in your area? Do their services meet your needs? Are they affordable? Will they teach you capacity while serving your needs?

At the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School, “We realized there were a lot of nonprofits that were not meeting the requirement to function in this state,” said Leslie Oakes, chair of the Accounting Department. “There were huge grants…from Kellogg going to nonprofits in some rural regions and there was no one there that could really help them. So they couldn’t get that grant renewed because they didn’t have the accounting to show that they had monitored the grant correctly.”

Janice Moen is one of Oakes’ former students, and when she graduated, Moen and Patrick Wilkins, chief financial officer of the United Way of Central New Mexico, began teaching financial training classes for nonprofit staff. They soon found that in many cases, education only addressed part of the problem: “They walk into the training. They are all excited. They’ve got their coffee. They’ve got their muffins. They sit down. They are all happy. […]  And then we start telling them, here’s the things you need to do fiscally. Here’s your responsibility,” said Moen.

Wilkins added, “All of them were committed to understanding, and then after about 15 minutes, they realized, ‘Oh gosh, I’m the executive director and I’m responsible for fundraising and for doing the program and I also keep the checkbook.’ We are talking about all these regulations and how to file a 990 and proper bookkeeping and restrictions, and all the things that are unique to nonprofits. […] The color would go out of their faces. None of them were accountants and they thought they could come take this class and get some tips and tricks. Then they realized they didn’t know what they didn’t know.” So, in 2011, Moen founded NonProfit Back Office Resources, which for a modest fee helps nonprofits set up financial systems and sometimes even actually runs them, complete with checks and balances.

Association with the university reduces the organization’s cost through access to interns. Oakes says such students are not in short supply:

I taught a writing class last spring and I asked them, “What does it mean to be a professional in your community?” We have students that come from the reservation, from little towns up north and they were talking about how being a professional means giving something back to your community. To be an honored person, who behaves respectfully and gives something back. I don’t think you would hear that from the usual accounting group in Milwaukee or Chicago or Dallas.

NPQ has long advocated for more back office support to nonprofits, and even to groups that are not themselves incorporated but need a nonprofit fiscal sponsor. However, making use of such a model does require a few things both from the nonprofit making use of it and the organization providing the service:

  • The nonprofit needs to do due diligence to ensure the entity with which they are considering contracting has a stellar reputation for dependability, accuracy, responsiveness, and ethics. There are many cautionary tales of things going awry both in fiscal sponsorships and back-office relationships. One of the more recent was in the death of FEGS, which outsourced its financial work—ironically to a social enterprise owned by FEGS—only to so lose sight of its financial position that it made the choice to close the agency, which had a $250 million budget.
  • Having someone else do your books and accounting does not relieve a nonprofit organization of the responsibility to take financial leadership. When it works, the relationship is more like a respectful partnership that strives always to develop systems that are ever more informative to the board and the exec at the nonprofit. This requires a kind of on-the-job training mode of interaction rather than a vendor/contracting-agency relationship.
  • The best of those doing this back office work are grounded in an understanding of the realities of the variables in a particular field. They have enough knowledge to be able to point out to an organization when a practice needs changing and enough skill to help them to make that change.

But this intimacy in the work also can be costly to the contractor. Foundations, like a Kellogg or any of the others that still invest in small powerful community-based efforts, might consider whether they may wish to make a parallel investment in back office service.—Ruth McCambridge