SPEAKER_01 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast with Rodri Davis. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rod Davis, and this week we have an interview with Claire Dunning. Now Claire is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland in the US. And she is the author of a book that came out relatively recently, last year, called Nonprofit Neighbourhoods, an Urban History of Inequality in the American State, which I really wanted to get Claire on the podcast to talk about, having read it last year, and also having read uh another paper that she wrote all about a fascinating episode in the history of philanthropy uh in Boston, particularly a sort of fairly kind of radical progressive experiment in philanthropy and what went wrong with it and some really fascinating lessons for the present day, as you'll hear in in the discussion afterwards. Um so I had a great chat with Claire, and we talked about the book and about what the idea behind it was and what the idea of a non-profit neighbourhood is. And essentially it's a story about the interaction of the state and philanthropy and voluntary action. And I think the thing that was most fascinating to me is that's a story I know quite well in the UK context, and I feel like I have a handle on what the the sort of d um the parameters of of that relationship are over time and some of the challenges that it's brought. And and obviously in the UK context, that is the pivotal moment, really, is the creation of the welfare state in 1948, and in some senses the relationship leads up to that point and then gets fundamentally reshaped and and then is kind of uh evolves after that point. And I was really interested to hear how that story is different and if it is different in in the US, and whether the relationship between state and philanthropy and the what the state expects of philanthropy, how it views it, and how citizens see that relationship differs. And so we had a great conversation all about that and some of the things that uh that Claire talks about in the book, and really interesting questions like whether uh the involvement of non-profit organizations in delivering services on behalf of the state inevitably means that there's some sort of trade-off in terms of undermining your ability to speak out or to campaign on issues, which is certainly something that's been a point of contention here in the UK. We also talked quite a bit about the how the the involvement of uh philanthropic or voluntary organizations in delivering state services uh reflects the ability of philanthropy to act as a kind of pro-democratic force or or an anti-democratic one. And the idea that um based on the work of of Alexis de Tocqueville, that that kind of voluntary action is a nursery of democracy in some sense. So being involved in civil society organisation gives you the skills and tools then to participate more widely in in the uh the democracy and in society, but whether actually in reality it sometimes becomes an alternative for marginalized communities uh to be involved in the mainstream structures of democracy, and actually that's whether that's a deliberate move on the part of governments to sort of offer them something rather than the fundamental reform uh to the kind of wider uh inequalities and and unfairnesses within the system. Um we also talked quite a bit about the paper that that Claire wrote um on the history of two organizations, the the Fund for Urban Negro Development and the Boston Black United Front Foundation in Boston in the late 60s, early 70s, I think. Uh, and which is a really fascinating story, and I'll put links in the show notes to that paper. Um and we talk there about what it shows um in the present day, particularly, about some of the challenges that come when uh formal funders and donors try to interact with kind of grassroots movements and where there are perhaps differences of opinion about tactics and how radical you want to be in your aims and in the way you go about achieving them. And whether even when philanthropy is is apparently on the surface of it done with no strings attached, whether actually there are always hidden strings simply because of the power differentials that there are between those who have resources and those who need resources. Um so we had a really, really fascinating conversation about that, and then also kind of more broadly some some uh chat about uh how valuable history is as a tool to inform our understanding of philanthropy and sort of some of the ways in which it can be useful and how we get that across to practitioners. Um so without further ado, let's go into the conversation. Um I hope you enjoy it. I really did. It was great to have a chance to chat to Claire properly. Um, and I will be back at the end uh with the usual bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. I'm here with Claire Dunning. Hi there, Claire. Hello, good morning. Great to have you on the podcast. Uh, and for those listening, Claire is uh an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy uh at the University of Maryland and also the author of a book that came out relatively recently uh called Nonprofit Neighborhoods, an urban history of inequality in the American State, which is absolutely fascinating. Uh, I thoroughly recommend it, and I'll put links in the show notes. Um, I'd love to talk about the book and what's in it and some of your wider work around philanthropy and kind of particularly the sort of historical angle on philanthropy, which I've been aware of uh for a while, um your work on it. Um but maybe the best place to start is just for you to say a bit about what the book's actually about and kind of what led you to write it.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Sure, and thanks for having me on the podcast. Um, it's a small world of those of us who think about philanthropy and nonprofits from a historical perspective, though, as we always hope more, we'll get engaged in those kinds of conversations. So I'm glad to be here. Um, the book really came out of my experience working in philanthropy, though I don't know if I necessarily knew it at the time. After I graduated from college, I found a job at a community foundation in Boston. And it was both the best education and the most frustrating one I think I've ever had. I was working on a housing and community development docket, uh, thinking also about nonprofit sector capacity, about youth violence and long-term poverty and inequality in the city. And I knew very little about philanthropy and I knew nothing really about what foundations did. So I scheduled a lot of meetings and did a lot of administrative tasks, but I also got to sit in on meetings and sort of listen and observe what my bosses were doing and asking, right? They were doing really thoughtful work thinking about the role of philanthropy in addressing big problems. But there was also a sense of frustration on my part and theirs around responding to problems that were decades or centuries in the making, right? When we're thinking about racism and poverty and inequality, but we were also talking in three-year grant cycles and we were thinking about how to trim or revise budgets. And there seemed uh a mismatch in some ways to me between problems that were big and then these conversations around grant making that sometimes felt small. And so that sort of tension raised for me a lot of questions and sort of uncertainties that my book ended up being a deeper exploration was. It was also, I was working between 2008 and 2001 when in the United States there was the financial crisis, housing crisis, and sort of recession. And it was a moment when our nonprofits in Boston and cities around the country were being tasked increasingly with dealing with housing insecurity for families and communities. But the nonprofits were also struggling financially, right? That they had bought up uh significant amounts of housing in certain neighborhoods, but their balance sheets, their assets with the foreclosure crisis were now worth significantly less. And so, again, there was this point of tension for me around these organizations that we're relying upon to help people in need are themselves struggling in this moment. And it felt frustrating, not right, and inadequate to have these organizations struggling when people needed them most. And so that to me felt like a bigger conversation than just any individual grantee or any individual nonprofit, and felt like a structural relationship between government, nonprofit organizations, certain neighborhoods, right? That these were predominantly Black or Latinx neighborhoods that were relying heavily on nonprofits to meet basic needs of shelter, uh, health care, after-school programming, et cetera. And so that felt like a bigger conversation to me and one that I didn't fully understand. And it seemed like a product, not of the contemporary moment in which we were working, but of a longer set of choices, right? And I wouldn't have been able to articulate that at the time when I was working, but it was enough to sort of spark a question that um I decided to go to graduate school and do sort of research on these questions about why do we rely on nonprofit organizations so heavily, particularly in American cities, particularly in Black and Latinx and other minoritized neighborhoods. And so that's what ended up being my graduate work and the book that um we're here to talk about today, nonprofit neighborhoods.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Yeah, absolutely. And and your your point there about sort of focusing at a local level, I mean the level of a particular city. So Boston's obviously a kind of big focus of the work in the book and other work that you've done, and and at an even more granular neighborhood level is really important. But then zooming out to what that says about a much bigger picture in terms of issues at the scale of kind of how philanthropy interacts with the state. Um one thing that was absolutely fascinating to me about the book is I'm I'm obsessed with the question of how philanthropy and the state have interacted in the context of the UK. And we've kind of got our own story there. I mean, how accurate it is, I don't know, and people would question it, but the sort of big picture narrative is one in which philanthropic or voluntary provision led the way in pretty much every area, and then the inadequacies of that eventually led the state increasingly to step in, and then we had the creation of a welfare state, and then a sort of process of rebalancing in the 20th century took place. In terms of how you view the kind of the big picture history of philanthropy and state in the US, is it broadly similar or is it a different story in terms of whether the state took the lead or voluntary provision took the lead and how the two subsequently interacted?

SPEAKER_00 11:41

I love this question because the comparative one is one that I haven't done enough thinking on. And so your work and others has has prompted me in this direction. In the United States, we have this really deeply ingrained notion, popularly and some in the scholarship, though the scholarship is certainly shifting, that the nonprofit sector and philanthropy is separate from the state. So the conversation that you and I are having about that relationship is one over here where we see them as really separate, right? That this the nonprofit sector, we call it the third sector, right? Separate from state and uh market provision. And this notion of a sort of independent, charitable, or voluntary realm is really deeply ingrained in the story of American exceptionalism that's sort of told in the popular narrative, where it's sort of a detox villain, sort of voluntary associations are the triumph of American democracy as this sort of separate space where people organize, serve the common good, etc. And one of the things this is a bit of a sidebar, one of the things I find so fascinating about the nonprofit sector is that everyone seems to love it, right? It's something that both conservatives and liberals, for very different reasons and sort of very different visions of what it looks like, nevertheless politically triumph and sort of celebrate nonprofit service provision, that there's something that sort of appeals across the political spectrum. And I find those points of convergence really interesting. And there's more to sort of dig down. But in terms of the nonprofit and state provision, right, we tell the stories as sort of separate, that the nonprofit sector is sort of compensating or sort of filling gaps for the state. We sort of disagree on whether it should do that, whether the state should do more. But one of the real sort of points of continuity in the US, particularly in the 20th century, is this notion that if we just sort of experiment or prove or demonstrate a program in the nonprofit sector, that the state will pick it up, right? Which is sort of similar to what I hear you saying about the UK, that voluntary sector leads the way and the state sort of absorbs and sort of takes up once there's a demonstrated need there. Don't necessarily see that happening in the United States. There's always this hope, right? Policy, philanthropy, political rhetoric is structured around, oh, we're just going to prove or sort of test or experiment what different programs could look like and then scale them up, right? This expectation that government will pick up programs that are deemed to be working. And that just doesn't really happen that often. And I think that in part it's because what constitutes proof or knowledge is heavily contested, that there's more interest in this notion of experimentation than actually investing in scaling and state absorption and recognition around whose problems and needs are getting addressed by the state or not. And this is where, in the United States context, legacies of discrimination and exclusion are really sort of central in ways that I try and draw attention to in the book that only some people's needs are being met adequately through state provision, and others are being sort of supplemented in a really precarious, inadequate way by nonprofit organizations. And so one of the moments that I write about is this sort of 1960s, the war on poverty under President Lyndon Johnson, which is itself an expansion of efforts started under his predecessor, John Kennedy, and a policy recognition that we're going to use government funding to support nonprofit organizations that are addressing poverty at a local level. So there is this recognition that nonprofit groups have grounding in grassroots communities, have local are local spaces for participation, engagement, service provision, sort of trusting and recognizing that communities know what they need. There's this famous line for maximum feasible participation that's written into the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act. And it itself is a highly contested phrase about what concept uh what constitutes maximum feasible participation. But it is the state recognizing that there's something valuable about nonprofit service provision and a desire to channel public dollars through these sort of private entities. But it's done in a way that sort of bakes in this public-private arrangement. And it's sort of sold in ways that both promises scale and never delivers on that, and celebrates this isn't government, right? There's sort of a skepticism of big government and a celebration of the local, of the small, um, in ways that serve interests other than those of communities. But at the same time, I would just add, right, that this war on poverty and the increasingly close relationship between nonprofits and the state, also something that Black and other marginalized communities are wanting, right? The state has been and continues to be a highly unequal exclusionary space. So in Boston and other cities, right, Black neighborhoods have the most inadequate housing, the schools are underfunded, the jobs don't pay well. Um, there's a variety of structural problems because these groups are being excluded from municipal service provision. And so the sense of fund us, fund our nonprofits because we're doing that work and we know what we need is deeply empowering, right? So this notion of partnering with the state, extracting funds and spending them by people who actually are from, in, and represent the communities in which they're being served, it's a real moment of transformation and a moment of persistent inadequacy. So this question of sort of state nonprofit or state voluntary sector is always in flux and very much not necessarily one of state absorbing or sort of picking up what nonprofit or voluntary organizations are sort of demonstrating a need for.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

And do you have in the US? One thing I've never quite got my head around is whether you have the additional aspect to that state voluntary provision relationship, which is not just the one where they're coexisting alongside each other in a kind of mixed economy of provision. And, you know, at some points in history, maybe the state takes the lead and at others voluntary provision does, but the one that we've certainly seen in the UK towards the end of the 20th century and to the present day, which is one where the state is interacting with the voluntary sector, but on a contractual basis to deliver services that otherwise the state might deliver itself. So rather than even giving a grant in recognition of something a voluntary uh organization is is doing, they essentially tender for a contract or outsource it. And that might be to the private sector, but equally it might be to a voluntary organization. Do you have that kind of contractual uh service provision element to the picture in the US as well?

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Very much so. Coming out of the 1970s and 1980s, right? The sort of political wins of that privatization neoliberal moment in the UK is similarly happening over here. So contracts increasingly become uh part of the landscape, grants, but also loans to uh to put another sort of form of money, right? And we know that these forms, grants, contracts, and loans come with different stipulations, constraints, opportunities, and how the money is structured really makes a difference, both on the government side and on the nonprofit side of um what you're able to do, the degrees of flexibility and what the service provision actually looks like. But very much so we have a sort of same similar trend towards contracted out, sort of outsourcing behavior with various adoption and sort of political preference or not for those arrangements.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

And and from the point of view of particularly with those kinds of relationships, I mean, one of the concerns latterly here in the UK has been that in going too far in that direction, the the voluntary sector itself has perhaps become complicit in allowing uh some of its legitimacy and ability, for instance, to speak out on issues to become compromised because I either the state is actively saying, you know, if you want this money, you can't criticize government policy, or organizations themselves end up self-censoring. Is that something that you saw in the work that you look at in the book? Did organizations have to kind of face up to the fact that maybe there was a slight Faustian pact to be made if you wanted to get hold of some of that government money?

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Definitely. And it's one of the things I really grappled with both sort of analytically and in writing the book about you use the word complicit. And that's that's a really tough question, right? About how do we recognize groups and right, and I'm often writing about neighborhood level small organizations. Um are they complicit? And and I don't know if that's the right word. I might say, you know, participants in, and I think that right, the leadership, one of the things the archives reveals is that they're very aware of what's happening, right? They're not sort of caught by surprise. They know that that accepting a government grant or a government contract or a government loan is a bit of a double edged sword. And they're grappling with this around, on the one hand, this money opens up opportunities to keep our staff employed, right? To run a summer program, to help keep people sheltered. Or sort of help meet some really immediate basic needs. And they also recognize, right? And it shows up in meeting minutes, it shows up in neighborhood protests, it shows up in all sorts of different archival materials of what this level of control from an outside funder means. And so when I think about these kinds of relationships, we have to talk about power, right? That the scale of government as a major funder, but I would say the same of philanthropic funding, they have a fundamentally different degree of power than a nonprofit who's a grant seeker, right? Grant making and contracting is fundamentally a power relationship between someone who has resources and someone seeking them. These are not partnerships of equals and the choice, right? We use the word choice often, that these kinds of relationships enable degrees of choice on the government and at the nonprofit side, right? The government has far more latitude in choosing who to fund than a nonprofit organization does to apply or not for a funding program. So these relationships of real deep power and balance, yes, makes neighborhood organizations and nonprofits participants in these broader political economic shifts of sort of outsourcing behavior, reliance on structurally uh precarious organizations, but their degree of participation has to be understood within that broader context of trying to keep people employed, trying to meet some basic needs, right? And so one of the things I try to think about is what we can hold people responsible for? And are people who are participating in practices or processes or policies that sort of contribute to broader shifts that actually undermine efforts at the local level? We can name their involvement without holding them fully responsible. So one of the ways that this shows up is sort of my discussion of neoliberalism and thinking about the turn to the market and turn to private sector provision as ultimately undermining the stability of Black and Latinx neighborhoods in the city, but as something that Black and Latinx leaders ended up supporting, right? So I think about their critique of government and their embrace for a period of market-oriented competition, market-oriented policies, ownership of housing, that that's a critique on the inadequacies of state and government to meet their needs and a sense, a hope that maybe the market would hold emancipatory potential of uh just a different kind of uneven funding that might reward these groups. Now we know that that sort of rhetoric ends up fueling the shedding of state capacity and state provision of social welfare rather than enhancing it. But recognizing the critiques that some of the leaders I write about were leveling and their hope that nonprofit organizations could thread this needle of meeting both economic and social needs is part of a bigger story. And so complicit has to be contextualized within these power relationships and this critique of long-standing inadequacy and inequality in the United States and in the particular neighborhoods I'm writing about. And one of your questions sort of hinted at is the depoliticization formal or informal, sort of direct or indirect? And I would say in the groups that I was looking at, it's a combination, right? That the state is sort of threatening to withhold funding, and nonprofits are recognizing that power relationship and sort of quieting some of their behaviors. There's an example that to me was really telling of a local group in the South End neighborhood of Boston was funded on a grant under the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. It's a sort of policing law enforcement-oriented program launched in the late 1960s. And this neighborhood group had gotten the community security grant to hire a few neighborhood organizers to serve as sort of a neighborhood watch and to assist elderly public housing residents check their mail on days that checks from welfare were delivered. And so some local security, public housing development, particularly for elderly residents. And this program is going well. And a few of the staff paid for on this grant recognize that security is sure, safety, sure, but these residents also have other needs. And so they organize a food distribution program where they're sending out and supporting dried macaroni, powdered milk, beans, right? Sort of basic surplus food. And so on the one hand, we would say, wow, this is a really creative, responsive program. And these staff are really going above and beyond what is narrowly a safety law enforcement program. But when it comes for a grant renewal, the funders who are sort of local bureaucrats at the city level in Boston say that this extra surplus food program is going beyond what the grant is for, and that's therefore not allowed. And they threaten to not renew the grant. And the organizers, the sort of foot ground level staff, get fired for creating this new program. And their boss says in a memo, look, I loved the program, but I can't risk not getting this grant refunded, right? That that so he said he fires them and but does it woefully, you're sort of recognizing their valuable efforts and saying, look, we we needed the money, and so we're gonna keep the sort of more narrowly scoped program and not this extra food surplus distribution that you're doing. And so to me, that's both soft and hard power, right? The city's threatening to not renew a grant, but the executive director sort of says, fine, right? I'll let this staff member go. And so I think that for me is emblematic of both degrees of sort of self-censoring, right? And of the government funders saying, look, you can't go beyond, we don't like what we're seeing. And it's really politically awkward. How do you bite the hand that feeds you, right? It's sort of the deep question of how do you critique someone who holds such power and authority over your future existence? And so I think it's a combination, what we see on the ground in the sort of day-to-day interactions, though the sort of what formal grant stipulations say, but in the correspondence back and forth, right? This is documented really clearly in letters in the sort of back and forth between funders and grantees within nonprofit organizations as they're grappling with we have a refunding opportunity coming up, we need our grant renewed, or we're going after this new one because this program has ended. How do we maintain these comfortable sort of relationships? So it's it's complicated. And again, I keep coming back to that power differential between funder and grantee and between state and nonprofits.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

And and I guess that tension between sort of idealism about uh how you would want the world to be, you know, uh ideally, versus the sort of pragmatism of, well, that's where the funding is is available for resource poor organizations, maybe isn't even a real choice, as you say. So accusing them of uh kind of being complicit in anything or selling out is unrealistic because they just have to go with the world as it is and sort of accept funding up to a point, and then there comes maybe a difficult decision about what what is the line you're not willing to cross in terms of undermining your own ability to speak out or or being pushed towards doing things that that you otherwise wouldn't be doing just to meet the needs of funders. Um and that goes on to another thing I really, really want to ask you about, which is some of the other work that you've done um around the fascinating history of the um couple of different fairly radical funders in Boston. Um but just before I did that, I wanted to pick up on one question, which was you mentioned earlier on the notion of the sort of Tocquevillian idea of voluntary associations, particularly in America, as being something that is kind of uniquely part of its story, and particularly his idea that they play a very valuable role as uh sort of nursery schools of democracy. In terms of the the time period you're looking at and the involvement of non-profit organizations, do you think that they they genuinely are bolstering the health of democracy by offering people opportunities for participation? Or is there a sense in which they're actually getting the government off the hook because they're they're allowing them to participate in non-profit organizations, but thereby meaning that they don't actually end up uh participating in the more sort of mainstream structures of civic engagement? So, actually, from the government's point of view, it's quite tempting to funnel money through uh these non-profit neighborhoods, because then black and minoritized communities can engage with those organizations, but they don't have to address the sort of fundamental structural inequality that means they're not able to engage in the mainstream democratic process. Is that something you kind of saw as attention? Because I'm I'm sure it's somewhere I kind of took out of the book.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Very much so. And I would sort of say both both sides of that question are true, right? We can see nonprofit organizations as spaces of uh community formation, people coming together, mobilization, democratic participation, and the sort of low small D democracy, right? People are having their needs met, represented, coming together, voicing opinions, participating in governance at a local level. And so that is the sort of fullest embodiment of uh a democratic system. And these are private spaces, right? That the nonprofit organization is chartered under law as private organizations serving a public good. And so one of the tensions I'm trying to hold in this book and sort of ask readers to hold in their mind is what happens when this increased participation is happening through private organizations. One of the things that's happening, particularly at right, and again, this is where the context of racial inequality is so central to the story, that the access that Black and other minoritized people in the United States have had to full democracy has never been realized. And so, with that uh legacy of exclusion, the increased participation via nonprofit organizations that are increasingly being recognized by the state and in local governance is still an inadequate substitute for full participation and full equality, right? To have rights of representation and participation filtered through a nonprofit can be both an improvement and a new form of exclusion, right? Both of those can be true. So people that are showing up at community meetings are participating in these, you know, the community neighborhood patrols I talked about, or the after-school programs, or the housing initiatives that show up in different chapters, they recognize simultaneously that this is an improvement and having rights and access to participate through systems that are predicated on the kind of power relationships we talked about earlier through those grants, through private entities, is not the same thing as undoing the kinds of formal uh inequality that continues to exist underneath it's the sort of bedrock underneath which all of this is happening. And so that's sort of an awkward and uncomfortable finding, right, for for me to think about to how these organizations are both supporting the democratic experiment in the United States and furthering its continued inadequacy and its continued um partialness and sort of legacies of exclusion. That sure we have formal voting equality, sure we have formal housing equality, right? The legal system in the United States has, through hard-fought legislative and legal and legal victories, achieved equality on paper, and yet the lived experience is still one of racial inequality. And so nonprofit organizations are part of both the achievements and the continuation of those inadequacies. And naming both sides of that, I think, is really important. There's a tendency, and the Tuckvillian sort of myth is part of that. I also think it's politically popular for politicians to say, look, we're relying on these nonprofit organizations, right? This is grassroots governance in action, right? We're trusting our local partners to engage the community and solicit what they need or what they want or what a better sort of system of social welfare might look like. The quiet part that goes unsaid is these organizations continue to be precarious, dependent on funding, and that at a sort of theoretical or f uh level, still in a relationship of exclusion and difference to have to rely upon these uh private organizations.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

Absolutely. I think that that sort of Tocquevillian picture of voluntary action as being something that is inherently good for the health of democracy kind of relies, as you say, on the implicit assumption that it's a point of entry into you know wider citizenship. Whereas actually, if there are invisible, you know, impenetrable barriers between participation in in voluntary organizations and participation in the democratic process as a whole, the whole thing kind of falls apart. Um, I I just I wanted to come on, just as I mentioned before, to ask you a bit about the the paper that you had and the other work that you've done around a slightly different aspect of um the history of philanthropy in in Boston, which I think is really fascinating. And I remember I was at the R Nova conference in 2019 and saw you uh talk about I think an earlier version of this research. And I think it's one that's a story particularly kind of pertinent at the moment in terms of the interaction of funders and social movements. Um and it's all about the the relationship of two organizations primarily, the Fund for Urban Negro Development or Fund, uh, and the Boston Black United Front Foundation. Maybe you could just say a little bit about you know the history of these two organizations, what they were, and kind of what the story in the paper is.

SPEAKER_00 37:54

I love this story, so thank you. This is was a I discovered this story while researching for the book, and it didn't quite fit in, but it was a story I wanted to think through and to tell. Um, so the story really begins in 1968, in April, when Martin Luther King is assassinated. And this group, the Boston Black United Front, had been beginning to come together in the months before King's assassination. It was sort of a coalition of local groups, uh, black groups in Boston, sort of thinking about the civil rights movement, thinking about black power and what um the black community in Boston needed. But it's this moment where King is assassinated where they say, look, the sort of slow, you know, having lots of meetings isn't what we need. What we need is money and what we need is action. And so they issue this list of demands to the city, and it includes the renaming of schools to honor uh figures in Black history, sort of changes to some local policies, but then also the transfer of $100 million to the Black community, the eradication of some of the funding programs that I write about in the book, the complete autonomy and control of uh state authority and money to this black group. And the mayor sort of says, these are ridiculous, I'm never gonna listen, like there's no way we're doing any of this, right? The uh business community in Boston completely writes them off and says, these are radical, we're not gonna listen to them. But there's this one guy named Ralph Hogland who is young, he's in his mid-1930s, he's a white guy who lives in the suburbs, and he had become very wealthy at a young age after founding or co-founding uh the Consumer Value Store, which we now know in the United States as CVS Pharmacy. And so he'd become quite wealthy, but he was young and had sort of good, strong liberal politics. And he says, okay, right? He sort of signs on and he gets what this group is saying. And so he says, look, me and some of the other these other white rich people are gonna transfer some money to this black uh coalition. And so the white funders sort of start what we would recognize today sort of as a giving circle, the fund for urban Negro Development. And they say, they start some breakfast meetings and they fundraise and say, we're gonna transfer the money that we raise to the Black United Front Foundation, the sort of black giving circle, as it were. And so then we have this one funder and one grantee. The funders are white, suburbanites, wealthy donors. And then we have this urban, black, community-based uh grantee. And they sort of say, let's do this. And the sort of phrase that they use is quote, no strings attached funding, right? But the black group, the Boston Black United Front, said, There's always strings, right? And we hear this phrase all this time all there's strings attached to this money, there's stipulations or requirements or constraints. And we want the money with no strings attached. And the white funders sign on to this notion of no strings attached funding. They say, Yep, we're gonna fundraise it and we're just gonna give it to you. And so I see this as a really sort of radical experiment. And it's sort of this extreme case of testing can money be given, be granted, be donated without strings attached? And one of the things I argue in the paper is that they're actually relatively successful at coming up with administrative processes that remove the strings, right? There's no grant application, there's no grant reporting, there's no sort of formal evaluation when the money goes from fund to the Boston Black United Front. So on the one hand, we can see the administrative ties really removed that there's no questions asked about, you know, sort of formal grant application, the ways that we would think about the strings that structure philanthropic giving. But what I see unfurling in, and this is sort of also a methodological paper, thinking about well, I have the archives of the Boston Black United Front and some from Fund. How are they regarding this experiment? And the answer is that a power relationship very much is still in play, and that we cannot separate the power of funder and grantee from the sort of racial hierarchies that exist in the United States, that this white funding group is asking in sort of soft or informal ways, they're still exerting a power relationship over the Boston Black United Front by asking, for example, members of the Boston Black United Front to come to their breakfast meetings and sort of talk about racism and sort of educate these white liberals about, quote, real life in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. They want stories of how the Boston Black United Front is then re-granting the dollars at the neighborhood level. Um what are you funding, right? Which on the one hand is a very understandable question from the funders' perspective of wanting to know where are the dollars going? This can help raise more funds, it helps educate the donors. Um, on the other hand, it's an exertion of control, of power, of asking the black leaders to come and use their time, tell their stories, and sort of soothe or sort of praise the egos of the donors. And so, yes, the strings have been removed in an admin and in an administrative sense, but there are still Fundamentally, a power hierarchy that is a racialized hierarchy that exists between these two organizations. And the the uh relationship, the sort of funding experiment between these two groups only lasts a few years, in part because the white donors lose interest. They're sort of captivated by this political moment in 1968 after King's assassination, and they're thinking in new ways about the civil rights movement, but then they lose their appetite. They have a really hard time fundraising after having a really initial sort of strong year, but they've overcommitted and they're not able to actually replenish their funds. The Boston Black United Front, they start getting really frustrated with fund about requests to sort of moderate their politics and not be too scary or angry when meeting with white donors. And so they say, look, if there's no money here, we're not in it for anything. And so they spend down their dollars, but it's regarded in the Black community as this really important experiment in community philanthropy and grant making, that they have an elected board that distributes the money. They give it as both grants and loans to local small businesses. And I think it's really important to see how their use of philanthropic dollars included both nonprofit and sort of local businesses, that that economic development was seen as serving a public good, a neighborhood good. And they actually get slapped on the wrist by the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service in the United States, who say that they've crossed a line in giving grants that sort of become, or excuse me, in giving loans that sort of become grants because they're not paid back to some local businesses, a clothing store, um a radio program, a couple different small businesses. And the IRS says, look, you're you're giving to non-charitable organizations and you're only giving to black groups. You're not, there's there's a degree of racial preference here that the government doesn't quite like. And of course, right, we have to recognize that this is a predominantly black power group. And so the policing and the disciplining of how they're giving is also a really important part of this story. Um, but their archives, the local community members who are part of the Boston Black United Front, go to some pretty extreme lengths to preserve the records of this experiment. They sat for many years in a train station and sort of were getting uh moldy. And then the trains, the building they were housed in was going to be demolished. And a local leader remembered that the archive was there and so rescued these boxes of materials, of their meeting minutes, of their grant making. Um, and they sit in his basement for a while and he starts processing them before they're eventually donated to a local community college. And I think the careful attention to the archive is a recognition of what this experiment looked like and its importance to the community in ways that is not paralleled on the side of the Fund for Urban Negro Development, the white donors for whom this was sort of a folly, a short-lived experiment, and held much less power or meaning to it.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

I think that question about um archives within philanthropy, within nonprofits and within funders, is I mean, it's a fascinating angle. I know a couple of people who are probably listening to this who are, you know, with maybe music to their ears because they're constantly trying to make the case for trying to convince nonprofits and funders now of the importance of maintaining archives for for future historians. And it and it does always seem, particularly when we're talking about social movements or more kind of grassroots organizations, there's a real danger of of archival inequality because you know the big the big funders um and the foundations probably will have well-maintained archives, but small groups it will be they may do because one individual or group of individuals happens to have taken care to keep those archives, but in many cases they won't, and they'll have been lost or or destroyed. Um one thing I really wanted to ask you about, it's such a fascinating story and a fascinating paper. In a way, it feels as though it's a real kind of edge case, because you know, what what what the funder is trying to do, the um uh the the group of white funders, is is pretty radical and progressive. Um, and so it sort of stands as a really interesting example of kind of what philanthropy potentially can do if it sets its mind to it. Yet, even given that, it runs into problems and you still have these power differentials and and kind of hidden strings. And so it acts as a really interesting cautionary example about, even with the best of intentions, what might go wrong. Um, from your point of view, I mean, what what do you feel as though the the most kind of pertinent lessons for the current day from it are? And as a historian, do you find yourself being cautious about drawing too many uh kind of conclusions about uh about the the present from the past?

SPEAKER_00 49:10

Uh always, right? There's always this tension between how do we apply the past to the present. But no, I think what you said about this being an edge case of a really genuine committed funder who is trying to embody this no strings attached concept is on the one hand both inspiring and sort of a cautionary tale that even under these circumstances where there is a nominal commitment to this no strings attached funding, they were able to remove the sort of basic structures of grant making of you know, no grant reports. Can you imagine no grant reports, right? Like these are the sort of bread and butter of grant-making relationships. And so they're able to do so much to sort of disrupt these patterns and experiment, and even still these relationships of power and racialized power remain. So to me, it's a really small story. It's short-lived, it's local. There's reasons in which it is hardly representative of the field of philanthropy, but the conditions are so unusual, and that even in this case, these broader relationships remain to me is suggestive of the field much uh more broadly. And I think when we're thinking about the contemporary landscape, we can't talk about philanthropy without talking about who holds wealth and who holds the decision-making authority around its distribution, right? And that cannot be a conversation divorced from hierarchies of race and other identities, right? In the United States and elsewhere. And so when we're thinking about even liberal funders who are committed to a version of civil rights or are committed to a version of racial equality, they are still projecting their power and authority in the transfer of these resources. So to me, what the exact prescription looks like is some of the questions around who works in philanthropy, right? And continues to be a predominantly white field, even as that's changing. Who structures how money is given, who sets priorities, and what some of the new both sort of administrative sides of sort of trust-based philanthropy of removing the administrative strings and uh listening to folks on the ground who have been excluded, right? Elevating and prioritizing decisions by Black Latinx and other minoritized persons is something that I think is increasingly happening in philanthropy, but it's overdue and has still not nearly compensated for the overall whiteness of the field and of the practice.

SPEAKER_01 52:08

Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like to me, stories like this one are a really valuable way of kind of enriching our understanding of those issues that might still face funders um today when they're kind of again with the best of intentions, genuinely trying to shift power or to sort of address historic injustice injustices and marginalization. From your point of view as a as a historian, you know, of philanthropy and sort of more broadly a historian, how what do you see as the kind of fundamental value of a historical perspective to practitioners in in philanthropy? And kind of what what do you feel are the best ways of bringing that that perspective to those practitioners in a way that doesn't ask too much of them or kind of expect them to go off and read vast tomes or kind of dig into academic journals? Do you kind of find yourself looking for ways to bridge that potential gap between academia and practice?

SPEAKER_00 53:06

I do, and it's hard. And I think it's something that my graduate training didn't fully prepare me for, but I work and teach at a public policy school. Uh, and so I'm constantly thinking about how do I explain why the past is valuable to the present and the future? And it's both like the content of history, of thinking about wow, there were, you know, there was this radical experiment in the 1960s and 70s that really sort of pushed the boundaries on what giving could look like and these are the ways in which it was limited, but also history is a way of seeing or thinking, right? About longer time horizons. And one of the powerful things for me about history is that it forces us to see the present not as a foredained conclusion, but as a set of choices made in the past, and therefore we can make different ones in the present. So it's a way of thinking about consequences, about long-term time horizons. And so for me, thinking about and historicizing philanthropy in the nonprofit sector, I think about the role that nonprofit organizations play and their sort of structural relationship between with the government. That's a set of choices that my book says have to be understood in the post-war United States as a response to civil rights organizing, urban inequality, and this sense of urban crisis. There's a specific history to the relationships about why we expect or rely upon nonprofits to help, right? These small, why do these small organizations have to solve big problems? And that that's a racialized story. And we can't talk about that without talking about race. Or to think about the current trend in giving, the sort of obsession with using business logics or borrowing practices from the corporate sector, or thinking about giving in a business-like way. Well, we can sort of root those trends in the 1970s and the 1980s with the rising power of the corporate business elite and their sort of both increasing interest in propping up the nonprofit sector and sort of celebrating it as a private alternative of social welfare provision, but that the infusion of sort of business like thinking of having a strategic plan or giving in a disciplined kind of way is the product of a particular moment in time, or the sort of obsession with RCTs, or that you know, the data and accountability and sort of what quote proof looks like to funders that we're only going to fund things that are efficient, right? This valuing of efficiency is a product of history and is a choice that is different from valuing justice. And the sort of focus on efficiency and counting and proving outcomes, I think, has a lot of merit to it, but it also narrows the things that get funded, right? It is hard to prove the efficiency or the data on social movements. It's very possible, and people are doing important work on what that can look like, but it looks different. And that taking a three or five year time horizon, the way that some funders expect, history tells us that change happens both more slowly and faster than those sort of formal bounds. And so thinking about change along a different set of time horizons, thinking about change as not always the prop product of a like very narrow program, but as a coalition of broader social movement pressures, all of that are lessons from history that I keep trying to distill and share wherever possible. And so one of the things that's been really exciting for me since the book came out last summer was having some conversations with funders around, right, joining a couple advisory groups on what lessons from history can tell us about contemporary funding practices and priorities. And those have been some really humbling and fascinating conversations on my part, or that I've that I've joined around people that are trying to fund and give in new kinds of ways and recognizing that they are perpetuating and trying to disrupt the larger patterns that have existed in the United States. But the value of history and historical thinking, I think there's an appetite for it in finding ways to communicate it in ways that land is important. And I'll I'll say one more part on sort of since the book has come out and conversations with practitioners of both the nonprofit and the funder side. A lot about what I write about in terms of these power differentials, the continuing inadequacy and importance of nonprofit organizations and their relationship to inequality in the United States. A lot of what I write about is very well known to nonprofit leaders, right? The dynamics of taking a government grant or contract or loan and knowing the constraints that come with that, understanding the political context and the depoliticizing pressures that come with it. Leaders know that. They live that day-to-day reality. And so a lot of what I'm saying is not new, but I'm saying it with a different kind of authority as an academic, with a different kind of um positionality that I am insulating from some of those funding pressures. So I'm saying it in hopefully a way that um amplifies things that people have been saying for a really long time. I'm just saying it in a new way or in a different way and with a different degree of uh authority and credentialing behind it, which I have complicated feelings about. And so one of the messages I have for funders is to say, look, we've been relying on small organizations to solve big problems for a long time, and it isn't working. And that isn't the fault of the organizations themselves, but of the broader funding relationships that they operate within. And so funding social movements, recognizing the politics at play here, all of those are messages that I'm trying to convey to funders of both the public and the private variety, because there's been a tendency to uh nitpick or focus on disciplining individual organizations and holding them accountable or responsible for their lack of uh progress on certain things, rather than turning the mirror back on themselves and recognizing how the structures of funding are perpetuating inequalities, even as you know, a handful of new housing units is important, even as after school programs are offering, you know, helping increase math scores, right? That can be valuable and it can be inadequate at the same time. And I'm hoping that funders increasingly recognize that, that it's not the fault of individual organizations, but the broader structural relationships of which they're a part. And that's a product of history. It's a product of choices made in the past.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:47

And and I definitely agree that there's there's a, I've found in the work that I do about history, there's a reassurance in a way when people are presented with historical examples that speak to themes they're finding in their own work, that they're they're not the first ones facing it, and they're not, you know, unique in finding them difficult to manage because a lot of these problems are very long-standing and pretty intractable, and you're not at fault if you can't come up with a you know a clever solution for them because, as you say, they're kind of actually a reflection of decades, if not centuries, worth of uh kind of structural factors that that you probably don't necessarily have the the ability to influence. Um you mentioned there as well, very nearly took me down a rabbit hole of um the point about historicizing the focus on uh efficiency and the idea that you can kind of make uh philanthropy and voluntary action more rational is one of my favorite topics. So I could probably go off for at least another hour talking about that, but I will I will let you go at this point, Claire. Um it just remains to say uh thanks ever so much for coming on the podcast. It's been absolutely great uh to talk both about the book and some of the other work that you've been doing. Um I'll put links in the show notes to places where people can find all of that. Um just an opportunity for you if you've got anything particularly coming up that you want to point people's attention towards, any events or anything like that. Um now's the chance.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:09

Oh goodness, I don't, I have to say I've the book is out and I'm trying to trying to get it in the right hands. So I guess the fact that I don't have anything I want to promote is perhaps an invitation that I'm uh if there's an audience or someone who wants to chat more about the book, I'm available to that. And I really appreciate the opportunity to join you for this conversation and to sort of think again about past and present and future and this little world that's not a little world of nonprofits and philanthropy. So thank you for this conversation, truly.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:41

Great. Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Claire for coming on the podcast. It was really great to have a chance to talk to her all about her work. Um, I'll put some links in the show notes to where you can find Claire's book and also the paper that we talked about and some other things that that Claire's written. If you want to check out some other things uh about philanthropy and civil society, do check out uh the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com where you can find lots of articles and guides and bits and pieces of me writing things elsewhere and all the back episodes of this podcast as well. Uh you can also follow me on social media. I'm on Twitter at Rodri underscore H underscore Davis or at Philiteracy. Uh I'm on Mastodon, although I'm not really sure how much use I'm making of that at the moment. Uh I'm there on LinkedIn if you want to trawl through and find me there. Um if you've got any ideas for people that we could talk to on the podcast or topics you'd like to see us cover, do drop us a line. You can find the email at the website. Other than that, just like, subscribe, tell all your friends about it. If you think they'll enjoy this, do pass on the good word. Uh, and leave us a nice review at iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts as that all helps, and I'll see you next time. Bye, but we're gonna be able to do that.