Executive Commentary
During coming weeks and months we will be featuring short articles and commentaries by leading foundation executives to highlight their insights and experiences relative to contemporary diversity in philanthropy issues and opportunities.
Our first featured field executive is Gara LaMarche, president and chief executive officer of The Atlantic Philanthropies, a U.S.-based international funding institution with strong program interests in population health and ageing, human rights and education. Prior to joining The Atlantic Philanthropies, LaMarche served for many years as vice president of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute. He is widely regarded as one of organized philanthropy’s most thoughtful leaders on issues of justice, social change and the independent sector.
This comment, completed with support from Diversity in Philanthropy Project consultant Robin Templeton at the close of 2007, underscores LaMarche’s views about the need to engage young people in change efforts bearing on diversity and the independent sector. It also speaks to LaMarche’s thoughts on the important roles issue framing and language can play in promoting or hindering this work.
Gara LaMarche
Gara LaMarche is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Atlantic Philanthropies, based in New York City. Until mid-2007, he served as Vice President and Director of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute. An internationally recognized leader in social justice philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, Mr. LaMarche serves on the National Advisory Board of the Diversity in Philanthropy Project, the Selection Committee of the Sundance Documentary Fund and the Leadership Council of Hispanics in Philanthropy.
Too often the frame of diversity puts an emphasis on bodies, not strategies. That’s not to say that numbers aren’t important, because you need a critical mass of people of color and diverse community leaders whose voices are being heard if you are to carry forward a meaningful social justice analysis. The two things are not disconnected. But one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. Diversifying staff doesn’t necessarily lead to diversifying strategies. The real issue is taking various forms of structural racism and institutionalized exclusion into account in your overall grant making. This requires a strategic change in orientation for most foundations, a new way of looking at what we do and how we do it.
When I served as Vice President of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute (OSI), for example, one of the first programs I started was our Urban Debate Program. The program was not launched with an explicit diversity rationale. The foremost aim of the program, rather, was changing the narrative about youth, especially young men of color. This was in the late 1990s, when the dominant narrative about youth of color was that of the “superpredator.” Fear of crime, particularly crime involving youth of color, had taken hold across much of the nation, including among many policy leaders. To challenge these trends in a novel and creative way, we decided to support an important new debate program for youth of color in selected public schools. Historically, debate programs were only available to kids at private academies and elite public schools. The Urban Debate Program allowed kids at low-income schools, 99.9 percent of whom were students of color, to compete with “the best,” to win international competitions, to go to the nation’s top colleges. Without overstating it, the Urban Debate Program helped change the way that urban schools were viewed. It also became a source of pride for the students at those schools.
Similarly, our Youth Media Program at OSI was also aimed at changing the narrative about youth of color. At the time when we established the program—despite the fact that the juvenile crime rate was falling—the perception remained that youth of color were a growing threat to public safety, a problem to be managed. Previously, philanthropic interest in high school journalism was to improve academic outcomes. But we saw the importance of youth-generated media in racial and social justice terms. We thought that even more imminently important than raising grades among youth of color was hearing their voices. Even beyond that, the importance of the Program, as we came to understand it, wasn’t just about making sure that youth of color could be seen as having something to say, but also ensuring that the authentic content of what they were saying could gain broader public consideration. We looked at the products of this media and saw that youth of color were raising salient points. For example, through one of the programs that we funded, a young person produced a film on truancy. It was low quality in terms of production but revealed that one could view skipping school as a quite rational response to school conditions. Why go to school when classrooms are overcrowded, teachers don’t like you, text books are antiquated and the benefits of school completion are uncertain? It was an important and valid critique of the education system for most young people of color.
Though OSI’s Urban Debate and Youth Media Programs didn’t start out that way, I came to see both as important in terms of promoting diversity and equity because they fostered a new public narrative about the voices and potential of youth of color. The programs put out a different message about young people, one of empowerment and autonomy. It’s not unlike the work of The Atlantic Philanthropies’ Aging Program. When you talk about the very old in today’s society, like with the very young, there is the same concern, that they are not seen as valuable by too many people and institutions. Our Aging Program is in part an effort to change the prevailing social paradigm about aging and the elderly. The goal is advanced by supporting efforts seeking to ensure that older people are not seen as a drag or burden on society, but instead are valued as an asset.
In addition to promoting inclusivity by expanding the frameworks around which we build our work, it is also important for people involved in philanthropy and social change to be reflective about the language we use. Terms of art that come to be widely employed often, when you think about them, have meanings we may not intend. References that we customarily use in our work can be unwittingly pejorative and clinical where diversity and human concerns apply. By referring to “populations” (a clinical term) we are working with or “targeting” (a common military expression), we can unconsciously feed the very problems we are trying to solve. We inadvertently objectify and devalue whole communities when we use language and conceptual frames that are reflective of the very injustices and inequalities our work aims to reverse. The worst of these usages, in my view, is “at risk,” since it defines a group—usually kids, often kids of color—in terms of deficits and dangers, not promise and potential. Essentially it suggests that investing in kids is necessary to forestall some otherwise bad outcome—that they will become dependent or criminal. Maybe that is helpful, even necessary, to spur some needed policy reform, but it does so at the “risk” of reinforcing the frame of deficit and danger when we think about young people. Similar problems are presented when we talk about our work in terms of the “disadvantaged.”
The very term “disadvantaged” raises questions about how we define value in society, and how we talk about the challenges our profession and institutions are largely set up to address. Is the problem one of the individual’s disadvantaged condition or is it rather institutionalized poverty, racism or sexism that is the problem? I think more philanthropic leaders need to be clear in their analysis and language that the real problem is not the symptoms so much as the underlying structural inequity that prevents diverse individuals and communities from achieving greater social, economic and political empowerment. And if that is something that many of us who do this work believe—and I think many of us do—then why not just say so? Why not just be more forthright about the problems we are trying to tackle and call them what they really are rather than resorting to language that is clinical or inadvertently pejorative? Why not focus on addressing the structural commonalities that bear on inequality in all of its forms, whether we are talking about poverty or race or sexual identity or age, or any other designation that informs inequality in society?
The interview and write-up that formed the basis of Mr. LaMarche’s “Leader Commentary” were conducted by Robin Templeton for the Diversity in Philanthropy Project.