According to the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s recent report on grantee experiences with intermediary funders, 33 percent of intermediary grantees report receiving multiyear funding, compared to 58 percent of grantees of other traditional funders.
I find this statistic particularly damning — not of intermediaries, but of the philanthropic field itself.
As referenced in the CEP report, philanthropy often asserts, “that (intermediaries) can be well positioned for field building and advocacy.” From my own personal experience, a large amount of Village of Wisdom’s funding has come from intermediaries who tend to have public statements, website language, and open application processes that are often explicitly about the role of race, class, and inequity.
However, when intermediaries and donor collaboratives find themselves in situations that the CEP report highlights — unsure of what their funding will look like from year to year — it undercuts arguably their greatest potential: resourcing transformational social change efforts. The question, then, must be asked: are intermediaries just another example of philanthropy’s inability to adequately fund strategic efforts to address root causes of social issues?
Let’s consider the impact of inconsistent funding for social change efforts through the lens of a familiar but, I suspect, under-examined legal battle in this country.
In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson confirmed the separate but equal doctrine, legally codifying segregation at a national scale within America. Plessy wasn’t overturned until 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. Said another way, it took nearly 60 years to bring about that significant social and legal change in this country. Brown v. Board was not just one case but an amalgamation of five separate cases brought to the Supreme Court starting back in 1936. This 18-year legal campaign was kicked off by Charles Hamilton Houston requesting the NACCP invest $10,000 for him and Thurgood Marshall to spend two to three years strategically planning for it. According to inflation calculators, Esquire Houston’s request in today’s US dollar value would equal to $234,900.
But how does this relate to intermediaries? Transformational change in this country is not something that occurs in three to five year grant cycles, with tepid dollar amounts, as Hilary Pennington points out in her blog reflecting on the CEP report about intermediary funding. In the case of social change that hinges on racial justice, there is evidence that decades of work by highly skilled and dedicated individuals (read: professionals earning $100K+ salaries) will be required to precipitate such change.
In the case of the organization I lead, it took Village of Wisdom nine years, cycling through multiple organizational strategies, hundreds of workshops with Black families, several research studies, and years of working within schools to finally win a Department of Education grant that hopefully will influence policy mandates for culturally affirming practices in education. To achieve this, Village of Wisdom has strung together an unusual amount of short-term, highly competitive grants — often through intermediaries. I find our pathway to be both uncommon and unnecessarily difficult, limiting the number of peers we have, which only limits our nation’s progress toward needed social change.
If intermediaries are supposed to operate in the philanthropic ecosystem as a catalyst for grassroots, community-led social change on a grand scale — which is how many see them — then they must be empowered to do so by those funding through intermediaries. And if social change is the goal, then there must be an understanding of the scale required, both in time and resources, including human capital.
So, what would a successful model of funding intermediaries for transformational social change look like? Well, I have three suggestions:
- My shorthand for the first strategy is called “Run Me My Multi.” That is, encourage, incentivize, and trust intermediaries to provide multiyear, multi-million dollar funding. Either enable intermediaries to make longer-term investments in organizations with the goal of building long-standing institutions led by communities of color or build the internal foundation capacity to fund it directly. However, I do think the strategy of moving that money away from trustees who are often disconnected from this community is a smart strategy, but the trust in intermediaries has to increase for this strategy to work. Either way, social change organizations led by communities of color need more access to “multi’s.”
- Don’t fund intermediaries that can’t demonstrate that they have better relationships with grantees than traditional foundations, especially grantees of color and those addressing social issues that are increasingly being positioned as politically polarizing. If an intermediary can’t do this, then they are in many ways an unnecessary middleman. To me, this shortcoming of some intermediaries is an indictment of their value proposition in being more able to address social change issues or offer targeted expertise. And, although I don’t like zero-sum thinking, math is math, and that money can be deployed to intermediaries who actually do offer greater rootedness in the community they are serving, and who deploy those “multi’s” to fund equitable social change.
- Incentivize intermediaries to fund organizations that are going to maximize on the promise of intermediaries. So many organizations, Village of Wisdom included, have depended on these funding models to build our capacity because entrance into traditional funding is often inaccessible. Imagine for a moment how “radical” the ideas of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall must have been in the 1930s — that’s 30 years before the National Guard was needed to escort six-year-old Ruby Bridges into a “desegregated school.” Influence intermediaries to find, build, and support organizations that have a daring dream and compelling strategy to achieve greater fairness and equality for all in this world.
Looking for an example of an organization that can do this type of work? Look no further than The CAFE group’s 1954 Project founded by Liz and Don Thompson. Through Liz’s leadership, the project yearly commits to a three-year, $1M grant to about five different Black-led, education-focused nonprofits in this country. That’s a significant multiyear investment in a population of organizations that are simultaneously most likely to be focusing on the acute issues of race and class that dramatically plague children’s education in this country and are the least likely to receive significant funding to address those issues.
One might read into the CEP report that intermediaries aren’t all that different from traditional funders. However, my take is that perhaps it’s not intermediaries that are failing to distinguish themselves but rather the broader philanthropic field asking them to do systemic change work with episodic and unreliable funding resources. Philanthropy could deploy its wealth to better position these entities to live up to their intended strategic purpose. Funders, if you see intermediaries as movers and shakers in deep, and deeply necessary, systems change work, then fund them to be just that.
William Jackson is the Founder & Chief Dreamer of Village of Wisdom. Find him on LinkedIn.
