Since I am someone who cares a lot about both education and charitable giving, it’s hard to imagine a moment that could possibly top yesterday’s breakfast – and it’s not because the food was especially delicious.

The breakfast was second billing to the main event: the students in my Nonprofit Giving class at Framingham State University held a ceremony in which they reflected on their experience in the course and honored the two organizations they chose to fund.  (See my previous post about the class.)

Students as philanthropists?  How can that be?  The class was one of a growing array of similar courses around the country.  The idea is simple yet revolutionary: a foundation puts up the money and the students figure out how and where to allocate it.  Along the way, they learn about pressing community needs as well as the nuts and bolts of grantmaking, such as how to read a funding proposal and conduct a site visit.

My course was funded by the Highland Street Foundation; we had $5000 to give away to nonprofits in Massachusetts.  Highland Street supports similar courses at other schools across the state too.  The Learning by Giving Foundation also funds many such courses at colleges and universities around the U.S.

Any teacher would have been incredibly impressed by the diligence with which the students engaged in a semester-long process in which they ultimately arrived at the decision to split the money evenly between two organizations, Families First, and Resiliency for Life.  The former provides parenting skills to low-income adults; the latter assists academically struggling high school students.

Yet the emotional power of yesterday’s entirely student-run ceremony brought me an even deeper sense of satisfaction at what this course meant to so many of its participants.  With poise and sincerity, many students spoke about how meaningful – and in several cases, life-changing – the experience was for them.  To learn about a subject that touches their passions while being able to do their small part in tackling economic inequality in American society was transformative for them.

Even more significant than knowing I played a role in enabling students to have this profound learning experience is another realization: many of them plan to work in the nonprofit sector after they graduate.  The future of philanthropy suddenly seems a bit brighter!

They are building it, so will you come and join in their efforts?

The “they” are high school dropouts.   What they are building is homes in the very communities where they live.  The organization behind this terrific work is YouthBuild.  It is addressing two critical issues simultaneously:
the dropout crisis among low-income youth and the lack of access to affordable housing.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a presentation given by YouthBuild founder, Dorothy Stoneman, and  four people whose lives the organization has helped to transform.  Hearing their stories about the ways their lives have been changed was awe-inspiring.

Whereas YouthBuild started small in East Harlem in 1978, it now assists low-income young people all across the United States and in several other countries around the world.  Yet, its effectiveness in fighting poverty is now in peril.  The organization relies heavily on government funding, which took a 37 percent cut last year and may be slashed further in upcoming rounds of cost-cutting budgetary negotiations.

Therefore, cultivating private sources of support is critical.  Amazingly, the organization currently only has about 300 individual donors.  These are the people so crucially needed to advocate for continued government funding  since monies from the government and foundations may not be used for this purpose.

The beauty of last night’s gathering was that it was informational and inspirational; the necessity of raising private funds came across as a sidebar.  This format only added to my wanting to become a supporter of YouthBuild.  I hope you might consider doing so as well.

I grew up, like most people, believing that giving is a way of showing concern and compassion toward people in need.  The conference I attended yesterday at Northeastern University reminded me that in these lean times it is about much more than that.

Many of the top brass from Boston’s philanthropic community came together to discuss “Funding Social Impact in the New Economy.”  There were several key take-away messages.  Far and away the most important one for me was this: philanthropy nowadays can no longer be simply about charity; giving is absolutely vital to our economic prosperity.

Lots of details underlie this message.  Cutting to the chase, three points matter most:

1. The U.S. is experiencing unprecedented – and rising – economic inequality.
2. The stark financial and social costs of this inequality reverberate across our educational,
   criminal justice, and healthcare systems.
3. Government lacks the resources, and often the political will, to address this inequality.  Indeed, government policy has often been a key contributor to it.

The mandate for philanthropy in the foreseeable future, therefore, is how to fill in for government in addressing this problem of mounting importance.  It will be quite a challenge considering that total annual giving – at around $300 billion – is just a fraction of government expenditures.  But, this is a challenge we must take on; it is – plain and simple – a matter of economic necessity!

Fifty years ago this month, Michael Harrington’s The Other America shook the nation’s conscience. It shined a light on our society’s gross economic inequalities, fueling the Johnson administration’s war on poverty. Let’s not allow Harrington’s legacy to become a historical footnote. We are long overdue for a renewed wake-up call about the urgency of addressing the poverty in our midst.

Of course, a lot has changed in half a century.  Nowadays, the government is unlikely again to take up comprehensive poverty reform.  There are, after all, enormous budgetary pressures as well as incendiary political divisions. But, that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and begrudgingly accept that America’s opportunity divide must go unchecked. We can indeed make headway on this issue and each of us has an important role to play.

“Today we have more power as private citizens to do public good, both at home and around the world, than citizens in all of human history have ever had,” commented Bill Clinton back in 2006. Clinton is certainly one who knows; he has devoted his years since leaving the Oval Office to many charitable causes.

These words underscore the incredible potential charity has to support and sustain nonprofits that are successfully offering low-income people greater access to opportunity.  It’s hard to imagine a more powerful a way to honor Michael Harrington’s legacy than to tap this charitable potential.

If $5000 suddenly fell from the sky and your goal was to give it away to help low-income people access greater opportunity, where would you donate it?

This is the task at hand for the 22 students in my Nonprofit Giving course.  The Highland Street Foundation put up the money; the students’ job is to figure out how to make good use of it.  Given that the U.S. poverty rate is currently at a record level, it’s difficult to know quite where to begin.  But fortunately there are many nonprofits doing great work to create opportunity.

One funding option the class discussed last week is workforce development.  The aim here is to mentor young people so that they obtain both job skills AND life skills.  So many American youth face the double jeopardy of not only having grown up poor but also lacking supportive adult role models to help guide them on the path toward a successful adulthood.  This is a problem that, as the New York Times recently reported, is plaguing many European countries too.  The class looked at the work being done by three nonprofits – Year Up, Future Chefs, and More Than Words – each of which is making significant inroads in mitigating this problem.

Other options for creating opportunity that we will consider in the course include Housing First and School Readiness.  Check back here to learn more about these.

 Despite how much has been said over the  past week about Susan G. Komen for the Cure, here is a take on breast cancer fundraising you probably haven’t considered:  Since there are only so many charitable dollars to go around, when one organization gets such a large piece of the pie the impact on other causes can be adverse.

It’s been a tough road of late for Komen, its having been the brunt of an onslaught of negative press for pulling back its funding for Planned Parenthood.  This comes in the wake of the release last Friday of the Canadian documentary Pink Ribbons Inc., which criticizes the branding of breast cancer fundraising.  The film exposes how much this good cause has been tarnished by its tie-in with corporate products.  Companies become associated with the warm feeling consumers get by knowing a percentage of sales revenue goes to fight a deadly disease.  This sentiment masks the fact that some of these products, namely cosmetics, may actually be contributors to the breast cancer epidemic.

Let’s set the record straight.  These critiques of Komen are not an indictment of the importance of fighting this disease.  Mine likewise aims to separate the cause from how it is being carried out.  And the facts certainly tell a story worth investigating.  Komen raises nearly half a billion dollars a year.  One of the reasons so many people support it is because breast cancer impacts nearly everyone in some way.  But, that’s hardly the only reason.  It’s no accident that people seek to attach themselves to a cause whose marketing and publicity is literally everywhere.  It is easy to give when a charity has the resources to inform ordinary people of the importance and urgency of its work.  And when the cause is in the media spotlight – as is so often the case with breast cancer – donors feel that their giving is doing something righteous.

And perhaps it is.  Or maybe not – how much good Komen is actually doing is a bone of contention, as Pink Ribbons Inc. makes clear.  But so much of the time, feelings tied to mass-mediated causes become the currency of philanthropy supposedly done well.  And since people have finite amounts to give, other causes that do not have a well-oiled marketing arm ultimately lose out.

The cause that particularly concerns me – and which is the focus of this blog – is the opportunity divide in the United States.  This is the gap between those who have the skills, contacts, and money to secure jobs that pay well with mobility prospects and those who don’t.  The urgency of this cause has become apparent in recent months for a host of reasons – the rising poverty rate, declining mobility in the U.S. relative to Canada and Europe, and growing economic inequality – all of which the Occupy protests last year made plainly visible.

There are so many nonprofits making inroads in countering this divide, yet very few have the power to get their good works into the public eye.  Whereas Komen’s marketing arsenal enables it to amass millions upon millions in contributions, organizations working to increase access to opportunity take whatever crumbs they can get.  This is why I profile some of these organizations elsewhere on this blog.

When it comes to schooling, might less actually be more?  That seems to be the take-away message in Michael Ellsberg’s 2011 book The Education of Millionaires.  Look at all the college dropouts who have gone on to become successful entrepreneurs.  Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are just the few among them whom most of us have heard of.  There are many others like them at the helms of the most successful U.S. companies.

Ellsberg shows why colleges and universities don’t educate students in ways that ignite the sort of creativity needed to start businesses that create jobs.  After all, so much of the classroom learning that takes place nowadays involves demonstrating information mastery rather than curiosity and exploration.  High schools, with their emphasis on getting kids to meet standards of competency, unfortunately contribute to an academic culture where students infrequently take intellectual risks.  This is a culture that I, as a professor, know all too well and work hard to transcend in the ways I teach my students.

So Ellsberg is on to something.  And indeed, I too have seen firsthand why college doesn’t seem to be the right path for all young people.  Yet, his prescriptive message is ultimately a bit short-sighted.  By interviewing millionaire entrepreneurs who dropped out of college, he erroneously trumpets the view that not going to college is a viable path toward a successful future, mistaking correlation for causality.  As my colleague Virginia Rutter put it, this view is a version of “hoop dreams” that isn’t just for Black kids.  Not having a college degree is as likely a path to becoming the next Steve Jobs as relentlessly practicing a jump shot is to becoming the next LeBron James.  The truth is that those with a college degree are much more successful than those without one.  And Ellsberg conveniently overlooks mentioning that the dropout-turned-millionaire celebrities he holds up on a pedestal succeeded in large part because they grew up with advantages unavailable to many young people; things like a stable two-parent family, material comforts, and a prep school education.

Given the infinitesimally small odds that a college dropout can go on to find decent, well-paying employment – let alone become the next millionaire start-up maverick – we would be prudent to hold onto a small piece of Ellsberg’s message while rejecting the rest.  He is right to point out that our society needs to do a much better job of providing young people – especially lower-income youth – pathways to occupational opportunity.  And of course it’s great when someone starts a billion-dollar company that creates jobs.  But the reality is that what we need most are better-trained people to fill those jobs.

Therefore, rather than tell young people they should do the rough equivalent of play the lottery, we instead ought to chart out viable pathways for non-college bound youth to attain decent jobs.  Check back here next week for part II of “Educating the 99 percent.”  It will discuss such pathways.

How much more evidence do we need that the American Dream is eroding?  The Census Bureau indicated in December that now nearly 1 in 2 people in the U.S. live in families with total household income less than twice the poverty line.  Last fall, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued a report showing that whereas from 1979-2007 the after-tax, inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 1 percent of earners increased 275-fold, incomes of the poorest fifth of the population rose just 18 percent.  And in today’s New York Times there was an articlebased on research showing there is significantly less upward mobility in this country than in Canada or Western Europe.

The Occupy movement has put economic inequality on the national agenda, so now it’s just a matter of what we decide to do about it.  Millions of Americans need help, not just so they can weather a tough economy but also to get a foothold on future opportunity.  As the presidential campaign kicks into full swing with next week’s New Hampshire primary, their need for help deserves center stage.

All candidates in the Republican field are steadfast in their anti-government stances, while President Obama is bracing himself for renewed battles with a Congress similarly bent against new spending on those in need.  This means we will have to tackle these problems the old-fashioned way: by helping one another.

Last fall, in the Times Nicholas Confessore described the likes of Bill Gates, William E. Conway, Jr., and Howard Schultz as “policymaking billionaires.”  They head up foundations that are spending massive sums of money to redress social problems at a time when the government isn’t.  Of course, there are few who can afford to give in this way.  But, most of us can still give something, and that is what matters.  The bulk of all giving in this country comes not from the wealthy but from people like you and me.  Considering the many nonprofits around the U.S. that are doing terrific work to create opportunity for low-income people (featured elsewhere on this blog), revitalizing the American Dream is actually something well within our grasp.

 Here’s something many of us know but which has gotten lost amidst the discussions and debates over the past several years about how to redress the educational achievement gap: this gap is, at its core, about class inequalities.  Thanks to a clear and concise op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times by Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske, we are reminded of the central reason so many kids are not proficient in math, science, reading, and writing.

Policymakers can talk all they want about fixing “failing schools” by holding them accountable to “higher standards” – as was the case with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and is similarly true with Obama administration rhetoric – but that doesn’t get us very far toward mitigating the problem.

This is why there is a growing consensus among education researchers that perhaps the best way to address the achievement gap is by investing in the many nonprofits across the U.S. which provide high-quality early childhood education to kids whose families can least afford to pay for it.  The significant benefits of making these investments are discussed elsewhere on this blog:

•  A Slam-Dunk Investment: Supporting Early Childhood Education
• Giving Kids the Best Chance for Success by Helping Them From Birth

 Like many others, my reaction to the Occupy Movement has been mixed.  While I am impressed by the creative ways it has publicized gross inequalities in our society, I am frustrated by the movement’s lack of an agenda for change. Complaining about problems without identifying solutions – that doesn’t sound very inspiring, or even novel!

Just when I was becoming resigned to seeing the Occupy protesters as just the latest evidence of hopeless idealism, last night I encountered an antidote for my disillusionment – not amidst the outdoor encampment that remains standing in Boston’s Dewey Square but away from the cold across the river in Cambridge.  I attended a reception held by Root Cause to celebrate two groups of local nonprofits.  The first group of five had just completed a year-long process in which Root Cause’s Social Innovation Forum helped them to better define their goals, strengthen their leadership, and improve their messaging.  They were now equipped to build strong relationships with funders and access wider sources of grant support.  The second group of six was just starting this exciting process.  Both groups had been selected from among over 100 applicants.

These 11 nonprofits are not only addressing some of the most challenging problems facing our society but they have the evidence to prove they are succeeding in their efforts.  For example:

• Future Chefs (discussed in detail elsewhere on this blog) provides youth with mentoring and support as they embark on careers in the culinary arts.
• MathPower is closing a critical piece of the educational achievement gap – inequality in quantitative reasoning.
• Innercity Weightlifting encourages urban youth to spend time developing bodybuilding skills for a career in personal training as an alternative to engaging in gang activity.
• Tempo Young Adult Resource Center provides crucial services to young adults who are aging out of the state foster care system.

As I ate the scrumptious food prepared by Future Chefs and met many of the others in attendance, what resonated with me most is that the “social innovation marketplace” all around me didn’t rest on idealism but pragmatism.  The predominant mood in the room wasn’t anger directed at myriad forms of injustice but determination to support ways of making lasting change.  Here were people coming together to promote feasible, high-impact solutions to complex social problems.  How could one possibly leave this event without a renewed sense of optimism that these problems can indeed be successfully mitigated!