|
|
 |
|
| Opportunities & Exposures: Philanthropy |
Grasping the Nettle
Gara LaMarche
03/01/2005
|
When President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill in the summer of 1996, George Soros, who had just a few months earlier launched his philanthropic endeavors in the United States after years of working to build democracies in Eastern Europe, felt he needed to act.
Soros was agnostic about the law’s pathbreaking shift of responsibility from the federal government to the states, but troubled by a provision barring legal immigrants from government benefits. An immigrant himself who has never forgotten how the British National Health Service helped him when he was injured as a young railroad worker, Soros vowed to reverse what he saw as unfair treatment of legal immigrants who pay taxes and contribute to our society. “When they need a safety net in hard times, it should be there for them,” Soros told me, then the newly minted director of his U.S. program. “I want to spend $50 million on this.”
When I recovered from the shock of the figure—having spent my career in nonprofits, I was accustomed to far fewer zeroes—we set up the Emma Lazarus Fund, named for the poet whose words adorn the Statue of Liberty. Most of Soros’s millions went to a network of proven service organizations and challenge grants for local donor collaboratives to significantly increase naturalization assistance and legal and social aid for noncitizens. The challenge grants multiplied Soros’s investment, but what really paid off were the grants to immigrant advocacy groups. Their work to educate the public about the hardships brought about by the new welfare reform bill for law-abiding immigrants eventually persuaded Congress to restore most of the benefits it had cut: $16 billion worth. Soros considers it one of the best investments he has made.
Soros supports not only immigrant services, but also after-school programs, drug treatment projects and debate leagues to help urban high school students build their self-confidence and academic skills. While Soros’s wealth directly assists individuals, families and communities, he multiplies these investments with public policy grants to increase government responsibility.
This approach is growing more popular among donors across the political spectrum. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, seeks to “encourage decentralization of power and accountability away from centralized, bureaucratic, national institutions back to the states, localities and revitalized mediating structures.” For the Bradleys, increasing public funds for faith-based institutions is a critical aspect of carrying out this agenda. The Bradley Foundation has been a leading force in efforts to expand the use of vouchers as a vehicle for school choice, supporting a legal team to defend Wisconsin’s school choice program in court, the pro-voucher Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and national advocacy groups like the American Education Reform Council and the Center for Education Reform.
The Bradley Foundation’s work on vouchers and welfare reform shows how a relatively small number of politically conservative donors have had enormous influence on the current policy landscape. A recent report by the liberal National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) documents this with grudging admiration. “With resources that pale in comparison to centrist and liberal foundations, conservative funders have supported public policies that now impact the entire nation,” NCRP writes. “Perhaps that is why foundations on the right tend to spend so little on evaluation—they can easily see their impact in the newspaper, on TV, in America’s classrooms and in the courts.”
I do not share the Bradley Foundation’s enthusiasm for vouchers or certain aspects of welfare reform, but I applaud its direct engagement in public policy. The only difference—and it is a significant one—between the Bradley Foundation’s work on vouchers and Soros’s investment in after-school programs in New York and Baltimore is that Soros believes necessary initiatives like these should be public obligations, like roads and libraries. He believes that a progressive tax system and democratically determined public expenditures should be required. The Bradley Foundation favors smaller government and plans that allocate funding based more on individual rather than collective decisions. This is a central debate of our time. But both realize that donors’ engagement in public policy debates is crucial to advancing their vision of a just and fair society.  | Gara LaMarche is vice president and director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Institute. |
|
|
|
|
|
