As we predicted in the summer issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly and in the Financial Times, the California state legislature and the state’s biggest private foundations struck a deal to scuttle the looming legislative mandate (Assembly Bill 624) that large foundations report on their grantmaking to racially diverse communities and minority-led nonprofits. The deal was struck away from the public spotlight and announced on June 24th.

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Remember when the Atlanta Journal–Constitution published a pathbreaking series on racial discrimination in awarding home mortgages? The Color of Money won a Pulitzer1 and put juice into community-based organizations, academics, and newspapers uncovering patterns of racial discrimination—or redlining—in bank mortgage and home improvement lending practices. Just as the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires banks to report on their mortgages and loans, should philanthropic redlining in U.S. philanthropy be remedied by a mandatory reporting regime?

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Whether one likes or dislikes the policies promoted by Barack Obama in his run for the presidency, he is impressively committed to transparency and disclosure. Obama appears unafraid of the cleansing role of sunshine in American politics, even if the disclosures spark some critical commentary.

Last month, Obama released a list of every — every! — earmark he had requested, successfully or not, in the federal budgets for Fiscal Years 2006 and 2007. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has not released her earmarks list, nor has she disclosed the names of contributors to her family’s and husband’s foundations or released her tax returns.

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There is something wrong with the debate about “diversity” that has roiled the foundation sector. The problem is simply diversity itself. Like much of modern political syntax, it is the term of art because it is increasingly devoid of meaning — or because it is more palatable than other, older, more politically charged variations on the theme.

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When any sector of our society defends conflicts of interest as essential for their operations, creativity, and impact, something pernicious is going on and needs to be rooted out of the body politic.

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It is not hard to find daily newspaper examples of nonprofit and foundation abuses sullying the charitable sector and a concomitant reluctance of nonprofit leadership institutions to say anything critical in other than the broadest, least specific terms possible. But a notable exception to this was the pledge by the Council on Foundations a couple of years ago in the wake of the Getty Trust scandal in Los Angeles, to speak out against foundation abuses wherever they might be, whether brought to the Council for action or simply stumbled across by newspaper-scouring COF staff.

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