How can this nation continue to be so mystifyingly confused, contradictory, and sometimes downright incoherent about immigrants and immigration?   The Summer 2009 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly is devoted to the challenges faced by nonprofits in serving, representing, and advocating for immigrant populations in the midst of a confusing public discourse.  The authors in the issue describe the obstacles of punitive state and local laws, hostile public opinion, and chaotic shifts and reversals in national approaches to immigration–and what creative, inventive, intrepid nonprofits around the nation are doing to counter these conditions.

Punitive, hostile, chaotic? You can attach these adjectives daily to the challenges nonprofits and immigrants have to address every day.  Consider these milestones of the last week or two: (more…)

Notwithstanding the White House meeting on immigration reform and commitments by the likes of Senators Reid (D-NV) and Schumer (D-NY) to get something done in Congress this year, the momentum for immigration reform action does not feel much like a juggernaut.  In the Washington Post, Tamar Jacoby of ImmigrationWorks (an employers group advocating immigration reform) and Jorge Castenada (Mexico’s foreign secretary from 2000 to 2003 under Vicente Fox) described President Obama’s position on the content of immigration reform as “studiously vague.”

If there is no action in Congress, don’t think that there’s nothing happening on immigration that should concern nonprofits that believe in human rights and community building, that realize that most of our communities have immigrants in their midst (even if they somehow fail to see them), that realize that the vast majority of us are immigrants, the children of immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants. (more…)

Some people might think that a concern about documented and undocumented immigrants is sort of outside the ken of most “regular Jane and Joe” nonprofits, the groups that aren’t immigrant-founded or -run, the groups whose agendas ostensibly have little to do or nothing to do directly with immigration reform.

That’s not true. All nonprofits have a stake in treating, serving, advocating for, and supporting immigrants in this nation. What should nonprofits be prepared to do? We have some suggestions.

(more…)

In January 2008, the Cohen Report wrote about the Pigford litigation that had attempted, with limited effect, to redress the historic discrimination of the U.S. Department of Agriculture toward black farmers.  In “Still Fighting the Last Plantation,” we took note of the principled support of then Illinois Senator Barack Obama and Iowa Republican Charles Grassley calling for an extension of the time period and some flexibility in consideration of the applications of black farmers for Pigford settlement benefits.

We also described some of the nonprofits that were engaged in fighting for black farmers rights, including the National Black Farmers Association, headed by one John Boyd.  The June 21, 2009 Washington Post just did a front-page profile of Boyd, who has not dropped this fight one iota.  Since becoming president, Barack Obama’s first proposed federal budget included $1.25 billion as money to settle the claims of some 70,000 black farmers who contend that they either didn’t know about the original $1 billion settlement in 1999 or had been otherwise unfairly excluded (as a black farmer in Virginia, Boyd himself was among the 16,000 farmers who got something, in his case, $50,000, in the original Pigford settlement).  According to Boyd, the $1.25 billion is $1.25 billion too little.

(more…)

Nonprofits across the nation ought to know what legislation is pending in Congress that would change the rules–hopefully for the better–for America’s diverse immigrant population.

The most important legislative initiative related to nonprofits and immigration–other than the elephant in the room, comprehensive immigration reform–is the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, S.729) . (more…)

Remember the debate in California regarding getting large foundations in that state to report on their grantmaking to racial/ethnic communities and to people of color-led organizations?  In several postings (available under the “racial equity” category here), the Cohen Report covered the foundations’ visceral, furious reaction against the legislation that the California state legislature was considering.  Before the legislation got to a vote in the California State Senate, in June 10 foundations struck a deal with Assemblyman Joe Coto, the original sponsor of the proposed legislation, to pull the bill in favor of the foundations spending 6 months or so to come up with a voluntary plan for increasing funding and increased capacity-building support for organizations serving minority communities and for POC-led organizations.

In December of 2008, 9 of the 10 foundations released a report describing their 2-3 year plan, titled Strengthening Nonprofit Minority Leadership and the Capacity of Minority-Led and Other Grassroots Community-Based Organizations.  Although the foundations’ report includes extensive discussion of the foundations’ current grantmaking reaching communities of color, the following chart lists all of the foundations’ self-categorized “new” commitments, both individual and collaborative, emerging from their 6-month review. (more…)

How will changes in the civil rights movement–changes in leadership, strategy, and program–affect the future of the nonprofit sector? News coverage of the turbulent recent history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People led to a spate of newspaper articles questioning whether the NAACP had a future or whether the civil rights movement itself was a historic anachronism. Coinciding with the presidential campaign and subsequent election of Barack Obama, the NAACP has embarked on a course to challenge reports of its obsolescence with a new, young leader, Benjamin Jealous, at its helm. How will the NAACP under Jealous’s leadership transform itself at this pivotal historic intersection of Obama’s presidency and its own 100^th anniversary?

(more…)

History As A Teacher: The Interactions Of Foundations And Legislators

In foundation circles, it is an oft-repeated truism that McGeorge Bundy, when he led the Ford Foundation, and his foundation colleagues botched their relationships with Congress when they testified against federal regulation and specifically what led to the 1969 Tax Act’s controls on private foundations. Though their dire predictions of the collapse of foundations after the Tax Act hardly came to pass—in fact, foundations boomed in numbers and assets following it–Bundy and his big foundation colleagues have morphed into philanthropic archetypes of how not to handle elected state or federal legislators.

The performance of some California foundations on May 12^th may be instructive for philanthropic leaders eager to avoid becoming New Millennium protégés of McGeorge Bundy. On that day, the California Senate Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development met to discuss pending legislation that would have required large California-based foundations (with assets over $250,000,000) to report on the racial/ethnic composition of their grantees, their grantees’ target communities, and the foundations’ own staff and board leadership.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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?

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Somehow, the Smithsonian’s leadership keeps giving and giving and giving (startlingly good examples of how to manage badly).

(more…)

We reported in the last issue of CR about the plight of black farmers and the nonprofits that were fighting on their behalf to secure justice. Even though a positive court decision supported the farmers’ rights, the federal government’s lack of diligent follow-up on the case has attracted the attention of Senators Barack Obama and Chuck Grassley in the Senate, and Congressmen Bobby Scott and Steve Chabot, in writing and supporting a bill that would extend the opportunity for black farmers to file for restitution for discrimination suffered at the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

(more…)

The subtext of film The Great Debaters was the dual life of the character played by Denzel Washington, by day a professor at Wiley College in Texas coaching the debate team, by night an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, established during the Great Depression to help black—and white—farmers. Fast forward to today, the plight of black farmers is still an issue in the wake of the landmark but unfulfilled class action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, [i ]but it is not on the public’s radar screen—nor of national politicians, except for that of Barack Obama.

(more…)

A former Legal Services attorney, California Congressman Xavier Becerra is the only Latino on the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee. But it is his distinctive voice and perspective, not his ethnicity, that has vaulted him to a position of visibility on issues of charity and philanthropy.

(more…)