From “Confetti Funding” to Effective Citizenship

John Brothers, President, T. Rowe Price Foundation

I came to T. Rowe Price in April of 2015 during the week of the unrest in Baltimore after the murder of Freddie Gray. Earlier in my career, I had worked as a community organizer, so when I arrived, those experiences as an organizer told me it was our job to listen in that moment. I found myself often in spaces where a lot of people read about the issues certain neighborhoods face, but couldn't tell us the name of someone in that neighborhood. That meant we had to learn to hear people. And we started doing just that — sitting in the basements of churches, the living rooms of residents, and in community centers to listen to what people said was really important to them.

A new set of values came out of that experience, which ultimately became what we called our Theory of Philanthropy. We identified nine areas that closely align with what is now known as trust-based philanthropy and that describe how we relate to community. Much of corporate philanthropy gives what is commonly referred to as confetti funding: the idea of spreading money far and wide to inspire communities to think that the company is made of good citizens. In place of that approach, we created a theory to foster effective citizenship and ensure that the impact we’re after is decided and reached by communities. 

Originally, we created those values not because they are trust-based, but because we viewed most other options as bad philanthropic practice. There's no conceivable justification for project-restricted funding (unless the community says to do it), and yet so many philanthropic agents are still resistant to multi-year unrestricted funding. We also have bad habits as a sector with evaluation and measurement. I remember meeting with a well-known community leader within my first two weeks of being in Baltimore, who had prepared a set of impact charts that she thought I would want to see. The message from her was, “I will measure what you tell me to measure.” That was eye-opening for me. We didn’t begin with our worldviews. We didn’t start by asking, “What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you awake at night?” Shame on our industry for leading our community members to that place. She and I have met many times since then and still laugh about this meeting, but that moment illuminated why it’s important to change how we do our work. For us, evaluation is tied to the self-determination of communities and what they mean by success, not using our jargony words of “impact.” It also means trusting what they tell us because they are the experts in their own self-determinations.

The origination of nonprofit boards look more akin to a community organizing strategy; it is supposed to involve community members coming together, locking arms on an issue they care about and ultimately creating and managing an organization built around that. Nonprofits have moved away from that over time for many reasons, including philanthropy promoting governance models that are not helpful. With thousands upon thousands of board meetings happening every day, could we imagine all of those boards coming together as a movement of building communities rather than controlling them? Philanthropy’s distance from that kind of action means there is a lot of opportunity for us to help the sector get to the root of what we were created for.