Foundations for Change? Advocacy and Participatory Grantmaking Strategies in the U.S. Philanthropic Sector

Abstract

Philanthropic foundations are not merely patrons that provide grant funding to worthy causes. Iseek to develop an understanding of philanthropic foundations as active political actors that attempt to influence social and policy change through two key strategies: advocacy and participatory grantmaking. The role of foundations in social and policy change merits scholarly attention for several reasons. For one, foundations wield significant power with the nearly $1 trillion in assets that they collectively hold, and they can wield this power to not only define the nature of societal challenges but also the manner in which they are addressed. Foundations—in particular private foundations—are also a unique organizational type as they are typically seeded with money from the wealthy, who receive generous tax breaks for doing so, and then are often run by the wealthy with minimal oversight. Critics argue that they thus represent a plutocratic and undemocratic force in U.S. society. Furthermore, their role as funders aims the attention of the nonprofit sector as a whole to focus on particular challenges and solutions and not on others. I develop a conceptual framework in the first chapter that aims to further understandingof what explains foundations engagement in social and policy change strategies. Drawing primarily on theories of organizational sociology, the framework posits that foundations’ structure and context influence their engagement in advocacy and participatory grantmaking. With respect to structure, I expect that foundations’ institutional logic, organizational form, levels of managerialism, and political orientation will affect their social and policy change strategies. In regard to foundations’ context, I expect that relational factors—network embeddedness and organizational field—as well as external environment factors—community wealth and community political orientation—will influence foundation engagement in this work. I test the framework across three empirical studies. Chapter two examines the extent to which the structure and context of large foundations influences their engagement in advocacy. Chapter three narrows the focus to community foundations, specifically, and their engagement in advocacy and lobbying. Chapter four turns back to large foundations to examine their adoption of participatory grantmaking. Across the findings from the three empirical chapters, the conceptual frame appliessomewhat differently among these contexts, but there are key themes across the studies. A community logic is consequential for advocacy as we see for large foundations broadly and community foundations specifically. Foundations with a community logic, and its focus on partnership and collaboration, engage in more advocacy than other foundations. Embeddedness in inter-organizational networks is also an important driver of advocacy among both large foundations and community foundations, lending support to the idea that networks are important conduits for knowledge sharing about advocacy. Furthermore, foundation form matters for both advocacy and participatory grantmaking but in divergent ways. Community foundations engage in less advocacy than private foundations but are more likely to embrace participatory grantmaking. In this regard, community foundations may feel pressure from donors and stakeholders to refrain overtly political activity, whereas participatory grantmaking, even if used as a tool for social change, may seem more in line with the roles and values of community foundations. The political or social justice orientation of foundations also clearly matters for bothadvocacy and participatory grantmaking. Across the three chapters, foundations with a liberal or social justice orientation are more likely to display social and policy change discourse. However, with respect to concrete actions such as advocacy funding, lobbying, and participatory grantmaking, they do not engage in these strategies more than other foundations. Conversely, conservative foundations are not associated with advocacy discourse but they are strongly associated with advocacy funding. While discourse is certainly important as it can reflect the values and actions of foundations, these findings across multiple studies should promote reflection among liberal foundations about whether their actions for social and policy change match their public presentation. The dissertation makes several contributions to the field. First, in terms of theoreticalcontributions, my dissertation applies theories from organizational sociology to this unique—yet understudied—type of organization. The dissertation also advances the nonprofit advocacy literature to address the drivers of foundation advocacy. Until now, this research has focused primarily on the determinants of advocacy among service-providing nonprofits. From a methodological standpoint, the dissertation uses machine-learning techniques to develop a replicable measure of advocacy that can be used for any organization with a website, and it generates original survey data on this secretive and hard-to-reach population. From a practical perspective, the dissertation raises both practical considerations and normative concerns for foundations engaging in these strategies.