Reinhold Foundation April 2, 2012 Sherry Magill Let me extend my - - PDF document

1 Reinhold Foundation April 2, 2012 Sherry Magill Let me extend my heartiest congratulations to those of you gathered here. I have the deepest respect and admiration for J.F. and Peggy Bryan and for the work of the Reinhold Foundation. You should take great pride in the fact that they think you all are worthy of the Foundation’s investment. I also have great respect for folks who labor in the nonprofit sector, and think what you do is a vital community interest. We all should do everything we can to increase the capacity of your organizations to provide the services you provide. The experience you have had as a Reinhold Foundation grantee, and as part of this leadership development program, will equip you to make unique contributions to the people of Clay county. I congratulate you and thank you for the work you do. I wish to share some of my thinking about the independent sector and democracy and I trust these thoughts will not sound too disjointed or random. At the outset, you should know that many things shape my perspective -- my experience growing up in the Deep South, my formal study of American democracy, my work as a teacher and as an administrator of a small private liberal arts college, and my experience of the past 21 years at the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. A few years ago, I was giving the commencement address before the graduates of Georgetown University’s Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate program and noticed this quotation in their program from Martin Luther King’s 1964 Nobel Peace: I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the

2 ambiguities of history . . . I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men

• ther-centered can build up.

1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech When reading Dr. King’s words, I think of Jessie Ball duPont, of J. F. and Peggy Bryan, of the Reinhold family, of folks like you. Let me say a brief word about Mrs. duPont. Jessie Ball was born in 1884, graduated from what is now Longwood College in 1902, became a teacher, and married Alfred I. duPont in 1921. In 1926, they settled in Jacksonville, where together they established new roots, built a new family fortune, and became philanthropists in what by then was becoming a great American tradition. I doubt that Mrs. duPont was a student of American philanthropy, but I can tell you that she understood deeply one's human obligation to share one's good fortune with those less fortunate, to give generously, to open one's heart to his or her fellows. She wrote, "I believe that funds should be spent for the benefit of society. I have always believed it. Don't call it charity . . . I think it is an obligation." I am reminded of the kind of philanthropic service exemplified by J. F. and Peggy Bryan -- folks who do not have to be engaged in trying to make life better for the disadvantaged and less well-off, but who are. I am also reminded of our individual and

3 collective responsibilities over our civic culture -- our role as citizens living in a great democracy – and of what Dr. King termed being ―other-centered.‖ It’s curious – to me anyway – how my life continues to be influenced by Dr. King’s words. His work, his example, his courage cast a very large and lasting shadow

• n what has become my passion for the Independent Sector. Long before I had

discovered a set of political ideas -- justice, democracy, citizenship--, long before a teacher introduced me to Plato’s Republic, with its inquiry into the nature of justice—, long before I ever heard the words ―Independent Sector,‖ Dr. King was working in my neighborhood. I came of age in the Deep South -- 12 miles north of Montgomery, 30 miles east

• f Selma, 90 miles south of Birmingham – when Dr. King too was present in these
• places. By the time I headed off to college, a race riot in my small town, the governor’s

stand in the school house door of my future alma mater, demonstrations in downtown Birmingham, the Selma March, and my personal experience of maneuvering through my senior year, a year in which the county school system I attended came under a federal court order to racially integrate its public schools, had all left an indelible mark on me. The example of citizenship denied haunted my young unformed, unstudied mind, mostly I suppose because my parents had been raising me to believe that the Constitution guaranteed the rights of American citizenship to all and my mother’s interpretation of the gospel required us to serve our fellow human beings, not beat them over the head with a

• bat. Both my parents worked as public servants – my mother a nurse and my father first

a medical supply officer in the Air Force and then a field representative for the Social Security Administration.

4 What rubbed in south Alabama, of course, was the inescapable fact that State laws and social norms denied people with black skin both the rights and obligations of

• citizenship. State law not only separated whites and blacks socially and educationally, it

also denied black people the right and obligation to vote. And State law was diametrically opposed to what my parents had been teaching me, whether my parents understood that fact or not. I was just young enough and just old enough to grasp the hypocrisy, and much of my understanding came from personally experiencing the results

• f the work of Dr. King and others.

In other words, the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship were not abstract, textbook ideas for me. The world was exploding in some sense on a daily basis right in front of me; my friends and I lived in the thick of things. I took my adolescent dismay with American hypocrisy off to college, where I got serious about understanding the evolution of American democracy. I was deeply interested in political theory and religious history, but Dr. King’s example and the social movement he helped lead kept moving me in the direction of trying also to understand American reform movements, especially those of the 19th Century. Abolition groups, women’s groups, labor groups; Hull House, the Salvation Army, Scouting all appeared. Citizens organizing to, yes, provide service, but also to demand change in social policy and to build community. I had stumbled upon the Independent Sector, and its role in the creation and maintenance of healthy democratic society, although I didn’t know it as such. And as you know, the organizations that we now consider components of the independent sector have played and continue to play a key role in our collective experiment with democracy.

5 In fact, without these organizations, the American experiment would not have been as successful as it has been. If you don’t believe me, think of the former Soviet Bloc countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain or of Iraq today. They’re desperate to create civil society – to build the kind of nonprofit organizations that we have – because these organizations are the glue, the connective tissue, of democratic cultures. Folks voluntarily coming together to do the work of healthy communities. Berger and Neuhaus termed these organizations ―mediating structures,‖ organizations that navigate the space between government and the individual. We live at a strange time in the history of democracy: We scream and yell at each

• ther in the public square, call each other despicable names, and two-bit television, radio

and newspaper pundits tell us every day that the other side is destroying the Republic. Our obligations as citizens are not obvious, we make war on nonprofits, and I’m beginning to wonder if we know what we mean when we use the word ―democracy.‖ Certainly ―democracy‖ is not just another word for individual freedom, especially the freedom to do whatever one wants and to be shed of any public responsibilities. Our collective experiment with democracy is an experiment in the idea of secular self–government. Its main question is this: can a diverse people, from all around the planet, speaking different languages and practicing different religions, build a single constitutional government whose laws protect the rights of each and every one equally, whose people choose through elections who will govern, and whose majority rules but under a Constitution that protects the rights of the minority? And once having created and inherited it, the question becomes whether or not we can keep it. Once having

6 created and inherited a great democracy, can we keep it? For me, this is a profoundly serious question. The citizen lies at the very heart of this great American experiment, for it is citizens who build and maintain government, who define its role, and elect those who will

• lead. Indeed, our individual rights and public responsibilities – not as subjects, but as

citizens – are the bedrock upon which self-government is based. My passion for democracy involves this idea of citizenship, with all its corresponding rights and responsibilities. Fulfilling one’s public responsibilities should be a rather clear obligation, and ought to be easy to fulfill. We have, I fear, lost something over the generations. We define democracy to mean individual freedom from

• bligations to one another, rather than as the freedom to govern ourselves collectively.

We have come to believe that the American experiment with democracy is an experiment in radical individualism, rather than an experiment in collective secular self-government. We are confused, and the idea of citizenship has lost its meaning. Yet, without an obligation to one another, without a sense of community, without citizens, democracy is impossible and will not flourish. Ironically, concern for the individual's relationship and responsibility to the community lay at the beginning of our intellectual, political, and social histories. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, said in a speech he delivered in 1630: ―Now the only way. . . to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly

7 affection; we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of

• thers' necessities; we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness,

gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together: always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.‖ Despite the fact that a focus on community lies at the very beginning of American thought, we rightly understood that American democracy must also be based on individual rights – rights that guarantee individual conscience free from governmental or church dictates, and the individual’s right to participate in the electoral process. But, for democracy to flourish, we must recognize the individual’s relationship to community and we must fulfill our public responsibilities to community. If we do not successfully execute these responsibilities, then I am absolutely convinced that democracy will not survive. We will have, I fear, all the form of democracy but none of the practice. We will confuse our freedom to choose from hundreds of different body perfumes with the freedom to govern ourselves. We must pay very careful attention to what self-government requires of us if democracy is not to degenerate into anarchy or fascism.

• Dr. King’s admonishment notwithstanding, I can despair. The data is daunting

enough – growing hunger, growing homelessness, states firing public school teachers when we have a national teacher shortage. But the general lack of understanding of the nonprofit economy and the role of the independent sector in maintaining democracy is mind boggling. In this respect, I worry about many things:

8 I worry that too many elected officials at all levels have dedicated themselves to dismantling government. The game seems to be about shrinking the public dollar as much as possible, the consequences for people, communities, and the public health be damned. I worry that State legislators don’t seem to know anything -- their attempt at policy making is more about resource allocation than it is about making sound policy for human communities. I worry about the growing disparity between rich and poor. I worry that local mayors and city council representatives are not equipped nor is local government equipped to make up for the dismantling of a federally and state funded social safety net. I worry that Congress, state legislatures, county commissions and city councils will move aggressively against nonprofits and philanthropy. In an effort to raise revenue, they will increasingly turn their attention to the philanthropic and nonprofit sector. They will argue that nonprofits should pay property taxes, for example, because their buildings are protected by police and firemen. But their unspoken rationale will be their dispassion for democracy. Indeed, the people who write social policy and determine government’s funding priorities should know that the public has historically funded nonprofit service providers through their federal and state public dollars expenditures, but they either missed this chapter or they just don’t care. As we witness serious reduction in federal and state public dollar support of nonprofits, particularly those serving our most vulnerable

9 citizens, we simultaneously see results in diminished capacity of nonprofits and increased demand for services provided by nonprofits. The assumption, of course, is that the church and private giving will make up the shortfall. Anyone who knows much about private giving and organized philanthropy knows that – even if we increase giving rates – we will not make up for the dramatic reduction in public dollar support for public enterprises. It just won’t happen. And church volunteer services are a poor substitute for social policy. In the final analysis, I don’t share the faith that faith communities and private giving – as important as those forms of charitable enterprise might be – can substitute for public dollar investments in our citizenry. They cannot. On its face, our situation would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. We are not only talking about people’s lives, we’re talking about the future of this democratic

• experiment. Our entire reason for being as a nation, I would argue, is being placed in

jeopardy by our systematic weakening of the independent sector, of what you do, particularly those organizations that serve our most vulnerable citizens. But what astonishes me, and I cannot overstate this, is the prevailing idea that our people are not worthy of public dollar investments. That in some sense, public dollar investments in our people – whether that means investing in public schools or nonprofits that serve the homeless, the frail elderly, and children – is somehow undemocratic and anti-capitalistic. No indeed. We are quite frankly talking about the kinds of investments we must make in our own citizenry if we expect to continue to govern ourselves. We are thinking about investing in work that strengthens the individual’s relationship to community.

10 Tough challenges face the independent sector, particularly what I would describe as lack of capacity within the sector and lack of public understanding of the sector. Nonprofits in which I place a great deal of my faith – places that help me maintain my hope – all too often lack the internal capacity to meet what is by definition growing human need: they do not have enough money, they do not have enough staff, they do not have the right board members, they do not have the right thinkers, they do not have the right technology, they do not enjoy the good wishes of politicians, business leaders, and the public in general, and they do not exist in a country whose people understand the relationship between the many things nonprofits provide and the health of the democracy

• itself. And while the folks who lead these organizations across this country are aware of

these capacity issues, they are too busy doing the work politicians and the public expect them to do to effectively mount a public education campaign. What folks like you do have is a passion for a life of public service and for

• community. All too often overworked and underpaid, you nonetheless believe deeply in

a life of service. I’ve met nonprofit workers day in and day out for 21 years. We must help you understand that you not only perform yeoman’s work in providing services to people less fortunate than themselves, but that the organizations in which you work play a major role in maintaining and preserving our experiment with self-government, with democracy. As Dr. King wrote: ―I refuse to accept despair . . . I believe that what self- centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up.‖

11 One thing that keeps me going, that helps me maintain hope and faith, is making site visits – visiting worthy programs, meeting people who work in the sector and who are in some way served by the sector. Other-centered folks. People like you. You have an enormous body of work before you. As a people, we have done a lot

• f tearing down of public enterprise over the past 20 years, over the past generation. We

are, I fear, on a self-destructive course. Your mission, and I know you have already accepted it because you are here today, is to change our course. I expect you to not only provide service to others, but also help the American people remember that we are engaged in a great political experiment in self-government. What happens to the idea and example of American democracy depends quite frankly on what you do. I am very happy for you. I trust you will, like Dr. King, maintain your hope and faith, be audacious, and understand that your work in service to the American citizenry is more than charity work – it is absolutely essential to creation, recreation, and preservation of healthy democracy. Thank you.