The Giving Review

“One of the things I look at are the funders of the seed money that helps found these groups,” @BrandeisU professor and Partisan Policy Networks author Zachary Albert tells @GivingReview’s @mhartmannmke. “The money is given in expectation of some form of politics, some particular viewpoint, and so that has a little bit of a path-dependent effect,” Albert says. “But then I also look at ongoing fundraising,” he continues. “How do these think tanks keep the lights on, sustain their operations? The big difference that I find between more of the academic model and the more-political model is that the academic groups rely much more on institutional money, even if that money has a viewpoint, has a perspective.” Institutional donors don’t want research they fund “to be seen as totally biased and disregarded by decision-makers, and so they care about the processes and quality of the research a bit more than a lot of individual donors,” often solicited by and responsive to direct-mail appeals or their now more technologized equivalents. Regarding nonprofit tax law’s distinction between § 501(c)(3) organizations that cannot engage in partisan politics and § 501(c)(4) ones that can do so in a limited way and the demonstrably increased number of affiliate relationships between the two types of groups, “the people I talked to that worked at these places said, effectively, that that makes no difference, they work hand in glove, they’re one organization with a common goal,” according to Albert. “There’s almost no firewall between the activities of the two. It’s purely a technical and legal distinction.” Might that thus present a potential avenue for reform? Well, “most folks know next to nothing about think tanks and care even less about them, although that’s probably not true of your readers,” he answers, so it’s difficult to interest policymakers in addressing the subject. And if and when “the enforcement agencies are required to make a subjective decision about whether that constitutes political activity that violates the law, it’s easy to dismiss their decisions either way as politicized themselves, right?” 2/2

thegivingreview.com/a-conversation… In 1st part of 2-part conversation, @BrandeisU professor and Partisan Policy Networks author Zachary Albert talks to @GivingReview’s @mhartmannmke about how so many think tanks have become partisan political organizations, including the role of their funding in the process … The changed nature of think tanks is “part of the broader, I think, decline in this early technocratic vision of what policy research should be, which came out of the Progressive movement in the early 20th Century,” according to Albert. “Of course, these groups were involved in political debates, but they were kind of anti-politics. They were opposed to the horse-trading and compromises and party bossism that dominated the period,” and they “believed that you could use objective research to come up with the best solution to policy problems and advocate that in a very technocratic way. “That started to diminish, that view, especially in the 1970s,” he continues. “Conservatives, I think to some degree correctly, saw that technocratic vision as being a big part of the New Deal, as being a big part of liberal policy, and they started creating their own organizations”—reflecting their founders’, and their funders’, “perspective as being a virtuous corrective to what was going on.” Then, “there’s a liberal reaction in the early 2000s during the Bush Administration, as well.” 1/2

@emiliemunson thegivingreview.com/a-selection-of…

INVESTIGATION: we found hundreds of NY nonprofits that are banned from engaging in elections have made donations to candidates in the last decade. timesunion.com/capitol/articl…

But Liberalism (as manifest in 2000s/2010s) can't "stay still". It has to keep moving forward (progressing as it where) because it views emancipation from all forms of obligations (natural, past, inherited, etc) as the telos of mankind -- and so, along with a non-profit sector that needed to justify it's existence -- it had to keep expanding the definition of oppression, creating new classes of injustices.

civitasoutlook.com/research/the-w… @Hillsdale’s Paul Moreno reviews @davidtbeito’s FDR: A New Political Life in @UT_Civitas’s @CivitasOutlook …

thegivingreview.com/amidst-histori… Amidst warnings about what may be future aggressive treatment of conservative foundations and nonprofit groups, and relying on great @davidtbeito book from @IndependentInst, @GivingReview co-editor @mhartmannmke looks at some historical precedents ...

jerryzmuller.substack.com/p/democracy-in… “Tocqueville thought that self-interest properly understood creates virtuous habits; not great virtues, but important minor ones,” @jerryzmuller writes on Substack. “It also leads Americans to associate,” according to Muller. “In a famous chapter called ‘How Americans combat individualism with the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood,’ Tocqueville describes how self-interest rightly understood leads people to learn to combine with others for their own advantage. And that experience leads to a balance between private and public interest, by demonstrating to people how concern for the interests of others in the long run serves one’s own interest.”

thegivingreview.com/what-kind-of-p… @GivingReview co-editor @WilliamSchambra argues that we have turned out to be exactly the sort of people the Founders intended us to be—and aimed at producing through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ... “[T]he Founders’ vision for America was a combination of two things: the large commercial republic preferred by the Federalists, plus a great variety of smaller communities embodying strong moral and religious principles, of the sort envisioned by the Anti-Federalists. People engaged in commerce primarily, but also engaged in community-building, on a local scale,” according to Schambra. “Now, let’s acknowledge there’s a tension here. It’s difficult to maintain strong moral communities in the face of the allurements of commerce, as every failed utopian commune in our history attests. But it’s not impossible,” he continues. “[T]hroughout our nation’s history, zealous left-wing crusades have gradually but invariably lost ground not because conservatives won arguments, but because, sooner or later, the practical and immediate demands of commerce reasserted themselves in the face of abstract utopian promises. It does take time, and that’s frustrating, but it does happen.”

“[D]onors, alumni, and parents need to be organized to express their concerns at every opportunity and to vote with their dollars and feet if they don’t see annual progress made in the data and in the rankings,” Brian T. Fitzpatrick writes in @LawLiberty.

SCOOP: An influencer network boosting Democrats in upcoming elections is facing a broadening investigation in Congress by House Oversight for 'dark money' ties and payments that Chair James Comer alleges must be disclosed to regulators ...more in @TheFP thefp.com/p/exclusive-in…

thegivingreview.com/a-conversation… In 2nd part of 2-part conversation, Connective Tissue’s Sam Pressler and @civic_lex’s @rbryoung talk to @GivingReview’s @mhartmannmke about the relationship between active citizens and philanthropic funders—as well as the opportunities presented to, and the responsibilities of, each … The primary audience of the letter, according to Young, was “fellow practitioners, to be like, ‘Hey, we see you. We know the work that you’re doing in your community, and if you haven’t started doing that work yet, you should just do it. You don’t have to wait for permission, … for a grant. You don’t have to wait for a program officer to give you their blessing. You don’t have to wait for any of that. You can just do your work, and we are here to support you, and we want to learn from you, and we want you to learn from us, and we’re working towards the thing.’” Every day, Pressler says, “I get inbound from people who” say “‘I want to do this thing in my community. where should I begin?’ There’s a renewed energy around this, because it feels like” the local “places where people live are the places where you can have a sense of agency over a world that feels like there’s a lot of distant forces acting upon you. I think we’re trying to hopefully be like, ‘Hey, we’ve been doing this, we see you. … If you’re just getting started, join us. If you’ve been doing this, you’re a part of something. And let’s go forward together.’” The language of the letter specifically addressed to those in philanthropy isn’t “to say, like, ‘Hey, national funders, you know, screw off,’” Pressler continues. Rather, it’s to say “‘There’s a different way of you being in relation to local places, and if you believe in the vision were proposing, … this is what it would look like to be more relational, this is what it would look like to be more participatory, this is what it would look like to actually support folks who are embedded in place.’” Young says “[c]ivic life works because it is a unique thing in a unique place that has very unique people that are doing a very specific unique thing that can’t be reproduced in another community because it’s all different people involved. It’s all a different context.”

The Gates Foundation and Jeffrey Epstein Were More Entangled Than We Thought vanityfair.com/news/story/gat…

New York City spends roughly $8 billion annually on nonprofit contracts—more than the entire NYPD budget—but sees limited accountability. A new MI issue brief by @joshjappel calls for a performance-based model tied to results.

thegivingreview.com/a-conversation… In 1st part of 2-part conversation, Connective Tissue’s Sam Pressler and @civic_lex’s @rbryoung talk to @GivingReview’s @mhartmannmke about “An Invitation to a New Civic Future,” their driving motivations to be part of the project, and the inherent localism and anti-professional and -managerial natures of successful civic renewal … Civic renewal is inherently local, Young says. “We live in a democratic system in our country that is an amalgamation of places, right?” Ours “is not a political system that exists on its own. It is a political system that exists from the places that we call home. For civic renewal to succeed, it can only be in the communities in which we live, and then our national civic life will benefit from that. But our national civic life is downstream of the civic life in our communities.” Pressler says we “have to recognize that the specific form of 501(c)(3) nonprofit … has become hyper-professionalized, hyper-managerial”—which “has actually played a pretty-significant role in crowding ordinary citizens out of the shaping of their shared lives together. “Nonprofits are a part of it, but informal groups should be a part of it, neighborhoods should be a part of it, small businesses that are anchors to places should be a part of it,” he continues. “It’s an all-of-the-above. I think where we get into trouble is when we say that you need these qualifications in order to be someone who is renewing your community. I think that is the inherent problem. To the extent that nonprofits have bought into that kind of approach of specialization and professionalization, then, yes, they are part of the problem. “The kind of modus operandi of civic life over the last 30 years, if not the last 50 years, has been … trying to control civic life as if it could be a well-oiled machine,” but “civic life is comprised of human beings that are organic creatures” who “are not machines. … All of these tools—professionalization, measurement—are meant to enable distant control by distant people in distant places” and end up treating “particular people in particular places as abstract anyones and abstract anywheres,” Pressler says. “And philanthropy has been a driver of that. As someone who had to fill out many logic models with inputs and outputs and outcomes, I can tell you very clearly that that is not how relationships work, that is not how the messiness of community works, that is not how the messiness of civic life works. I don’t think philanthropy in and of itself is a problem, I think philanthropy in terms of the how that it’s operated is the problem.”

George Soros's Fund for Policy Reform puts in $5 million to the Virginia Democratic redistricting effort.