Vital New Report on Faith-inspired Impact in the Social Sector
Don't miss this new Bridgespan Group report
Recently, the Bridgespan Group released a new report on “Elevating the Role of Faith-inspired Impact in the Social Sector,” and it is important enough for us to lift up in a separate post here at the newsletter.
The Bridgespan Group is essentially a non-profit consulting firm that advises mission-driven organizations on how to strengthen their work and improve their results. This report was written by three Bridgespan staffers, Jeri Eckhart Queenan, Peter Grunert and Devin Murphy.
Five Things You Need to Know From This Report
Philanthropy, in general, is not reflecting the communities they aim to serve, nor the sectors they seek to influence when it comes to religion.
From the report:
In our research, we found that faith-inspired organizations account for 40 percent of social safety net spending across a sample of six cities, which vary in size and demographics.
Yet, while some individual philanthropists and community foundations have recognized faith-inspired organizations as platforms for impact, that perspective has not translated into funding from the largest institutional philanthropies—particularly those seeking to address the effects of poverty and injustice.
This should be recognized as not just a problem of opportunity cost, but as an ethical dilemma, particularly for philanthropic organizations that bill their work as reflecting a “bottom-up” approach, or who prioritize reflecting the communities in which they invest in other ways.
Legitimate tensions require careful navigation, not blanket disqualification
Our review of the role of faith in communities—especially low-income communities of color—pushes us to reconsider faith-inspired nonprofits in light of the continued role faith plays in the lives of so many people. Despite recent declines in religious affiliation, nearly three out of every four Americans remain religiously affiliated.
Given this nuanced reality, we believe that the pendulum may have swung too far in the direction of strategic and institutional philanthropy’s avoidance—at the cost of evaluating the merits—of faith-inspired organizations that are working toward shared aims.
As the report notes, there are a range of personal, historical and missional reasons for many secular philanthropic organization’s avoidance of faith-inspired grantees. However, like other tensions and areas where philanthropic organizations might lack competency, the answer is not to avoid those areas, particularly if they are implicated by their mission, but to seek the tools and resources to better understand them.
American life is not secular
In the report’s myth-busting section, the first myth they bust is one I’ve written about quite a bit.
From the report:
A lot of media attention is given to the increasing disaffiliation with faith traditions in the United States. Indeed, the number of Americans who do not identify with any organized religion rose from 17 percent in 2009 to 26 percent in just 10 years. However, nearly half of this disaffiliation is driven by individuals who no longer identify with a particular religious tradition, rather than actively identify with agnosticism or atheism. The overwhelming majority of Americans still affiliate with a religious tradition. And the role of faith is often more important in communities that have been marginalized by, and left without access to, public institutions such as hospitals and health centers.
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“Secularism is the dominant narrative in the US, but often less so in vulnerable communities, in my experience. It’s a disservice to not even acknowledge it,” says Kashif Shaikh, co-founder and executive director of the Pillars Fund, a grantmaking organization that invests in American Muslim organizations.
Faith-inspired efforts reflect large percentage of social safety net, small percentage of philanthropic dollars to strengthen the social safety net
From the report:
Roughly a third of the 50 largest nonprofits in the country have a faith orientation. And 40 percent of international nongovernmental organizations are faith-inspired.
We sought to add to that mosaic of data with a rigorous analysis of the social safety net, one of the social sector’s largest segments. We analyzed Candid’s GuideStar data on nonprofits and conducted expert interviews to identify the secular and faith-inspired nonprofits that provide critical basic-needs services in six US cities. We found that faith-inspired nonprofits account for 36 percent of “safety net spending” in Washington, DC, and 46 percent in Detroit. In Amarillo, Texas, it is 71 percent. Across our six-city sample, the weighted average was 40 percent—representing two out of every five dollars spent on safety net services.
And those numbers are just from the nonprofits we were able to observe. Many congregations—whose information is not available through comparable datasets—also provide direct support via mutual aid, volunteering, and contributions that are not captured in IRS reporting.
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While many safety net organizations receive government reimbursements and benefit from individual giving, philanthropic giving still matters. And the largest philanthropies have, in aggregate, paid less attention to the faith-inspired safety net. Our research found that faith-inspired nonprofits represent only 12 percent of safety net funding for the 15 largest private foundations in the United States, despite the fact that these organizations provide 40 percent of human services spending in our six-city sample.Indeed, faith-inspired organizations represent only 2 percent of all grant dollars provided by those top-15 institutional philanthropies.
The decision of philanthropic institutions to so inequitably fund faith-inspired efforts in communities they claim not only to serve, but in many cases, represent, can no longer be viewed as neutral. When philanthropic institutions “don’t do religion,” yet seek community transformation, they are imposing a secularity that is often dissonant with the communities they are seeking to transform. Again, this not only results in a significant opportunity cost, but a true ethical dilemma that should provoke reflection and change in which entire organizations are implicated, from the top executive to the DEI specialist to program officers.
In communities where many other institutions are viewed with distrust, faith-based actors can be “brokers of trust.”
I have commented recently that in the context of COVID-19 response, too many elected officials and public health officials have made a mistake by viewing religious communities as problems to solve rather than potential partners. Much of the tension and conflict we have seen has resulted from an unnecessarily passive, if not adversarial, government approach to faith communities. This is too often the case for philanthropic organizations as well. Yet, there is an opportunity for philanthropic organizations to increase their impact with thoughtful consideration of the role faith plays in areas and communities they wish to affect.
From the report:
Similarly, faith institutions hold high levels of trust in Black and Latinx communities. “As a means for intersecting with communities that are rooted in race and ethnicity,” says David Dodson—who is active in the interfaith community in North Carolina and recently retired as president of MDC, a catalyst for social change in the South—“faith-inspired organizations that are governed, run, and accountable to the people they serve can be excellent partners for funders who wish to build authentic connections and partnerships with underrepresented communities.”
It’s an opportunity that exists across the country. For example, New York State partnered with local congregations in communities of color to turn their churches into COVID-19 testing sites to rapidly increase access to testing.
Faith was there before you were; adjust appropriately.
Increasingly, philanthropic institutions seek to recognize and complement the existing resources in a community they intend to serve as opposed to approaching a community as a blank-slate with no resources or culture worth respecting. This pivot should be made when it comes to faith as well.
The final recommendation of the report is to “Complement the role faith-inspired organizations play by collaborating on solutions for the communities they serve.”
“Churches are really key anchors in underserved communities,” says Kathryn Pitkin Derose, senior researcher at RAND Corporation, a policy think tank. “They excel at responding to critical needs, and they know those needs in their communities very intimately. When you start to combine efforts with churches, you can really have an important impact on the community as a whole.”
Amen!
Read the full Bridgespan Group report.
Michael
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