Data on Social Justice Philanthropy at Commmunity Foundations

Albert Ruesaga and Barry Knight did a survey of community foundations re: and social justice funding. Albert's conclusions are mild, but I suspect his frustration is high. How hard is it for a community foundation to endorse fairness? Apparently, as with Occupy Wall Street, the message of every moral tradition, or any, save Ayn Rand, is having a hard time getting through. What means "social justice"? Such a puzzle! Close the blinds, Jeeves. Those riffraff in the streets beating tom toms. How can a funder think? 

Comments

[Mazarine]

"It is always the respectable classes, the polished Ivy League graduates, the prep school boys and girls who grew up in Greenwich, Conn., or Short Hills, N.J., who are the most susceptible to evil. To be intelligent, as many are at least in a narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral. These respectable citizens are inculcated in their elitist enclaves with “values” and “norms,” including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a belief in the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay deference to systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their own goodness, unable to see or comprehend—and are perhaps indifferent to—the cruelty inflicted on others by the exclusive systems they serve. And as norms mutate and change, as the world is steadily transformed by corporate forces into one of a small cabal of predators and a vast herd of human prey, these elites seamlessly replace one set of “values” with another. These elites obey the rules. They make the system work. And they are rewarded for this. In return, they do not question."

-Chris Hedges

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/finding-freedom-in-handcuffs-by-chris-hedges/

[Phil Cubeta]

I find this chillingly accurate. The ones who propser where the ones who lined up for recess in neat lines. We used to call them the "earnest strivers." In a corporate setting knowing which end is up is a survival skill. When views change at the top, your own had better change as well. And yet it is from the ranks of these schools that also come the wild seeds. Matrullo, Kia, Tracy Gary and others who read this site and do not comment in public are of this elite tradition, and truer to it that the good boys and girls whose success leaves them untroubled. As the job market worsens, the elite children who are treated now like everyone else, and preyed upon, and cast off, are the most dangerous opponents of the status quo. They/we are insider/outsiders and we know the game; we are just playing for other outcomes, by rules more "elite" than you might find on Wall Street, like Matrullo citing Dante, whose Hell burned brighter with eternally replenished flesh of the traitors to a creed and tradition.

[Fax-On-Demand]

Whose Hell burned brighter with eternally replenished flesh of the traitors to a creed and tradition?

Good question for a twisted quiz show.

[Phil Cubeta]

Mr. Matrullo might help us work through the various rings of Purgatory and Hell, to correlate the sins of old with our current vices, now deemed often to be virtues.

[Curator]

A very thoughtful commenter on the survey post asks, "[S]hould philanthropy uphold or challenge the status quo? I've always seen the role and purpose of [community foundations] as being one of brokerage between the two positions. We stand of necessity with a foot in both camps, and it is our specific function to interpret each side to the other and make them intelligible. A CF that plants itself squarely on one side or the other will betray its mission."

The translator is often a comic figure in literature, slapstick fastened to his sash, hoodwinking the two masters who've hired him to mediate their dispute.

[Phil Cubeta]

Not advocates, but moderators, mediators, brokers, plain dealers, symbolic analysts, translators, synthesizers, coalition builders, maybe teachers, and maybe as teachers wounding others into thought, as you do so well, Mr. Curator.

[Tom Matrullo]

I love Curator's desc. of the translator - Trickster makes this world, as Hyde put it.

"...trickster must do more than feed his belly; he must do so without himself getting eaten." #%$%

[Phil Cubeta]

"The trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art." Yes, the Trusted Advisor is a Trickster, if not a Dupe. But then the client too may be such! "All the professions berogue one another," as Peachum, the fencer of stolen goods and government snitch, sings in Gay's Beggar's Opera.

As Peachum points out we all act in dual capacity both for rogues and against them. Such is the role of the community foundation devoted to social justice and catering to philanthropic desires of the wealthiest.

Tricksters verge over into sacrificial victims, pariahs, and scapegoats. Someone, even in Gay's light opera, is always about to be hanged, and it is seldom the biggest crook.