Foundations: The Enablers of Faux Justice,
In the Capstone Seminar of the Human Services and Social Justice (HSSJ) program, students are given the opportunity to grant money through a class-run foundation. While this allows students to learn how foundations operate in the service field, it does not address the inherent issues around foundational and philanthropic work. Foundations are regularly portrayed as a method for individuals, particularly those with access to wealth, to make change in local communities. Fundamentally, foundations cannot be committed to justice because of their role as gatekeepers of capital. In the field large foundations neglect community voices, are driven by elite interests and fail to be held accountable.
Foundations are a cornerstone of modern philanthropy, with organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative representing the future of charitable giving. These organizations are funnels through which millionaires and billionaires set aside their riches to the causes they have deemed worthy of solving. While the work these foundations pursue can sometimes be of merit, the method through which these issues are solved lack strong community guidance and democratic accountability.
In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million donation, which was to be matched for another $100 million by other donors, to improve the Newark, New Jersey education system. This money was immediately transferred to a newly formed foundation called Foundation for Newark's Future by then Newark Mayor Cory Booker. The announcement took place on the Oprah show, blindsiding many community members and the exclusion of local voices continued from there. The board of this foundation only included individuals or organizations that could contribute a minimum of $5 million dollars a year. This not only excluded parents and teachers in Newark, but also local organizations that had been working to improve Newark schools for years. The foundation was using private funds, therefore no elected official could be held accountable for the impending missteps the project would take.
The tax-exempt status of this foundation additionally prevented tax funding of the local government while this massive sum of money was being spent. Instead, the funding was designated based on the interests of the wealthy board members as well as Mark Zuckerberg. The problematic nature of foundations can be examined before looking the results of this $200 million dollar charitable experiment, these tax-exempt organizations prefer a top-down, business-minded approach. Their tax status prevents revenue from reaching state coffers, keeping the money firmly in the hands of business-minded individuals who are neither elected by or represent a majority of the community. Zuckerberg’s Newark education experiment is only a public and newsworthy example of the pitfalls of foundations. Around the country, foundations conduct themselves in a similar fashion and because of this, the foundation our class has created falls into many of the same problematic trends.
These tangible examples demonstrate how foundations as the gatekeepers of community-distributed capital neglect community voices, are informed by the special interests of the American upper class, and have few accountability safeguards. When foundations seek to operate like corporations, instead of creating and implementing community-driven processes, they are actively taking part in the problematic capitalist structures that hinder justice. The aspects of voice, elite interest, and accountability explored above demonstrate the complicit nature of foundations in this miscarriage of attempts to truly serve communities.
