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will generate new leaders from all
disciplines who are willing to lead nonprofit
organizations at some point in
their careers. One of the silver linings
of the economic downturn might be
that more people discover nonprofit
work as a career option.
PND: This is probably the most
challenging fundraising environment
in 30 years. Can veteran nonprofit
leaders apply the lessons they have
learned in the past to the current
environment, or is this new territory
for everyone?
JR: It’s new territory for everyone.
Many leaders, in both the nonprofit
and for-profit sectors, have had the
great good fortune of managing
organizations in a strong economy,
when the focus was on growth and
expansion. Today’s environment, on
the other hand, challenges leaders
to rein in and even shrink the organizations
that, in many cases, they
have built. That’s very difficult.
Another issue is the nonprofit
sector has never had any great
financing mechanisms or a good
flow of capital into the sector. Meyer
recently funded an Urban Institute
study — the first of its kind — to
find out if nonprofits in the metropolitan
DC area have operating
reserves. According to the findings,
they don’t — or if they do,
their reserves and working capital
are insufficient. I think the report,
Washington-Area Nonprofit Operating
Reserves, will generate a lot of discussion
in the sector. The undercapitalization
of nonprofits is an issue
the Meyer Foundation has been
concerned about for a long time.
PND: We look forward to reading the
report. Thanks again for your time.
JR: Thank you.
— Alice Garrard and Matt Sinclair
Make a Socially Responsible
Investment in Young Black Men
By Cedric Brown, Director, Mitchell Kapor Foundation
We had to do something.
In 2004, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation began noticing a disturbing
trend in the San Francisco Bay Area. Black male applicants were
visibly absent from the selection pool for the educational programs
run by our sister organization, the Level Playing Field Institute. At the
same time, we were dismayed by the news of several shootings of
young black men, among them a college-bound high school senior.
We knew then that we had to do something.
C o m m e n t a r y & O p i n i o n
We dug deeper, and the numbers we uncovered
painted a disturbing picture. In today’s
tough economic climate, job loss is hitting
black men the hardest, and research links education
to that trend. In California, it is estimated that nearly
half the state’s black male students drop out of high
school. Even in the “knowledge economy”-based San
Francisco Bay Area, black males are less likely to have
high school or college degrees than the general population: 27 percent of black
males in Oakland and 32 percent in San Francisco have a high school diploma
or GED, while only 10 percent of black males in Oakland and 14 percent in San
Francisco have a bachelor’s degree. Moreover, high school dropouts and those
without a college degree are more likely to be jobless and incarcerated.
Although young black men in our communities have tremendous potential,
too often that potential is not being recognized or maximized. So we decided
to do something: We launched an effort to invest in the phenomenal minds
that exist in our communities, with the aim of getting youth away from the
margins, helping them overcome obstacles, and supporting them on a path
to college.
Five years later, this past June, we celebrated the first cohort of collegebound
graduating high school seniors from our Black Boys College Bound
Initiative, a multiyear, $1 million effort aimed at increasing the number of black
male youth in the Bay Area, particularly from San Francisco and Oakland, who
are prepared for college.
As part of the initiative’s first phase, we allocated grants of up to $50,000 to
11 organizations. To date, our grantees have served nearly 400 Bay Area youth in
middle and high schools with such programs as college readiness workshops, college
tours, academic coaching, mentoring, mental health services for students and
their families, social development and much more. This fall, more than 40 seniors
will go on to college, serving as visible role models of success and possibility for
other youth in their communities.
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