The Center for Participatory Change & NCGives:
The Center for Participatory Change (CPC) is partnering with NCGives around two major goals: (1) changing communities by amplifying giving (especially the giving of time and talent in communities of color), and (2) documenting and lifting up horizontal giving or Philanthropy of Community, the webs of mutual giving, help, and support that exist naturally in low-wealth communities and communities of color.
Changing communities by amplifying giving. The Center for Participatory Change (CPC) has been partnering with NCGives to change communities by amplifying giving in low-wealth communities and communities of color across Western North Carolina. CPC works to support and strengthen grassroots groups working on racial and economic justice. These groups are key structures through which people living in low-wealth communities give their time, talent, and money.
CPC's work focuses particularly on the giving of time and talent, because these are the gifts most often made by people with little money. In our work, we have found that collective and strategic gifts of time and talent can change communities in profound ways. Through strategic gifts of time and talent, CPC's grassroots partners have engaged in charity or relief work (e.g., food pantry, clothes closet), family strengthening work (e.g., parent's groups, women's groups), development work (e.g., income-generating projects, converting a trailer park into a collectively-owned Community Land Trust), justice-oriented work (e.g., workers' rights, immigrants' rights), and systems and policy change (e.g., changing laws, holding public agencies accountable). These changes are significant and real, and they are all the result of people in low-wealth communities and communities of color giving their time and talent (and money as well) to make their communities more livable.
CPC supports 40 or so grassroots groups every year. Most of these groups are working on amplifying gifts of time and talent (also money) from people in their community. CPC works with these groups so that they are better able to amplify giving among community members, and so that they can channel that giving strategically. Concretely, CPC's support of grassroots groups focuses on capacity building (coaching and technical assistance around amplifying giving), community organizing (supporting efforts to pool people's gifts of time and talent for maximum effectiveness and collective power), network-building (connecting circles of people giving time and talent with other circles), and grantmaking (making matching micro-grants to grassroots groups to amplify the giving of money in local communities).
Documenting and lifting up horizontal giving. A second major focus of the partnership between the Center for Participatory Change (CPC) and NCGives is a research study focusing on horizontal giving, the informal webs of mutual help, support, and giving that exist naturally in low-wealth communities and communities of color.
Our interest in horizontal giving came from a study that NCGives staff shared with CPC, a study titled The Poor Philanthropist: How and Why the Poor Help Each Other, conducted by the Building Community Philanthropy Project at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) Graduate School of Business. In this report, the authors distinguishes between philanthropy for community (conventional philanthropy where people with wealth give money to poor people) and philanthropy of community (where poor people help each other through horizontal relations of help exemplified by collective self help efforts). They found that in Africa there are systems of horizontal philanthropy where people who are poor, in response to a need or problem, mobilize and share resources among themselves. This form of philanthropy is woven through the fabric of people's daily lives. It is often invisible and rarely celebrated, and we rarely think strategically about how to amplify this kind of horizontal giving.
The main findings from the South Africa study were as follows:
- People living in very low-wealth communities in four South African countries reported that non-material giving (knowledge, physical / manual support, emotional / moral support) was slightly more important than material giving (food, money, clothes) - but that both were important.
- People reported that the help, support, and giving they received from the people around them (e.g., friends, neighbors, family) was much more important than the help they received from grassroots groups, nonprofits, foundations, or other sources.
- People reported that they give more out of obligation (systems of reciprocity, give and give-back) than altruism.
- People reported that giving was used to both help folks keep from becoming poorer, and to help folks move out of poverty (both survival and development).
The authors of the study lay out the following implications, all of which are relevant to giving in a US context:
- Poor people give deeply; they are important philanthropists.
- The giving of money is relatively unimportant compared to all other forms of giving. Philanthropy does not equal giving money, in poor people's eyes.
- Seeing philanthropy as altruistic and voluntary is misleading - most giving occurs in the context of mutuality-based systems of duty and obligation (reciprocity and cooperation)
- Reciprocity and cooperation, grounded in mutual support, are the core of they type of giving they describe, which they call "horizontal philanthropy" or "Philanthropy of Community".
- The researchers redefine philanthropy to have a vertical dimension (people with wealth give altruistically to poor people) and a horizontal dimension (poor people give to each other through webs of mutual exchange). And for poor people, horizontal philanthropy is much more important.
- We can rethink conventional philanthropy to see poor people not as "recipients," but as protagonists in their own development and significant philanthropists. A poor-centric architecture for external / vertical philanthropy would amplify and not displace the networks of mutual giving that exist in poor communities.
CPC is partnering with NCGives to conduct a research study that is replicating the South Africa study (although at a much smaller level). Horizontal giving has not been studied in the US, so this research is breaking new ground. CPC will conduct 10 - 12 focus groups across Western North Carolina, focusing on documenting and lifting up horizontal giving in African American, Latino, Hmong, Cherokee, and European American communities. The findings from this research will likely shape the work of both CPC and NCGives.
About the Center for Participatory Change
The Center for Participatory Change (CPC) has worked with over 100 grassroots groups since we started in 2000; we support around 40 groups each year. Not all of this work focuses specifically on giving, but it all does focus on building grassroots groups, which we see as one of the major vessels, containers, or structures through which giving occurs in rural low-wealth and marginalized communities. Poor people, by definition, have limitations on the amount of money they can give, but they give richly of the resources they do have: their time, ideas, experiences, talents, commitment, and passion for improving their communities. This form of giving, often taken for granted, is an essential element of philanthropy for social change.
The work of NCGives, as we understand it, is to transform philanthropy. Some NCGives partners do that by showing that marginalized groups of people, like women and African Americans, have long traditions of giving money for the common good, and that the philanthropic table needs to be enlarged to include them as well. CPC's role, as a grassroots support organization, is to strengthen grassroots organizations, which are a primary vehicle for the giving of time, talent, passion and energy, and to lift up those forms of giving as an equal and necessary part of philanthropy.
It is clear to us that strong grassroots groups, with skilled leaders and members, are an important vehicle for actualizing philanthropy in low income and marginalized communities. Neither CPC nor our grassroots partners create the urge to give, for that is a foundational element of a balanced human identity. Nor do we direct the form of the giving-people share what they have available to share, whether that is money, time, energy, ideas, passion, commitment, or talent. What we do help create is an effective outlet for giving to happen: a community-based organization where people belong and are respected, where the time and energy they give makes a difference, where they have a say in decisions, where they feel the power that comes from working as part of a group. Grassroots groups are a space where poor people's giving of time and talent is harnessed strategically to have maximum impact for positive community change.
