Private Philanthropy and the Self-Help Myth

Foundations are bizarre beasts. They are created to solve societal problems by using inordinate amounts of wealth — wealth that is inherently contradictory because it was gleaned out of the inequalities that it proposes to address.

Author interview with a foundation program officer, San Francisco, California, 2009

At a Hilton Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, dessert and coffee were served as the opening luncheon plenary of the 2013 annual conference of the Council on Foundations commenced. On a raised stage in front of a packed room of philanthropy professionals, Ellen Alberding, president of the Joyce Foundation, introduced the panel, "A National Dialogue on Healthy and Safe Communities." The lunching crowd chatted over her welcome. Only as youthful James Anderson, raised in a poor Chicago neighborhood, stood up to speak was full attention drawn to the stage. Anderson captivated the room with his story of a triumphant journey out of poverty, abandonment, and abuse at the hands of his father. "No one cared about me," he told us. After years of isolation and loneliness he joined a gang and got hooked on meth. Eventually he found himself in prison. Then, one day, someone from the Wellness Foundation approached him. Being invited to participate in the Anti-Recidivism Coalition was all Anderson needed. He finally found the will to pull it together because someone gave him reason to believe in himself. To rousing applause, and tears in the eyes of the women seated at my table (including me), Anderson concluded: "One person can change a life."

I attended the Council on Foundations conference as an ethnographic researcher interested in the response of private foundations to deepening poverty and inequality in the United States. As I listened to James Anderson's rousing speech, a woman maybe forty-five or fifty years old, with the name Paulina embroidered on her server uniform, carried a large tray to our table. Visibly straining, sweat on her brow, Paulina lowered fifteen plates of grilled chicken, potatoes, and broccoli rabe to her serving stool. I was struck with the contradiction of the buoyant professionals gathered to celebrate their work to alleviate poverty, while being served by some of the poorest people in the United States: food-industry workers. I was also struck by how throughout the course of the three-day conference most panels included a real-life tragedy-turned-victory story of individuals like Anderson who had pulled themselves out of poverty.

These moments provide a window into the philanthropic trend of asking the poor to help themselves, while avoiding the structural causes of poverty and inequality. At the heart of the self-help approach is the enduring belief that entrenched poverty is the result of social and economic isolation that has trapped poor people within a culture of poverty marked by hopelessness and self-harming behaviors. This belief corresponds with the argument that poverty can only be interrupted when individual poor people take responsibility for changing the way they act. Questions of unequal opportunities, histories of exclusion, profiling along the lines of race, gender, class, and legal status, and capitalist economies that produce wealth for a few and poverty for many are most commonly avoided. The mainstream self-help narrative also fails to recognize that success stories are often made possible by an ongoing social infrastructure of aid, including public assistance programs and institutions, family networks, and private charity. James Anderson, for example, did not help himself alone. He was provided with a support system and resources as a youth coordinator with the Wellness Foundation's Anti-Recidivism Coalition.

Over the past thirty years, the self-help approach to poverty alleviation has gained new ground in economically struggling urban centers and rural regions in the United States and the global South. In the United States, the "trickle-down economics" and anti-state policies initiated by Ronald Reagan's administration (1981–1989) included significant cuts to the upper tax brackets and a three-decade trend of trade liberalization, a shrinking public sector, wage stagnation, increase in part-time and low-wage jobs, and expanding inequality. With the conservative attack on the Great Society programs of the War on Poverty, the idea that the individual poor person, not the state, is responsible for helping themselves out of poverty became increasingly popular ideology. During this time the unions, public institutions and programs, and grass-roots groups that organize and advocate for poor people have suffered declining resources and legitimacy. In some cases they have bureaucratized and professionalized in ways that fail to serve the needs of the new working poor. In the same thirty years, these trends allowed private wealth for the top 1 percent of the population and in the philanthropic sector to rapidly expand. In many regions public programs were replaced by privately funded nonprofit organizations that serve poor and marginalized communities.

Yet, have these private investments changed the conditions of poverty or helped the people they claim to serve? This book shows how private foundations maintain systems of inequality by funding individualistic programs that appear to address poverty but that in practice often avoid the root causes of the problems foundations propose to solve. For the people in this book — social movement leaders and nonprofit organizational staff concerned with farmworker and immigrant poverty — the dominant self-help formula ultimately acceptable to foundations is particularly problematic. The poverty in California's Central Valley is not the result of the culture or behaviors of poor people. Instead, just as in resource-rich regions in the global South, poverty is produced through relationships of capital production, often hidden from sight, amidst great wealth. Beyond the main highways and thoroughfares that run up and down the Central Valley of California, many families struggle with food insecurity and poor health, and live in substandard homes, often with no heat or clean running water. This enduring poverty is produced and maintained through large-scale farming that relies on low-wage, labor-intensive seasonal fieldwork, high pesticide use, an entrenched labor contractor system, and unmonitored working conditions for the increasingly undocumented immigrants who produce profit for major agricultural and food retail conglomerates.

Today, poverty rates in the Central Valley are higher than those in postindustrial Appalachia and Detroit. According to the 2012 US Census, three of the region's main metropolitan areas, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Modesto, rank among the poorest in the state and the nation. Fresno County, which produces more than $6 billion per year in agricultural...