With Success Comes Responsibility

By Ruth Massinga and Luz Vega-Marquis, AlterNet. Posted April 15, 2004.

Last year the endowment of the Marguerite Casey Foundation grew by $121 million, thanks to the start of a market rebound. At the same time, the number of American families living in poverty increased by more than 400,000.

Sadly, these two statistics are not unrelated.

It is nearly impossible to get a grip on how many bags of groceries or heating bills $121 million might buy, or to envision 400,000 new households (more than the entire population of Miami or St. Louis) joining the ranks of the nation's poor all at once. Like so many statistics, numbers this large can seem abstract, incomprehensible, far removed from our day-to-day lives.

But the truth of the matter is they couldn't be more real.

The Marguerite Casey Foundation has been blessed with a sizable endowment (worth more than $600 million as of this writing), and like other foundations, we manage these assets as carefully as possible, trying to maximize the return on our investments. As the stock market grows, so too does our pool of available grant dollars, which we devote to efforts to help low-income families and communities.

But what is the true cost of this type of financial gain? The foundation's bottom-line growth is plain to see year after year. But what successes can low-income families, the very people our foundation seeks to support, claim? And how is it that our investments can be performing so well, while millions of working families in this country are falling further and further behind?

Such questions, uncomfortable as they are, deserve more debate and discussion than they usually receive within the philanthropic world.

Our foundation has struggled with this irony since its inception, at both the staff and board levels. We are emboldened when the market performs well, yet we know these profits come with very real human consequences. Publicly traded corporations in which we have invested streamline here and downsize there, maximizing for efficiencies one day, merging and acquiring the next. And with each transaction applauded by Wall Street, the lives of hundreds or thousands of working families can be irrevocably changed for the worse.

Recent trends bear this out. While the stock market has slowly inched its way back up from the bursting of the bubble, low-income families and the working poor have seen few, if any, meaningful gains of their own. Among the key trends:

• Job losses and slower wage growth resulted in a decline in median family income of nearly $1,500 over the past two years;
• More than 43 million Americans (15 percent of the population) did not have health insurance in 2002, and the amount of premiums that insured employees pay for family coverage has increased about 50 percent over the past three years;
• Since 1997, the number of hours worked by dual-earner and single-earner couples has increased an average of 12 hours per week. Americans work longer hours than people in any other developed country, including Japan, and have less time to spend with their families as a result;
• Over the past decade the average amount of credit-card debt for low-income families has risen by 184 percent.

These pressures are worsening by the day. Single-earner families are less likely to stay above the poverty line than ever before. Unemployment continues to rise. And we have no method to accurately count the number of unemployed workers who have given up their job hunts altogether.

Yet unlike the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange -- whose tickers, technologies, and trend watchers let us measure second-by-second ebbs and flows from the comfort of our laptops -- we have no such national index for family well-being, no scientific metrics to assess the human costs of buying low or selling high.

We watch nightly as the evening news reports on what the Dow Jones industrial average did that day. But when was the last time your favorite news anchor reported on how many single parents took on a second or third minimum-wage job just to cover the mounting interest fees owed to their neighborhood check-cashing outlet?

We recognize and share the responsibility foundations bear in helping to alleviate the challenges of poverty. The struggle for a more just and equitable society is a marathon rather than a sprint. That's why our grant-making strategy is focused not on providing temporary assistance for those in need, but on leadership development, strengthening the operations and capacity of nonprofit groups that serve the poor, promoting efforts to get all citizens involved in policy making, and other long-term strategies to improve and permanently change systems and institutions that serve the public.

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