Soup

The New Yorker is a wonderful magazine -- the best. Anyone disagree with that? No, I thought not. Barely a week goes by without me being excited or moved or challenged by something in it. This week, it was all three, in a remarkable - and beautifully written - account of a church-based day centre for homeless people in Manhattan. Ian Frazier's stories of the writers’ workshop which is attached to a soup kitchen, the effect it has had on people and the changes it has brought about in their lives are truly impressive. The soup kitchen is clearly about more than soup.

But it is its funding which was the challenging bit. After all, the very phrase ‘soup kitchen’ symbolises everything that’s wrong about old-style philanthropy. My mentor in this world is (of course) Joseph Rowntree. In December 1904, he used the example of the York soup kitchen to explain why he wanted the trusts he was then setting up to focus on tackling the causes of problems rather than the symptoms. He wrote that ‘The Soup Kitchen in York never has difficulty in obtaining adequate financial aid, but an enquiry into the extent and causes of poverty would enlist little support’.

I’ve bought into that approach to philanthropy in a big way. I distinguish between individual heartfelt responses to need, and institutional foundation responses. It's one thing to dip into your pocket when somebody waves a tin outside Sainsbury's on a Saturday morning, or to write a cheque after you've been moved to tears by images of suffering on television. But it’s quite another when you have the opportunity to sit and reflect, to look at written applications, to deliberate on a committee; institutions don’t have tear ducts.

But that’s not how it looks from the other end of the process. Frazier, writing about the funding of the soup kitchen, says of the foundations -

… they are well-intentioned and generous but subject to moods. "Donor burnout" is one of those. Fashions in charitable giving also come and go. Recently, foundation charity has been more focused on "making a difference," an idea that works against the soup kitchen, which changes people from hungry to not, but invisibly. Also, foundation donors now like to talk about "measurable outcomes" -- they expect recipients like the soup kitchen to single out the people who are helped, and measure the improvement in those people situations over time. Again, that's not something the soup kitchen, with the off-the-street population it serves, can easily do. In the past 18 months, several major foundation donors have dropped out, and no replacements have been found.

It would be very interesting to have Frazier debate the issue openly with someone from one of those foundations. We (I’m not permanently associated with a foundation at present, but I feel part of the foundation community) ought to be willing to open these issues up for discussion, and the power relationship being what it is, if we don’t do it, no-one else will. I’m struck by how few opportunities there are for this kind of discussion – most UK foundations have websites, but very few use them in any bi-directional way; it’s all about ‘these are our policies, this is how to apply; take it or leave it, and we certainly don’t want to know what you out there think about us’. Frazier’s candour is unusual, and should make us think hard – not least about why we have to read this stuff in the New Yorker, as distinct from hearing it as part of our day-to-day business.