The View from the Heights of Arnstein’sLadderResident Engagement byCommunity Foundations BY G . ALBERT RUESGA

AND BARRY KNIGHT

It goes by many names: citizen participation; com-munity or resident engagement; bottom-up grantmaking; grassroots philanthropy. For some commu-nity foundations in the United States, it’s a pro formaexercise; for others, a source of power and pride. Fora significant number, it’s still little more than a fonddream, something wished for but somehow neverattained.

When program officers and other community foun-dation leaders speak of stakeholder engagement,they often point to the desire to have their grant-making interventions “informed” or “shaped” bythe communities they serve. These philanthropicprofessionals might go a step further—at leastrhetorically—and seek the “meaningful participa-tion” of underserved communities in the design andleadership of grant-making programs. The expres-sion of these desires is sometimes motivated by a re-gard for democratic ideals or by a sincere respectfor self-determination. It might spring from a deeprespect for fairness or an adherence to some form ofthe Golden Rule. Stakeholder engagement might attimes be sought to put a democratic patina on whatare essentially elite decisions.

Whatever their source, calls for resident engagementhave become normative in the field, as reflected, forexample, in the Grantmakers for Effective Organi-zations publication by J. Courtney Bourns (2010) ti-tled Do Nothing About Me Without Me: An ActionGuide for Engaging Stakeholders. The primary ar-gument here is one about efficacy: Foundations thatengage stakeholders are “part of a growing move-ment in philanthropy—a movement founded on thebelief that grantmakers are more effective to the ex-tent that they meaningfully engage their granteesand other key stakeholders” (p. 1, emphasis added).

Repr inted with permission of the authors . See http: / /postcards.typepad.com/white te lephone/2013/06/the-view.html .

And yet, when do our efforts to make our grant mak-ing less top-down move from the token to the mean-ingful? Beyond the norms of professionalism, be-yond the demands of our philanthropic technocracy,is there a moral dimension to the requirement thatour grant-making efforts be more citizen informedand directed?

Fortunately for organized philanthropy, the issue ofhow to understand and assess resident engagementefforts is not new. In 1969, for example, Sherry Arn-stein (1969) published a powerful article address-ing these key issues. She proposed a typology, calledthe “ladder of citizen participation,” that has beenwidely used. Her typology looked like the one de-picted in Figure 1.

Ultimately for Arnstein, citizen participation isabout citizen power. The ladder reproduced in thefigure is designed to highlight the “critical differencebetween going through the empty ritual of participa-tion and having the real power to affect the outcomeof the process” (p. 216) The higher up the ladderyou go, the greater the degree of citizen empower-ment. At rung 4, for example, we invite citizen opin-ions but offer no assurance that these views will beheeded. At rung 5, we place a token number of the“worthy” poor on advisory committees and the like,but “[i]f they are not accountable to a constituencyin the community and if the traditional power elitehold the majority of seats, the have-nots can be eas-ily outvoted and outfoxed” (p. 220). And so it goesas we climb or, in many cases, descend the ladder ofengagement. For in the world of community founda-tions, the kind of resident engagement that Arnsteinholds up as the ideal—full citizen control—is rare orperhaps nonexistent, at least in the U.S. context.

It’s certainly easy for community foundations toclaim some form of citizen engagement. But as we

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Figure 1. Ladder of Citizen

Participation

shall see, there are reasons why it’s difficult to dowell.

What Is Community Engagement, and Why Is It

Important?

Academic studies of community engagement tendto distinguish between two different but relatedideas: “association” and “participation.” Associa-tion means people coming together to pursue mutualinterests. Participation means using those mutual in-terests to connect with authorities and influence howthese authorities behave.

When they are combined, association and partici-pation form part of what political scientists such asSimon O’Meally (2013) call “the demand side ofgovernance.” What citizens do is quite differentfrom what public authorities do—that is “the supplyside of governance.”

There is clear evidence that in order to be effective,the supply side of governance requires a strong de-mand side. It is by now well established that top-down resource allocation often fails to trickle downto the people who are supposed to benefit. Large-scale centralized government-initiated programs—from schooling, to welfare, to home lending, toirrigation systems—perform badly, fail to addresspoverty, and sometimes damage the environment.

These observations have led to a rethinking aboutinternational aid in the developing world. Participa-

tory development, pioneered by Robert Chambers(1983), has demonstrated that people with few so-called marketable skills and significant need oftenplay leading roles in successful programs while ex-ternal agents do better by simply providing tech-nical advice. At the same time, it is clear that theprocesses of participation are not magic bullets.Evidence on the ground suggests mixed results inpart because authorities are reluctant to let go ofcontrol.

There is a clear role here for community foundationsin pioneering meaningful community engagement.They can set an example for government interven-tions and for programs designed to aid the devel-oping world. As “borderland institutions” betweenpeople with power and those without it, they are ide-ally placed to bridge the demand and supply sides ofgovernance in a given community.

The Very Idea of a Community Foundation

The first community foundation, established in 1914by Cleveland banker Frederick Goff, was a deliber-ately top-down affair, note Lucy Bernholz, KatherinFulton, and Gabriel Kasper in On the Brink ofNew Promise (2005). It was designed to put multi-ple charitable trusts under unified management andtap into the current and future largesse of commu-nity leaders. While Goff clearly took his inspirationfrom the great private philanthropies of the time,Eleanor W. Sacks (2009) wrote, he strove to drawa clear distinction between the private foundationsestablished by the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie,and his own emerging concept of a communityfoundation:

[T]he Cleveland Foundation would be large-scale, non-sectarian, and have a provision tomodify funds established in the foundation asconditions changed. However, being a “com-munity” foundation, rather than a national orinternational private foundation, meant some-thing else. It would have a board of prominentand knowledgeable local citizens, appointed bypersons who held respected offices in the com-munity, to take responsibility for the distribu-tion of grants. The board would not be self-perpetuating, but serve for limited terms without

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pay, and it would operate in the public eye andbe accountable to the community. (6)

In addition to sharing private philanthropy’s fo-cus on addressing the root causes of our social ills,community foundations would, just like their largercounterparts, have boards of trustees controlled byelites. For most community foundations, this pre-ponderance of elite control has remained to thepresent day.

Over the years, a number of community foundationsin the United States have sought to democratize theirgovernance and grant making and, to a lesser extent,their fundraising practices. Some boards of trusteeshave elected prominent people of color to their ranksand/or invited nonprofit and other community lead-ers to serve. Community foundation staffs have be-come more diverse. The great civil rights strugglesof the 1950s and 1960s raised public conscious-ness about marginalized communities and their de-sire for self-determination, prompting some commu-nity foundation leaders to seek input or directionfrom the populations they serve. These efforts havetaken many forms.

And yet the degree to which contemporary com-munity foundations do with rather than to remainsan open question. Despite good intentions, howmany resident engagement programs manage toclimb past the tokenism rungs of the Ladder of Cit-izen Participation, described earlier? Where is thereal locus of power in these community engagementefforts?

There’s a tension inherent in the work of communityfoundations. These institutions are funded largely byelites who have a stake in preserving the social, eco-nomic, and other structures from which they drawtheir personal wealth and power. The communitiesserved by these institutions tend to have a more jaun-diced view of the status quo. Although this kind oftension can have destructive consequences, it canalso be a source of transformation for a community.In these cases, the community foundation can act,if it so chooses, as a borderland institution, one inwhich the well-to-do and the marginalized engage inlively give-and-take conversations across barriers ofrace, class, and other differences. Ideally, a commu-nity foundation can play an important role in help-

ing rich and poor work together to decide how bestto use scarce resources to address pressing commu-nity needs.

Some Telling Examples

Community engagement is not only normal practicein the developing world, it is often the only strat-egy available. Halima Mahomed and Brianne Peters(2011), for example, describe how the Kenya Com-munity Development Foundation has given grantsto community associations in the Makutano areaover a fifteen-year period to enable residents torecapture semiarid land. It would have been verydifficult for the government to do this, given thatthe area is cut off, located twenty-three kilome-ters (fourteen miles) down a dirt road. The onlyway to build the necessary wells was for local peo-ple to use their own money, time, and labor. Totake another example from the developing world,in Nepal, local people were fed up with the con-sequences of being dependent on aid, somethingthat tended to favor “projects” with professionaljobs for outsiders. They formed their own asso-ciation, Tewa, using donations from 3,000 peo-ple and have made more than 300 grants to localgrassroots organizations from money raised locally.(See http://www.tewa.org.np/site/.) They are mod-eling lateral relationships, avoiding a hierarchicalview of the world in order to relate to all kinds ofpeople as equals.

Such approaches to community engagement are alsofound in the United States. For example, in Novem-ber 2002, in Selma, Alabama, one hundred peo-ple came together to build a community founda-tion from the bottom up. They envisaged that theBlack Belt Community Foundation would develop amechanism for all residents to contribute to healthycommunities and build a vibrant regional economywhere everyone shares the benefits.

The big issue in the Black Belt of the southern UnitedStates is race. Despite being the cradle of the civilrights movement, de facto segregation still exists.The community foundation sees itself as a bridgebuilder between different parts of the community,working both with establishment elites and poorcommunities. Racial equality runs through the or-ganization at board and staff level and is found in

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all aspects of its programming. Central to the strat-egy are “community associates,” approximately onehundred local volunteers who connect the founda-tion to different neighborhoods as its eyes and ears.Rather than focus on deficits, the foundation takesan asset-based approach to its work. Its motto is“using what we have to build what we need.” Thebiggest asset is not money; it is the people.

Even in this last example, we have not yet climbedto the very top of Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Par-ticipation, nor is it clear that doing so would neces-sarily best serve the needs of the Selma community.The Black Belt Community Foundation’s board oftrustees is not entirely controlled by citizens, if weinterpret this to mean control by those who are mostdirectly targeted by the foundation’s programs. Andyet there is a sharing of power and expertise that’srare for many foundations. There’s a dynamic give-and-take at work that can serve as a model for otherfoundations that have tried top-down approaches toaddressing social problems and failed.

Conclusion

The work of community foundations lends itself nat-urally to meaningful interactions between a soci-ety’s haves and have-nots. These foundations are alocus for important cross-group negotiations abouthow best to deploy a community’s limited resources.They bring together the lived experience of those inpoverty with elite knowledge of how best to shiftthe political will of a given community. They canbe a powerful force for change. Yet in spite of theirfront-line status, they’ve had only limited success inaddressing issues such as concentrated poverty andenvironmental degradation. There are resource con-straints and failures of imagination at work here, tobe sure; and often an uneasy relationship exists be-tween philanthropy and other fields that might helpit advance. But we suspect that beyond these con-straints, there’s the loss of an important resource—resident knowledge, skills, and activism—that canhelp communities reach a tipping point in their de-velopment. The field’s own aspirations for moremeaningful community input, and hard lessons frominternational development, suggest that citizen en-gagement can help reduce the failure rate for phil-anthropic efforts. Beyond the need for greater ef-

fectiveness, there’s a moral imperative at work aswell. Seeing families and communities as ends notjust as means requires that those who have powershare it with those who do not; through this lens,we understand why individuals might resist inter-ventions that compromise their sense of agency orpersonhood.

The view from the heights of Arnstein’s ladder ofparticipation is rare for community foundations. Itshould become less so as the field continues to rein-vent itself in the years ahead.

References

Arnstein, Sherry R. 1969. “A Ladder of Citizen Participa-tion.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (4):216–24.

Bernholz, Lucy, Katherin Fulton, and Gabriel Kasper. 2005.On the Brink of New Promise: The Future of U.S. Com-munity Foundations. Blueprint Research & Design, Inc. andMonitor Company Group, LLP.

Bourns, J. Courtney. 2010. Do Nothing About Me WithoutMe: An Action Guide for Engaging Stakeholders. Washing-ton, DC: Grantmakers for Effective Organizations.

Chambers, Robert. 1983. Rural Development: Putting theLast First. Essex, England: Longmans Scientific and TechnicalPublishers.

Mahomed, Halima, and Brianne Peters. 2011. “The StoryBehind the Well: A Case Study in Successful Commu-nity Development in Makutano, Kenya.” Nairobi, Kenya:Coady International Institute and Global Fund for Commu-nity Foundations. http://www.coady.stfx.ca/tinroom/assets/file/StoryBehindTheWell.pdf.

O’Meally, Simon. “Is It Time for a New Paradigm for‘Citizen Engagement’? The Role of Context and What theEvidence Tells Us,” People, Spaces, Deliberation (blog). April29, 2013. http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/it-time-new-paradigm-citizen-engagement-role-context-and-what-evidence-tells-us.

Sacks, Eleanor W. 2009. “Frederick Harris Goff, Rocke-feller Philanthropy and the Early History of U.S. CommunityFoundations.” Rockefeller Archive Center Research ReportsOnline. http://www.rockarch.org/publications/resrep/sacks.pdf.

G. Albert Ruesga is president and chief executive officer ofthe Greater New Orleans Foundation.

Barry Knight is the director of CENTRIS-UK.

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