Grant Makers Support Big-Picture Solutions to Harassment

As programs designed to combat bullying proliferate across America, some large foundations are gearing up support for the next generation of solutions.

Their proposed remedies go beyond merely raising public awareness about peer-to-peer harassment, a problem that affects an estimated one in four kids. The grant makers are supporting groups that seek to change the way students relate to one another or are disciplined in school. By doing so, they believe they will end the culture that inadvertently creates bullying.

Some grant makers, like the NoVo Foundation, are working with research groups to uncover how to change the social and emotional environment of schools so kids can better resolve conflicts and exhibit empathy toward one another. The foundation, run by Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer, has $1-billion in assets from his father, Warren Buffett, and is expected to get another $2-billion in July, so it could become a major player in the movement to redesign the way schools work.

“We’ll be focusing on this for the next 25 years,” says Ms. Buffett, president of the NoVo Foundation. “We could end up spending 40 percent of our assets on this eventually.”

NoVo now spends more than $12-million a year studying the issue. It’s been working with eight school districts nationwide and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, a research group in Chicago, seeking ways to create schools that reduce behavioral problems and increase learning.

“There’s a lot of evidence that shows that when you teach kids conflict-management skills when they’re very young, they themselves become mediators in the longer term,” Ms. Buffett says. “Bullying is the dashboard light going on and off. We all want it to stop flashing, but it’s a persistent warning that we need to give our kids real skills so that they can deal with ways around violence.”

Stakes Are High

Other large grant makers, including Atlantic Philanthropies and the California Endowment, have made commitments to student-led organizations that are trying to change school policies they see as contributing to bullying or that punish too severely or wrongly. Often, leaders of those organization say, victims of bullying—including many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youths—are suspended because they are the focal points of trouble they did not instigate.

In California, where more students are suspended each year than graduate, according to state government reports, the stakes are particularly high. Black and Hispanic males are suspended or expelled at disproportionately high rates, and LGBT kids drop out or are suspended at higher rates than the general student population, according to a study by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“That’s all pretty significant and why this has become a priority item for us,” says Daniel Zingale, senior vice president of the California Endowment’s Health Happens in Schools program. “Our goal is to keep kids in school. To do that, you often have to help the victimizers as well as the victims.”

The endowment started studying the issue two years ago and has provided $5-million to pay for advocacy work, research, and meetings with kids to discuss problems they see in schools. Its findings show that school disciplinary practices in California often make a bad situation worse.

“The kids say they are all in this together,” Mr. Zingale says. “The notion that everything will be OK if we kick out all the bullies is just not right. Zero-tolerance policies have run amok, and even LGBT kids say they won’t keep them safe. They actually have some empathy for all these kids getting kicked out.”

Organizing Students

Atlantic Philanthropies has made grants totaling $20-million to groups that work to reform school policies and change the environment at schools, including $3.5-million to start the Just and Fair Schools Fund, part of Public Interest Projects, which offers support to social-justice and human-rights organizations. The fund has made about $2-million in grants to organize student groups, such as the Philadelphia Student Union.

“We try to engage students to see themselves as a community in which they have a voice and not just as bullies and victims,” says Azeem Hill, 19, a youth organizer for the student group.

Along with 10 other similar groups in Philadelphia, the Student Union led a boycott of South Philadelphia High School earlier this year to protest persistent bullying. Their efforts, and others by similar collaborations of student groups elsewhere, including in Chicago and Los Angeles, have led to changes in how some school systems handle peer-to-peer harassment.

“The message we sent to school leaders was: Our schools aren’t properly funded or staffed to deal constructively with bullying behavior,” says Mr. Hill. “And that’s why the school isn’t safe.”