Making Her Point in Public

Secretive donor’s daughter heads campaign to increase giving

Charles F. Feeney, the Irish-American business entrepreneur, shook up the non-profit world

ALSO SEE:

Groups Put Pressure on Foundations to Increase Their Grant Making

The French American Charitable Trust

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

2/06/97: A Donor’s Obsession With Secrecy

2/06/97: For Anonymous Donors, Offshore Philanthropy Can Be Appealing

when he acknowledged in 1997 that he had secretly given away some $600-million and planned to give away another $3.5-billion.

Two years later, his 31-year-old daughter, Diane, is shaking up philanthropy — through her own unconventional grant making as well as her aggressive efforts to persuade foundations to give away more money.

Since 1995, Diane (pronounced dee-ann) V. Feeney has headed the French American Charitable Trust, a $40-million foundation created by her father. The trust, which operates out of offices here, has an ambitious mission: to make American society more egalitarian and to support activists in France who want to help disenfranchised people there by protesting French government policies. This year the foundation plans to spend $3.5-million. Most of its grants will go to grassroots groups — like Justice, Economic Dignity & Independence for Women, in Salt Lake City, and the Farmworkers Institute for Education and Leadership Development, in Tucson, Ariz. — that fight for social change.

Until recently, Ms. Feeney had kept a low profile. She says she did so out of “respect for my father.”

Mr. Feeney, who co-founded Duty Free Shoppers Group, talked to the press about his giving when a lawsuit over the sale of the company would have revealed that he had transferred his holdings in it to his philanthropies. He had previously been adamant about keeping his identity a secret — and continues to require that his grantees promise never to reveal their benefactor’s name.

But now, Ms. Feeney says, she feels an obligation to speak out and to press grant makers to improve their performance.

Ms. Feeney chairs a new campaign that is encouraging foundations to increase by one percentage point the share of assets they give away each year and to dedicate those dollars to social-change groups. The campaign, called “The Payout Initiative: 1% More for Democracy,” is run by the National Network of Grantmakers, which represents foundations and donors that support progressive causes.

“Good grant making includes being responsive to grantees, and being responsive now,” she says. “If you’re in the business of grant making, you should be giving away as much as you can.”

The drive is raising more than just eyebrows among foundation leaders, some of whom fear that any effort to call attention to the amount that grant makers distribute will lead Congress to tighten the rules on foundation giving. Now, foundations are legally required to distribute at least 5 per cent of their assets, on average, each year. If foundations have to give away much more annually, say some grant makers, they will eventually have no money left to support charity.

While Ms. Feeney had not been in the public spotlight until the payout campaign, she got her start in the non-profit world by working with an organization known for its ability to attract attention through daredevil stunts: Greenpeace.

After graduating in 1990 from Cornell University — her father’s alma mater — she began writing for the environmental organization’s magazine and working on its campaign to preserve Antarctica.

She quit in 1993 to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy and social policy because, she says, she was “looking for some ideas on how to approach this issue of poverty and oppression in our society, and how do you explain it?” But she soon realized that she was not interested in the academic explanations of how public policies harmed or helped the poor, but instead in finding ways to help poor people learn how to influence those policies.

One way to channel those interests, she decided, was through her family’s philanthropy. Her father had set up the French American Charitable Trust in 1990 to allow Diane, her four siblings, and her mother to support causes they cared about. The fund was named to honor Mr. Feeney’s American nationality and the French background of his first wife, Danielle, who is Diane’s mother.

During its early years, the fund spent most of its time giving to the family’s pet causes, but in 1993 Ms. Feeney began exploring with family members the possibility that she could take over leadership of the fund and give it a more concrete mission.

“I said to them: I don’t want to fund universities, and I don’t want to fund soup kitchens, even though I think they’re great and that’s why I volunteer at them,” Ms. Feeney recalls. “I want to think about this in a much more strategic way. How can we really be involved in bringing about a more just society? What are the leverage points, and who are the players that we can help to do this?”

Her mother, brother, and three sisters — all trustees of the fund — agreed, and Ms. Feeney started interviewing experts nationwide to get ideas and formulate the fund’s mission.

What she came up with is very different from the causes supported by her father. Charles Feeney, she says, is more interested in “creating lasting things” and tends to finance bricks-and-mortar projects and large institutions such as research universities.

“I have a much more radical approach in how to create social change and greater democracy,” says Ms. Feeney. “I’m more interested in the grassroots, and issues of power and advocacy.”

“Of course,” she adds, “we’re playing with different amounts of money.”

But her father’s spirit is not entirely absent. He, too, has given to at least one controversial cause: donating tens of thousands of dollars to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

Diane Feeney says she and her siblings have been strongly affected by her father’s generosity and sense of values.

“His example and his leadership are something that we have always been very influenced by, as well as his very strong sense of right and wrong and justice and equality for people,” says Ms. Feeney.

Though Diane Feeney is the daughter of a multimillionaire, she shares her father’s modest way of life. Just as he wears a $15 wristwatch and shuns first-class air travel, Diane tends to wear casual clothing like khaki pants and simple white shirts on visits to grantees, and she jots down her notes in a recycled-paper spiral notebook.

She encourages her grantees to take the same simple approach. As the foundation’s guidelines state: “We are not interested in fancy presentations, so do not use folders, binders, or superfluous paper.”

To save on rent, the trust shares its offices here in the Financial District with another family fund, the McKay Foundation. And last year, the foundation’s three full-time employees here and one part-time employee in Paris earned a combined $240,000.

Ms. Feeney received $50,000 of that amount. “I’m not in it for the salary — although I make a perfectly good salary,” she says. “But I wanted to make sure that I was paid. Not that you’re not respected when you do volunteer work — but it was a very conscious decision to make this my career.”

Patricia Bauman, president of her family’s Bauman Foundation, in the District of Columbia, says Ms. Feeney need not worry that she will be viewed as a dilettante heiress. “She cares very deeply about achieving results,” says Ms. Bauman. “This is not a vanity venture for her.”

Ms. Feeney tried to figure out how best to get results by studying social-change movements, like those spurred by civil-rights workers in the 1960s and by Christian Coalition activists in the 1980s and 1990s.

“To pass stuff that really remains permanent you have to have educated people continuing to put pressure on public officials,” she says. “We’re not only interested in the self-help stuff. We want to push it further and say that in order to have a healthy democratic civil society, all parts of that society need to be involved in the decision-making process.”

Ms. Feeney says that foundations and charities too often try to dictate how social changes should occur. She says that poor people “don’t need people to come tell them that their kids are getting a bad education.” Instead, she says, “what they need to do is gain the skills to go to a city-council meeting and speak in front of 30 people.”

One risk of her style of grant making is that her grantees sometimes advocate positions with which she doesn’t agree.

For example, she says, one grantee, the Labor/Community Strategy Center, in Los Angeles, is trying to persuade the National Football League to refrain from starting a team there because, in the center’s view, the regional governing bodies are racist. The center made that claim after the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority refused to respond to a court order to expand bus services. By doing so, the center says, the authority is discriminating against poor people and minorities.

Ms. Feeney says that calling the city racist is “a pretty radical statement,” but that her opposition to that view won’t jeopardize the center’s grants from her fund. “Sometimes our grantees will do things, and I’ll think it’s not such a great idea. But it doesn’t matter whether I think it’s a great idea or not.”

Supporting small and upstart groups is not the only thing that makes Diane Feeney an unusual grant maker.

Unlike most other foundations, the French American Charitable Trust makes the majority of its grants as general operating support — or money with no strings attached. In addition, it supports its grantees — about 60 in the United States and 12 in France — for many years at a time. While the majority of grantees have to re-apply for grants each year, Ms. Feeney says that the foundation makes an “implicit agreement” with non-profit organizations that they will receive financing over the long term.

To be able to support grassroots groups over time so that they can become stable and take off on their own, Ms. Feeney says, the foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals. While that aspect of the foundation has garnered some criticism, Ms. Feeney says that, because the foundation’s endowment is relatively small, she cannot afford to spread it too thin.

Pamela Chiang, who helps run the Laotian Organizing Project, in Richmond, Cal., says the $72,000 the group has received through Ms. Feeney’s fund has allowed it to develop its capacity to respond quickly to potential problems. For instance, she says, the project was able to mobilize a major protest earlier this year after an explosion at a local Chevron oil refinery.

The organization demanded that Contra Costa County, which includes Richmond, do a better job of warning the people who live near the county’s 350 chemical storage and manufacturing companies about the potential dangers. Since many of those people are non-English-speaking Asian or Hispanic immigrants, the project is urging the development of a warning system in multiple languages and is currently in negotiations with the county.

“It takes a foundation like FACT that really sees the importance of multiyear support,” Ms. Chiang says. “And not just support in giving money, but in providing a vehicle for us to step back and think about what our long-term goals are for creating social change.”

Many grantees say they admire Ms. Feeney most for her direct involvement with their work and her understanding that social change often involves making some mistakes along the way.

The foundation makes a point of making a site visit to each grantee once a year, and Ms. Feeney makes a good share of the calls herself. That surprised some non-profit leaders at first, since, they say, most family members at family foundations try to keep a distance from potential grantees. Perhaps more surprising, say some grantees, is the way Ms. Feeney encourages charity leaders to be candid about their problems.

“Sometimes site visits can be a real dog-and-pony show, where groups basically try to gloss over weaknesses in organizations,” says Charles Taylor, state coordinator of the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment, in Greenville, S.C. “But with Diane and FACT, we have an honest encouragement to have a frank relationship where we can say, ‘We designed this campaign, it looked great, and everything was there, but it didn’t work.’ It’s enormously valuable to have a space for that to happen, without the threat of a grant being pulled.”

Ms. Feeney, who holds both American and French citizenship, says she hopes that through her grant making she can encourage activists for the disenfranchised to share ideas as much as possible.

Over the past two years, the foundation has given $75,000 to the French-American Foundation, in New York, to arrange visits between non-profit leaders in the United States and France. In the future, Ms. Feeney hopes to broaden the program to include an exchange between North American and European non-profit leaders.

Sam Mistrano, executive director of the Human Services Network of Los Angeles, says his visit to Paris in March made him think in new ways about how his clients could be helped.

For example, Mr. Mistrano was struck by the way the French government gives each citizen — regardless of his or her economic status — a subsidy so that no one can fall into deep poverty.

He says that subsidy helps give people of all walks of life a sense of self-worth. By contrast, in America, he says, self-worth is often defined by the profession and income a person holds. Now one of his goals is to push for new ways to help his clients gain that same sense of self-esteem he saw among the French.

Ms. Feeney says her bicultural background helped her see the value of getting non-profit leaders to think about their work in a global context. Too many Americans, she says, do not know enough about what is occurring in other parts of the world and, as a result, fail to see their work as part of ameliorating larger international problems.

“We have to think a little bit differently and realize that we’re not the center of the universe,” Ms. Feeney says. “There are a lot of international political issues that affect our poor communities here, and we really have to think about them — not just how you fight the next battle and how you put out the next fire.”