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WORK TITLE: The Self-help Myth
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PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.ericakohlarenas.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
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NATIONALITY:
https://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/milano-school-faculty/?id=4e44-4d77-4e54-5178 * http://www.ericakohlarenas.com/bio * https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-kohl-arenas-897a39b3/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1968.
EDUCATION:Reed College, B.A., 1991; University of California, Davis, M.S., 1999; University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, assistant professor. Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy at the New School for Social Research, assistant professor. Formerly worked as educator and community development practitioner in urban public schools, immigrant nonprofit organizations, and coal mining and “crofting” towns in Appalachia, Scotland, and Wales.
AWARDS:New School Award in Outstanding Achievements in Diversity and Social Justice Teaching, University of California, Berkeley.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Territories of Poverty, edited by Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2015.
Contributor to professional journals and other periodicals, including Geography Compass, Journal of Poverty, Public: A Journal of Imagining America, and Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest.
SIDELIGHTS
New School for Social Research assistant professor Erica Kohl-Arenas focuses on the relationship between philanthropic efforts and social change. “Erica’s work in classrooms and communities,” explained the contributor of a biographical blurb to the author’s eponymous Web site, the Erica Kohl-Arenas Home Page, “is inspired by an early experience working with the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee.” A contributor of a biographical blurb to the New School Public Engagement Web site wrote: “Her primary research areas include studies of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, participatory community development, and the intersection of American and global poverty studies. Public scholarship and community collaborations include a social history memoir on the progressive school reform movement with her father Herb Kohl.” She is the author of the monograph The Self-help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty.
The Self-help Myth looks at the ways in which different philanthropies have tried to alleviate the poverty of farm laborers in California during the latter part of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first century. “Each of the cases captures a distinct, and extended, episode of foundation intervention to address migrant worker poverty, each at a distinctive `moment’ in the long trajectory of agricultural restructuring and social policy reform,” explained Alice O’Connor on HistPhil. “Each, too, gets at different aspects of how foundations exercise power in the grant-making relationships they initiate—even when they are not entirely in control. And each presents us with a different stage in … a deepening entrenchment of self-help logic in foundation-funded antipoverty programming. One constant is worth emphasizing: poverty has remained exceedingly high in the Central Valley throughout the period.” “Kohl-Arenas documents how, over the decades, grassroots self-help initiatives have repeatedly been co-opted by private foundations into `nonthreatening service or civic participation programs in keeping with [their] current funding priorities,’ obscuring the fact that foundations in general are reluctant to support union organizing, strikes, boycotts, and other types of `radical’ activity,” assessed Kyoko Uchida on the Philanthropy News Digest Web site. “The surprise, for Kohl-Arenas, is that anyone would be surprised. After all, it was Andrew Carnegie, in the Gospel of Wealth (1889), who suggested that `the new rich had a responsibility to help the poor help themselves—in the interest of preventing protest.’” Writing in Choice, R.S. Rycroft declared that the analyses “show how subtle pressure from foundations can redirect poor peoples’ organizations from opposition to … collaboration.”
Kohl-Arenas uses case studies drawn from her own research that tries to understand the ways in which philanthropy has impacted poverty among those workers. The author “draws on her interviews with the community-based `stakeholders’ to show how the shift to a strategically circumscribed vision of immigrant rights drew them away from their economic justice work,” O’Connor continued. “At the same time, she makes it clear that the grantee organizations did not passively buy into the foundation’s framing, but tried to adapt it for their own purposes while also educating funders about the needs of their communities. The same can be said about the initiative’s chief program officer (and others Kohl-Arenas interviewed), who actively sought out ways to get funds for grass roots organizers on the sly.” Writing on the Aidnography Web log, Tobias Denskus declared: “As the narrative of [more than five] decades of charitable work in the Californian agricultural industry unfolds, we have the great fortune of exploring one of the best development ethnographies I have come across in the very long time—despite the fact that Kohl-Arenas’ research actually took place in the U.S. and not in a developing country. Her detailed, yet carefully selected vignettes from the early days of the self-help movement in the 1960s to the social capital era of the 1990s and today’s ‘win-win’ coalitions including the agricultural industry are framed into three beautifully written chapters that elucidate her key points vividly.”
Critics appreciated Kohl-Arenas’s contribution to the national debate on poverty and philanthropy. “In her research and teaching on philanthropy and participatory community engagement,” said Craig McGarvey, writing on the National Council for Responsive Philanthropy Web site, “Professor Kohl-Arenas describes herself as working in the space `between scholarship and practice.’ At a time when prominent foundations like the Ford Foundation are refocusing their work `to disrupt the drivers of inequality,’ the field needs many more such scholar practitioners. Let’s encourage the strategic planners at all foundations interested in promoting equality and ending poverty to read Kohl-Arenas’ important book.” The Self-help Myth, Uchida wrote, “serves as a reminder that the roots of [poverty, inequality, and racial injustice] … are deeply embedded in our political and economic system—the same system that enables philanthropy on an institutional scale—and strongly suggests that any lasting solution to them needs to see the existing status quo as hindrance rather than the answer.” “When all is written and done,” Denskus wrote, “The Self-help Myth rises to be a stellar example of modern, critical, ethnographically informed research communication that not only is a joy to read, but equally to discuss with students or recommend to fellow researchers. Add it to your reading list!”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, R.S. Rycroft, review of The Self-help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty, p. 1519.
ONLINE
Aidnography, http://aidnography.blogspot.com/ (March 7, 2016), Tobias Denskus, review of The Self-help Myth.
Erica Kohl-Arenas Home Page, https://www.ericakohlarenas.com (May 12, 2017), author profile.
HistPhil, https://histphil.org/ (April 11, 2016), Alice O’Connor, review of The Self-help Myth.
National Council for Responsive Philanthropy, https://www.ncrp.org/ (January 14, 2016), Craig McGarvey, “`The Self-Help Myth’ Tells an Important Story about Philanthropy.”
New School Public Engagement, https://www.newschool.edu/ (May 12, 2017), author faculty profile.
Philanthropy News Digest, http://pndblog.typepad.com/ (January 14, 2016), Kyoko Uchida, review of The Self-help Myth.
Erica Kohl-Arenas
Assistant Professor at The New School
The New School University of California, Berkeley
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Erica Kohl-Arenas is an Assistant Professor at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy and is the first recipient of The New School award in Outstanding Achievements in Diversity and Social Justice Teaching. She earned her PhD from the Social and Cultural Studies in Education program at the University of California, Berkeley (2010), an MS in Community Development from the University of California, Davis (1999), and a BA in Sociology from Reed College (1991).
Kohl-Arenas' book, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty (University of California Press, 2015), analyzes the history of philanthropic investments in addressing farmworker and immigrant poverty across California’s Central Valley. Her primary research areas include studies of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, participatory community development, and the intersection of American and global poverty studies. As a publicly engaged scholar-teacher Kohl-Arenas’ remains engaged in the practice of participatory development by designing and managing community-university partnerships across New York City.
Prior to her graduate studies, Kohl-Arenas worked as a popular educator and community development practitioner in a variety of settings including urban public schools, immigrant nonprofit organizations, and coal mining and ‘crofting’ towns in Appalachia, Scotland, and Wales. Kohl-Arenas’ work in communities and classrooms is inspired by an early experience working with the Highlander Research and Education Center. She has also been a fellow with the Coro Foundation, The Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and the Sustainable Communities Leadership Program. See lessSee less of undefined summary
Experience
The New School
Assistant Professor
Company NameThe New School
The New School
Assistant Professor
Company NameThe New School
Dates EmployedJul 2010 – Present Employment Duration6 yrs 10 mos
LocationNew York City
Education
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Field Of Study Social and Cultural Studies
Dates attended or expected graduation 2003 – 2010
Reed College
Reed College
Degree Name Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Field Of Study Sociology
University of California, Davis
University of California, Davis
Degree Name Master of Science (MS) Field Of Study Community Development
Faculty
Erica Kohl-Arenas
Assistant Professor of Nonprofit Management
EMAIL:
kohlaree@newschool.edu
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Fanton Hall/Welcome Center
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PROFILE:
Erica Kohl-Arenas is an Assistant Professor at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy and is the first recipient of The New School award in Outstanding Achievements in Diversity and Social Justice Teaching. She earned her PhD from the Social and Cultural Studies in Education program at the University of California, Berkeley (2010), an MS in Community Development from the University of California, Davis (1999), and a BA in Sociology from Reed College (1991).
Kohl-Arenas' book, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty (University of California Press, 2015), analyzes the history of philanthropic investments in addressing farmworker and immigrant poverty across California’s Central Valley. Her primary research areas include studies of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, participatory community development, and the intersection of American and global poverty studies. Public scholarship and community collaborations include a social history memoir on the progressive school reform movement with her father Herb Kohl and student engagement projects with New York City nonprofit organizations including the Center for Court Innovation and Groundswell Murals.
Prior to her graduate studies, Kohl-Arenas worked as a popular educator and community development practitioner in a variety of settings including urban public schools, immigrant nonprofit organizations, and coal mining and ‘crofting’ towns in Appalachia, Scotland, and Wales. Kohl-Arenas’ work in communities and classrooms is inspired by an early experience working with the Highlander Research and Education Center. She has also been a fellow with the Coro Foundation, The Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and the Sustainable Communities Leadership Program.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS:
The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty by Erica Kohl-Arenas, University of California Press, November 2015. Pre-order: http://www.ucpress.edu/go/selfhelpmyth
Kohl-Arenas, Erica, “Funding the Other California: An Anatomy of Consensus and Consent,” in Territories of Poverty, editors Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane. (University of Georgia Press, Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series, 2015)
Kohl-Arenas, Erica and Harry Boyte and Carleton Turner (2015). Working the Frontlines of Imagination and Civic Education: A Conversation with Carlton Turner and Harry Boyte, Facilitated by Erica Kohl-Arenas. Public: A Journal of Imagining America, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2015. http://public.imaginingamerica.org/blog/article/working-the-frontlines-of-imagination-and-civic-education-a-conversation-with-harry-boyte-and-carlton-turner-facilitated-by-erica-kohl-arenas/
Kohl-Arenas, Erica, Myrna Martinez Nateras & Johanna Taylor (2014). Cultural Organizing as Critical Praxis: Tamejavi Builds Immigrant Voice, Belonging, and Power. Journal of Poverty, 18:1, 5-24.
Kohl-Arenas, Erica (2013). Will the Revolution Be Funded? Resource Mobilization and the California Farm Worker Movement. Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest. Volume 13, Issue 4, 482-498.
Kohl-Arenas, Erica (2011). Governing Poverty Amidst Plenty: Participatory Development and Private Philanthropy, Geography Compass, 5 (11): 811–824.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
philanthropy, social movements, poverty, critical pedagogy
CURRENT COURSES:
Critical Issues Philanthropy
Erica Kohl-Arenas is an Assistant Professor at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy at The New School and is a recipient of the university's awards in Outstanding Achievements in Diversity and Social Justice Teaching and the Distinguished University Teacher Award. She earned her PhD from the Social and Cultural Studies in Education program at the University of California, Berkeley (2010), an MS in Community Development from the University of California, Davis (1999), and a BA in Sociology from Reed College (1991).
Kohl-Arenas' book, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty (University of California Press, 2016), analyzes the history of philanthropic investments in addressing farmworker and immigrant poverty across California’s Central Valley. Her primary research areas include studies of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, participatory development, and the intersection of American and global poverty studies.
Prior to her graduate studies, Kohl-Arenas worked as a popular educator and community development practitioner in a variety of settings including urban public schools, immigrant nonprofit organizations, and coal mining and ‘crofting’ towns in Appalachia, Scotland, and Wales. Public scholarship and community collaborations include a social history memoir on the progressive school reform movement with her father Herb Kohl, a cultural organizing curriculum project with the Pan Valley Institute of the American Friends Service Committee, and student engagement projects with New York City nonprofit organizations incuding Tenants and Neighbors, Hunts Point Alliance for Children, the Center for Court Innovation, the Humanities Action Lab 'States of Incarceration' project, and Groundswell Murals.
Erica's work in classrooms and communities is inspired by an early experience working with the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. She has also been a fellow with the Coro Foundation, the Sustainable Communities Leadership Program, and The Thomas J. Watson Foundation.
Kohl-Arenas, Erica. The self-help myth: how philanthropy fails to alleviate poverty
R.S. Rycroft
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1519.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
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Kohl-Arenas, Erica. The self-help myth: how philanthropy fails to alleviate poverty. California, 2016. 252p bibl index afp (Poverty, Interrupted, 1) ISBN 9780520283435 cloth, $65.00; ISBN 9780520283442 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9780520959293 ebook, $29.95
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In this first volume of a timely new series, Kohl-Arenas (The New School) is critical of private philanthropy's efforts to alleviate poverty. Common to a diverse array of private foundations, both big and small, is the promotion of a philosophy of self-help among the poor. Grants are given to promote "civic engagement," "community building," and worker-employer collaboration but not to help with the real problem, namely, capitalism. When the poor recipients of philanthropic largesse turn to organizing, strikes, and worker ownership, support quickly vanishes. The author makes her argument by using three case studies involving farm worker and migrant organizations from California's Central Valley in three time periods--the 1970s; the late 1990s to the early 2000s; and within the past decade. The case studies show how subtle pressure from foundations can redirect poor peoples' organizations from opposition to the economic system to collaboration with it. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate students through faculty and researchers.--R. S. Rycroft, University of Mary Washington
Alice O’Connor On Erica Kohl-Arenas’ THE SELF-HELP MYTH (2016)
Posted on April 11, 2016 by HISTPHIL Leave a comment
Editors’ Note: Alice O’Connor reviews Erica Kohl-Arenas’ The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty (University of California Press, 2016). Kohl-Arenas recently participated in the inaugural HistPhil Exchange with Linsey McGoey.
Erica Kohl-Arenas opens her important and sharply-observed new book with a field note from her visit to organized philanthropy’s grand palaver, the Annual Meeting of the Council on Foundations. An ethnographer amidst the multitudes of foundation professionals in attendance at the plenary luncheons and break-out panels, she is moved by the stories of personal uplift and transformation narrated by the formerly addicted/incarcerated/impoverished or otherwise abandoned beneficiaries of foundation-funded projects who are featured speakers on the program. And by her account they are inspiring stories, of people overcoming incredible odds to get on what looks to be a path to middle-class stability and respectability. But she finds herself wondering why there is no room on the meeting agenda—or, evidently, in the work of the professional poverty alleviators in the audience—to recognize the everyday hardships of the low-paid food service workers who are putting their meals on the table, or the state of permanent economic insecurity to which they and countless others have been reduced.
This is the kind of question foundations find uncomfortable, and as often as not dismiss out of hand. After all, foundations have no real way of influencing the workplace practices of corporate employers or the wage standards of the market. But that is precisely Kohl-Arenas’ point. Foundations, she argues, are not exactly passive or innocent bystanders in the oft-recognized contradiction that defines their existence—the contradiction, that is, of institutions devoted to skimming the surplus of concentrated capitalist accumulation to ameliorate the inequities that concentrated capitalist accumulation produces. If anything, foundations perpetuate the conditions they claim to correct. Showing how is the aim of the book, titled The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty (University of California Press, 2016).
As a brief aside I should acknowledge here that a number of people would reject the notion of an inherent contradiction or paradox in the capitalism-philanthropy connection, albeit for very different reasons: neo-Marxists because it acts as a smokescreen for philanthropy’s essentially untroubled corporate, oligarchic agenda; free-market conservatives and new age philanthrocapitalists because market outcomes need no amelioration—if anything, foundations need to refashion themselves to be more in sync with capital markets and for-profit investors. The notion of a philanthropic contradiction, on the other hand, requires at least some openness to the idea that foundations are sincere in their desire to alleviate hardship and actually are in a position to do something meaningful about poverty and the growing economic divide. Kohl-Arenas is willing to take foundations at their word, but she also wants to hold them accountable for their role in perpetuating the myth that the way to alleviate poverty is to help poor people help themselves, while actively discouraging structural analysis, activism, and reform.
Most of The Self-Help Myth is devoted to showing how this dynamic plays out—and how it works to the detriment of poor people’s movements—in foundation practice and grantee organization experience. The book features three case studies developed from the recent (post 1960) history of anti-poverty and farm worker activism in California’s Central Valley, and based on a combination of historical research and ethnographic field work and interviews Kohl-Arenas conducted between 2007-09 when she was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Though similar in some of the particulars, each of the cases captures a distinct, and extended, episode of foundation intervention to address migrant worker poverty, each at a distinctive “moment” in the long trajectory of agricultural restructuring and social policy reform. Each, too, gets at different aspects of how foundations exercise power in the grant making relationships they initiate—even when they are not entirely in control. And each presents us with a different stage in what, taken together, the case studies point to as a deepening entrenchment of self-help logic in foundation-funded anti-poverty programming. One constant is worth emphasizing: poverty has remained exceedingly high in the Central Valley throughout the period covered in these case studies, a period that has also featured peak industry profits.
Kohl-Arenas’ first case study takes us back to the heady, if troubled, days of farm worker organizing and federal War on Poverty spending in the late 1960s, when, amid heightening internal tensions and industry attacks, movement leaders turned to private foundations for much-needed support, in the hope on the one hand of shoring up the movement’s legal/worker rights infrastructure and on the other of building its capacity to provide community-based services and training for its members. In a discussion that highlights the protracted negotiations and a few tortuous letter exchanges between United Farm Workers (UFW) president Cesar Chavez and Field Foundation program officer Leslie Dunbar, she shows what great lengths the then-leading lights of Great Society philanthropy (including the Ford Foundation) took to make sure their funding did not support anything that could be tied to labor organizing or otherwise overtly “political” activities—here replicating the proscriptions imposed on federal community action funding as well. At one point, Field arranged to funnel money for UFW legal support through the hardly apolitical American Civil Liberties Union-affiliated Roger Baldwin Foundation, in order to prevent foundation funds from supporting AFL-CIO-affiliated lawyers. The money got there but the message was clear: labor rights were not civil rights, and they were off limits as far as foundations were concerned. Although she acknowledges the long-brewing tensions between trade unionists and community-service organizers within the movement, Kohl-Arenas argues that foundation pressures only deepened this divide, by pushing Chavez and UFW-affiliated organizations to segregate their social welfare from their economic justice activities, and eventually to channel more and more of their own energies and organizational efforts into the kinds of politically neutralized service and educational activities foundations were willing to fund.
By the time of the second and third case studies, in the late 1990s and 2000s, foundations were intervening more directly to rechannel and redirect movement priorities, this time with multi-million dollar initiatives of their own design. This was the era of the philanthropic collaboration, as Kohl-Arenas succinctly reminds us, when a number of prominent national foundations announced high-profile, multi-year, and sometimes multi-site initiatives that involved numerous grantee/”stakeholders,” often coordinated or otherwise guided with some sort of training or technical assistance by a designated intermediary, that aimed to demonstrate philanthropy’s power to leverage high-impact, lasting, consensual social change in problem areas where more limited interventions had failed. Best known among these were the various community change initiatives that targeted economically depressed, mostly urban neighborhoods around the country with the promise of greater comprehensiveness, more inclusion, better information systems, more attention to economic development and more fully articulated “theories of change” that could in turn be translated into measurable “benchmarks” for purposes of evaluating their impact. These privately-funded initiatives took on outsized significance amidst three signature features of the millennial political economy: ongoing retrenchment in public support for low-income programs and communities, the vast expansion of private philanthropic wealth, and rising economic inequality.
The initiatives Kohl-Arenas studied were shaped by these trends. But as projects of California-based foundations with significant ties to local industry, they were also keyed to what, in the increasingly divisive politics of immigration reform, was emerging as common, if not exactly politically neutral ground between agricultural employers and migrant labor: immigrant rights and what would come to be understood as a mutual interest in promoting “pathways to citizenship”—so long as they didn’t broach issues such as wages, employment practices, or workplace democracy. In one especially telling quote from a program officer involved with immigrant rights work at a major foundation: “I would never attempt to bring a grant proposal to my board that speaks of challenging economic inequity through direct action organizing, labor, or welfare rights, or holding businesses or major industries such as agriculture accountable. Such proposals have been known to cost many a program officer their jobs.” (p.91) Notably, one reason Kohl-Arenas is able to report such frank testimony is that she disguises the identities of the foundations, program officers, grantee organizations, and the initiatives themselves. This is in keeping with the Human Subject protocols of Berkeley and other major universities, but it is also a tacit acknowledgement that in the foundation world, speaking truth about power can come at a price.
More central to Kohl-Arenas’ point, though, is to show how the foundations in these case studies exercised power through softer controls, first by reframing the issues around their own rather than farm workers’ priorities, then by drawing local service and advocacy organizations into elaborate, process-oriented collaborations that often distracted them from their own core organizing missions, and finally, more fundamentally, by making their own dubious theories and logics the price of admission—only later to pull the plug when the initiatives did not produce measurable results.
This is what happened in the second, and most fully-realized of Kohl-Arenas’ case studies, an immigrant participation and civic engagement initiative that ran from 1996 to 2003 with $5 million in annual funding, and drew dozens of local grassroots organizations into its orbit before the foundation announced that it was downsizing and shifting away from immigrant rights work in the wake of 9/11. Kohl-Arenas offers an especially acute critique of the widely influential ideas about social capital and civic engagement underlying this initiative, which put a premium on network building, leadership development, cultural diversity, and social integration while actively discouraging any kind of confrontational organizing or acknowledgement of structural inequality at all. She also draws on her interviews with the community-based “stakeholders” to show how the shift to a strategically circumscribed vision of immigrant rights drew them away from their economic justice work. At the same time, she makes it clear that the grantee organizations did not passively buy in to the foundation’s framing, but tried to adapt it for their own purposes while also educating funders about the needs of their communities. The same can be said about the initiative’s chief program officer (and others Kohl-Arenas interviewed), who actively sought out ways to get funds for grass roots organizers on the sly, by translating their work into “fundable” projects without compromising their basic aims.
Still, there were limits to this strategy, given the narrow boundaries of the foundation’s “civic participation” frame and the strictures against criticizing the agricultural or any other industry. Near the end of the initiative, the grassroots collaborators were resorting to donor-friendly bus tours to draw outside funding for their work; in its aftermath, the chief program officer lost his job. The self-help logic lived on, though, as we learn in Kohl-Arenas’ third and final case study, of a $50 million farm worker aid project funded by another area foundation starting in 2006, that promised to fight poverty by bringing farm workers and growers together in collaborative “partnerships” based on commonly-agreed-to goals—in this case defined as keeping big agriculture in business, while taking modest steps to address workers’ health and welfare needs.
Of course, it is tempting to conclude that this last case study is just another example of philanthropy doing capital’s bidding, with its embrace of neoliberalism’s now ubiquitous “win-win” premises and insistence on rationalizing everything, including so-called “asset-based” models of community change, in market terms. Kohl-Arenas acknowledges as much, but to her credit she avoids taking this or any other over-determined line, preferring to argue from a theoretically informed, but ethnographically grounded perspective. Thus, without denying that it was structurally tilted toward industry interests, she argues that what turned out to be a much watered-down mutual aid initiative stemmed not from top-down neoliberal designs but from the efforts of basically progressive program officers to negotiate support for farm workers in terms their boards—and industrial growers—would approve. In the process, they built an extraordinarily elaborate program based on what I would argue is the myth not so much of self-help as of the market, and its role as the ultimate arbiter of social value and the common good.
Indeed, my one quarrel with Kohl-Arenas’ broadly persuasive and well-documented analysis is that it exaggerates the ubiquity of the self-help myth. Instead, I would suggest that the common theme linking these case studies is that activists and in some instances program officers come up against the boundaries of liberal reform in their respective moments—including its current, neoliberalized iteration—with its attendant conviction that poverty can be seriously addressed, if not outright eliminated, without seriously challenging the structural and institutional underpinnings of inequality embedded in social policy and political economy. If anything, what this sequence of philanthropic case studies reveals is just how dramatically narrowed those boundaries have become, and the role of big, well-heeled foundations in reinforcing and helping that process along. This is not to deny the currents of self-help ideology running throughout the history of liberal reform. It is, though, to draw a sharper distinction than Kohl-Arenas’ framework allows between foundation efforts, however convoluted and indirect, to assist farm worker organizing in the 1960s—including the struggle to extend New Deal labor protections to agricultural workers—and the voluntaristic “partnerships” of the new millennium. Something major happened in the way philanthropy positioned itself to address poverty in the decades separating the case studies in the book, and it cannot be explained as a variation on the self-help myth.
So can organized philanthropy do anything meaningful about poverty and inequality? That seems to be the question of the hour in foundation circles these days, as the biggest among them, Gates and Ford, announce major plans to take those issues on, albeit without much mention of whether, or how, the structures of capitalism, public policy, or workers’ rights fit into the mix. Meantime, as indicated by the success of an avowedly social democratic presidential candidate and the movement activism Kohl-Arenas mentions in the conclusion to her book, that conversation is already well-underway, and it raises the kinds of questions foundations find uncomfortable, but that they will need to answer if they want to be relevant to the coming debate.
-Alice O’Connor
Alice O’Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has written extensively about the history of philanthropy, and is the author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History; and Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up among other publications. Before joining the UCSB faculty in 1996, she was a program officer at the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council in New York, and directed a small nonprofit in Washington, DC.
[Review] The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty
January 14, 2016
"Foundations are bizarre beasts. They are created to solve societal problems by using inordinate amounts of wealth — wealth that is inherently contradictory because it was gleaned out of the inequalities...it proposes to address."
That contradiction, shared with Erica Kohl-Arenas by a foundation program officer in an interview conducted for her new book, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty, is at the heart of what Kohl-Arenas calls the "self-help approach to poverty alleviation." It's an approach, she writes, grounded in the "belief that entrenched poverty is the result of social and economic isolation that [traps] poor people within a culture of poverty," while largely ignoring "the structural causes of poverty and inequality." As starkly illustrated by Kohl-Arenas, an assistant professor of nonprofit management at the New School in New York City, it is also an approach whose inherent limitations raise troubling questions about the ability of private philanthropy to change "the conditions of poverty or help the people [it] claims to serve."
Book_the_self_help_myth_for_PhilanTopic
Drawing on case studies of the mid-twentieth-century farm workers movement and more recent foundation-funded initiatives in California's Central Valley, Kohl-Arenas documents how, over the decades, grassroots self-help initiatives have repeatedly been co-opted by private foundations into "nonthreatening service or 'civic participation' programs in keeping with [their] current funding priorities," obscuring the fact that foundations in general are reluctant to support union organizing, strikes, boycotts, and other types of "radical" activity. The surprise, for Kohl-Arenas, is that anyone would be surprised. After all, it was Andrew Carnegie, in the Gospel of Wealth (1889), who suggested that "the new rich had a responsibility to help the poor help themselves — in the interest of preventing protest," while the history of American philanthropy in the decades since is rife with examples of foundations de-politicizing and "neutralizing" initiatives that threaten the social and economic status quo. As a result, Kohl-Arenas argues, foundation-funded self-help programs have served to shift the focus from "capitalist processes that create poverty" to "the weaknesses and responsibilities of the poor."
To illustrate her argument, Kohl-Arenas devotes a chapter to the case of Cesar Chavez, whose efforts to organize and unionize farm workers in California and Florida in the 1960s and '70s have been the subject of two recent books and a movie that, in her words, "complicate [the] story most commonly told." A farm worker and civil rights activist in the 1950s, Chavez rose to national prominence in the 1960s as co-founder (with Dolores Huerta) of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). The broader farmworker movement had received crucial early funding, including "Depression-era grants to support migrant community and childcare centers incubated through the [Works Progress Administration]," from the San Francisco-based Rosenberg Foundation, which provided additional funding in the late 1950s and early 1960s to assist Central Valley farmworkers in building their own homes and to support so-called movement organizations. The effect of the foundation's programs, however, was to create, in Kohl-Arenas' words, farmworker leaders "more concerned with empowerment through education, relationships with mainstream institutions, and migrant-led infrastructure development," a model that, because of "its educational and relational, as opposed to confrontational and systemic, approach to self-help...garnered mainstream institutional support in local communities."
The emergence of Chavez as a social justice activist during the Delano grape strike of 1965 and the national grape boycott launched by NFWA the following year changed the picture. According to Kohl-Arenas, a younger Chavez never imagined union organizing becoming the focus of the movement, but as political unrest across the country mounted, the charismatic Chavez "rose to the occasion and became a spokesperson for the strike, both in the fields and nationally."
The growing militancy of the farmworker movement began to make its philanthropic allies "uncomfortable," however, especially after "grape strikers in the Central Valley threatened [in 1968] to turn to violence." Chavez, who was nothing if not ambivalent about the radicalization of the movement, "fasted for twenty-five days to redirect [it] toward peace" — and received a message of solidarity from Martin Luther King, Jr. just months before the civil rights leader was assassinated in Memphis. The assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy, another key Chavez ally, a few months later compounded "Chavez's growing paranoia, which was fueled by death threats, FBI surveillance of the movement, and his unfounded suspicion of disloyalty among his closest allies and organizers."
In 1970, Chavez decided to relocate the movement's headquarters from Delano to a compound outside Bakersfield, where he and a group of family members and movement leaders formally incorporated the National Farm Worker Service Center as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. NFWSC had been established in 1966 with support from the Ford Foundation (which subsequently backed the UFW's application for tax-exempt status) and the Chicago-based Field Foundation. But the UFW's overtures to the AFL-CIO during this period fatally compromised the latter's support for the organization, and other key funders soon followed its lead, choosing to support NFWSC, whose programs "fell within the acceptable logic of self-help," rather than the UFW. The result, writes Kohl-Arenas, is that the "revolutionary interpretation of mutual aid to foster self-determination and ownership, and the subsequent union approach, were both replaced by a more charitable model."
At the same time, while foundations' "limited definitions of self-help undermine[d] the political organizing of the movement, their program operation and paperwork requirements" overwhelmed its leadership. "Between 1970 and 1976," she writes, "angry letters from foundations were received claiming that there was no documentation of how funds were being spent, no financial accounting, and unapproved re-appropriation of funds to undisclosed projects."
Indeed, the scramble for grant funding and the need for organizational capacity building that comes with it are recurring themes of Kohl-Arenas' book. In the mid- to late 1990s, for example, a foundation-driven, multi-stakeholder initiative focused on bolstering immigrant civic engagement and "social capital" in the Central Valley failed, Kohl-Arenas suggests, in part because grant contracts held the grantee organization accountable to funders — not to communities or constituents — and partners were selected by foundation staff who often had little on-the-ground expertise.
Moreover, with the goals of the initiative defined as civic engagement, knowledge sharing, and relationship building, immigrant rights groups and talk of community organizing were kept out of public presentations so as not to frighten off foundation board members. As one activist interviewed by Kohl-Arenas noted, however, it is precisely poor immigrants' "invisibility" that deprives them of a civic voice. At the same time, the funding dynamic often meant that partners became rivals, while the focus on capacity-building efforts designed "to develop more organizations that...bigger foundations [could] fund" ended up diverting staff time away from the work, grassroots organizing, most likely to create change.
The third case study in the book focuses on a worker-grower partnership launched in 2007 based on "the now hegemonic 'win-win' or 'double-bottom-line development' trend in poverty alleviation, which proposes that what is good for capital is good for the poor." According to Kohl-Arenas, the theory of mutual prosperity, in which workers learn new skills that drive improvements in wages, living conditions, and profit margins yet again precludes the actual reform of industry practices that hurt workers. For example, even though foundation-funded research exposed alarming health conditions and food insecurity among Central Valley farm workers, a task force convened to build multi-sector consensus around how to address the problems called for action by the state, healthcare providers, and the workers themselves — but not the agriculture industry itself. Indeed, by requiring consensus from all stakeholders, she writes, "win-win" by definition waters down and de-politicizes collaborative action, making systematic change all but "unthinkable."
"[T]he partnerships between foundations, social movements, and advocacy organizations featured in the three case studies are ultimately untenable," Kohl-Arenas writes in conclusion, in that they promote "theoretical frameworks, institutional arrangements, and professionalized practices that constrain the work of organizers" and hamstring grassroots leadership. Moreover, if the strategy to create new nonprofits to mediate and separate economic from social justice concerns was once seen as successful and innovative, in hindsight we can see that it "ultimately failed the movement." Funders who attempt to improve public school systems, reform juvenile justice systems, or reduce food insecurity, joblessness, and health disparities among the poor, she suggests, would do well to pay attention.
Where does that leave the field? Is there a way for philanthropy to support efforts designed to address the structural and economic root causes of poverty? Kohl-Arenas isn't optimistic. In a blog post about the Ford Foundation's decision to shift its focus to attacking "inequality at its roots," she reminds us of the foundation's past efforts to address structural racism and inequality and wonders whether it can ever truly subvert its own power and privilege in order to put people in the driver's seat of social change. Nor does she find much reason to think that the current generation of institutionalized, professionalized, and foundation-funded nonprofits are the answer. Instead, she admires DIY "solutionaries" like the late Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, who in her final years focused on person-to-person relationships, neighborhood-run gardens, community policing, and cooperative schools; the Occupy movement and its recent focus on tenants' rights, a higher minimum wage, and anti-police brutality initiatives; and the founders of the Black Lives Matter campaign.
In the months since Black Lives Matter-inspired protests in Ferguson, New York City, Baltimore, and elsewhere captured the attention of the country, many foundations and nonprofits have reaffirmed their commitment to tackling poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. While The Self-Help Myth doesn't discount those commitments, it does serves as a reminder that the roots of all three are deeply embedded in our political and economic system — the same system that enables philanthropy on an institutional scale — and strongly suggests that any lasting solution to them needs to see the existing status quo as hindrance rather than the answer.
Kyoko Uchida is PND's features editor. For more great reviews, visit our Off the Shelf section.
AUTHOR: Kyoko Uchida TAGS: Philanthropy Poverty Alleviation | Comments: (0)
Mar
7
The Self-Help Myth (book review)
If there was such a thing as an award for best chapter in a monograph, I would definitely nominate the first chapter of Erica Kohl-Arenas’ book ‘The Self-Help Myth-How Philanthropy fails to alleviate poverty’. The chapter provides an excellent overview over core debates about philanthropy, beneficiary participation in self-help projects and how such approaches have a historical legacy of failing farmworkers in California.
As the narrative of 5+ decades of charitable work in the Californian agricultural industry unfolds, we have the great fortune of exploring one of the best development ethnographies I have come across in the very long time-despite the fact that Kohl-Arenas’ research actually took place in the USA and not in a developing country.
Her detailed, yet carefully selected vignettes from the early days of the self-help movement in the 1960s to the social capital era of the 1990s and today’s ‘win-win’ coalitions including the agricultural industry are framed into three beautifully written chapters that elucidate her key points vividly, yet leave space for complex discussions rather than blaming a ‘neoliberal conspiracy’:
By separating questions of production, labor, institutionalized structural inequality from the moral and behavioral explanations of poverty, the self-help approach has been depoliticized-excluding action that challenges the status quo (pp.16-17).
But the philanthropic self-help industry is not simply a contemporary manifestation of today’s capitalistic dynamcis.
‘We operate in an area of grayness, where few laws apply, and where many of those used against us are of questionable constitutionality’
Letter from Cesar Chavez to a foundation official, January 1967 (cited on p.63)
The second chapter and first case study of her book introduce Cesar Chavez and his struggle in a period of active union engagement and the emergence of charitable foundations from the mid-1960s onward. By following farmworker movement organizer Chavez and his move away from grassroots organizing and union-led strikes the reader gets a first glimpse into a core theme of the book: How the logic of philanthropy almost always leads to less critical, less politicized, less radical and arguable less effective forms of community engagement
not through explicit agendas of control, but through negotiation, compromise, and increased professional administrative demands (p.40).
As Chavez and his group get entangled in the emerging business of charity in the 1970s, including drafting administrative directives for fieldworker representatives to dress as peasants and drive aging cars (p.72) and accusations of mismanagement of funds (p.73) the ‘brilliant approach to taking on a seemingly monolithic industrial system of rule’ (p.73) ultimately fails to change the foundations of power and profit:
The self-help formulation that was acceptable to funders, middle-class consumer boycott supporters, and eventually even a worn-down Chavez consumed with protecting his own power was that of the poor field hand in need of skills, education, and philanthropic charity-but not a movement in struggle for self-determination, community control, and economic power for the workers (p.75).
As we are entering the ‘neoliberal era’ of the 1980s many powerful factors and institutions of a professionalized ‘third sector’ are already in place, making fundamental changes even more difficult.
‘It became all literacy and services and no organizing. Now people are trapped on computers. … We need to be accountable to communities, to people and their schedules and not to our meetings and foundation deadlines’
Long-term farmworker organizer (cited on p.105)
By the middle of the 1990s a professional culture and ‘habitus’ are firmly embedded in farmworkers quests for better working and living conditions. Farmworker and immigrant organizations have started with ‘collaborative initiatives’ that foster three main professional practices: a ‘foundation-promoted “civic participation” theory of change’ with a focus on ‘civic responsibilities of poor immigrants’, collaborative grant contracts that hold ‘advocacy organizations accountable to funders, not communities’ and foundation-driven ‘selection of partners’ without taking shared identities, leadership and membership into consideration (pp.79-81).
As ‘social capital’ research and capacity-building workshops enter the scene, I was reminded of the critical debates in international development that emerged in the early 2000s around ‘NGOization’ and the institutionalization of civil society and social movements.
The case of Central Valley cultural festival is a good example to illustrate the complexities around grant-funded events that still may be meaningful expressions of the ‘soft ties’ that bind together networks and communities. It is one of many good case studies where ethnographic nuances emerge that remind the reader of the diversity beyond ‘poor farmworkers’ or ‘destitute immigrant’ labels. In the end, despite ‘inspirational’ and ‘transformative’ (p.111) experiences for some the cultural performers and community leaders in the three years of the festival the director of the organizing institution
found herself overwhelmed by festival organizing duties, a changed relationship with local groups vying for stipends to participate, and an organizational program increasingly distant from their mission to convene immigrant leaders in popular education and movement building across the region (p.112).
For many high school teachers, college professors or medical practitioners these tendencies of bureaucracy taking over core aspects of a profession or mission will sound all too familiar. One of Kohl-Arena’s many skills is that her narrative does not provide simple answers to the reader, pointing out ‘the industry’, ‘lobbyists’ or an active conspiratorial regime as culprits.
Rather, it left me with an image of a revolving door where professional community leaders, foundation staff, researchers, industry people and many other representatives of groups enter and exit the building of agriculture without ever really being able to catch up with each other…
‘These girls with jewelry and pantyhose who go into poor people’s houses like they don’t want to get dirty…we end up with the same old thing as usual: outside people getting input from immigrants but not doing a damn thing about it’
Interview with Gracie Hermosa, 2007 (cited on p.154)
The third and final case study (chapter 4) introduces the ‘now hegemonic “win-win” or “double-bottom-line development” trend in poverty alleviation, which proposes that what is good for capital is good for the poor’ (p.124).
We have arrived in the ‘now’ of philanthrocapitalists, big business as a partner and a general tendency to apply ‘entrepreneurial’ logic to charitable work:
The “win-win” paradigm brought new ways of speaking about poverty in agricultural communities, simultaneously silencing older notions of “antagonistic” organizing and producing new frameworks that lack radical socola imagination (p.127).
In short, this is the time when young, college-educated women with farmworker parents are invited to lead foundation programs.
Kohl-Arenas explores a theme that has been part of this blog’s broader framing-from the ‘Oprahfication’ of development discourses to focusing on charity ‘heroes’ and ever-expanding philanthrocapitalism.
To keep the growers involved in the project, she describes a program that trains ‘workers in a culture of compromise, focusing on ways they can improve their own skills, productivity, lives and communities through leadership development programs’ (p.141).
With new immigration debates, environmental challenges in California and increased global competition today’s agricultural industry has come a long way since the strikes and boycott’s of the Chavez-era in the late 1960s:
In an unimaginative environment where everyone is fearful of confronting growers (…) relationships between private foundations, professionalized advocacy organizations, and other regional stakeholders have solidified a limited understanding of what is possible in addressing enduring poverty and inequality (pp.167 & 170).
So is there any light at the end of the tunnel?
Moving back to the fields and Laundromats and the promise of a new food movement
My research uncovered how leaders and professional staff seeking private funding during the social movements of the 1960s, the civic-participation initiatives of the 1990s, and the entrepreneurial “double bottom line” development projects of today have had to promote programs that ask the poor to help themselves while evading the root causes of poverty and inequality (p.176).
Even if this may hardly come as a surprise for those who have been engaged in international development and have seen many a discourse rise and turn into a depoliticized manual, such historically disempowering processes still deserve critical self-reflection on our own positionality and professional co-optations.
Kohl-Arenas ends her book on a positive note:
Aligning farmworker rights, health, and safety with the increasingly popular food movements is a particularly hopeful strategy (p.187).
So will hipsters and foodies ‘save’ agricultural production or is the system broken beyond repair?
I would recommend The Self-help Myth without any hesitation for development studies or development anthropology courses.
Not simply because of the timely content and the historical depth behind it, but because it is such an effective teaching, learning and communication tool. Well-researched, well-written and well-edited, Kohl-Arenas delivers her poignant observations and powerful analysis in an accessible and readable style. She needs less than 200 pages and avoids the pitfalls of many textbooks and academic writing in general. Given her long-term research, community engagement and own positionality her story could have easily ended up as a detail-heavy wordy jungle of words that only insiders would be able to penetrate. But when all is written and done, The Self-Help Myth rises to be a stellar example of modern, critical, ethnographically informed research communication that not only is a joy to read, but equally to discuss with students or recommend to fellow researchers. Add it to your reading list!
Kohl-Arenas, Erica: The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty. ISBN 978-0-520-28344-2, 252 pages, USD 29.99, University of California Press, Oakland, CA, 2015.
Posted 7th March 2016 by Tobias Denskus
“The Self-Help Myth” Tells an Important Story About Philanthropy
Written by: Craig McGarvey
Date: January 14, 2016
In The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty, Erica Kohl-Arenas’ first book, The New School professor is bent on busting some fondly held philanthropic beliefs. Thoroughly researched, beautifully written and convincingly argued, The Self-Help Myth explains how philanthropy, by its inherent nature, often fails in its attempts to reduce inequity and poverty.
The setting is California’s Great Central Valley, a region Kohl-Arenas knows well. The wealthiest food production area in the history of the world, the Central Valley is also home to some of the poorest people in America, many of whom are immigrant farm workers.
Historically under-resourced by philanthropy, the Central Valley has seen at least three major periods of sustained foundation investment since the 1960s. Kohl-Arenas offers case studies of each, demonstrating how well-intentioned grant programs, unwilling to address the structural issues behind poverty, have diluted, diverted and co-opted farmworker community efforts that challenge the California farming economy’s status quo.
The thrust of the book’s argument is sadly not new: private foundation funding has little appetite for taking on the American economic system that created the “capital surplus” that allows for philanthropy’s pool of wealth.
Kohl-Arenas makes her greatest contribution by showing that philanthropic influence is rarely heavy-handed, top-down or hegemonic. Rather, it is more often a set of complex negotiations, full of nuance, within contextual constraints on both the philanthropic and community sides of the table.
By means of literature review, extensive archival analysis, participant observation and scores of interviews, Kohl-Arenas describes in fascinating detail how this complex foundation/community dance has played out over five decades of work and millions of dollars of investment in the Central Valley.
During the ’60s and ’70s, the evolving conversation between the Field Foundation and Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Worker (UFW) movement helped to steer the latter away from “mutual assistance,” “all-volunteer,” “dues paying,” “self-sustaining” organizing, and toward the creation and maintenance of a bevy of 501(c)(3) service organizations. In the ’90s, the Stewart Kinney Foundation’s Immigrant Participation Collaborative[i] “launched two successful campaigns and several productive projects,” but ultimately demonstrated the difficulty of building lasting “strategic coalitions” from “monetarily-driven partnerships.” In the early 2000s, the Western Foundation’s Farm Worker Community Building Initiative, guided by a “double-bottom line,” “win-win,” “philanthrocapitalism” approach that sought to engage both farmers and farm worker organizations, diverted attention from “action organizing” to “leadership training,” and never did manage to bring farmers to the table.
Kohl-Arenas organizes her analysis under the umbrella of “civic participation,” and its many possible interpretations inside and outside foundation offices. Is “civic participation” a guise through which canny, progressive program officers sell hard-action community organizing to conservative, confrontation-shy board members of their foundations? Is it a hegemonic means by which the wealthy place the burden of changing their life conditions on the backs of the poor, while ignoring any challenge to the economic structures that have entrapped them in poverty?
Civic participation is this and more, as Kohl-Arenas enables us to understand. As she says in her conclusion:
“[Traditional philanthropy] tells people how to help themselves in order to change their purportedly bad behaviors, neutralize conflict and maintain systems of power. [Radical action] calls for people to analyze their own relationship to power in order to transform it. Most often we are caught somewhere in between.”
Kohl-Arenas also writes about South Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a farmworker group that provides an ideal model for philanthropy-supported organizing. CIW is known for authentic ownership by its farmworker members, as well as for its politically savvy strategies to transform power relationships. Kohl-Arenas mentions support given to CIW by the Kellogg Foundation, and we readers eagerly wish to know more about the ongoing relationship between CIW and its funders. Perhaps this will be her next book.
In her research and teaching on philanthropy and participatory community engagement, Professor Kohl-Arenas describes herself as working in the space “between scholarship and practice.” At a time when prominent foundations like the Ford Foundation are refocusing their work “to disrupt the drivers of inequality,” the field needs many more such scholar practitioners. Let’s encourage the strategic planners at all foundations interested in promoting equality and ending poverty to read Kohl-Arenas’ important book.
Craig McGarvey previously served as a foundation program officer, and worked in California’s Central Valley with Erica Kohl-Arenas.
[i] Names have been disguised under ethnographic protocol.
Tags: Civic engagement