The Poor’s Voice Among Philanthropists

Pablo Eisenberg changed the face of philanthropy forever 12 years ago with an article in an obscure magazine.

The 54-year-old Eisenberg, who played tennis at Wimbledon and served in Africa as a U.S. Information Agency propagandist, wanted new players at the table when foundations and rich corporations divided the charity pie. Those players: the poor, minorities, the handicapped, children, the elderly and women.

He wanted philanthropic endowments--which escape taxation on the theory that their privately administered money will benefit the public--to stop lavishing money on institutions serving the rich and affluent while tossing mostly small grants like so many crumbs to charities helping the economically and socially vulnerable.

Grants for the Poor

In Santa Monica, the Pico Neighborhood Assn. credits Eisenberg’s strategy with helping increase its share of block grants funds that the federal government distributes to the city to help the poor from zero in 1979-80 to 75% or more of the $1 million or so granted each year since 1982-83.

“An enormous number of poor people,” Eisenberg argues, “find themselves--through family, circumstances and geography--saddled in a poverty situation without the effective resources to climb their way out. I believe in empowerment, as I think almost everyone does. The purpose of empowerment and self-help is not to guarantee that everyone will succeed but to provide equal opportunities for everyone.”

Not providing opportunities, he contends, weakens the nation’s spirit and its economy.

“By any reasonable definition,” Eisenberg said, one in four Americans is poor and their “potential is not being tapped in our increasingly competitive world. We are losing the enormous resources, intellect and talent of one quarter of our population to our detriment as a nation.

“Poor people, to have a real say, have to do it through collective action. By themselves they are atomized and powerless, but when they get together in a group, they have some chance at self-help success and having their concerns heard and acted on,” he said.

One of Eisenberg’s main roles is helping the poor get access to those in power and to foundation and corporate funds through his growing network of grantmakers. He also seeks government money, a tough job since federal support for nonprofit community development organizations, one of Eisenberg’s major interests, is 44% less than it would have been but for the new budget priorities in Washington, an Urban Institute study shows.

“One of the charms of the boy is he goes around almost biting the hand that feeds him--be it foundations or corporations or what have you--by shaming them into giving and yet he has made it quite a paying proposition if you look at the returns,” said Julien Engel, a Third World development consultant.

Engel and Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, the Maryland Democrat, were Eisenberg’s roommates at Princeton. The trio graduated from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1954, followed a year later by another man bent on living out one of the university’s mottos--”Princeton in the nation’s service”--Ralph Nader.

Eisenberg’s 1974 article on noblesse oblige that prompted major shifts in organized philanthropy appeared in the Grantsmanship Center News, an obscure magazine published in Los Angeles.

He wrote about a private commission--equally obscure, but enormously influential with close ties to the White House and Congress--that was raising more than $2 million to study private philanthropy and public needs.

The Filer Commission, as it was known, wanted to examine how the 1969 Tax Reform Act affected benefits the rich could obtain through their gifts and how foundations operate. These were matters of great concern to the commission’s many wealthy members, including John Filer, its chairman and then chairman of Aetna Insurance Co., then Treasury Secretary William E. Simon and George Shultz, now secretary of state.

Half-Empty Glass

Eisenberg argued that the Filer Commission was looking only at the half of the glass that was full. He said it had failed to examine the half that was empty, the public needs in search of money; failed to consider the question that the poor and vulnerable ask:

Who benefits from philanthropy?

Soon Washington attorney Leonard Silverstein, the Filer Commission’s executive director, invited Eisenberg over for a chat. Eisenberg proposed that a wide array of people be invited in, that the commission make studies about the concerns of donees--as some grantseekers call themselves--and publish the findings. The Filer Commission agreed.

Thus was born charity activism, a small but potent force that foundation executives, corporate giving officers and leaders of United Ways and other federated fund-raising organizations across the country acknowledge has had a significant impact not on who gives, but on who gets.

A Crucial Role

“Pablo was absolutely crucial in seeing to it that the donee group was created in the first place,” said Jim Abernathy, who staffed the donee studies and now works for an environmental agency in Seattle.

“The fact that he published an article in the Grantsmanship Center News is the only reason there was a donee group in the first place. And with no donee group, there would be no National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and a lot of other things that have flowed from that,” Abernathy said.

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, itself a charity, is the self-appointed critic of large foundations and United Ways, pushing them to be more open to competition and to include more charities controlled by women, minorities and advocates. It also serves as a lightning rod for more than 80 small federated fund-raising drives which serve as alternatives to United Way.

For the past 11 years, Eisenberg has been president of the Center for Community Change in Washington, which provides technical assistance to grass roots neighborhood charities, teaching them how to focus their concerns and get the government’s attention and how to better manage their operations.

A Drastic Change

In Santa Monica, research by the Center for Community Change led to a drastic change in how the city spent its federal Community Development Block Grant funds, according to Fred Allingham, former executive director of the Pico Neighborhood Assn., which represents an area where 70% of Santa Monica’s poor and minority residents live.

“The center’s research on how the city had been using the block grant money showed that in six years we got less than 2% of the money even though we were one of the major reasons the city got the money,” Allingham said.

“Santa Monica was using the money for replacing sewers, to develop a lawn bowling area up on Wilshire, things like that. But over time, because of the facts the center developed and their help in showing how to organize the community to get what it deserved, more and more funds went into the Pico neighborhood,” Allingham said.

Councilman Denny Zane, a leader in the Santa Monica tenants movement, said the center’s “research helped bolster the position of advocates of the Pico Neighborhood for more money. Having good information will result in change if you have organizational ability to press for change and also receptive leadership,” Zane said.

Eisenberg shares that view and so the Center for Community Change devotes much of its resources to helping nonprofit groups like the Pico Neighborhood Assn.; the Southside Low Income Housing Development Corp. in El Paso where the median family income is $4,000 per year; the West Harlem Community Organization in Manhattan’s ghetto; the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center in Holmes County, Miss., the fourth poorest county in America, the Mississippi Action for Community Education in the Mississippi delta, and El Rescate, a Los Angeles aid center for Central American refugees.

“The Center for Community Change pretty much gives us assistance, but they try not to become very involved,” said Carmen Felix, director of the Southside Low Income Housing Development Corp. in El Paso. “They let us pretty much do what we want to do. The center people may tell us this is good or bad, but they don’t tell us what to do. We have the ideas and they help us put them together effectively. But they are our ideas, not theirs.” Della Bahan, associate director of El Rescate in Los Angeles, said “The center helped us function more efficiently, helped us to focus on priorities, helped to teach us the value of planning and forethought in defining what the organization stands for, what its goals are and how to achieve them step-by-step. . . .We are under so much pressure and so many demands. No one ever really sat down and thought out a one-year work plan or dreamed about what other resources we might go after, what skills we might develop, until the center provided a very effective organizer, Jessica Govea, to work with us.”

Core of His Philosophy

Showing people how to organize their concerns is at the core of Eisenberg’s philosophy.

“We empower people by teaching them how to organize, how to analyze their needs and concerns and to get action,” Eisenberg said.

“Poor people, to have a real say, have to do it through collective action. By themselves, they are atomized and powerless. When they get together in a group, they have some chance at self-help success and having their concerns heard and acted on,” Eisenberg said.

It is Eisenberg’s contention that large foundations have “increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots by giving to higher education and the arts institutions which knew how to write attractive, interesting grant proposals and not funding the poor, who didn’t know how to ask for money.” For the poorest of the poor, there is evidence that conditions have become much worse in the ‘80s. One Urban League study found that the poorest 10% of black families saw their purchasing power drop 22% between 1980 and 1984. The Harvard School of Public Health recently concluded that in the ‘80s “hunger has returned as a serious problem across this nation.”

Abandoning the Poor

Eisenberg argues that progressive foundations, most of which have small endowments and write grants in three or four figures, have also abandoned or reduced domestic poverty and injustice as principal concerns.

“The liberal and progressive foundations are also trendy foundations and so they have left grass roots organizations and the poor for global peace, anti-nuclear and Central America issues,” he said.

Showing how to articulate a community’s need so that the powers that be understand it and take an interest in it is still the most crucial technical assistance the Center for Community Change provides.

The center’s staff has become expert in the complex financing schemes now required to build and rehabilitate low-income housing because straightforward government grant and subsidy programs have been drastically reduced under the Reagan Administration. Instead of writing a grant proposal to the federal Housing and Urban Development Department, for example, center staffers now must understand housing fund trusts, multi-tiered and shared appreciation mortgages, tax increment financing and other sophisticated financing methods.

Eisenberg said that when he worked for the Office of Economic Opportunity, the core of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, in the late ‘60s “self-help strategies and creating independent community-based organizations seemed much more radical because it hadn’t happened very much before and it threatened established institutions, especially public ones. . . .Having community based groups challenging local and state governments, which at the time were very weak, had less authority and much less competent people than they have today, frightened a lot of people, not that there’s much enthusiasm for self help strategies today.”

Eisenberg is also president of Friends of VISTA, a bi-partisan organization which has successfully fought the Reagan Administration’s efforts to defund the domestic version of the Peace Corps.

“Pablo has emerged as a voice for a whole lot of groups that otherwise wouldn’t have a voice in the private enterprise system,” said Eugene R. Wilson, president of the Arco Foundation in Los Angeles, which gave the Center for Community Change $50,000 last year.

In the genteel world of organized philanthropy, Wilson is among the few grantmakers who do not expect grantseekers to treat them with deference, if not reverence. And Eisenberg is never deferential.

Norton Kiritz, president of the Grantsmanship Center--which teaches donees or grantseekers how to ask for money--said, “Pablo is obviously the most influential person in the donee movement.”

Eisenberg’s stature is reflected in the speaking invitations extended to him, almost as a matter of due, by the Council of Foundations, which represents most of the nation’s large philanthropic endowments. The council bars most grant-seekers from its annual meeting.

Perhaps the most revealing measure of his stature in the philanthropic world is that of 49 people interviewed about Eisenberg, no one criticized him. Eisenberg even offered the names of several people, both grantmakers and grant-seekers, whom he believed would criticize him. Each declined comment or acknowledged respect, even admiration, for his dedication, even if they don’t like his views.

“Pablo has plenty of critics, but I doubt any would publicly criticize him because everyone who deals with him recognizes that he is an incredibly fine and decent man,” said one of his admirers, charity consultant Jill Shellow, author of “The Grant Seekers Guide.”

Silverstein, the Washington attorney who was executive director of the Filer Commission, sees Eisenberg as “a gentleman” leading a charity activist movement that Silverstein believes is composed mostly of the Great Unwashed and graduates of the Vietnam War opposition more interested in protest than betterment.

Richard Lyman, who as president of the billion-dollar-plus Rockefeller Foundation has been the direct or implied target of many of Eisenberg’s sharpest criticisms of foundations, conceded he does not care much for Eisenberg’s criticism nor his confrontational style, but would say nothing stronger than that “I’m not such an admirer of his.”

Then Lyman suggested that a reporter contact his wife, whom he described as an Eisenberg fan.

He’s ‘Fairly Difficult’

Jing Lyman, head of the nonprofit Hub Co-Ventures for Women’s Enterprise in New York, said, “I know a fair number of funders who have found Pablo fairly difficult because he is feisty and he won’t leave them alone and he argues the issues many of them would rather not have to deal with. It’s so ironic because they are the people that a lot of funders care about--that a lot of funders say they care about--but that very few funders really get out and do things with.

“In most public-private partnerships,” Jing Lyman added, “government and business move in, make a lot of nifty decisions and then they call in the community organizations and say, ‘We have these neat ideas for your area and, of course, you are going to buy on.’

“Pablo and I used to pound the table to get these people to understand they would never succeed until they see to it that the community people have an equity position,” Jing Lyman said.

“Pablo has been fighting those battles for years and years and he has been training other people to fight them and bringing people out of the communities to do that, giving them leadership skills which are the only way in the long run that the poor can be empowered,” she added.

Engel, the Third World development consultant, says Eisenberg is “the old concerned liberal school who has stuck with it for all of these years through thick and thin at a time when many others peeled off to more lucrative fields and he has done this at great financial cost to himself and his family.”

Eisenberg is paid $62,000, a modest salary for a national organization of the Center for Community Change’s size and his length of service. Until 1985 he got $52,000. He provides his own automobile. “I don’t believe in having a company car,” he said. “If I get one, then everyone on the staff should.”

On the road, he flies super economy fares and stays in the cheapest safe hotels he can find. In Los Angeles, he frequents a Holiday Inn that charges $48 per night.

“His attitude is ‘Why spend money uselessly? If you can take the money that otherwise would be used for expenses and serve people then do it,’ ” said Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes.

Asked how he got his name, Eisenberg chuckled and says “my parents had a sense of humor.” Pressed, Eisenberg mentions that his father was a musician of some note and his godfather was a family friend who was a Spaniard, but no more. The unnamed godfather was cellist Pablo Casals.

Eisenberg’s picture does not appear in the Center for Community Change’s annual report and his name appears only in the routine listings of board and staff.

Eisenberg hasn’t done too badly at getting foundation bucks himself, though. The Ford Foundation put up the money to open the Center for Community Change 18 years ago, nurturing it ever since.

When Ford moved on to other interests, it gave Eisenberg’s Center a $3 million final grant. The money, together with $1 million from the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, will be placed in what Eisenberg hopes will become a $12 million endowment, which should generate close to $1 million annually to help cover his agency’s $1.5 million annual budget.