Now that both major parties in the U.S. have presumptive nominees for the Presidency, it seems like a good time to share some thoughts on the relationships between philanthropy and government – relationships that Atlantic has considerable experience with in each of the countries in which we operate.

In the just society in which we all wish to live, government, business and the nonprofit sector all have key roles to play. We operate in a societal ecosystem where the economic and social health of all will be damaged by weakness in any of these elements. But right now in the U.S., there is an imbalance in this ecosystem. We need to restore a strong social welfare role for government, which is the only institution that is both democratically controlled and can deliver, to use a philanthropy buzzword, at “scale.” And we also need philanthropy that puts much more advocacy muscle behind the replication of its successful demonstration projects, and that recognizes the most sustainable investments are in strong organisations and experienced community leaders who can direct their energies and resources not just to the public policy needs of today, but those of the years to come, many of which we can’t yet see.

For various reasons, philanthropy has too often in the last several decades kept an arm’s length relationship with government and public policy. That has to change if we are to have any hope of making real progress on many of the leading challenges of our time:the reduction of poverty and the expansion of health care access, achieving a society that empowers and cares for the young and the old, providing justice and inclusion for immigrants and restoring or strengthening civil liberties.

For its part, government has experienced a steady loss of confidence in the last few decades, some of it well-earned, borne of failing schools and opaque and unresponsive bureaucracies. Here in the United States, for instance, we wouldn’t need to support programmes like Single Stop, which helps low-income families get counseling to obtain the benefits to which they are legally entitled, if government always worked as it should. And we wouldn’t need to spend resources making sure the state of Florida actually implements the restoration of voting rights for former prisoners, if government always worked as it should.

Fortunately these trends are beginning to turn around. Both Presidential candidates, for example, favor a stronger, affirmative role for government in many areas, and both have had engagement with foundations at various levels, Obama even having served as a trustee of the Chicago-based Joyce and Woods Foundations. And to judge from the strongly positive reaction to a recent Atlantic Reports on why foundations should fund advocacy efforts, there is much more interest and activity in philanthropy in cutting-edge public policy work. But there is still a ways to go.

Foundations can innovate, demonstrate, spur, fill in gaps, foster knowledge, identify talent, and do many other things that contribute to the betterment of society. But they cannot through their own funds alone begin to feed the hungry, care for the sick, and educate for participation in contemporary society many millions of young people. By definition their role must be catalytic.

In my first year at Atlantic I’ve learned much about models of working with government from Atlantic’s staff in the other geographies in which we make grants, and they illustrate to some extent the relationships between government and philanthropy in the U.S.In the Republic of Ireland, there is little tradition of investigative journalism and few think tanks to influence policy. Civil servants are of a generally high quality, and government is very centralized, so we form relationships with them – with the permanent government, as it were. This has paid off in co-investments by Atlantic with the Irish government in youth development programmes, and in the appointment of key ministers to advance the concerns of older adults in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

In South Africa, our Population Health programme negotiates with the national Department of Health to support some the costs of upgrading nursing training facilities, and our Reconciliation and Human Rights Programme has partnered with the Department of Land Affairs to provide legal advice and support to farm-workers who face illegal eviction. The Legal Aid Board, which provides legal support for indigent people, has entered into a partnership with our grantee the Association of University Legal Aid Institutions to provide support in some rural areas. The Department of Social Development provides support to some advice offices in the Western Cape which also receive support from Atlantic, and the Department of Education matched an Atlantic grant to build a Life Sciences Complex at the University of the Western Cape.

In Viet Nam, of course, the government’s role is quite pervasive, and Atlantic’s programme has to interact quite closely with it. But there are many levels of government, and depending on projects’ needs and administrative requirements, and we work with the appropriate level of government as needed. In Viet Nam this ranges from public health programmes such as mandating motorcycle helmets to dramatically reduce traffic fatalities to co-financing the upgrading of rural commune health clinics. The Ministry of Health is also our partner in raising needed matching funds for large projects such as the National Hospital of Pediatrics. Through Harvard University, we also assisted the Ho Chi Minh National Political Academy in creating more effective HIV/AIDS policies in their home localities. At times, we also press the Office of the Prime Minister and Deputy Minister to facilitate progress and overcome administrative hurdles.

Here in the United States, Atlantic’s relationship to government has taken two forms.The first is in a sense adversarial.We fund organisations that monitor, criticize and sue the government, like civil rights groups fighting draconian restrictions on immigrants cropping up all over the country, and civil liberties lawyers challenging Guantánamo, where our grantees had a big win in the Supreme Court recently and warrantless wiretapping. The second is an attempt at partnership, from working with the U.S. Labor Department to provide more employment opportunities for older adults in economically challenged regions of the country, to the State of New Mexico and the cities of Oakland and Chicago to match our investments in integrated services for middle school students.

We are of course in the throes of a Presidential campaign like none in recent memory, with higher turnouts and passions all across the country, and many people – including many younger ones who have not connected with the political process before – deeply engaged in choosing their government. The new administration, whatever its character, will be a fresh and important test of how foundations “get” advocacy for policy change. If John McCain takes office, some vital national issues may be in play, such as immigration reform, torture, and other post-9-11 civil liberties and human rights issues. If Barack Obama is inaugurated come January 20, there are additional opportunities to advance a progressive agenda, beginning with universal health care, the gaping hole in the U.S. safety net. To help advocates lay the groundwork for reform, the Atlantic board last week approved a $10 million grant to Health Care for America Now, a new national campaign to ensure that quality, affordable health care coverage for all is debated as an issue in 2008 and achieved in 2009. The campaign, which will be launched on July 8 in Washington, D.C. and in 44 states, is bringing together the nation’s most politically active labour unions, dozens of national organisations, and women’s groups, and is also being supported by thousands of doctors, nurses, small business owners, netroots activists, faith-based organisations and community organizers across the country.

Any new administration has a relatively short window to advance its agenda, and I would not want to look back on 2009 and 2010 and feel that Atlantic and other funders concerned with human rights and social justice did not do everything in our power to support advocacy groups in taking advantage of this moment, supporting and pushing the new administration as appropriate.

Gara LaMarche
gara@atlanticphilanthropies.org

This column was adapted from remarks made at the Annual Meeting of United Neighborhood Houses on June 11 in New York.

Related links:

• Single Stop
  
• Legal Aid Board
  
• Association of University Legal Aid Institutions
  
• University of the Western Cape
  
• Viet Nam National Hospital of Pediatrics
  
• Harvard University/ Ho Chi Minh National Political Academy
  
• Health Care for America Now
  
• United Neighborhood Houses

Last week was a dramatic one, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the battle to preserve fundamental human rights against the recent disturbing tendencies of two of the world’s leading democracies to invoke fear of terrorism to claim extraordinary and excessive powers. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush, by a narrow 5-4 majority, that the foreign nationals held in U.S. prison camps at Guantánamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas corpus challenges to their detention. In the United Kingdom, Parliament approved Prime Minister Gordon Brown's proposal to increase the lawful period for detention without charges from 28 days (which is unacceptable to begin with) to 42. Atlantic’s grantees have been on the front lines of the struggle to preserve fundamental human rights in these cases and campaigns.

“The Bush Administration’s system of injustice is starting to crumble,” declared Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Boumediene (see link below). At issue in the case was whether the now-270 detainees at Guantánamo, some of whom have now been held for six years without charge or trial, can be denied any meaningful right to challenge the legality of their imprisonment. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law.”

Against these stirring words was the acid dissent of Justice Antonin Scalia, fanning the rhetorical flames even more than usual:“The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Distressingly, given his earlier record of opposition to torture and other human rights abuses of the Bush Administration’s post-9-11 policies, and signalling that basic human rights guarantees could become a “wedge” issue in the Presidential campaign, Senator John McCain called the decision “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”Going one better, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Boumediene “worse than the Dred Scott decision,” the notorious 1857 Supreme Court ruling that held that slaves could not be citizens or sue in court, and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories – that, in short, that slaves were “inferior beings” who had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.”

It’s perverse to compare Boumediene, in which three of the Justices in the five-person majority were appointed by Republican Presidents, with Dred Scott, when the historical analogy is precisely opposite. The Administration argued that the human beings at Guantánamo had no rights the U.S. was bound to respect, and the Justices properly and courageously drew the line. But that a prominent political figure could make that comparison with a straight face shows just how much work there is to do to restore the damage done by the abuses perpetrated and tolerated by the United States in the last seven years.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, another key Atlantic grantees, has been sending habeas counsel to represent the prisoners at the base since winning the first Guantánamo case, Rasul v. Bush, in 2004, and has been responsible for organizing and coordinating more than 500 pro bono lawyers across the country in order to represent the men at Guantánamo, ensuring that nearly all have the option of legal representation. The Center was co-counsel in Boumediene, and you can read more on its website.

“The Supreme Court has finally brought an end to one of our nation’s most egregious injustices,” said CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren. “By granting the writ of habeas corpus, the Court recognizes a rule of law established hundreds of years ago and essential to American jurisprudence since our nation’s founding. With habeas you never would have had these men—so many of whom have been cleared of any wrongdoing—locked up and abused because no court was watching. In those cases, the government will now have to put up or shut up: it will have to show an impartial judge enough evidence to justify detention. This six-year-long nightmare serves as a lesson in how fragile our constitutional protections truly are in the hands of an overzealous executive.”

The Boumediene decision marks the third time the Court has rebuked the administration’s lawless actions at Guantánamo. The government has repeatedly delayed in applying previous rulings.

In Britain, the rights of detainees did not fare so well in the political process.

The government pulled out all stops to win the vote, which became in Prime Minister Gordon Brown's view a critical test of his fading political viability, and the margin of success in the razor-thin vote was provided, ironically, by the Democratic Unionist members from Northern Ireland.

Though Atlantic no longer maintains a funding program in the U.K. outside Northern Ireland, we thought it important to support the opposition to Prime Minister Brown's plans when he announced them last summer, because any incursions on basic rights of detainees in Britain, as in the U.S., will be cited and copied by repressive regimes around the world as a justification for their own abuses. We provided a grant to the British civil liberties group, Liberty, which fought a valiant campaign, "Charge or Release," against the measure. You can read more on Liberty's website.

I was in London the day after the vote in Parliament, and visited the rabbit-warren-like offices of Liberty, whose tenacious and eloquent Director, Shami Chakrabarti, paid tribute to “the brave parliamentarians of all stripes who held their nerve against the pressures of party politics and the terrorists’ attempts to provoke us to abandon our values.” Fielding calls from the media and urgent messages from staff and allies, Chakrabarti lamented that “recent years have shown how forgetting Britain’s moral compass has left our country less safe; so on to the House of Lords—once more the guardian of fundamental rights.”

Liberty’s aggressive and creative fight against the proposed law demonstrated that the government had offered no evidence for extending what is already the longest pre-trial detention period for terror suspects in the western world, not “a single instance in which an investigation has failed because they ran out of time.”They won the battle of public opinion, if not yet the vote.

A surprise development the day after the vote was the resignation from Parliament of Tory Shadow Home Secretary David Davis, forcing a by-election that could be a referendum on what he called “the insidious and relentless erosion of civil liberties in Britain.”

Atlantic will continue to support Liberty in its campaign to stop the 42-day detention plan. In the U.S., we have joined with the Open Society Institute and other funders to build on the heroic work of advocates during the last seven years in a coordinated campaign to use the coming election and transition to reconstruct core civil liberties and restore proper limits on executive power. All over the world, no matter what the fears and pressures, no matter how unpopular the victims or how disturbing the crimes of which they may be suspect, there must never be anyone whose rights we are not bound to respect.

Gara LaMarche
gara@atlanticphilanthropies.org

Links to organisations mentioned in this column:

• Center for Constitutional Rights
• Liberty
• ACLU Amicus Curiae, Boumediene v. Bush (PDF)

Themba Mngomezulu stood on a hillside on his family’s land, in Ingwavuma, in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, not far from the border of Swaziland, and told us his story. Not far away, his grandmother sat on a straw mat on the floor of her one-room house near a crackling wood fire heating a pot of beans and taking some of the chill off the late autumn day. Themba proudly pointed to the first goat he ever bought, tethered nearby, while the goat’s progeny explored our minivan.

In my last Atlantic Currents column I wrote about the xenophobic violence that has swept South Africa in recent weeks, shocking the world and causing South Africans to ask what kind of country they are. While the violence continues, the overwhelming response of civil society, from protest rallies to relief efforts, has provided a more hopeful answer to that question: one in which a strong majority still believe in tolerance and the rule of law, and will work to expand the promise of the new South Africa to all.

I return to a focus on South Africa with another story from my recent visit, which captures better than anything else the hope that we all seek—the story of Themba, one of the most engaging, entrepreneurial and inspiring young men I’ve met anywhere. He works as a physiotherapist at Mosvold Hospital, 410 kilometres (255 miles) from Durban. Mosvold was founded in 1936 by Scandinavian missionaries. Most people in Umkhanyakude, the district in which Mosvold is located, eke out a living from subsistence farming, supplemented by old age pensions, child support or other modest government grants of the post-apartheid era. Most district residents have no piped water or electricity, little access to transportation and communication, and few opportunities for paid work outside the handful of government jobs. Schools are overcrowded and the standard of education is poor.

While there are five state hospitals, 45 clinics and 15 mobile services serving the 550,000 residents spread out in the sprawling district, the health problems are daunting: widespread HIV/AIDS—up to 40% of women who give birth are HIV positive—as well as malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhoeal diseases and respiratory infections.

Such severe health needs call for a virtual army of trained medical professionals, but as in much of rural South Africa, the gap in service is enormous: a 46% vacancy rate for nurses, and a 55% vacancy rate for senior medical officers. A combination of forces, including the reluctance of many medical professionals to move to or stay for long in remote rural areas, and a “brain drain” of South African doctors and nurses to England, Canada and other English-speaking countries, has widened the gap between the poor and those who can attend to their health needs. This critical problem is a central concern of Atlantic’s health programme in South Africa, which supports grantees who advocate for more effective and accessible public health care; for better, faster resource allocation; and who train and develop health care workers in their own communities.

This takes us back to Themba, and how he got to Mosvold Hospital. Themba is one of four children in his family—one sister is studying in a secretarial course in nearby Jozini; another is in 11th grade at Isicelosethu High School, which Themba attended, and to which he gave us a tour, where we could see how much pride the headmaster and students took in his all-too-rare accomplishments. A brother is also completing his high school studies, and Themba supports them all on his Mosvold salary, also assisting his mother by purchasing her groceries, since his father has taken a second wife.

Themba’s quest to make the most of his life, reaching high for education as the key to security for himself and his family, began in his final year of high school. “In my matric year,” he told us, "I wrote to a number of educational institutions for application forms. After completing the forms I needed to send R120 (about US$16) with the application. When I asked my father for the money he did not give it to me since he did not see the value of it—he believed that after school you get a job.”

Tensions at home followed, Themba said, and not only because of the differences in opinion about education. “One of my responsibilities was to ensure my father’s cows were in the kraal by 5 o’clock in the afternoon or else there would be trouble,” he said. “This motivated me to work hard and bring about change in my life.”

During his senior year Themba saw his way to a better future. He attended an open dayat the Mosvold Hospital, where he learned what a physiotherapist does for soccer teams—a crucial incentive, as soccer is at the centre of Themba’s life (in the picture above, he stands next to a house he built on his family’s property, with the logo of his favourite team carved into the foundation). Themba continues to play and coach soccer, and felt that a career as a physiotherapist would allow him to help soccer players with their injuries, and also help improve his own performance as a player.

After graduating from high school in 2000, and with no prospect of financial support from his father, Themba knew that if he was going to attend university he was going to have to earn the money for the registration process R1000 (about US$130) even at Mangosuthu Technikon (the least expensive of all tertiary institutions).He set that as a financial goal.

“I started doing part time work at the Women’s Cultural Centre in Ingwavuma, doing painting and building repairs for R35 (about US$4.50) a day,” he said. “While doing that job, I heard of opportunities to volunteer at Mosvold Hospital. I then heard that the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was reserving 10 places for disadvantaged students.”

Themba enquired about the opportunity, and applied to the Friends of Mosvold Trust’s Scholarship Scheme, a programme that helps expand the reach of high quality health services to the people of rural South Africa by identifying, training and supporting rural students who have the potential to become heath care professionals. He received a scholarship, and soon after learned that he had been accepted at Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg.

“The adaptation from Ingwavuma to Johannesburg was huge,” Themba told us. “I had never seen a lift before, let alone knew how it worked!” Themba completed his degree in 2006, and he has been working at Mosvold Hospital ever since.

Atlantic supports programmes like Friends of Mosvold because they build a cadre of trained health professionals grounded in local communities. But Themba’s story shows that the impact of such programmes is much wider, not only improving public health, but providing pathways out of poverty. With a sweep of his arm around his property, Themba told his visitors: “My family is here—I support my mother, and I have a soccer team which I coach and inspire and buy boots and kits for. I have been able to buy a pick-up, which I use to transport my soccer team. And I have also been able to build some new rooms at our homestead.”

Gara LaMarche
gara@atlanticphilanthropies.org

Links to organisations mentioned in this column:

• Friends of Mosvold (FOM) Scholarship Scheme

• University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg

• Mangosuthu Technikon