Reinhold Foundation April 2, 2012 Sherry Magill Let me extend my heartiest congratulations to those of you gathered here. I have the deepest respect and admiration for J.F. and Peggy Bryan and for the work of the Reinhold Foundation. You should take great pride in the fact that they think you all are worthy of the Foundation’s investment. I also have great respect for folks who labor in the nonprofit sector, and think what you do is a vital community interest. We all should do everything we can to increase the capacity of your organizations to provide the services you provide. The experience you have had as a Reinhold Foundation grantee, and as part of this leadership development program, will equip you to make unique contributions to the people of Clay county. I congratulate you and thank you for the work you do. I wish to share some of my thinking about the independent sector and democracy and I trust these thoughts will not sound too disjointed or random. At the outset, you should know that many things shape my perspective -- my experience growing up in the Deep South, my formal study of American democracy, my work as a teacher and as an administrator of a small private liberal arts college, and my experience of the past 21 years at the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. A few years ago, I was giving the commencement address before the graduates of Georgetown University’s Nonprofit Management Executive C ertificate program and noticed this quotation in their program from Martin Luther King’s 1964 Nobel Peace: I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the 1
ambiguities of history . . . I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. 1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech When reading Dr. King’s words, I think of Jessie Ball duPont, of J. F. and Peggy Bryan, of the Reinhold family, of folks like you. Let me say a brief word about Mrs. duPont. Jessie Ball was born in 1884, graduated from what is now Longwood College in 1902, became a teacher, and married Alfred I. duPont in 1921. In 1926, they settled in Jacksonville, where together they established new roots, built a new family fortune, and became philanthropists in what by then was becoming a great American tradition. I doubt that Mrs. duPont was a student of American philanthropy, but I can tell you that she understood deeply one's human obligation to share one's good fortune with those less fortunate, to give generously, to open one's heart to his or her fellows. She wrote, "I believe that funds should be spent for the benefit of society. I have always believed it. Don't call it charity . . . I think it is an obligation." I am reminded of the kind of philanthropic service exemplified by J. F. and Peggy Bryan -- folks who do not have to be engaged in trying to make life better for the disadvantaged and less well-off, but who are. I am also reminded of our individual and 2
collective responsibilities over our civic culture -- our role as citizens living in a great democracy – and of what Dr. King termed being ―other - centered.‖ It’s curious – to me anyway – how my life continues to be influenced by Dr. King’s words. His work, his example, his courage cast a very large and lasting shadow on what has become my passion for the Independent Sector. Long before I had discovered a set of political ideas -- justice, democracy, citizenship--, long before a teacher introduced me to Plato’ s Republic , with its inquiry into the nature of justice — , long before I ever heard the words ―Independent Sector,‖ Dr. King was working in my neighborhood. I came of age in the Deep South -- 12 miles north of Montgomery, 30 miles east of Selma, 90 miles south of Birmingham – when Dr. King too was present in these places. By the time I headed off to college, a race riot in my small town, the governor’s stand in the school house door of my future alma mater, demonstrations in downtown Birmingham, the Selma March, and my personal experience of maneuvering through my senior year, a year in which the county school system I attended came under a federal court order to racially integrate its public schools, had all left an indelible mark on me. The example of citizenship denied haunted my young unformed, unstudied mind, mostly I suppose because my parents had been raising me to believe that the Constitution guaranteed the rights of American citizenship to all and my mother’s interpretation of the gospel required us to serve our fellow human beings, not beat them over the head with a bat. Both my parents worked as public servants – my mother a nurse and my father first a medical supply officer in the Air Force and then a field representative for the Social Security Administration. 3
What rubbed in south Alabama, of course, was the inescapable fact that State laws and social norms denied people with black skin both the rights and obligations of citizenship. State law not only separated whites and blacks socially and educationally, it also denied black people the right and obligation to vote. And State law was diametrically opposed to what my parents had been teaching me, whether my parents understood that fact or not. I was just young enough and just old enough to grasp the hypocrisy, and much of my understanding came from personally experiencing the results of the work of Dr. King and others. In other words, the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship were not abstract, textbook ideas for me. The world was exploding in some sense on a daily basis right in front of me; my friends and I lived in the thick of things. I took my adolescent dismay with American hypocrisy off to college, where I got serious about understanding the evolution of American democracy. I was deeply interested in political theory and religious history, but Dr. King’s example and the social movement he helped lead kept moving me in the direction of trying also to understand American reform movements, especially those of the 19th Century. Abolition groups, women’s groups, labor groups; Hull House, the Salvation Army, Scouting all appeared. Citizens organizing to, yes, provide service, but also to demand change in social policy and to build community. I had stumbled upon the Independent Sector, and its role in the creation and maintenance of healthy democratic society, although I didn’t know it as such. And as you know, the organizations that we now consider components of the independent sector have played and continue to play a key role in our collective experiment with democracy. 4
In fact, without these organizations, the American experiment would not have been as successful as it has been. If you don ’ t believe me, think of the former Soviet Bloc countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain or of Iraq today. They ’ re desperate to create civil society – to build the kind of nonprofit organizations that we have – because these organizations are the glue, the connective tissue, of democratic cultures. Folks voluntarily coming together to do the work of healthy communities. Berger and Neuhaus termed these organizations ― mediating structures, ‖ organizations that navigate the space between government and the individual. We live at a strange time in the history of democracy: We scream and yell at each other in the public square, call each other despicable names, and two-bit television, radio and newspaper pundits tell us every day that the other side is destroying the Republic. Our obligations as citizens are not obvious, we make war on nonprofits, and I’m beginning to wonder if we know what we mean when we use the word ―democracy.‖ Certainly ―democracy‖ is not just another word for individual freedom, especially the freedom to do whatever one wants and to be shed of any public responsibilities. Our collective experiment with democracy is an experiment in the idea of secular self – government. Its main question is this: can a diverse people, from all around the planet, speaking different languages and practicing different religions, build a single constitutional government whose laws protect the rights of each and every one equally, whose people choose through elections who will govern, and whose majority rules but under a Constitution that protects the rights of the minority? And once having created and inherited it, the question becomes whether or not we can keep it. Once having 5
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