Implementation Beyond Headline Victories

Representatives from Liberty Hill grantee partner Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) participate in a Sustainability Expo with youth in Wilmington before the pandemic. (Photo courtesy of Liberty Hill Foundation)

No one could doubt that philanthropy has invested in important fights for justice and fairness. The news is filled with examples. But the sector has developed a bad habit of declaring victory at the starting line. When a city council passes a program or a governor signs an innovative policy into law, we celebrate with great fanfare. But where are we when, years later, those goals are not achieved? When implementation has been neglected? When impressive predictions have given way to a weak shadow of the prior status quo, leaving the would-be beneficiaries with only the echo of a broken promise?

On too many occasions, philanthropists have run only a third of the race, then dropped the baton, and gone home. It is time for philanthropy to invest in implementation: we need to run all the way through the tape.

Broken Promises

Los Angeles County’s recent history is strewn with examples of headline victories that sputtered on the road to real change, from millions of dollars allocated to green energy programs that the responsible agencies left unspent to the Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act of California, which was created in 2000 to allocate scattered state funds to community-based organizations with proven track records, but let millions of dollars piled up unspent (or went to business-as-usual programs with poor track records). Look at the eviction “moratoriums” passed by local and state governments in early 2020: though these policies were designed to provide lifelines to workers facing COVID-related job loss, and community-based organizations were backed by philanthropy to win these protections, landlords still filed evictions with the courts and the Sheriff's Department enforced lockouts, making these “moratoriums” insufficient.

In each case, the cost of failed implementation can be measured in human lives: children jailed for missing school, families who must choose between paying utility bills, medical bills, and rent, or entire communities sickened by the polluted air they breathe.

Lessons From the Inside

For more than 20 years, I have worked on these issues, first as an organizer, then as a legislative staffer, a foundation executive, and an appointed commissioner. In the vast majority of cases, implementation isn’t foiled by back-room machinations or fatal flaws in written legislation. The failure is for far more mundane reasons: implementation is highly technical, it takes forever, and it’s expensive. And while it’s difficult because it requires time, money, and persistence, time, money, and persistence are three areas where philanthropy can excel.

However, implementation also requires understanding how to build, direct, and sustain power. This is much less familiar knowledge in the philanthropic sector, and it is here that our sector has too often fallen down. (For this reason, Liberty Hill has led a strong shift in philanthropy towards investment in community organizing that can build power for the communities we serve to push elected officials to pursue and implement needed policy changes. These campaigns have amassed landmark victories.) But too often, implementation is seen as the technocratic and inevitable aftermath to a policy victory, as if government is a computer that will—once activist organizations reprogram it through legislation—simply deliver a determined result.

However, policy implementation is yet another arena in which power is exerted in many directions at the same time. Elected officials continue to wield influence; so, too, do commissioners, department heads, and other bureaucrats, each with their own incentives and facing their own unique constraints. Transformative initiatives suffer due to a lack of capacity and support when focused change takes a back seat to the system’s routine obligations—its everyday operations—to say nothing of crises that it cannot forestall. When new policies require funding to be pulled from existing programs, this raises new legal and technical barriers, not to mention political ones. Innovations can require coordination across departments that barely communicate, while tomes of laws and regulations govern which funding streams can support which programs, requiring creativity, persistence, and arcane mastery to reorganize them.

Since new policies often require the development of new practices, the hiring of new staff, and the establishment of new (and threatening) systems of accountability, it becomes clear how dangerous it is for a campaign to hang up its spurs after a winning vote. To the contrary: A vote is only a juncture after which the power built over the course of a public campaign must be maintained, strengthened, and strategically directed.

Building an Implementation Agenda

A campaign that begins by identifying a goal and its accomplishment through legislative action only addresses one part of the life cycle of a community-based struggle for justice. Some problems have not been clearly articulated or documented, let alone matched with policy solutions; others are known but lack viable solutions that can be petitioned from government. Still, others have policy solutions in place that have been implemented poorly. The organizations in this space often lack the capacity and resources to invest in the perpetual cycle of research, identification, implementation, and accountability that produces lasting change. Few organizations have the means to participate in working groups, committees, and subcommittees; to work directly with government officials to craft and refine practices and systems; to testify at public hearings; to collect data and conduct research; and to communicate with constituents on an ongoing basis.

For an organizing or advocacy group to shift focus from energetic campaigning to sustained implementation requires painstaking attention to detail, the trust of government insiders who will share data and help navigate the system, a high level of expertise about how systems work, and ongoing interest from the press. If philanthropic organizations wish to see their goals and those of their grantees become reality, this is where we must now invest.

Imagine what the year-and-a-half following a victory at the legislature or the ballot box could look like if organizers and advocates had the resources they have told us they need—ideally in the form of multi-year general operating grants. We would see media strategies to maintain political pressure and public attention, research and data collection to create and monitor implementation, capacity building, and technical assistance including ongoing education in the basic functions and parameters of different government programs and approaches.

Models From the Field

In Los Angeles County, Liberty Hill has frequently worked with community organizations to create models of what a full implementation agenda could look like. Of the three examples I cited of initiatives that suffered from a lack of follow-through on implementation, all three—green energy, juvenile justice, and eviction prevention—have seen successful course corrections:  

1. When green energy incentive programs were failing to reach the low-income and BIPOC communities they were intended to benefit, the Liberty Hill Foundation partnered with a coalition of community-based organizations across Los Angeles County to create emPOWER, a county-wide outreach initiative that directly supports outreach and organizing focused on decreasing the demand for fossil fuels while also generating potential household savings of thousands of dollars per year. The program connects low-income residents to more than 60 money- and energy-saving programs, including ratepayer incentives, energy efficiency upgrades, solar and clean vehicle rebates, and other programs that simultaneously benefit the environment and help reduce utility bills for financially stressed households.
2. In response to the disappointments of the poorly implemented Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act, organizers, advocates, and foundations in Los Angeles fought for the distribution of funds to community-based organizations that could take responsibility for prevention, intervention, and diversion services. Funders backed those implementation efforts, and a broad coalition advocated to expand the funding committee to include community representatives. Two years later, more than $20 million has been invested in serving youth through community-based organizations, rates of youth arrests and incarceration are rapidly declining, and educational, economic/professional, personal wellness, and civic outcomes are all improving.
3. The Liberty Hill Foundation serves as the backbone for 20 housing justice and tenant rights organizations in the Stay Housed coalition that won county funding to support education, outreach and legal defense—making it possible for hundreds of thousands of county renters to prevent eviction and potential homelessness.

Changing Philanthropy’s Culture

Because foundations field many more requests than we can possibly grant, a desire for our funds to go as far as possible can lead us to spread our efforts wide but not deep. We can be eager to notch a win and commence a new battle too quickly. But implementation is a time-consuming process. It isn’t as dramatic as a campaign or as joyous as a victory celebration. It can be difficult to maintain momentum and inspiration for this kind of slow, detail-oriented work. But detailed work that requires time, expertise, and a steady commitment of resources over years is exactly the kind of work to which philanthropy is suited.

It is time for funders to step up and fulfill our responsibility to see implementation through. We need to invest in organizing and advocacy to hold government accountable and ensure that those directly impacted have seats at the table and can access the resources to stay there until the work is done. This will require us to invest tremendous trust in grassroots organizations and leaders in the form of multi-year unrestricted grants and capacity-building support.

Frontline community leaders, organizers, and advocates have kept their promise to us. They have won, time and again. It is time for us to keep our promises to them and see the job of implementation through. It is time to make sure that this time, the changes stick.

Read more stories by Shane Murphy Goldsmith.