A Conversation with PhilanthropywoRx’s Allen Smart (Part 2 of 2)

From and through PhilathropywoRx, the consulting firm he founded, Allen Smart brings attention to and helps grantmakers and those who serve them think better about and practice rural philanthropy. He and the firm also help nonprofit groups implement philanthropically supported rural projects. The firm name’s capitalized “R” stand for rural.

Smart directed a project on rural philanthropy at Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C., that was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. At the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, he served as interim president and vice president, and he directed its health-care division. As well, he’s been vice president of programs at The Rapides Foundation, director of community development for a Midwestern Catholic hospital, and grants administrator for the City of Santa Monica, Calif.

Smart was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation last week. During the first part of our discussion, which is here, we talk about rural philanthropy’s size and scope, its nature, and the benefits of and challenges to doing it well.

The just less than 15-minute video below is the second part, during which we further discuss the benefits and challenges of rural grantmaking, including the growing role of intermediaries and the proper, localist sense of place in it.

“I think the family and cultural traditions of many rural places have been set for generations,” Scott tells me, “and if a national funder sanctions one nonprofit versus another one in a community, that kind of tips a lot of things. That that might be okay; maybe they need to be chipped. But it could be disruptive, where it’s just more painful than positive.”

There have been a number of national rural-philanthropy intermediary organizations created in recent years, he notes. “They’re all national. They’re funded by national funders,” he says. “They seemingly have similar names and similar bodies of work at times, and maybe working in similar communities. I think it’s created a bit of a sense of confusion. What it does is lead people to believe, ‘Oh, there’s a lot more rural philanthropy going on, so that good,’” but “I would conjecture that more money that’s not to the right people, at the right time, in the right way is not necessarily good for rural America.”

Smart regularly recommends that both national foundations and intermediaries hire people with rural backgrounds.

Smart also later says, “We need to move away from this idea in rural philanthropy that ‘I’m going to be an education fund, or I’m a health funder, I’m an economic-development fund.’ The way smaller and rural places work, both people and institutions are working across issues.”

Using an example, he criticizes the “idea that we’re going to drive a best-practice K-through-3 reading doctrine and that is the highest, best use of a philanthropic dollar—when the hospital’s getting ready to close and the roads are terrible and there are no opportunities for after-school care.

“We’ve got to be looking at places,” according to Smart. “I often use the phrase ‘Place up and program down.’ The best rural philanthropy is placed-based.” It’s “really cognizant of the history of places, the institutional stakeholders, the old families with money, [and] engages them.” It’s “not so issue-specific, unless there is an urgent” need.

“People working across issues,” he adds, do so

across political divides. … Contrary to some of the media portrayals, people in smaller rural places are not spending 100% of their time talking about the presidential election. They might be talking about why that school is falling down while no one is paying attention or how they can or can’t afford certain youth-sports things. But they’re not fixated on the national political scene.

Plus, “I think we don’t talk enough about this rural-national philanthropy disconnect,” Smart says. “There had been people doing tremendous rural philanthropy for 100 years, and we only think about a rural philanthropy when a small group of national funders say, ‘We’re going to focus on’” it. “It’s like there’s no real philanthropy happening unless X national funder says it is happening, which I find both patronizing and insulting. but really shorting the possibilities of how national funders could be tremendous contributors.”

Specifically, “We don’t have any funding for someone, for example, to support some really deep peer learning among rural funders and rural communities about what’s working,” and “we don’t have any real big ticket funding to talk about what does scaling and evaluation look like for all this rural work, because it’s got to be different than the urban work if you’re only dealing with 200 people instead of 20,000 people.”

He concludes, “There’s a branding aspect of this, I’m sure: hey, ‘We have just contributed $300,000 in X really remote rural place in Appalachia or the Delta.’” In relative terms, “it’s such a small amount of money, and it’s not particularly contributory to building a field—and, in fact, may be disruptive to the local funders.”

This article first appeared in the Giving Review on August 20, 2024.