Would today’s philanthropists have funded the Underground Railroad?

Editorial note: this essay originally appeared at The Giving Review.

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But can it scale? Is it reproduceable?

These questions are the most-frequent objections from well-intentioned philanthropists and academics who are skeptical of indigenously led solutions playing a significant role in addressing social problems. Anyone without a heart of stone is typically inspired by encountering individuals or communities that have experienced authentic transformation, but significant philanthropic investment is typically reserved for interventions that funders believe can be grown or duplicated. Since professionally credentialled outsiders design their interventions with scale and reproducibility in mind, they get first (and second, and third) dibs at major resources.

Of course, some grassroots efforts will not scale, and they are no less worthy of support than a rural hospital or a small-town fire department. But many homegrown mediating structures in low-income communities actually can grow and even multiply, but usually not like McDonalds or Starbucks. Human transformation isn’t transmitted through a logo, a recipe, or a standard operating procedure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t spread.

The Underground Railroad, which helped untold thousands escape to freedom, was an incredibly high risk and resource intensive solution to the brutal outrage that was American chattel slavery. Without any kind of centralized leadership, it began most likely with Quaker efforts at the end of the 18^th Century and spread for decades until the end of the Civil War. It grew not by professionalizing and marketing its services, but by prioritizing local knowledge, constantly innovating, and sharing intelligence and best practices from town to town. For obvious reasons, trust was a non-negotiable prerequisite to get involved.

Leaving aside the threat of punishment under the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, would the Underground Railroad have passed the “can-it-scale?” test with so many of today’s funders?

Operating principles over structure

As my boss Bob Woodson has been patiently explaining for decades, what scales about the most-effective grassroots solutions to social problems are the operating principles, not the structure of the intervention, nor even necessarily the specific content of any curriculum that has been created or utilized. Anyone who has not done so should check out his book, Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles, where he discusses these in detail: competence, integrity, transparency, resilience, witness, innovation, inspiration, agency, access, and grace. These principles are not inculcated in traditional credentialing programs and do not correlate with wealth or education level, so they are largely invisible to conventional study.

The Underground Railroad provided a service, but the local circumstances and constraints were incredibly varied and constantly changing. A standard operating procedure of “follow the river” wouldn’t scale in communities without a river, but the operating principle of “understand local geography and figure out how to best leverage it” certainly did.

Writing about the failure of so many international anti-poverty programs, Efosa Ojomo observes:

A major contributing factor [to failure] is that many anti-poverty programs are designed to be deployed in a modular fashion. Modular solutions work when they fit seamlessly and predictably with the other elements in a system; in other words, there are well-defined interfaces between the different elements and the proposed solution. In contrast, a solution must be interdependent when there aren’t well-defined interfaces between it and the other elements in the system.

Effective upward mobility efforts are not plug-and-play. Whether it’s the intermittent availability of electricity and running water overseas or the local nuances of job markets and gang landscapes here in America, the factors that contribute to poverty vary greatly from neighborhood to neighborhood and family to family. These variances are not cosmetic details, but core realities that make the difference between enduring transformation and complete failure. The Underground Railroad is just one example of an interdependent solution that adjusted to local particulars while still growing and achieving its mission.

Dismissal of “charismatic” leadership 

Besides a general distrust of the insights of low-income people into their own problems, funders and academics are often reflexively skeptical of the growth potential of any intervention led by someone they perceive as a “charismatic leader.” The intangible qualities that enable someone to inspire commitment, loyalty, and transformation lead many outsiders to conclude that such qualities are not only mysterious, but also unpredictable and exceptionally rare. An individual’s magnetism may be so powerful that it even blinds them to the leader’s other qualities, or to the deployment of Woodson-like principles that may be equally if not even more essential to the leader’s effectiveness.

Sociologist Joan Maya Mazelis spent many years studying members of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU). While noting the positive effects of membership, she offered a typical scholarly conclusion that “KWRU may not be replicable,” in part because it was, as she described it, “founded and run by a charismatic figure,” Cheri Honkola. Mazelis’s suggestion instead was that government-run agencies should mimic some of KWRU’s practices, with the goal of creating similarly beneficial results among aid recipients at scale. In the view of many credentialed outsiders, effective grassroots leaders are exceptional within their own communities, but what they achieve is well within the capabilities of the average credentialed outsider.

While any given person’s capacity for inspirational leadership can be improved, there certainly are innate gifts that some possess in greater quantity than others. These can be deployed for good or ill, and indeed one of the most-powerful practices of effective grassroots interventions is helping indigenous natural leaders—particularly the young—to turn such talents to productive and edifying ends. But none of this demonstrates that the presence of a charismatic leader in a key role prevents an intervention from scaling.

Harriet Tubman was certainly a charismatic leader, and she remains the best-known Underground Railroad conductor, famously making 19 trips, rescuing 300 individuals, and never losing a passenger. But by many estimates, the Underground Railroad led at least 100,000 individuals to freedom, and many of its conductors did not share all of Tubman’s exceptional qualities. Furthermore, it would be profoundly insulting to reduce all Tubman’s capabilities and achievements to her unique and formidable personality.

It is worth at least acknowledging the possibility that people who do not possess charisma but do possess post-graduate degrees might also be subconsciously biased against a model of change that makes good use of the former and does not require the latter. And of course, we manage to find enough physically attractive people to fully populate our countless ad campaigns and enough athletically gifted people to compete in all our rapidly expanding professional sports. The existence of inborn qualities alone need not disqualify any solution from an opportunity to grow and spread.

Patience and discernment

Donors understandably only want to give big money to big ideas, and “solutions” to poverty that promise to scale rapidly and work for anyone, anywhere are very tempting. But human connection and transformation cannot be standardized and reproduced like fast food or cellphone accessories. No two marriages or families are exactly alike, but most of us understand that the institutions of marriage and family actually do exist at scale. And even within the business world, there are companies like Chick-fil-A that focus less on rapid market saturation and more on growing only as fast as the supply of high-character owner-operators will allow.

Today’s low-income communities are full of Underground Railroads that are invisible to outsiders. And there is untold potential for high-quality growth. But we must be patient and discerning enough to prioritize the leadership qualities and operating principles that are proven to work. Scalable but ineffective is hardly the way to change the world.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/would-todays-philanthropists-have-funded-the-underground-railroad/