Group’s Goal: Social Change, Not Charity

Like so many baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s, Lee Chemel, 58, reminisces passionately about the social activism of her youth.

Once involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements, Chemel eventually became the director of TV hits such as “Murphy Brown,” “Mad About You” and “Spin City.” “Ultimately,” she concedes, “I went into another direction.”

But the mother of two adopted 6-year-olds, and others like her, are exactly the kind of donors the Liberty Hill Foundation is after. And Chemel says that, in the early 1990s, the foundation was just what she was looking for--a group that funds the causes that still move her.

“I realized they were more interested in me being knowledgeable about what I was putting my money into, not just writing a check,” she says.

With the slogan “Change, Not Charity,” the foundation has been raising funds from the progressively minded well-off and doling out grants to a variety of grass-roots groups for 25 years.

It’s a perfect fit for Chemel, who this year sits on one of the foundation’s funding boards and says she gives about $5,000 to $10,000 annually.

She is one of many of the foundation’s regular left-of-center donors from the entertainment field, a group that includes Susan Sarandon, Alfre Woodard, Ted Danson, and Rhino Records.

“We’re sort of like Robin Hood, except we don’t steal. We organize the rich to get their money,” says Liberty Hill Executive Director Torie Osborn.

Rather than just collect alms, the Santa Monica-based foundation offers progressive philanthropy advisors to donors, workshops on how to affect social trends with donor dollars and tours of organizations that have received Liberty Hill funds.

“Our mission has always been to try and change policy or public opinion, to try and get at the root cause of inequity,” Osborn says.

Liberty Hill is meeting the growing desire by some philanthropists to be more involved in the causes they support, says James M. Ferris, director of the Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy at USC.

“They were sort of ahead of their time when they started,” Ferris says, adding that any attempt to change society is a challenge. “What they can do is affect communities in a way that some of these more traditional foundations may have resources for but not necessarily the processes for.”

Though Osborn shies away from too critical a comparison of her foundation with its more traditional counterparts, she says the difference is simple. “They’re really about upholding the status quo,” she says. “We’re about changing it.”

By giving almost exclusively to Los Angeles-based groups with social change agendas, Osborn says, “we’re building social capital.” And it’s paying off.

When the foundation began awarding grants averaging $1,500 from its $60,000 fund in 1975, it was one of a few charities with such a progressive mission. This year, it expects to clear the $2-million mark, and regularly donates sums in the $25,000 range to progressive causes.

They include $10,000 for a Gay Asian Pacific Network public awareness campaign; $25,000 to help the Bus Riders’ Union push the MTA for more environmentally safe buses; and $53,250 for Santa Monicans for Responsible Tourism to advocate for a $10.50 city minimum wage, now on the verge of becoming law.

Liberty Hill and grant recipients say the foundation’s liberal mission helps small community groups that are usually passed over by traditional charities.

“We’ve been able to use those funds to show mainstream funders the type of effects we can have on the community,” says Marqueece Harris-Dawson, associate director of the South-Central-based Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment.

In its 10-year history, the coalition has received 26 grants from Liberty Hill totaling $338,761. It has used the funds to counter local substance abuse by blocking 150 new liquor store licenses and getting dozens of crack houses closed down in South-Central Los Angeles, Harris-Dawson says.

The link between liquor stores and wider substance abuse “is not always easy to get funders to see,” he adds. “But Liberty Hill has seen it from the beginning.”

For the Native American group Ne’ayuh, a Tongva word meaning Friends, the $14,000 given by the foundation to support a cultural center is helping the group preserve a culture and reshape non-Indian perspectives through workshops and history seminars. The center, a onetime mountain fire station, is located along Angeles Crest Highway north of Pasadena and draws about 70 visitors a week.

“Liberty Hill took our dream, our mission and saw it,” says program coordinator Kat High. When Ne’ayuh started, she says, it had not even incorporated as a nonprofit organization; now it will apply for several state and county grants. “Nobody else would have given us funds to get started.”

Liberty Hill operates five funds targeting environmental justice, lesbian and gay issues, social entrepreneurial efforts, newly formed organizations and urban development.

“After the civil unrest in 1992, the organization decided to have a graduating fund giving grants of up to $25,000 for race relations, poverty and urban unification,” Osborn says of the group’s Fund for a New Los Angeles.

That year, the foundation joined the long-established Southern California Assn. of Philanthropy and, later, Los Angeles Urban Funders. “We took a giant step into the mainstream,” she adds, “and the mainstream embraced Liberty Hill.”

And although Liberty Hill still gets about 40% of its funding from well-to-do baby boomers like Chemel, it also acts as a conduit for larger foundations, which last year accounted for 28% of its revenues.

“It’s a perfect marriage,” Osborn says.

Chemel says the same of her affinity with the foundation, and adds that it has rekindled her social sensibilities. She’s decided to make a documentary on L.A. sweatshops.

“In this time of economic distance between rich and poor, I’m so glad I found Liberty Hill,” she says. “Now I’m turning my eye away from the network commercial thing.”