NEW YORK — Forward Through Ferguson has left a mark on the St. Louis community and region by focusing on justice and education, racial equity, and police reform.
The Missouri-based nonprofit was founded in 2015 to implement the societal changes needed in the Ferguson Commission Report to address the issues that contributed to the police shooting of Michael Brown Jr. and the riots that followed in Ferguson, Missouri.
The new non-profits and similar organizations that want to support the community saw money is flowing in from companies such as St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch and major philanthropic organizations ranging from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the NBA Players Association Foundation.
According to Annissa McCaskill, executive director of Forward Through Ferguson, it didn’t take long, she told The Associated Press.
She doesn’t want to dwell on the negative, because many have generously helped the organization. But she won’t forget the community group that promised her nonprofit multi-year support and then decided after the first year that it would stop paying. “Our priorities have shifted,” the group said. Local businesses that initially supported the group also stopped, “changing their priorities again.”
It’s not as if her organization has ever received the multimillion-dollar donations that many corporations like to boast about. In fact, experts say it’s very difficult to track where money from corporations and their foundations goes.
“The largest donation we’ve ever received from a corporation is $210,000; the largest donation we’ve ever received from a foundation is $150,000,” McCaskill said, adding that those gifts and other high-profile donations followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Thanks to these donations and the revenue the group generates through racial equity training for government agencies and businesses, Forward Through Ferguson was able to grow from five full-time employees to 10 employees last year.
“In many cases, it’s piecemeal,” McCaskill said. “But when you put pennies in a pot, it starts to add up. Of course, I think, ‘How many things do I need to do to endow this fund so that we have general operating money instead of it being so program-specific?’”
That complaint is common across philanthropy, especially among organizations that rely on public donations each year versus organizations like Ivy League universities, for example, that have large endowments that generate steady annual income. It’s also not uncommon for nonprofits to see a surge in giving while their cause, from protests to weather events, is in the spotlight, only to see donations quickly dry up.
The racial reckoning that took place in Ferguson, however, should have been different.
This story is part of an ongoing AP series examining the impact, legacy and fallout of the so-called Ferguson uprising, which sparked Brown’s death a decade ago.
Emerson Electric, a Fortune 500 company headquartered a mile from where Brown was killed, announced that it “Ferguson Forward” Initiative a month after the protests. The initiative has allocated about $4 million over five years to improve education, offer scholarships to colleges and trade schools, and provide business development to people in the community, hoping that other companies in the region will do the same. In 2014, Emerson earned about $2.1 billion in profit on $25 billion in revenue.
“Ferguson is our home and has been for 70 years,” said David N. Farr, chairman and CEO of Emerson, at the time announce the plan. “We choose to be here and are committed to this community, especially now in this time of increased need. We believe in hope and opportunity and want to help break down barriers so more of our neighbors can succeed.”
According to experts, there are a variety of reasons why companies engage in social giving, ranging from altruistic and community-oriented donations to business-related donations, such as employee retention and building a stronger customer and employee base.
According to Kari Niedfeldt-Thomas, managing director and chief operating officer of Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose, a partnership that advises companies on sustainability and corporate social responsibility, recent trends indicate that more companies are offering goods and services at a reduced rate in addition to donations, rather than simply giving money to communities.
According to CECP research, the broad definition of giving, which includes volunteerism, community donations and providing services and products to nonprofits, has increased from 24% of a company’s total corporate social responsibility budget in 2021 to 35% of that budget in 2023, Niedfeldt-Thomas said.
But the current backlash against anything that could be seen as a diversity, equity or inclusion program makes it harder to measure companies’ commitment, even as companies devote more resources to it, she said.
“I think we’re seeing fewer and fewer publicly traded companies feeling like they need to raise this,” she said.
Earl Lewis, professor and director of the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan, said the lack of transparency was particularly striking after the flood of promises and statements from companies following the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Together with his research team, Lewis, who previously led the Mellon Foundation, designed a database to make information about the racial equity commitments and actions of major U.S. companies more accessible.
“Maybe there was a way to take people at their word that they were going to do something and then try to see if we could find data in the public domain that would support their claims,” Lewis said, explaining that they had contacted all the companies on their list and would update the results if they responded with public information.
Companies are rarely required to disclose this information. However, if they donate through a corporate foundation, they must report outgoing grants on their tax forms.
Lewis’s team, led by data scientist Brad Bottoms, looked at statements and reports from 51 of the largest U.S. companies from 2020. Just over half, or 27 of the 51 companies, made a public pledge around racial equity that year. Of the companies that didn’t make a pledge, the researchers found that 10 mentioned racial equity when reporting on their donations.
Six companies that made commitments did not report in detail on how they were delivering on them, even though Lewis and his team considered this a priority.
“I think many companies understand that they need to be accountable, but accountability and transparency are not always seen as synonymous,” Lewis said.
One of those companies, AT&T, did not respond to questions about whether the organization has fulfilled its $10 million pledge to historically black colleges and universities.
Social media giant Meta said it was making good on a pledge to give $10 million to organizations working toward racial equality. The company also said it provided $20 million in cash and $12 million in advertising credits to 400 nonprofits serving Black communities, which Meta had previously not disclosed.
Consumer giant Johnson & Johnson said it had spent $80 million of the $100 million pledged by the end of 2023 on “community-led organizations and programs” to improve racial health disparities, but did not specify which organizations those were.
It is difficult to independently confirm these figures based on publicly available information, especially when companies make donations through their legal entities rather than through their foundations.
Other companies often consider as charitable certain business decisions that can still generate profits for them, such as banks that make loans to minority-owned businesses. Even the organizations that help distribute these donations are becoming hybridized, often known as community development financial institutions, or CDFIs.
CDFIs accept money from businesses, government agencies, and philanthropic institutions and use it as loans or grants to help community groups and businesses.
Harold Pettigrew, president and CEO of the Opportunity Finance Network, a partnership of more than 400 CDFIs across the country, calls the organizations the financial first responders at major events because they know their communities and can quickly mobilize resources.
CDFIs have struggled to convince businesses that it’s important to donate through them or even invest in communities they care about, but Pettigrew says that’s starting to change.
“Certainly, corporations, philanthropy and other institutions are starting to understand that CDFIs are the independent conduits that they’re looking to for impact and economic power, especially in recent years,” he said. “I think performance matters, right? I think what you’re ultimately seeing is recognition that as an industry, we know how to get it done.”
Forward Through Ferguson’s McCaskill is eager to show what her group can accomplish. The Ferguson Commission’s report included 189 calls to action to change the systems that led to Brown’s death and the community’s anger in the protests that followed.
McCaskill acknowledges that many of these calls to action are incomplete. But she is proud to say that many of them are currently being addressed by community groups, many of which have been supported by her organization’s Racial Healing + Justice Fund.
“We recognize that some things can come much sooner than others,” McCaskill said. “But we know that policing is something that people are paying much more attention to and much more involved in now than they ever were before Michael was killed.”
She also sees another progression in the way her 20-year-old son and his friends view the world.
“They’re educated, they’re organized, and they know very, very well what needs to be done,” McCaskill said. “It’s different than it was 10 years ago, because they’ve gotten to the point where they understand how the system works. And so you see them in different positions, in different places, tapping into that, in some cases in protest and in other cases literally in organizations and in positions of power where they can change cultures.”
She said it took generations for Ferguson to reach the troubled point it was in 2014 and that it was always going to take more than 10 years to get out of it. But they have started.
“How do you eat an elephant?” she said, smiling. “One bite at a time.”
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