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For years, Allen Smart has championed the so-called “fly over zones” of the country, urging philanthropy to venture beyond its urban fixations and recognize the diversity and dynamism of rural America.
Over the course of his career, Smart has worked both inside and outside philanthropy, in California, the Midwest and the South. That experience has given him insight into the strengths and needs of rural regions, and the role philanthropy can play in addressing them. From his perch at PhilanthropywoRx, the organization he founded, he’s helped amplify and advocate for rural issues and concerns, and served as a resource, sounding board and cheerleader for funders who want to expand their rural portfolios.
Smart has also been a reliable source for journalists, providing input on articles and making connections with experts in the field — including for many of us here at IP — and is an IP contributor himself. He was the clear choice for recognition as rural philanthropy guru in IP’s 2024 Philanthropy Awards.
Last November, Smart announced that he is retiring, and PhilanthropywoRxs closed its doors at the end of last year. (A pop-up on the website reads: “Gone Fishing … Literally.”) Asked about next steps, Smart said he may do some consulting; he and his wife also plan to travel to rural Quebec, West Texas “and a few other places we’ve had on our list for awhile.” Smart is quick to say that he’s loved the work — and he’s ready to move on. “I’ve really poured my heart into this for years,” he said. “It’s the end of something. And, yes, it’s time.”
We caught up with Smart last month as he was closing up shop and asked him about his career, the changes he’s seen in rural philanthropy over the years and how it could work better, and what he’s liked best about the work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about how you got into this work and the origins of your interest in rural philanthropy?
Well, like a lot of people, my career trajectory wasn’t particularly linear. There’s not a philanthropy track, necessarily, that people pursue. I had actually hoped to be in the movies, and I went to film school at the University of Michigan for graduate school. And then a college friend of mine, Peter Berg, who is a director and actor, invited me out to Southern California. And then happenstance, luck, whatever — I ended up running a large grants program for the city of Santa Monica during the first wave of the homeless crisis. I was young and inexperienced, but I had a boss who had a lot of confidence in me, and I ended up being in charge of a very public effort to house homeless people in the winter. We developed a number of innovative programs using motels and some other options. That experience turned me on to this idea of philanthropy as a civic force that went beyond charity. Certainly some of what we were doing was charitable, but it was also challenging people to solve problems — it was really an exciting time.
Then I had an opportunity to work in the Midwest, in Chicago, and there, I worked with a Catholic healthcare system that was assisting people in low-income communities, and I started connecting with various funders and learning about that side of things. But I never, at that point, had any aspiration that, oh, I should go be a program officer at a foundation. I didn’t even know how one might do that.
During that time I got married. My wife is from rural Oklahoma and is a member of the Cherokee Nation, and we decided that we were going to go out and make a difference. I ended up working as a program director at an organization in rural Louisiana. I think I was employee number three or four at that point. The organization was doing philanthropy in central Louisiana, in a place that had very little philanthropic presence. This was the middle of the first wave of health conversion foundations. It was a contentious hospital sale, so we were in the middle of that.
Through that experience, I started to get interested in the idea of rural philanthropy, because at that point, there was none. National groups weren’t particularly [active] there. So it was a lot of just getting on the phone and calling people and asking, “What do you know?” Or, “what have you done?” I began developing my own insights and working with others who were thinking about, “what does good rural philanthropy look like?” This was a densely rural environment, with majority-minority parishes, in some cases — places that even the Louisiana state government hadn’t paid much attention to. How do you bring those places forward and get people excited about their future?
I worked there through Katrina and Rita. We were about three or four hours from the bullseye of Katrina, and a lot of evacuees came there and stayed for six months, 12 months, even years, so we were doing a lot of emergency services work. I started meeting people in national philanthropy who were working in Louisiana, and that broadened my sensibility. I also got involved in a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation national advisory committee. It was a program that matched local funders’ efforts. I met a lot of RWJF folks and bent their ears about rural, and they ended up doing more grantmaking in our area.
Didn’t funders (and a lot of other people) become more interested in rural regions after the 2016 election when rural voters came out in large numbers to support Donald Trump?
That’s an interesting question because the national consensus would say that the height of interest in rural philanthropy was in the ’60s and ’70s. Ford Foundation, Kellogg Foundation and others were all investing tremendous amounts of time, effort and dollars, and that wound down through the ’80s. So there was this sense that nothing was happening in rural philanthropy after that. But that was the exact time of the ascendancy of what is now 400 or so healthcare conversion foundations, many or most of which have a rural footprint. The innovation and creativity on the local level was accelerating because of all these new rural health funders. Many of them started out just doing health, but most now address a much broader base of rural community-building across issues.
But yes, 2016 did mark a spike in interest. I’ve told this story a thousand times: Right after the election, the next morning, I had on my voicemail a call from someone at the Chronicle [of Philanthropy]. He said, “Allen, you’re known to talk about this rural philanthropy thing. Who are these rural people who were fundamental to this shift, who everyone is now wondering about?” So the recognition was pretty immediate.
When you started PhilanthropyWoRx, what gap did you see it filling?
There have always been major nonprofit and for-profit consulting firms and large intermediaries — going back 30 or 40 years — that work with funders and work with nonprofits. But there was very little that was rural-specific: people who really knew the inside-out of philanthropy and could speak to the rural side. So yeah, I thought, I’m going to give this a go. I had developed a very broad and deep network of contacts and funders and rural-serving nonprofits, and thought that I could continue banging the drum and pointing out that there is an art and science to rural philanthropy. My point was that we need to rethink how it’s being done and go beyond this idea of just more money. We need to start getting down to some of the tenets of how rural communities work, and respond to those.
There’s always been a philanthropic advocacy core that’s just about more money: you know, “we’re not getting our share of the money.” And certainly there’s some truth to that. But my motto has always been more and better. Because certainly, there’s plenty of examples of large funders — even large state funders — almost indiscriminately making grants in rural areas in ways that aren’t useful, and are in some cases disruptive to progress people were making on their own. So yeah, I’ve never waved the flag just for more and more and more.
There are better and worse ways to not just do grantmaking but to interact with communities, to partner with local folks. I’ve celebrated the work of local funders and tried to introduce them to larger funders for almost 30 years now, to give national funders a sense of what’s really going on in rural communities. I think that’s still a shortcoming in a lot of the national efforts. There’s certainly more attention to rural philanthropy today, and there has been more money. But I think the treasure trove of information and success and models of what works are often still being ignored by larger funders.
Can you point to examples of approaches to rural philanthropy that work and approaches that don’t?
For one thing, I think it’s important for funders to promote regionalism. Often, a large funder will decide that X community of 1,000 people merits a grant or attention for, say, mental health or third grade reading scores. And the adjoining communities, which are very similar, get left behind. This approach is actually disruptive and defeating in some ways. I think foundations — whether it be local, statewide, national — should be working at all times to help people work across counties, work town to town, and create some sense of regionalism. They need to be working in ways that try to bring people together.
Too often, funders take the easy route of, oh, here’s a nonprofit or a town that looks really exciting, we’re gonna put some money there. That just doesn’t speak to the way that things work. Say a funder is just about education. The idea that you, as a funder, aren’t interested in after-school programs or food insecurity or where kids go to get their shots — how can you just be interested in these parochial, segregated issues, rather than the family or the community in a larger sense? You don’t have to be doing grantmaking in all those areas, but certainly, you should know what state resources are coming in, what people are doing locally and what other opportunities are out there. Maybe you can bring in other funders. But just focusing on single issues in rural places is often — the word I generally use to describe it — distracting. And it’s not reflective of the lives of the families in that community.
I think this is actually getting better. And I’m hesitant to say this, but I see this [focus on single issues] happening more on the part of family funders who have a single interest. You know, we’re laser-focused on mental health, or we’re laser-focused on services for disabled people. But this ignores the context of the lives of the people in the community and how they need to deal with all these things concurrently.
A lot of funders today say they are all about community engagement and listening to the community. You know, “we’re handing over the power,” but oftentimes, that’s not true. It’s a communications tool. After all the learning journeys and community input and all the surveying, what does the average rural community get back from any of that? I call this the extraction model of philanthropy and it still continues in rural areas. Funders come in asking questions, holding focus groups, bringing people together, and later, people reasonably ask, what happened with those people who were here six or 12 months ago? Foundations applaud themselves for collecting all this information, but I think what happens with any of that is often a mystery, even to foundation staff.
How do you advise funders who want to work in rural areas, and want to avoid some of the pitfalls you’ve talked about?
One obvious step is hiring people who are from rural areas, people with cultural competency, whether that be foundation staff or intermediaries. The whole patronizing aspect has gotten better in recent years, but when I first started as a local funder, you would get a visit from a national funder and you’d expect some collegiality and there just wasn’t. It was kind of like, you small-town idiot people, we’re from Princeton or Seattle or whatever, and we don’t know what you’re doing here, but we know what we’re doing. I think that certainly still exists, but it has gotten much better.
Another thing I tell funders is to not just pick a nonprofit in a rural place and make them your all-things-all-people effort. This happens so much in the Mississippi Delta region. Over the years, there were three or four or six nonprofits who got all the grantmaking and all the attention. That just creates and reinforces territorialism.
Instead, bring in people who you would not normally hear from, who don’t really know how to speak to funders, who may have a different perspective. Particularly for funders who are very publicly politically progressive, try to listen and understand the complexity of the community, and not just who responds to you in a way that you understand. It’s very easy to be, oh, we’re funding rural now, and here’s six groups we’re funding, and they’re all the progressive rural groups that raise their hand and know how to respond. That’s not particularly helpful to anyone. An authentic conversation, authentic engagement requires a receptivity on the funder side to actually act upon what people are telling you, and it requires you to, in some cases, gamble on organizations that don’t fit your profile of fundable groups.
Also, there are rural regions in the country that get absolutely more attention than others for all sorts of reasons. Appalachia has received a tremendous amount of attention in the last 10 or 20 years. Thirty or 40 years ago, the Delta was receiving a tremendous amount of attention. But there are rural regions in the Midwest and Northern New England and the Southwest that still don’t receive much attention.
And finally, if you’re working in say, rural Nebraska, it’s not going to be the same as your work in rural Virginia. You can’t just transpose rural work from one place to another. Without understanding the differences in these places, you can really go down the wrong road.
But it’s important to say that there are some great rural funders out there. Some that I would include on that list: the Blandin Foundation, Texoma Community Foundation, the Vermont Community Foundation, Inatai Foundation, Maine Health Access Foundation, Roundhouse Foundation, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, Truckee Tahoe Community Foundation and the Georgia Health Initiative.
What changes have you seen in philanthropy over the years?
I think there is a greater willingness to recognize and understand the contributions or the work of other funders. When I got into philanthropy, people were, to some degree, dismissive of what other funders were doing for reasons that were always a mystery to me. I think there’s much less of that today. I think that’s great.
In terms of negatives, I hear from nonprofits that there is still too much reporting and there are too many site visits. One of the worst things that has happened to philanthropy in the last 30 years is this explosion of staffing. I’m not going to name names, but there’s a very well-known funder who has had something like a 25% appreciation in their endowment size. They’ve gone from about 12 staff people to 38, I think, in the past 10 or 15 years. There’s another brand-new health conversion that has 50 staff people. They had 30 or 40 staff people, I think, before they were even doing any grantmaking. If you have all the staff people, they all need something to do, and that often makes more work for the nonprofits they’re funding.
I think the whole field of foundation-funded communications has grown too quickly, and foundations and their intermediaries spend extraordinary amounts of money and time branding and advertising what they do. They could use some of those resources to, for example, help people on a local or a statewide level advance their causes and help them better connect to government, better connect to national groups. There’s just so much time and money spent on things like a fancy report on a grant we gave out. What’s the value of that at the end of the day?
I also wish funders would make their language more rural-friendly. Philanthropy has gotten so jargony that even I don’t understand what the intent is sometimes. But rural communities don’t see themselves in RFPs. And some of those that use the most jargon are groups that are explicitly rural!
But I have never been one of these people who say that foundations or funders are evil people. Most everyone I know in philanthropy is someone of good will. But we actually know how to do better. Let’s start doing better.
Besides more and better funding, are there specific developments in rural philanthropy that you’d like to see?
We still need a lot of work on evaluation models in rural philanthropic efforts. Rural is different from other types of philanthropy, in terms of scale and other factors. There’s not a field of rural philanthropic evaluation. There are some great people who have worked on this over the years, but there’s not a menu of standardized practice to evaluate the impact of specific initiatives. That still seems years away.
What have you liked most about the work?
I have two answers to that question. I’ve gotten a real soul-sustaining thrill out of mentoring and assisting individuals, often who are younger in terms of their career in philanthropy, or didn’t know about rural. I’ve loved getting them excited about it, getting them invested in the idea so as a funder or an advocate, they could hit the ground running in rural. To turn people on and support them has really been my life’s work in many ways.
The other part that’s really been exciting is bringing people who have seemingly disparate interests together. Whether their issues aren’t the same, or they have political differences, or they don’t know anything about philanthropy or don’t want anything to do with it — trying to bring them together in ways to solve problems. That’s been very satisfying.
Here in North Carolina, for example, we’ve had a couple of big victories, expanding access to care, expanding healthcare services for older adults — bringing together people who didn’t necessarily have similar interests by creating a sense that this is important work.
The number of rural people, rural advocates that I have met who are doing phenomenal work and who I’ll probably know throughout my lifetime — it is mind-bending to see. I’m talking about tiny, little foundations, and program officers who don’t have many resources and are working virtually on their own. It has been great to be able to help them.
Do you recommend authors who you think do a good job conveying the rural experience?
I just read for the first time — and then reread — one of Larry Brown’s books. He started out as a Mississippi fireman in Oxford and then became a full-time writer. My wife’s got a rural background and I have about 400 years of rural in my [family] background, in Maine and Canada, and in my mind, he captures rural in novel and short story form in ways that are just exemplary. He passed away too early, about 10 years ago. He died at age 53. He probably still had another 10 books in him.
Editor’s Note: This article is republished with permission from Inside Philanthropy. It was first published here.
