Men control most of what goes on in philanthropy. Though women have long played a central role in the sector, and their wealth and influence are growing, men still make up the greater part of leading donors, and men still head most of the biggest grantmakers and their largest recipients. As is often pointed out, organizations led by and serving women receive a relative pittance next to their male-led counterparts. Organizations led by women of color get even less.
Given those facts, it might seem odd to pose the question suggested in the title of this piece: Where is philanthropy for men and boys? In one sense, it’s everywhere. But the fact that most of society’s resources lie in male hands hasn’t prevented many men and boys from struggling — and in some very specific ways.
In a widely discussed book, Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at Brookings, laid out some of the challenges boys and men face in the U.S. today. By a whole bunch of metrics, Reeves wrote, men aren’t doing as well as women. For instance, college enrollment among men is sagging heavily — at seven times the rate of women during the disruptive year of 2020. One in three American males with only a high school education are out of the labor force. And “deaths of despair” (suicide, drug overdoses, deaths related to alcoholism, etc.) affect men at three times the rate of women.
It’s clear that even as men continue to dominate society at the top, many others are falling through the cracks, with sad and often disturbing consequences. While it’s hard to know how the pieces all fit together, a toxic mix of economic instability, mental health issues and fear over shifting gender roles seems to be fueling frightening developments such as rising gun violence, far-right extremism and misogynist ideologies like the “incel” movement. That doesn’t mean we should be sympathizing with retrograde movements and behaviors, but there are underlying societal failures and vulnerabilities that are nudging some men down these paths.
Philanthropy, however, hasn’t been doing much to tackle these problems head-on. In the field of gender equity, the sparse resources that funders do make available mostly go toward organizations focused on people who aren’t cisgendered men, and rightly so. But given the intersectionality of many of these “men’s problems” with other challenges plaguing the U.S. — including challenges facing women and gender nonconforming people — it’s a lens that grantmakers ought to consider paying more attention to.
A few examples
Most philanthropic money goes toward organizations led by men, but very little of it benefits organizations specifically serving men. Some nonprofits working with struggling populations do end up serving mostly men — say, a charity for homeless veterans or a group serving certain segments of the incarcerated population. In those cases, it’s usually the issue (homelessness, incarceration) that takes precedence. There have been a few examples of grantmaking specifically targeting men’s problems, mostly supporting men and boys of color.
Over a decade ago, for example, top funders like Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Open Society Foundations teamed up with the City of New York on an effort called the Young Men’s Initiative, which dedicated over $100 million to tackling the disparities facing young Black and Latino men in the region. Other efforts followed, including the Executives’ Alliance to Expand Opportunities for Boys and Men of Color.
The Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative is another noteworthy example from the past decade, as are other regional efforts like California Funders of Boys and Men of Color, a collaborative that grew out of work by My Brother’s Keeper in the Golden State. Philanthropic gifts also make it to smaller-scale efforts, often local in nature. One example is MacKenzie Scott’s support for Kingmakers of Oakland, which tackles educational challenges facing Black boys in Oakland, California. Boosting entrepreneurship is also a recurrent feature of some philanthropic work to support men and boys of color, especially from corporate grantmakers.
Besides funding for men and boys of color — and that’s still quite rare— almost no philanthropy trains its sights on U.S. men in general. That is, inclusive of lower-income white men and boys, many of whom are unemployed, underemployed and clearly struggling. Why is that?
There are likely a few reasons at play. For one, it’s easy to understand why funders, particularly those with social justice missions, would be hesitant to focus on a demographic that wields considerable privilege and power. Doing so, whether in the service of helping those in need or preventing bad behavior, can come across as an effort to center those who are always centered. In other words, this is delicate territory, and nobody wants to screw it up and gain a reputation as the men’s rights funder.
And insofar as struggling men of any race live outside major metro areas, philanthropy’s underfunding of rural America also plays into it. Many of the issues impacting men and boys — shifting economies, isolation, drug and alcohol abuse — loom large in these areas.
This is speculation, but another factor could be the presumption among elite funder types — mostly men themselves — that men, and white men in particular, should be able to “help themselves” and that those who do not are personally deficient in some way. That notion, which is itself rooted in patriarchy and racism, may be one reason why organizations like A Call to Men, one of a handful of organizations focused on serving a broader swath of men, gets much of its funding from female donors and women’s philanthropies and not from big man types.
Avenues for funding
A Call to Men (which, incidentally, also got a gift from MacKenzie Scott) is focused on the narrative and messaging angle — that is, promoting a positive concept of manhood and masculinity that isn’t rooted in dominance over women and other men. Though the jury’s still out on how successful philanthropy-backed narrative change can be, it’s generating a lot of interest lately. This is one avenue for funders to consider, especially in an environment where many struggling young men take their cues from toxic political ideologies and the dubious, often misogynistic worldviews of media figures like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.
Economic interventions are another path forward. Reeves’ book and other analyses go into this in greater depth, but one of the big reasons for a “crisis of masculinity” in the U.S. today is the demise of the traditional unionized manufacturing job, along with long-term wage stagnation. For many older men, especially, male identity remains bound up in the concept of work, so it’s no surprise to see the long-term disempowerment of the American worker manifest as problems for men. Of course, the problem of crappy jobs and worker disempowerment also isn’t male-specific. Neither is the most far-reaching philanthropic solution: more support for the workers’ rights movement and pro-worker corporate regulation.
In another piece, I overviewed a few issue areas where philanthropy has struggled to move the needle. Several of them are relevant to boys’ and mens’ struggles. The opioid epidemic is one. Gun violence is another, which, along with violent crime in general, is often the purview of very young men. Finding ways to stem the tide of violence would be another way to help men who are suffering and lower the number of men succumbing to deaths of despair.
There are, in fact, some promising philanthropy-backed avenues to do just that, including community violence intervention — identifying and working directly with the specific young men in a community most likely to commit or become the victims of violent crime. More support for gun violence prevention could also benefit at-risk men by making it harder for them to commit suicide, which remains the top annual cause of gun death in the United States.
Not a zero-sum game
The larger point here is that pretty much all of the ways men are struggling in the U.S. today trace back to deeper structural issues, and not to the fact that women are doing better, on average, than they were a half-century ago. As ever, it’s primarily powerful men who preside over the economic and policy status quo that’s keeping other men down. Nevertheless, much of the rhetoric around the problems men and boys face continues to paint opportunity for men and women as a zero-sum game.
In light of everything women continue to face in the U.S., and particularly in light of the Dobbs decision, it makes sense that organizations attuned to issues of gender wouldn’t want to center cisgendered men. Nonprofit funding, at least as grantees usually experience it, truly is a zero-sum game, and should arguably flow to the most disempowered groups first. But treating “men” as an empowered monolith, who just need to suck it up, does a disservice to the portion of men who are clearly struggling, and to the families and communities they’re a part of.