Missing System Failures for the Transformative Power of a Mani-Pedi

• In Event: 2347 - The Practice of Social Justice

Abstract

Decades into an aggressive movement to privatize public goods and services, philanthropy is under a microscope. U.S. policy retrenchment has placed significant burden on the private sector to fund basic social services through philanthropic foundations. As many theorists would have predicted, those goods and services appropriately identified as public goods that required the equalizing constraints of delivery through public bureaucracies run into trouble when they must be provided through private philanthropy. Social services funded through private mechanisms, without public oversight and policy driven structures, will likely reflect the system’s inequities. Recent critiques point to what is lost in the retreat to private provision of public goods.

This paper enters the conversation at the level of communities and local philanthropies that are engaging with public and private entities in collaborative impact approaches to social change. I explore the potential role for engaged applied Sociology in helping diverse publics understand their own communities’ needs, identify causal mechanisms at work, and support a move away from local elites simply doing what they think is right (or what makes them feel good) and toward informed decision-making to address root causes of problematic social dynamics. Engaged applied sociology can provide community decision makers with current research and best practices and can help communities understand the implications of privatization and the places where they may need to reconsider public provision to ensure that needs are met and broad access to opportunity is a reality. This paper suggests that robust public conversation on appropriate roles for markets, public structures, and philanthropy is essential both to democracy and to building resilient communities and an economy that delivers more broadly shared prosperity.

Author

• Melissa S. Fry, Indiana University Southeast