Philanthropy Research Workshop: Funding the Urban North: Philanthropy, Policy, and Racial Equity “After” Civil Rights

Claire Dunning, assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, will discuss how philanthropy shaped U.S. cities in the decades after the civil rights movement.

Abstract

Funding the Urban North explores how philanthropy shaped U.S. cities in the decades after the civil rights movement. Specifically, it follows the efforts of the relatively small Taconic Foundation and its decades-long quest to desegregate housing and promote racial equality. Beginning in the 1960s, Taconic underwrote Architectural Forum, funded litigation, and supported voucher experiments, making a permanent, if largely invisible, mark on how and where Americans lived. The book project spatially grounds histories of philanthropy “post” civil rights metropolis, analyzing how the movement of dollars shaped the built, social, and legal landscapes in the second half of the twentieth century. This presentation considers how Taconic’s founders, Stephen and Audrey Currier, used their wealth and their social standing to improve urban areas during an era of unrest, divestment, and suburbanization.

Bio

Claire Dunning is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studies the histories of poverty, inequality, governance, and nonprofit organizations in US cities. She is the author of Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State (University of Chicago Press, 2022) a book tracing the consequences of pursuing a public good through private organizations from the 1950s to the present. Her articles have also appeared in the Journal of Urban History and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, as well as the Washington Post. She holds a PhD in History from Harvard University and previously worked at a community foundation.