My Brother's Keeper: what exactly can Barack Obama hope to achieve?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/28/my-brothers-keeper-barack-obama

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Last month, Barack Obama told Congress he had a pen and he had a phone, and if it didn’t work with him to get things done, he’d use both to accomplish things on his own.

On Thursday, the president unveiled one of the first of these initiatives, a programme called “My Brother’s Keeper”. It’s an effort to work with not-for-profits and the private sector, in order to “build ladders of opportunity for boys and young men of colour”.

Ten major foundations (and 20 smaller contributors), the White House’s announcement says, have signed up to support the initiative and will fund $200m of programmes over the next five years. It’s a commendable idea – but how significant is it?

The money

The first question is whether $200m is actually all that much to spend on such a broad initiative, trying to tackle so broad a societal problem. Young black men, for example, have the highest incarceration rates in the country, the lowest level of educational attainment and higher unemployment than other demographic groups.

In this context, $200m is chickenfeed: over five years, that’s $40m a year. If the My Brother’s Keeper money was applied only to the around eight million black men and boys under 25 in the country – in reality the programme will seek to help Asians and Hispanics too – that would amount to about $5 per person per year.

There are also significant question marks as to whether there is even $200m available: the widely-reported figure is a goal, not a firm funding commitment.

The 10 foundations that have made a firm commitment have pledged far less than $200m, each putting in $750,000, for a total of $7.5m. While the foundations say they will commit more money later, at the point of the announcement there’s not that much cash and most of it is intended to be used for scoping out out the next stages for the initiative’s plans and infrastructure.

The next question mark hangs over how much of this $200m will be newly-pledged money. Most of the foundations that have subscribed to Obama’s initiative already spend in this area, and had already planned to spend more in the future.

As an example, The Atlantic Philanthropies – one of the major partners – is a time-limited foundation which focuses its grant-making on addressing racial disparities in American life. It has $70m to invest before such operations cease in 2016. Some of this will now go through the president’s initiative – but it would have been spent on similar goals in any case.

It should be noted that those involved in the plan don’t want $200m to be the limit; they hope the initiative will serve as leverage to get more funds from other foundations or private companies, or that it will shake loose public money to further boost the life chances of young black men.

The White House did not respond to a query asking about the funding plans for the program.

The plan

While it’s clear that $200m alone, if found, is not going to fix the life chances of every targeted young man, it’s clearly enough money to potentially make a big difference to some – if it’s spent right, and targets the right priorities.

Here again there are questions to ask. Those priorities have not been decided. The foundations, according to a staffer at one, are going to hammer it all out over the next 90 days, deciding what to fund, what the priorities are and how the system will work.

The announcement

Therein lies the question: what did Obama actually announce yesterday?

As of yet, there’s no new plan or approach for how to improve the life chances of the young men the president wants to help. Only around $7.5m of new money has been committed, albeit with aspirations for a good deal more – though even that would still not be much compared with the scale of the problems the initiative is aiming to tackle.

If Obama is trying to prove just how much he can get done with Congress, the most honest answer might not be a happy one: not a lot.