After graduating from law school, Greg Propper ran a nonprofit called Be the Change, helping pass the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act during the early days of the Obama administration aimed at improving problem-solving infrastructure in low-income communities. He helped set up the organization’s West Coast office, working with people in the entertainment and creative communities. Propper started to notice that these figures had a real desire to direct money toward causes to create change but didn’t feel like they were making a real impact.
Today, Greg Propper serves as president of Propper Daley, a leading social impact agency headquartered in Los Angeles founded in 2012. The firm’s clients include John Legend and Kerry Washington, major corporations like Disney and Activision and leading nonprofits like the Clinton Foundation.
“I kept getting feedback that people were giving a little bit of money here, and time there, but not necessarily feeling like they were moving the needle on anything,” Propper told me as he started describing his early days bootstrapping his agency, adding, “Part of the challenge at the time, though I think this has changed… is that things were very siloed. You were picking a lever of change and having some impact, but it was narrower than it should have been. So how do you take a holistic and integrated approach?”
Propper Daley works with individual philanthropists, brands, and organizations wanting to create measurable and outcome-oriented social impact in the world. A third of its clients are nonprofits and foundations interested in culture change work. They’ve worked with organizations including Everytown for Gun Safety, Girl Scouts and the Grammy Museum. The next third are brands like Activision and Best Buy. And the final third are celebrity philanthropists like Bradley Cooper, John Legend and Kerry Washington.
“Our clients are somewhat self-selecting and very thoughtful about wanting to create longer-term systems change work. We’ve worked with John for about seven or eight years,” Propper tells me.
A New Era of Celebrity Philanthropy and Activism
While celebrity philanthropy is sometimes perceived as posturing, there’s a long history of entertainers who are quite dedicated to progressive causes. Think of the prominent role that some Hollywood writers played in resisting McCarthyism in the 1950s; stars like Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty lending support to the activist movements in the 1960s and 1970s; or television producer Norman Lear founding People for the American Way in 1981 to oppose the Christian right.
As for the next generation of celebrity activists and givers, Propper says that these days, Hollywood’s elite are thinking about how to leverage their platforms and their capital beyond things like events, fundraising and even social media.
The firms’ clients’ work is backed by the firm’s three-pronged theory of change, rooted in the notion that all social issues go through three phases: awareness, attitude shift and then the elusive behavior shift. Propper believes that brands and organizations too often focus only on the awareness component.
The 2020 election, unsurprisingly, is something Propper says has the attention of many of his clients, but even this work runs the gamut. Some clients are more interested in traditional voter education work, while others are involved in stamping out voter suppression. Propper notices a particular interest in investing in activist organizations and grassroots leaders on the ground. And rather than funders telling leaders on the ground what the problems are, they instead trust in leaders to propose their own solutions and do that work.
“Kerry and John are awesome,” Propper says about two of his most prominent clients, who have nearly 20 million followers combined on Twitter. One of them, Kerry Washington, star of such hits as ABC’s “Scandal,” has long been interested in grassroots power building in marginalized communities.
Washington co-chairs the newly minted Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, which directly supports grassroots leaders in their efforts to build an anti-racist America and amplify the voices of Black luminaries across the country. She also co-chairs Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote campaign and is the founder of Influence Change 2020, an initiative that partners with nonprofit organizations to increase voter turnout, as well.
One intriguing thing about Influence Change is its use of data-driven analytics to activate audiences for social change. “The aim is to help other influencers more deeply understand their social media following and figure out what kind of messaging is more effective to turn out followers,” Propper explains, echoing Propper Daley’s focus not just on awareness, but on cultivating actual attitude and behavioral shifts.
Looking forward to 2021, Washington is also launching a fund in partnership with the Movement Voter Project (MVP) to back a cohort of women of color-led organizations engaged in power-building across the country.
“The day after Trump was elected, she went on to social media and saw ‘Olivia Pope save us,’” referencing Washington’s powerful political fixer character in Scandal. “But Kerry knows that each of us is Olivia Pope. We all have power,” Propper says.
Criminal Justice, Mental Health and Other Interests, Too
On the heels of reading Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” 11-time Grammy Award winner John Legend showed an interest in education reform and then the school-to-prison pipeline. Today, Legend is one of the most prominent celebrity advocates for racial justice and criminal justice reform. He launched the Show Me Campaign, which seeks to give every child access to education, and #FREEAMERICA, a program designed to change national conversations and policies around the criminal justice system.
In Florida, Legend helped raise millions to restore the voting rights of incarcerated citizens, joining other high-profile names like LeBron James and Michael Jordan. During the pandemic, Propper says Legend has been particularly interested in trying to reimagine systems. The musician is a supporter of FUSE Corps, which works with cities and counties on a range of issues, including economic and workforce development, healthcare, public safety, climate change and education.
Propper also sees some of his clients digging into mental health more than in the past, focusing not just on mental health, but also mental wellness. In addition, celebrities have been a lot more open about their own experiences and battles with mental illness. Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation supports the mental health of young people. And Bradley Cooper, who lost his own father to lung cancer, is interested in psychosocial care for low-income cancer patients.
Corporate client Viacom also plans to release a guide for content creators and storytellers about how to better discuss mental health and wellness. “I think it’s going to be pretty revolutionary,” Propper tells me.
“Unreasonable Conversation” and the Power of Collective Action
Propper is excited by celebrity philanthropists and activists coming together around collective impact and aligned action. Historically in this space, he notes that funding has been the prime driver of acting collectively. But he believes celebrities themselves can be an incentive for a fragmented field to work together more and agree on a common set of goals.
He notes the power and success of, say, Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), a charitable program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation launched by Katie Couric and other women. Central to the program is a telethon that was first televised by the four major broadcast networks back in 2008. SU2C has since raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for translational cancer research through online and televised efforts.
As a compelling example, Propper Daley runs an annual event called A Day of Unreasonable Conversation, a gathering of leading thinkers and frontline activists with top TV writers, showrunners and producers to challenge how they conceptualize future narratives and storylines. In 2019, speakers included Stacey Abrams, who spoke about voting rights, and Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, who spoke about modern segregation. “We gather about 500 to 550 TV writers, producers and executives to talk about greatest challenges and opportunities on the calendar and how critical current events can shape and inform more nuanced storytelling,” Propper says.
