I read with earnest the article below that appeared in today’s Toronto Star (a sort of prelude to an upcomimg book about today’s nonprofit world.) The author muses about the legacy we need to leave - as normal every-day individuals - in light of the recent “epic”-donations from huge, famous, mega-business gods and celebrities. An imprint with both our finances and the involvement of our time. His desperation is felt throughout the article especially as he walks through a number of interviews with charity fundraisers. A desperation haunted by the striking need of humankind. His thinking is that our generation (40-somethings) are giving more, volunteering less and that the coming generation will do less of both.
What do you think? And what do your donors think? I spoke to a donor the other day that remarked how “sorry” she felt because she could only give $75. “I’m no Gates”, she said.
The article is thoughtful, powerful, extremely well researched and factual, and worth the long read. It’ll stir debate and yet his words are an honest look…an outsiders look…into our business.
Here is the Toronto Star article in it’s entirely:
Shaking charity’s foundations — Nov. 19, 2006.
Several years ago I began to notice the word “philanthropist” in obituaries, which, at age 57 (and a half), I now read. I observed that many of the deceased - no matter their means, age or sex - had been rigorously engaged in benevolent acts.
I saw, too, in the news pages, that the rich and famous, from Bill Gates to Brad Pitt to Oprah Winfrey, were toiling cheerfully on the world stage for their chosen causes: treating AIDS in Africa, fighting child poverty, helping victims of tidal waves and hurricanes…
I began clipping articles, making inquiries, and searching the literature. The file grew. My initial interest was personal, fuelled by the death of my mother and our large family’s debates about ways to honour her memory. But as I learned more, I began to think about legacy, what we leave behind, the mark we make.
What I kept seeing was individual generosity on a grand, even epic, scale. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is surely the most powerful charitable foundation the world has ever seen. They had a $29 billion (U.S.) war chest (and that was before Warren Buffett tossed in $37.4 billion) and decided, for one thing, to battle malaria in the developing world. The annual budget of the World Health Organization, at $1.65 billion, looks puny by comparison.
It seemed there was a charity Olympics under way, and the numbers were dizzying. Almost every week came news of another windfall. This wasn’t about one person writing a fat cheque and being done with it. The donors’ hands-on involvement, their knowledge and focus, their travels to far-flung places to observe firsthand how their largesse was making a difference - this zealousness seemed new and unprecedented.
Some “social entrepreneurs” were literally giving of themselves. Zell Kravinsky, for example, is an American math whiz and English professor who amassed a $45-million real estate fortune expressly to give it to charity. He then donated one of his kidneys to a stranger.
When Steve Nash, the Canadian basketballer and the NBA’s Most Valuable Player the past two years, mentioned in an interview several months ago that his aim upon retirement was to become a philanthropist, he was simply joining “the new philanthropists” in this, “the golden age of philanthropy,” as some observers are calling both. Even the Nobel Peace Prize of 2006 went to a philanthropist: Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, launched the revolutionary idea three decades ago of the Grameen Bank - giving micro-credit loans to destitute people.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Ben Goldhirsch, heir to his father’s magazine fortune, has just launched Good, a magazine aimed at hip, young philanthropists. “Good is getting really sexy,” its publisher declares.
And Madonna, of course, has stirred this whole pot with her decision to adopt a child from Malawi. Is this, as some contend, a grab at publicity or, as she claims, an act of charity?
In a special report on philanthropy in 2004, The Economist cited two major developments: one, the soaring number of philanthropic foundations (in the U.S., the number has gone from 22,000 in the 1980s to 76,000 today); two, the intergenerational transfer of wealth - unprecedented in human history - now under way. In the U.S. between 1998 and 2052, up to $136 trillion will change hands, and every charity in the world would love a slice of that pie (thus the rise of “charity brokers,” who will marry you with the cause that suits you best).
My first response to the generosity of Gates, Buffett et al. was pure admiration. I had long lamented the cutting of social programs by governments more concerned with balancing books than the welfare of its citizens. I wondered if some law of human physics might explain this new wave of sharing. As the rich get richer and the poor poorer, maybe something in human nature kicks in to try to redress the balance.
But as I continued over the years to clip and read and ponder, doubts formed. All those photographs of Sting and Bob Geldof smiling with prime ministers and presidents began to irritate. Endless promises were made to address poverty (the House of Commons passed a unanimous resolution in 1989 to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000; donor countries have repeatedly promised - most recently with “the Monterrey Consensus” of 2002 - to give 0.7 per cent of their gross national product to development assistance).
But the promises are not being kept, and despite the influx of high-profile philanthropy, little has changed. All this glitter, all this goodwill - the warm, fuzzy feeling that a new golden age of philanthropy was delivering social justice - began to feel like an illusion.
Benevolence is as old as humankind - think of the Good Samaritan in the Bible, the notion of obligatory giving, or zakah, as one of the five pillars of Islam, and the tzedakah, or call to charity, from Judaism. The ancient Greeks had their philanthropia, the Romans their panem et circenses (bread and circus programs for the poor), the early Christians preached agape (do unto others).
Yet the surge in high-profile philanthropy is not bringing joy to many Canadian fundraisers. One I talked to warned of a reckoning to come, one that front-page largesse will not assuage. “My generation,” said my forty-something source, “is volunteering less and giving more. The next generation is doing neither. We have lost that ethic of giving. We no longer have a sense of the common project.”
The first lecture in the June Callwood Professorship in Social Justice at the University of Toronto was delivered last fall by Callwood herself, the face of altruism in Canada. Statistics Canada, she said, had in 2000 calculated the annual worth of human kindness in this country to be $17 billion. In other words, if all the pin-stripers at hospitals and Meals on Wheels drivers and door-to-door canvassers were paid for their volunteer labour, that would be the tab.
But then came this: Callwood said that Michael Hall, vice-president of research for Imagine Canada (formerly the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy), was shocked by a study in 2000 that documented a 31 per cent drop in volunteerism during the previous three years and the loss of a million volunteers. Hall, she said, doesn’t know why, but he is certain “there is something going on.”
I asked Hall about the drop. More recent studies make it difficult to gauge whether volunteerism is now up or down in Canada, but he’s still mystified by the perilous decline in volunteers and wonders if time pressures on families are to blame. What is clear is that volunteers are the heart and soul of Canada’s non-profit organizations. For them, our time is worth more than our money.
Mike Meadows, director of resource development with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, told me that smaller charities - without websites and professional fundraisers - are fighting for their lives. “It’s an enormous concern,” he says. “The question is how to level the playing field.”
Two recent studies by Imagine Canada support his claim. A national survey in 2004 found that 21 per cent of donors account for 82 per cent of donations.
Another survey, in 2003, revealed that the 1 per cent of charities and non-profit organizations with revenues of $10 million or more was grabbing 60 per cent of available donation dollars. Meanwhile, the 42 per cent of organizations with revenues under $30,000 got just 1 per cent.
So charitable donation totals, thanks to the epic largesse of Bill Gates and his ilk, stand at record highs, but smaller charities aren’t seeing a benefit. The world now counts 587 billionaires with a combined wealth of $1.9 trillion. Each, no doubt, with his or her own pet charities. Too bad if yours isn’t on that list.
Wealthy donors are inevitably drawn to children’s hospitals, art galleries, and universities, not the local food bank. They prefer to donate to places where giving big can clothe your family’s name in glory. I understand the impulse: Maybe, had we deep pockets, the Scanlan clan would have created a hospital wing in my mother’s name, not a nursing scholarship at the University of Toronto.
For decades, all in the name of fighting debt and deficit, the Canadian government and many others have cut back on their social-welfare obligations - health care, post-secondary education, legal aid, the arts… The list is long and growing.
Ideology drives some of these cuts, but maybe they seem more tolerable to the cutters when private money appears to be filling the void. I remember reading about former prime minister Paul Martin responding late in 2005 to a question from a high school student in Kitchener on the dearth of women in politics.
“I’m not sure that Parliament is all that functional a place,” he said, before praising the good work that women can accomplish in non-governmental organizations.
That year, former U.S. president Bill Clinton was making much the same point about the frustrations and hassles of political office, and how comparatively easy and simple it was to use his name to raise $2 billion for the AIDS effort.
In Western society, we hold dear an individual’s right to create wealth. Sharing that wealth is the tricky part. Where does that right end and responsibility begin? Can the private interest and the public interest both be served? This is a complex issue, with hard choices: We can tax the rich and let elected officials decide how that money should help the dispossessed; or we can keep taxes to a minimum and let the economy roll on unfettered in hopes that some tycoons, sooner or later, will “give back.”
Political activism, the current argument goes, might lead to change, but the process is ponderous and complicated. Individual social activism, on the other hand, answers an immediate need with immediate benefits. If you want to effect change, don’t run for office - form a foundation for your favourite cause and run it as you see fit.
At the moment, it seems, we love philanthropists and we loathe politicians. Some wonder if we are returning to the days of the Medicis in medieval times, when the rich acted as patrons to science and art. Are the new philanthropists making a bid for power and immortality? Is it simply a wise use of wealth for the greater good?
Or is grand generosity also a form of self-interest, a way of maintaining the status quo?
Andrew Carnegie was, arguably, the greatest philanthropist who ever lived. In his lifetime (1835-1918), he gave away $350 million; with inflation, that sum today would be worth about $588 million, greater even than the $550 million later given away by Rockefeller.
Gates has upped the ante yet again, but Carnegie was the one who put this ball in motion and set out the obligation of the rich to share. As he once famously said, “He who dies rich, dies disgraced.”
But there is evidence from the robber baron literature of the early 20th century that fear of social unrest contributed mightily to the philanthropy of Carnegie and his like.
Carnegie may well have had it right when he wrote in his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” “The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth…” It’s what followed in that sentence that seems so naive: “so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.”
Carnegie believed the gap between rich and poor was regrettable but unavoidable. Philanthropy, he insisted, would keep the system from unravelling.
Between 1883 and 1929, he built 660 libraries in Scotland, England and Ireland; 1,689 in the United States, and 156 in Canada. Carnegie’s name rarely appeared on the building, but his motto - “Let there be light” - was inscribed over each library’s entrance.
The Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh houses a photographic portrait of its founder. He’s wearing a heavy cloth suit and leaning over a studded leather chair, his left hand clasped lightly over his right. His nose is broad, his look thoughtful, his cheeks are Santa Clausian. I see kindness in those eyes.
When I think of philanthropy, I think first and always of Carnegie. We all know his name and enduring legacy, but most of us know nothing of the Homestead Strike of 1892. This was the defining moment in Carnegie’s life. “Nothing,” he would write, “in all my life, before or since, wounded me so deeply.”
Homestead was a steel town on the banks of the Monongahela River, 11 kilometres east of Pittsburgh. The town was part of Carnegie’s domain. The richest man in the world, a steel baron who fancied himself a liberal, he had voiced sympathies for the workingman.
But when the contract of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers expired, the namesake and owner of the Carnegie Steel Company left for Scotland, leaving negotiations in the hands of his partner, one Henry Clay Frick. Frick’s stone mansion in New York City is now home to works by Rembrandt and Gainsborough, Whistler and Turner, and he is remembered as an art patron and philanthropist. His role at the Homestead plant is less well known.
Carnegie’s instruction to Frick was to shut down the plant and wait for the union to cave in. Later, writing the words he would always regret, Carnegie told Frick, “We… approve of anything you do. We are with you to the end.”
The bloody end, as it turned out.
Notoriously anti-union and ruthless by reputation, Frick hired a small army of thugs - 300 Pinkerton agents, all of them toting Winchester rifles. On July 5 at 4 a.m., thousands of workers, their wives, their children and sympathizers confronted the guards. A14-hour gun battle ensued, one that left a dozen dead and many more wounded.
Near the end of his life, Carnegie sent a message to Frick urging a reconciliation, for their once fabled partnership had dissolved. Frick’s reply fell into legend: “Tell him I’ll see him in hell, where we both are going.”
Until she retired, Sue Cox ran the Toronto Food Bank for 10 years. I asked her recently what she was seeing in the world of doing good.
“Philanthropy,” she told me, “is less… philanthropic.”
What she saw, increasingly, were businesses giving with an eye to their public image and profile. In the past, says Cox, companies simply signed a cheque and got the tax donation. Now, “the giving is all tied in with marketing strategy.”
Samantha King makes much the same point in her new book, Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy. An associate professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies at Queen’s University, she lived in the United States in the mid-1990s and was troubled to see “the increasing popularity of shopping as a way to support philanthropic causes.” A car or kitchen appliance would be sold with the promise that a portion of proceeds would go to, say, breast-cancer research.
“At the same time,” King says, “there was a rolling back of state responsibility for welfare, and I thought those two things were related.”
Her book examines the issues that arise when corporations, cancer and marketing intertwine. One is that a low ceiling is often put on such campaigns, which can end up being more about profit-making than fund-raising. King also worries that glossy campaigns celebrate the so-called good news of the fight against cancer, not a dark and unrelenting truth.
“Death,” she says, “does not sell. These campaigns shift how we think about breast cancer. There’s no recognition that women are still dying, horribly, of breast cancer.”
The Oct. 9 issue of The New Yorker contained GAP ads that linked buying products with the fight against AIDS in Africa. One line leaps out: “Can an individual change the world? Yes you can.”
I’m not sure what happened to collective action against human misery, but the button being pushed here is one-person, one-purchase philanthropy.
Jeffrey Brison - a professor of history at Queen’s University and the author of Rockefeller, Carnegie, & Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts & Letters in Canada - finds striking similarities between the new golden age of philanthropy and the one that preceded it.
“What Carnegie and Rockefeller tried to do,” he tells me, “is convert financial capital into cultural power. This was the age of trust busting, and these men were personally unpopular. But the foundations they created funded research into social problems. That research sowed hope and raised awareness.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal followed, as the state got involved in social welfare.
The problem today, as Brison sees it, is that when the state does the right good thing - builds a library, say - the act is either invisible or taken for granted. Private philanthropy, on the other hand, is highly visible, and we give it more weight than it warrants. The state has more clout, the philanthropist gets more credit.
But, says Brison, “It’s a lousy system. And it’s inefficient. People assume that because the rich are good at making money, they’re good at solving the world’s problems. It’s a spurious assumption.”
Michael Hall at Imagine Canada agrees. “Philanthropy is an important part of the human spirit,” he says. “But philanthropy is not a panacea. There are many things it can’t address.”
The last word goes to Stephen Lewis. The United Nations special envoy for HIV and AIDS was in Berlin the second week of October for a UNICEF conference, and though the clock in his hotel room edged close to midnight, he was still on fire as he spoke on the telephone about Third World poverty and the failure of rich governments to end it.
“It’s all a scramble,” he said. “And it shouldn’t be. It seems like Africa is always the target, always betrayed. It’s as if a whole continent is expendable.”
If the leaders of the G8 countries were to make good on their promises to devote 0.7 per cent of their gross national product to fighting world poverty, the magic figure of $200 billion could be raised and the world’s poor would indeed have the shelter, food and water they need. New trade deals and debt forgiveness, also promised, could wrest poor nations from poverty’s grip.
But, as Lewis puts it, “it’s one sham meeting after another. I can’t stand it.”
Lewis is full of admiration for Gates, Buffett and all the Hollywood stars and starlets who lend their names and faces to good works.
“But I know it’s not the answer,” he says. “The celebrities are moving in to fill the gap left by government.”
For Lewis, the answer to world poverty is government action, and he offers a little math as proof. Gates, the richest man in the world, can offer only 2 1/2 per cent of what’s required each year to end global poverty.
Lewis has travelled in Africa with Gates, and he has seen firsthand his passion and thirst for knowledge. “I’m very glad,” says Lewis, “he’s on our side,” but adds that it’s naive to think that a few deep pockets will break the back of global poverty.
“Poverty,” says Lewis, “bedevils everything. It’s at the root of hunger and disease and sexual violence and conflict as people squabble over resources. It is possible to overcome poverty, but it will never happen without a grand coalition of governments, non-governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and devoted community activists in country after country.
“Above all, the world needs political will. The poor have been waiting - and dying - for an eternity.”
Lawrence Scanlan, an author and journalist in Kingston, Ont., is writing a book on the changing face of philanthropy.
Tags: General Fundraising, Large Gift Donors, Nonprofit, Trends
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