Friday Notes, May 31, 2024
Dear Friends —
I poured myself a Friday evening glass of wine, sat down with a printout of the new Social Sector Innovation Review article, “Where Strategic Philanthropy Went Wrong,” by Mark Kramer and Steve Phillips, and prepared to be enlightened. Where did strategic philanthropy — a practice I have been involved in as a grantmaker for nine years, and as a grantee for more than that — go wrong?
What I discovered is that we use the term “strategic philanthropy” in such a broad and inconsistent way as to render it useless. I also learned that we know strategic philanthropy went wrong because we still have big social problems. Sigh.
According to Kramer and Phillips, strategic philanthropy originated in the low-oxygen environment inhabited by Andrew Carnegie in the latter part of the 1800s, and was based on the following assumptions: “that the beneficiaries of philanthropic support are incapable of solving their own problems, that wealthy donors have the wisdom and incentive to solve society’s many challenges, and that the social sector is an effective alternative to government in building an equitable and sustainable society.”
Hmmm. That may have been Andrew Carnegie’s modus operandi but I know no self-identified strategic philanthropists today who would fit that bill. In contrast, Wikipedia says that strategic philanthropy is “a model that involves using a specific strategy to allocate funding to charitable work.” And the Philanthropy Initiative expands on this generic statement, in its 2021 “A Shared Definition of Strategic Philanthropy”:
[W]e define strategic philanthropy in a way that goes back decades. Paul Ylvisaker, a wise educator and foundation executive, defined philanthropy as finding systemic solutions to underlying causes of poverty and other social ills. As I shared with Denver, we continue to believe that philanthropy has a critical role to play as society’s risk capital. Being strategic starts with articulating a clear vision and goals. To move from goals to effective strategies, strategic funders listen to, learn from, and engage with people with all different perspectives on the issues the funder cares about, and then use this input to inform their philanthropic strategies. Those strategies, in the best of situations, are not prescriptive. They build on the expertise, wisdom, and knowledge of those who are experiencing the direct impact of systemic and structural barriers, community leaders, experts, and others. The best strategies may also incorporate new ideas, rooted in curiosity, a beginner’s mind, and the humility to know that the solutions to most issues are far from simple. We all know that if the answers were easy, we would have solved these problems long ago.
From my perspective, the term strategic philanthropy demands only a goal; a theory about how to achieve it, in whole or in part by moving money from a big bank account to smaller ones; and a means of measuring progress and adjusting in response. It contrasts with the kind of small-scale philanthropy that I do with my own modest charitable giving, and that I assume some very wealthy people do with theirs: allocate funds to a bunch of worthy but unconnected uses, based on impressions of need and potential impact (alongside a big helping of relationships). Plenty of warm glow and no expectation that anything will add up.
Kramer and Phillips seem to be having a genteel argument with foundations that like to fund and increase the reach of services through nonprofit channels (rather than government), and maybe with the philanthropies who act like a general contractors in big social engineering enterprises. Those folks are out there, for sure, but they are not most of the strategic philanthropists I’m in touch with, who recognize that problems are hard, funders have few of the answers, and nonprofits can complement but not substitute for a functional public sector.
K and P propose an alternative: “empowerment philanthropy.” In empowerment philanthropy, social ills are addressed by distributing resources directly to people via cash transfers; and improving the responsiveness of government, including through voter engagement (which, if the people with money are going to get a tax break, has to be nonpartisan).
That sounds like a strategy to me. It also sounds like some — not all — of what I’ve had the chance to recommend as grants so that people have a wider set of life chances and more influence over their futures when they are part of communities that have little economic or political power. Many grantmakers who practice strategic philanthropy promote the use of cash transfers, directly or through research projects, while at the same time supporting collective solution-finding. And in the U.S., many encourage voting through education, often in concert with other work to strengthen public policy and help make government dollars serve the right communities.
I’m glad Kramer and Phillips put their strategic thinking out there for us all to learn from. I’m sorry they thought they needed to create a strawman to burn down.
When you spend enough — or possibly too much — time around people who are wrestling with the implications of generative artificial intelligence and robotics, you end up getting pulled into a lot of conversations about what it is to be human. It’s definitely not the ability to read and write; we’ve already seen that, on average, even the most basic version of Chat GPT is better than most of us are at absorbing and communicating ideas in a clear and logical way. It’s not even the ability to connect disparate ideas and create new-ish ones. Claude and several of the other large language models are uncannily good at that. Generative AI also is rapidly overtaking us in the domains of conversation, illustration, and maybe even musical composition when the prompts are right.
Then there are the robots. What generative AI is doing to separate our brains from our humanity, robotics is doing for our bodies. There are the robot warehouse workers (thanks, Amazon), and now the robot massage therapist. And years before these inventions, men with more cash than dates could order up Harmony the Sex Robot.
So what is left for people (and other living beings) to uniquely do? The only thing that seems out of bounds for machines is the one thing we ourselves seem to be getting worse at: feeling and expressing love.
While it’s true that in words and movement machines can look like they are loving, we all know they’re just playing a part. People, on the other hand, experience and share love — romantic, parental, brotherly — in ways that express a very human essence: a profound set of emotions that connects soul-to-soul.
So if this is even a little bit true, it makes me wonder if we need to prepare for the future by amping up this comparative advantage over the fast-improving machines. Could we get better at being loving beings? And what might that mean for how we spend our time and money, raise our children, and organize our work lives? I’m going to give that some thought this evening (possibly alongside that glass of wine).
Highly recommended podcast: “Towers of Silence.” It’s a trip to another culture, combined with an amazing tale of the interconnectedness of people and nature. Spoiler: disappearing vultures are involved.
Have a good weekend,
-Ruth