Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties

Philanthropy takes many forms these days, from the change jars located at the checkout at local hardware store, to the full color brochure appearing in your mail box, to a text message on your cell phone to prompt a gift. Volunteering, making in kind gifts, and check writing are the means through which time, treasure and talent are devoted to many charitable purposes. But now all the new digital forms of social media are creating many more avenues to promote giving. These new tools are multiplying so fast, it is hard to keep up with what is the most recent “new new” thing. Still, looking at all these changes, the one that stands out as a genuine watershed moment predates cell phones, Twitter, and all the rest:  the short hand I use for this is what I call the advent of the “philanthropy for what” question. 

Beginning in the early 19th century, the conventional wisdom was that charity’s purpose was to alleviate symptoms of poverty, making life, at least in the shortest of terms, less cruel and punishing. Two titans of commerce, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, changed all that by establishing private foundations, in 1911 and 1913 respectively, which pursued charitable goals based on intellectual principles of self-described “scientific philanthropy”. Accustomed to doing big things in the private sector, the two men advanced a practice of philanthropy that challenged giving as primarily a strategy of providing alms to the poor. The scale of their philanthropic ambition was matched by the pile of money each was prepared to devote to their vision. Their approach was to focus private giving for public purposes in addressing the root causes of poverty.

Both men commonly shared a dark reputation associated with the ruthlessness with which they pursued their for-profit endeavors. So this recast wasn’t necessarily all about a rebirth of moral purpose.  Their view was that charity may help ameliorate conditions of poverty, but it also discouraged poor people from engaging in the kind of self-help that would help them transcend their circumstance. Their vision of the role of philanthropy was transformational. With their foundations they sought to remove barriers they surmised were impediments to an individual’s access to opportunity, beginning first within the realm of education, and then later, onward to issues of public health.

While this approach moved the ball down the field and away from the prior circumstance of philanthropy as largely a passive act, this new form of philanthropy stopped short of challenging the social order which served to create and sustain many social inequities. Neither Rockefeller nor Carnegie sought to unravel with philanthropy the conventions of class, race, and gender that were foundational to a system of free enterprise that was an engine of both great wealth as well as grinding poverty. Said Carnegie, “It is criminal to waste our energies in endeavoring to uproot, when all we can profitably or possibly accomplish is to bend the universal tree of humanity a little in the direction most favorable to the production of good fruit under existing circumstances.” 

This notion of philanthropy “going this far… but no further” in advancing social change has been a tension within philanthropy’s purpose for a long time. Because philanthropy is, in effect, social venture capital, it is an important resource absent many of the encumbrances associated with a government bureaucracy. Philanthropy can be entrepreneurial in spirit, posses the flexibility to course correct for changing circumstances, and seek creative solutions on comparatively nimble feet.  Its capacity to leverage the potential for social and economic change has redemptive power when focused upon improving the quality of American life for a wide swath of the poor and disenfranchised. Someone once described this capacity as “America’s passing gear”, a rather apt description in the context of building momentum quickly when other ingredients are present that support social progress. 

If  American “philanthropy 1.0” is philanthropy as charity, then “philanthropy 2.0” was, as one Foundation leader described, the era of building the infrastructure for the charitable sector that exists today. She ventures further that “philanthropy 3.0” is all about philanthropy emerging as “interdisciplinary, problem-focused” and concerned with ”seeking innovation, influence and impact.”  As we ponder the “philanthropy for what” question today, the reply might well be leadership on behalf of promoting solutions to urgent problems in today’s society that produces change on a systemic scale.  On that measure, Carnegie and Rockefeller may be judged as having been only right by about half.    

The views expressed in this blog are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Community Foundation.