Another Incisive Critique of Venture Philanthropy
This post is about today’s venture philanthropy, a world so foreign to most of us that I think we need a frame to help us get our bearings. Here with some familiar principles is the gifted preacher, and longtime pastor of New York City’s Riverside Church, the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin:
“The way we are cutting taxes for the wealthy and social programs for the poor, you’d think the greedy were needy and the needy were greedy.” (CREDO, p. 61)
“One of the attributes of power is that it gives those who have it the ability to define reality and the power to make others believe in their definition. Thus it is that private property in America has come to be considered all but sacred. Obviously this makes its redistribution difficult, even through taxation.” (CREDO, p. 60)
“Given human goodness, voluntary contributions are possible, but given human sinfulness, legislation is indispensable. Charity, yes always; but never as a substitute for justice.” (CREDO, p. 56)
These statements speak to the operations of today’s mega-foundations, the recipients of the fortunes of the super-rich. Donations to philanthropic foundations are tax-free, the counter-democratic idea being that the rich can define, with the assistance of the staff they employ, what’s good for the rest of us. These days mega-foundations are defining the “solutions” to some of the world’s greatest challenges—global agriculture, global health, and in our own country, public school reform—in ways that many of us do not understand. Foundations are defined as charities, but increasingly they influence the legislation that shapes our primary institutions and they drive the policies of international agencies like the World Health Organization. According to Lindsey McGoey’s new piece in the fall Jacobin magazine, The Philanthropy Hustle, they blur the lines between between charity and business. McGoey’s subject is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s biggest philanthropy, whose endowment is $42 billion, and which every year makes grants of $3 billion.
“(M)ore and more, corporate philanthropy is not about corporations giving money to charity,” explains McGoey. “Corporate philanthropy today is about private, tax-exempt donors such as the Gates Foundation giving their charity to corporations.” McGoey continues: “(I)t’s not true that foundations must direct grants only to charitable entities. They are free to offer donations to for-profits that fulfill the foundation’s charitable mission—an extremely permissive criterion that donors such as the Gateses are interpreting in novel and unprecedented ways.” Much of McGoey’s discussion is unrelated to education—the Gates’s Foundation’s gift of $11 million in 2014 to Mastercard to create a wireless payment system in Another Incisive Critique of Venture Philanthropy | janresseger:
