Philanthropy as a Field of Practice

The Ford Foundation in studying the emerging field of corporate social responsibility suggested it was a "field of practice," evolving out of isolated and amorphous efforts. I would like to say the same about the field we call "giving" or philanthropy, or philanthropic consulting. First, let me adapt Ford Foundation's definition of a field of practice, then glance at the current amorphous state of the giving trades, and then suggest how we might evolve towards a true and effective field of practice.

Field of Practice Defined

1. Common Focus: Those engaged in the field focus on the same core issues, or a family of closely related issues.
2. Community of Practice: Those engaged in the field use similar methods to address the core issues, though there is considerable variability as to emphasis. Those involved respect on another, see the world through one another's eyes, and share overarching norms, values, and vision. A common vocabulary is recognized and understood by all. A common bibliography or core curriculum is understood by all to be "what everyone should know." Best practices and professional standards are generally agreed upon and a standard setting body, with some enforcement powers, may govern the evolving code of conduct.
3. Collegiality: Those engaged see other practitioner's as laborers in the same vineyard. They see value in sharing ideas, lore, and "what works." Communication mechanisms are in place that help those engaged in the field stay in touch with one another and with the "leading edge" work in their field.

Current Situation in Philanthropy

O.K., where are we now in philanthropy?

A field of practice? "Not hardly," as they say in Vermont. We are a crazy quilt of mis-matched pieces, sewn here or there together at the edges, but generally not stitched together at all. Moreover we do not share common norms, a common curriculum, common communications channels, a common professional organization, or a common standards setting body. So what? We will discuss that, but for now, would you agree that sadly enough what we really lack is respect for one another's efforts, mutual understanding, and a sense of common purpose? Who "we"?

"We" in the Field of Giving

These are the laborers, or trades you find, at the Tower of Babel we call "giving" today, or planned giving, or philanthropy. You can add subdivisions or other categories, but grant, if you can the main point that these groups do not speak the same language, worship the same gods, or sing the same campfire songs. They are largely mutually non-comprehending. Tribes, they are, and tribes tend to tell stories of scalpings, war parties, and conquerors. We all are not one "we." We are, each of us, generally members of one of the tribes below. A big "we" is what I am advocating, like the Fool that I am often, quite rightly recognized as being.

1. Donor groups:  like Regional Association of Grant-makers, or Council on Foundations, or Regional Councils, or women's philanthropy networks, or Philanthropy Round Table, or many others. Note, please, that these groups make it a major point to meet in secret, by invitation only and that members of the some of the other groups below are not only uninvited by disinvited, since they are predators. (Get it? The point: We are tribes telling stories of atrocities and huddling around our campfires singing songs of us versus them. Sad, very sad, and also highly dysfunctional.)
2. Financial Advisors: We (who we?), I repeat, "we" can say that financial advisors are the predators who must be kept at bay. Or we can say they are a necessary evil in the philanthropic process, or we can say that without them ideals are ineffectual and vision is blind.   Tax and Legal: These brutal savages are acknowledged, not only by themselves, but even by donors, as a necessary if crude and ignoble trade. You can't get giving done without a JD, but few understand giving tools, many are contemptuous of effete types who give money away, and few are able or willing to engage in what they call a "touchy feely" conversation about ideals. They would rather sue somebody, or do a complex trust, or wheel deal, litigate and profit. They are driven into the mold of Hobbesian win/lose thinking by their training in law school, and often mourn not for their lost souls. Yet, they are necessary as means to an end. The problem is that in their presence under their leadership ends go darkling and means too often become the ends in view. (There are many honorable exceptions, many of whom are my colleagues and friends, my point is to work the language of frustration and mutual if secret contempt. My point is that we are tribes who make smoke the peace pipe around a campfire, but that we are essentially divided today by our methods, values, and views of what it is to be a "good at what you do.")
3. Donor Advisors/Foundation Advisors: An eclectic lot. Some like the Philanthropic Initiative work on grant-making from individuals and foundations, without any interest in finance per se. Money is money; let's move it for the best possible social impact. To financial advisors and to tax and legal people this seems a narrow niche and seems like operating in a vacuum. Money is not money. For entrepreneurs money is bricks and mortar, raw land, an automobile collection, a ranch, intellectual property, or unexercised stock options. Without planning, assets don't become money for charitable purposes and the conversion of the right asset to the right gift at the right time is riven with tax, legal, and financial planning considerations, let alone with considerations, like those addressed by TPI about social impact and personal satisfaction.
    
4. Wealth Counselors: Often these professionals have a degree in psychology, though some have learned their trade through personal experience with their own (screwed up) families. The idea here is that inherited wealth is a trauma, "the elephant in the room," and that heirs need counseling in order to cope. Dysfunctional families, alcoholic parents, sibling rivalry, dark silences, secrecy about money, internal conflict about coming out as a wealthy person to middle class friends, complexities about love, when the lover just (Dad says) wants your money, and problems that arise from not having to work, or never having had a real job, and being isolated and insulated by wealth  - all off this is dealt with by Wealth Counselors.
    
5. Family Therapists: Figures like Lee Hausner and Eileen Gallo, are true psychotherapists who specialize in working with families around money, parenting, business succession planning and philanthropy.
    
6. Wealth Coaches: Often a variant of life insurance salesperson, or financial planner, or financial planner specializing in what is called "life planning," these coaches may be paid on fees, but generally make most of their money on commissions. A wealth coach has financial and interpersonal expertise and tries, successfully or not, to navigate a process that begins with ideals, passes through planning, and ends with implementation of tax, legal, business, and philanthropic tools and techniques. Wealth Coaches don't address how best to save the rain forest; they free up money to do so. For the rain forest advice, a client might want a firm like The Philanthropic Initiative.
    
7. Life Coaches: a new discipline working with people of widely varying backgrounds and economic status to help them set goals and take appropriate action. Most of these folks do not have financial or philanthropic expertise, but some do, like Lisa Tracy. What they generally have is the ability to ask open ended questions, get people to open up, and break through internal barriers. A good life coach elicits the client's own wisdom and focuses it on moving forward with a plan that the life coach monitors. The possible overlap with philanthropic coaching is an "emerging issue" in our emerging field of practice.
8. Fundraisers/Planned Giving People: Generally if you meet one for lunch and ask how they are doing, they will say something like, "Very, very busy. I have to raise $5 mil by June and so far we are on track, but we have a long way to go." That is, fundraisers are quota driven, not driven, professionally by donor ideals, or the overall tax, legal, and financial plan of the donor. They see the donor as donor, make a case for their own organization, to the exclusion of others, explore gift options (to their organization only), and make the ask. Fundraisers at their best can inspire a person to become a donor and to realize their loving intentions towards a particular organization. Fundraisers like salespeople are great relationship builders ("friend raisers"), but their trade is transactional. It does them no good to cultivate a wealthy person, to elicit all their goals, hopes and dreams, build a wonderful plan, and see the gift go to another organization. As with a financial person licensed with only one firm, the money has to land where the professional works or he or she is said by their boss to have failed, and compensation consequences may follow, directly or indirectly over the short or long term.  The financial, tax and legal planners generally are wary of fundraisers since the fundraiser knows zero about the client's finances and simply pitches gifts in a vacuum, without regard to the client's overall financial plan. Hence, the client's professional advisors are often seen as "gate keepers" and "door-closers," and "deal killers" by the fund raising tribe.
9. Political Fundraisers: Now, how did they sneak in here? Lobbying is not giving! No but giving to a think tank to create public policy is a pretty good work around. Here the effort is to create public benefits by influencing public policy. Public benefits, or what pass as such, and the mechanisms by which they might be achieved, are political footballs. But if you have a big company and need tax relief, regulatory rollbacks, and tort reform to prevent massive judgments, you might find a gift to a think tank, or a legal foundation, a pretty good use of funds with a pretty good return on investment. Plus you can be philanthropist and take a tax deduction. This crowd, of which Bill Schambra, in my opinion is among the smartest and most interesting brings to the work a vision that is maybe Machiavellian but comprehensive. Such thinkers see giving within the sweep of human history, as potentially fomenting world historical change. Nor is that a dream. They have seen it and done it in their own lifetimes.  More interesting to me personally, these are trained thinkers with a mastery of subjects like economics or political theory. They understand that social change is more than a  candlelight vigil, or holding the hands of  the dying. Social change is brutal, often cruel, sometimes necessarily occluded, and more like war sometimes than like a family or civic event. Social change is not for sissies and will happen, as the saying goes, over a number of dead bodies, in the streets, prisons, boardrooms, battle fields, courts, Congress, or wherever. Philanthropy, like politics, has become, in certain instances, war by other means.
    
10. Values-based planners: Well, truly we all have values, even a psychopath does. We all have taste, good or bad, and ethics noble or debased. We all have preferences, which is why we have brands and marketers. Values-based planning can be value-neutral. Find and sell to the client's values, since selfish SOBs abound and make a great market for tax, legal, and financial products. It is not our job to impose, so some planners say, our values on our client's our job is to serve them for hire.
     
11. Trickster Heroes: Theoretically, some other values-based planners are, or could be, teachers, coaches, tricksters who take it that we are all lifetime learners, as was Trasmachus and those who put Socrates, Christ, and Martin Luther King to death. To encourage powerful grownups to think critically about their own values, and the world their actions will create or preserve, is both uplifting and mutually terrifying. It is a Fool's game, which is why Fools have been a feature of elite cultures for a long time, and have been an ornament to many an Emperor's court. I recommend the role to you. You go first! I will meet you in the dungeon and we can debrief, before your last meal. But for every Fool who goes down, another will take his or her place, and the mantle, the cap and bells, will pass on for as long as vanity, jumped up ignorance, and pride and privilege own and rule our world.
     

Coming Together as a Field of Practice

I will continue and revise this screed with any input I get by email or in the comment section, but here are some quick points.

• Today around each of the silos above you can find a bibliography, professional journals, email lists, web links; some figures highly regarded by others in that silo as role models; some meetings, conventions or conferences where the top people tend to show up; periodicals, software, management systems; and some accepted best practices. Sometimes you need a credential, secret handshake, or a personal introduction to attend. Sometimes you will be kicked out if you are not "one of us," not one of our little giving tribe. (Not part of our political party, lack money, not an heir, no credential, not one of our big donors, not a graduate of our school, not a member of our professional society, on and on.)
• Each tribe has its own game to hunt or crop to harvest. Each tribe worships that particular animal or gain. If you hunt buffalo, you worship The Great White Buffalo. If you hunt rabbits, you worship Rabbit. If you live on bread, you worship Ceres. Each tribe has norms, values, and a culture that supports the rabbit or buffalo hunt or the harvest.  Sucking up to wealthy people and doing whatever they want within the law, though a crime against  equality and democracy, and sin against human nature, and the worst thing you can do for the client's soul, let alone your own self-respect, is a professional responsibility to the donor advisor paid on fees or commissions. "Don't tick off the clientele," becomes a sacred bond of trust between kingpin and enabler, or client and professional advisor. (I am being polemical.) For those who live by raising funds the gift to their org is sacred, regardless of the effect, say, on heirs, or on the donor's overall finances. To the political fundraiser or think tank thinker, the conclusion has been paid for in advance, and the arguments and theories well up from the mind and heart after years of practice. You have to believe the conclusion or you will seem insincere and looking plausible is part of the job description. To the commission based advisor who makes money off assets under management a good gift is a deferred gift, and the best gift is a meager trickle from assets managed in perpetuity inside a trust or foundation managed by the advisor. To a gift consultant or a fundraiser a good gift is more likely a current gift. "Early money is like yeast." To a wealth counselor or a life coach, the key may be the moral and emotional impact of a gift. To a strategic planning consultant the key determinant of success may be social impact in line with the donor's carefully clarified ideals, but without regard to what else is happening on the donor's income statement and balance sheet.

You get the picture of chaos. We are not a true field of practice. There is no "we," Phil, give it up!

Still, I think, we in the these trade, the people we serve and society as a whole and even the sweep of human history in this perilous era depends on our doing a bit better at understanding one another and linking our efforts to make common cause, if only case by case. We do have much to learn from one another. And our poor donors/clients/customers/fellow citizens who must navigate this no man's land among the discipline, how can they do it, if we ourselves can't? No wonder donors cower in safe places and hire consultants and therapists to hear their traumatic tales, to commiserate with them, and pass the Kleenex. We owe one another better.

Gift Hub and Inspired Legacies

Over the last 18 months Tracy Gary and I have been discussing these issues, she from a donor's perspective and that of a fundraiser and nonprofit advocate, and I from the position of the financial trades and the tradition of the court fool. What we both see is the need for a central place, preferably a nonprofit, where we can be a we after all. We want a place where you know you are cared for and loved whether you are donor, an heir, a client, a customer, a fundraiser, a planned giving consultant, a financial advisor, a tax expert, a political theorist interested in philanthropy as strategic lever, or a therapist, coach, or consultant who works with those at various stages from ideal-clarification, through planning, to the gift and then to societal impact.

We talk many languages, we get paid in different ways, and we have different even warring ideals, it would seem. But with conversation, interaction, and shared best practices we can, at the very least, learn to work with one another more successfully. At the very best we can create a new overarching "field of practice" with many sub-disciplines, harmonized under a common set of real ideals.

So - what do we need?

Common Focus: On what the donor? Society? Good planning? Tax? How about a good life in a good society supported by the best efforts of each of us as donor, advisor, citizen, nonprofit leader, parent, child, human being? Our common goal is a better life in a better world, a world that will not come into being unless we unleash human generosity and couple it with prudent planning. In that complex effort we all have our specific roles to play, but the overarching purpose is to fulfill the promise of giving, for the betterment of the donor, the family, and the community, all things considered, with the shots ultimately called in our democracy and free market by the donor, but with the best advice of counselors, therapists, keepers of the treasury, astrologers, necromancers, diplomats, advocates for causes, stooges, Machiavels, and fools. How donors, who are our era's Kings and Queens, do under those mixed conditions will largely determine the fate of democracy, and of our planet.

Community of Practice: Let us first learn another's discipline, at least a little of it. Fundraisers should consider the Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy program at the American College, to learn a bit about finance and tax, and to get on the same page with advisors. Financial types engaged in planning for gifts might join their local chapter of National Committee on Planned Giving. Nonprofit advocates might consider National Association of Philanthropic Advisors, where advisors from the financial services world congregate. Anyone in the disciplines with a professional credential might consider joining their local estate planning society. Community foundations might consider mixing donor education and professional education in new ways, to cross-train these groups, as risky as that might be. (Introducing the lamb to the lion, maybe, but some of the lambs are lions too and can more than hold their own with advisors.) In planning curricula and conferences conveners might think across the disciplines as well as within their own, seeking an exemplary figures from a field now considered marginal to that discipline. (Have an heir talk to an estate planning society about the trauma inflicted by an incentive trust or other tool. Have a financial professional address a donor group about how to manage an advisory engagement and how to get the most from an advisor by being clear about goals and financial facts. Have a nonprofit address financial advisors about the cause and about the reasons why donor lists are sacred and how the charity has become so leery over the years of working with predators, or those who might be. Have a political think tank send a speaker to a financial planning organization to talk about gearing estate and financial planning into social change and how it pays off for donors and advisors. For a financial group, have a priest, shaman, or college president discuss spiritual traditions or the role of the liberal arts in eliciting and clarifying ideals.)

Collegiality: Well, I think we should be more open and less guarded, and more like bloggers than like diplomats. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made," said Kant, oft quoted by Isaiah Berlin. We are all crooked timber. We should feel at ease outing one another's faults, since our's are outed too. Yes, in the words of Bob Dylan, "We all gotta serve somebody." We all need to make a living, and make a life, and contribute as best we can to the good of society by our own dim lights. I have been playing with stereotypes. "He do the police in many voices," to cite T.S. Eliot. I have done the voices of our disciplines as they are heard behind closed doors heaping contumely on the "Other." I have a passport, I guess, and have sat among the tribes learning how they describe and demonize one another, or simply are oblivious to one another. My take away from that is that we are all simply human, doing the best we can, and that we have much to learn by being curious and observant of the other's best practices, and the disciplinary rationales for those. We cannot make our own deep but narrow knowledge, and vast ignorance all around our deep knowledge, the standard. We need each one of us to dig a little bit sideways and create tunnels like an ant farm in which we can have communication and interchange going sideways, even if at first we make one another angry, indignant, or baffled. We have to realize that our Buffalo is not sacred to all, but that our sacred traditions of "here is how I get paid," are themselves just a small piece of God's creation. As citizens we need to step outside our narrow roles and meet in the public square to make civic friends for the common good.  We can do better for the donor, our organizations, and the community at large by being less isolated, ignorant, proud and  dismissive.  We are field of practice. We need one another if we collectively are to escort donors from ideals, through planning, to choice of tools, to gifts, to impact in a world where ideals are often fighting words.  If we fail in that effort,  in today's "ownership society," God help those own little, to mention just one motive for kindness or jsutice.

Inspired Legacies

My guess is that Tracy Gary's Inspired Legacies, soon to be launched as a brave new nonprofit, will carry this message and become one of several points, along with the American College, and maybe professional associations like NCPG, NAPP, and the estate planning councils, for this evolving and societally indispensable new field of practice. Join us, in this wide-open conversation. You cannot possibly make a bigger fool out of yourself that I just made of myself. But let us be foolish together in a good cause, lest it be lost.