Gift Hub

Men in Philanthropy Surface at Council on Foundations Conference

I got an email from an anonymous tipster at the Council on Foundations Conference. He had just had an Orange Mimosa fueled lunch with one of the bloggers responsible for the short lived, and much missed, Men in Philanthropy. Apparently, the site was put up  by a group of three women in philanthropy whose intent was to discredit us as men in philanthropy by making it appear we have a sense of humor. The site is gone; everyone is back to normal. Not even a smile. Back to saving the world.

The Role of Philanthropy in a Security State

The comment on an earlier post by my old nemisis, Captain Blowtorch, raises certain life and death issues for philanthropists. May I expound upon them? (Hop in and be so kind as to pull the lid closed on the dumpster. Not all messages are for all ears. This is strictly need to know. You never know these days who is listening or for what purpose or how what you say may be used against you in a court of law, or in some dark alley for that matter.)

The world we have is all screwed up. The world we want is very different. But the world we have is owned and operated by people with money and power who will defend their own interests by fair means and foul, up to and including rewriting our Constitution, torturing people, and having them assassinated. We all know this, right? And that is why we are silent about it? We know it, but we know not to talk about it? We know it is now to late to resist? There is no alternative?

Anyway, let's say that we are in fact still committed to the world we want, a world characterized by the rule of law, openness, transparency, freedom, economic opportunity, and justice for all. How, then do we work towards that world when it is anathema to those who profit from being above or outside the rule of law, and who benefit from operating by force and guile in secret and with impunity, while hurling down edicts, propaganda, laws and and swat teams on those who want nothing more than to have America's promise restored through loving and peaceful means?

What action items come to mind for the good people in this country to take our country back against the forces of darkness, including but not limited to Captain Blowtorch, and his compatriots in Wealth Bondage, a front some say, for the CIA? How about these steps?

• "Many pieces loosely joined," or a network for a loving and peaceful version of  "net war."
• Not secrecy, but brazen openness - loving kindness expressed openly in thought, word, and deed.
• Awards and prizes and honors for whistle-blowers, truth tellers and dissidents
• Think tanks with real thinkers in them
• Political organizing outside the party system by all citizens to retore our Constitution
• Media specializing in investigative journalism
• A database of dissidents and whistle-blowers to track their mortality and morbidity against societal averages. The longitudinal data to serve as a starting point for further investigations if the population of dissidents and truth tellers proves more than normally susceptible to accident, disease or suicide.
• Scholarship programs for budding young satirists
• Investment programs that bypass Wall Street and put money to work on Main Street
• Advisors who work with high capacity clients to determine how much capital the client can put to work for social good in imaginative ways, hedged against potential counter-measures.
• Broad-based communications networks to activate citizens who are slowly waking up the the new realities of life in a security state.
• Civic dialogues, formal and informal, online and off, to make us more at ease in discussing such things as dirty tricks, wet work, death squads, suicide teams, torture, lies in high places,  and how to turn that around to love, justice, and peace.
• Artists, dramatists, novelists, singers, to help us form a shared consciousness, living in truth.
• Philosophers, historians, critics, sociologists, and critical theorists to teach us how the weapons of the weak have been used in ages past to keep hope alive under oppression.

Now, look, let me make myself clear. I am not declaring war on Wealth Bondage, not even a covert or cold war. That would be suicide. I am as dependent upon the forces of Wealth Bondage as anyone else. I am deeply implicated in the status quo. Every dollar I have invested, every dollar I make, circulates around inside one or another institution of Wealth Bondage, or goes in taxes to Wealth Bondage projects, or piddles about in various Wealth Bondage philanthropies.  If Wealth Bondage goes down, so does my pension, my mutual funds, everything I have, as little as that might be. My clients are mostly Wealth Bondage bigshots. My generous patron is the CEO of Wealth Bondage; she who rules us all. I do not in any way want to jeopardize what little I have, and the little credibility I have earned by being a Faithful Servant and Trusted Advisor to Wealth Bondage Private Banking Clients. I have always been loyal to Wealth Bondage.  I buy into the concept. I have drunk the Koolaid. I am on board.  I pledge allegiance to Wealth Bondage.  I have no desire to become a lightning rod for whatever Wealth Bondage does to retain its control if challenged. Those people are morally insane. They will stop at nothing here or abroad. They creep me out. So, don't get me wrong. I am a happy camper. I am really just thinking that promoting civic philanthropy might be a good double bottom line social investment opportunity, catering to the needs of those wealth holders in Wealth Bondage who prefer democracy, or a more credible simulation of it.  The pro-democracy movement is a niche, a small one, but maybe profitable? High risk for high return? A piece at least of a prudent philanthropic social venture portfolio, if only as a hedge against the possibility that democracy and the rule of law might one day be restored, and the malefactors brought to justice? Surely, in Wealth Bondage there is room for a brand of philanthropy catering to a taste for even a niche product like democracy? It wouldn't change anything, it would keep trouble-makers occupied, and it would be good for business?

I am going to pitch Candidia, and see what she says. With any luck she will be my first investor.

(Tag, Catherine, you are it.)

The Happy Tutor's Cure for Tapeworms

The Happy Tutor, the master to whom I was apprenticed in our noble trade, during my years in Wealth Bondage, when I was young and foolish, before I was born again as a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, is almost 500 years old. I assume he was in his thirties in 1515 when he starred in Erasmus's The Praise of Folly.  Some say he is much older than that, older than Romulus and Remus even, old maybe even as Dionysus himself.  Tutor can always be found wherever the faithful make merry in Carnival. You can see him moving among the Monks, Kings, Queens,  CEOs, Trusted Advisors, Butlers, Courtiers, Beggars, and Machiavels, with his Jester's Cap and Bells pushed back on his neck, his eyes aglint with sadistic glee, looking for some lovely upscale sinner to spank into virtue. Some say The Happy Tutor lives inside Wealth Bondage. Others say he inhabits a Dumpster on its margins where Wealth Bondage proper abuts the public square. (Philanthrocapitalists say the public square is a service of  Wealth Bondage provided as an amenity to its Private Clients, and made available to ordinary people from time to time under a double-bottom line master contract with binding one way opt out. Whether that's so or not I do not know.)

Anyway, to bring you up to date, I dropped by the Dumpster after work today to talk with my old mentor. When he is not pretending to be a teacher, he often pretends to be a Physician. (It is all a way to get girls, honestly.) He said, raising his forefinger high in the air, that he had found a cure for the tapeworm. "They are parasites that inject you with a chemical that makes you long for what kills you. The more you consume, the more the tapeworm consumes you. The more you eat, the hungrier you are. You can tell someone has the tapeworm when they begin to talk about Freedom all the time as they compulsively feed their face . Freedom is what tapeworm people call it when they have the tapeworm inside them, eating them alive. Through contact with food, or clothing, or money touched by the infected person, the tapeworm spreads throughout the marketplace. It has become an epidemic, but everyone is happy, feeding away, and passing on the tapeworm to those they love. It has become a huge public health crisis, though no one talks much about it.  Now, you will be glad to hear, I have found the cure! To get the tapeworm out of a consumer's system you can go at it from either end, Phil," he said, "if you know what I mean. You can reason with them, of course, as you do, Phil, for all the good that does, or...." And then he began to rummage among his sacks of garbage for some kind of medical implement. I did not wait around to find out what. I have known him of old. You are better off not messing with him when he is in that crazy mood.   

"It's a Dog's Life," as Diogenes said

As a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, I work hard for my money, or rather for the bones I am tossed by my Private Client, she who rules us all. Unfortunately she also keeps a bulldog, Rex, and he tends to rip the scraps from my hands, often leaving me badly mauled.  I hate that dog. His dog house is bigger than my Dumpster. It is like a McMansion. He has a diamond studded collar. He has a mohair jacket for when its cold. A chef comes in every night to cook him a special bedtime snack. He has a professional dog walker. He goes to this Doggie Salon to get his nails clipped and manicured. You can imagine my chagrin when I found out from my Owner's Personne De Confiance (her former Butler who went through leadership coaching) that Rex is in Milady's will for $350,000 to keep him in the style to which he is accustomed in the event Milady predeceases him.  As for me, my Dumpster escheats to the State of TX. I get squat. For more on setting up a Trust Fund for a pet, and how much might be enough, see "It's a Dog's Life" by Hannah Shaw Grove in the current issue of Private Wealth, Advising the Exceptionally Affluent.

An Indigent Father's Advice to His Grown Children

Dear Children, Hope of my Old Age:

As you know, I have pretty much wasted my life in the liberal arts and in morals consulting to wealthy people who have zero interest in improving their morals. They go for liposuction, tummy tuck, PR makeovers, hair transplants, upscaling their spouse, or for personal trainers, dancing masters, tennis coaches, and life coaches, or for therapy, or for alternative healers, but they have no interest in buffing or burnishing their moral character per se, unless they have gone to jail and need something to show the parole board, and even then it is mostly about appearances. So, rather than pass on our family values to you, which would only perpetuate misery, I make a plea in your own best interest. Now that you are out of college and had a chance to see how the world works,

1. Go to Business School to get your MBA, or
2. Go to Law School, or
3. Study Accounting or Finance, or failing that,
4. Become a Fabulist (speech-writer, think thank thinker, publicist).

These are "coin of the realm." The market, the courts, financial statements, the management of money, or the management of public opinion are great goods - imperishable and always in season. Religion, if any, and taste, and wisdom,  or civic spirit, if any, are best left for your own private time with family and friends. If you follow the above advice you will have what is called a "Journey from Success to Significance." Given your ill-considered liberal arts education to date, that phrase may strike you as kitschy, and hopelessly almost tragically under-educated. So call it something else. The point being, kids, get rich first. The significance part is for later, if ever. Get yours first. And please budget a little for my old age. I don't see the morals consulting gig going anywhere good. And with the delirium tremens and with the $1,000 I owe at 38% per annun to the Pierre Omidyar's Social Loan Sharking Venture for the abscessed tooth I had extracted (an operation not to be repeated since it was my last tooth), my future is not what I had hoped it would be, when I first set out to be a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families.

Children: Remember, "Charity starts at home." A few thousand a year in my case from both of you (that is, say, $5,000 each, more when you can afford it) would make all the difference. My life has amounted to nothing, but the advice I give you now has cost me a world of hurt and is as good as gold. This sorrowful wisdom is your only inheritance. Yet, invest it wisely and you shall be rich beyond measure.

God bless, and please send money,

Your devoted Father.

Total Quality Management for Philanthropy

When philanthropy and the nonprofit sector has been optimized, routinized, and made more effective and efficient, when we have legible and repeatable end to end solutions, when we measure what we manage and manage what we measure, when we prune back the idiosyncratic human elements, and eliminate the dead wood, the malcontents, the unions and the organizers who make nothing but trouble, is it fair to assume the following benefits?

• Managers, owners and investors will be better paid than currently, having straightened the rest of us out?
• Worker bees will work within plans that are carefully routinized around the proven and approved best practices, fad by management fad?
• Lower wages, benefit stripping, pension reductions, risk shifting, outsourcing, downsizing, right-sizing, sigma sixing, mandatory happiness training, and periodic purges will be necessary to insure a steady flow of dollars upward to the bosses, the social investors, the MBAs?

Having seen how this well-managed con works in education (No Child Left Behind and the immiseration of casual labor in academics), can you blame us who are worker bees for being skeptical about the social entrepreneurs and philanthrofatcats who approach us with the line, "We are MBAs. We are here to optimize you"? We know that what MBAs do essentially is what a parasite does, suck out the blood, and grow fat and lazy in the heat of another's labor.

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank my mentor, The Happy Tutor, Dungeon Master to the Stars, for his assistance with the tone and tenor of this post. He is helping me develop my Juvenalian side as part of my performance review and planning annual development program. I am being "optimized" on the fast track to a Dumpster of my own.

Disclaimer: By MBAs I do not mean my immediate superior, nor his boss, nor any of the bosses on up the line, to she who rules us all. Nor do I mean the Board of our Parent Organization, nor the many MBAs who contribute, or rather "invest" in Wealth Bond*ge, proud sponsor of Gifthub. Every rule has exceptions. Those who manage me are very fine people, as it happens, as is my owner.

Needle Through The Balloon

Imagine, Ian, that philanthropy is a big balloon, inflated. Now imagine satire as a needle, wet. Did you know that if you do it right, you can puncture the balloon with that needle, while leaving all the air inside until the needle is withdrawn? Yes! But it is not as easy as it seems. A demonstration is here. Try it! Warning, if it pops you are fired. (Helpful hints here.) Now, go fetch the needle. See what you can do with the lastest issue of The Chronicle.

No Satire, Please, We're Philanthropists

Ian Wilhelm at Give and Take, the blog for The Chronicle of Philanthropy: the Newspaper of the Non-Profit World, on a recent flap:

After less than a month, a blog that made fun of the nonprofit world and gender roles has shut down. Men in Philanthropy, which promised to recognize “the vast, marginally relevant, contributions men have made to the world of philanthropy” has been “removed,” according to its Web site host. While some said the site was in poor taste — one commenter on Give & Take called it “insulting and stupid” — Phil Cubeta, author of Gift Hub, writes that the short-lived effort brought some badly needed laughs to philanthropy. “Another fine satiric site goes dark,” he writes. What do you think? Do we need some blogs poking fun at philanthropy?

Taking a cue from Ian, I decided, rather than hazarding an opinion of my own (and so exposing myself to potential criticism from my boss, funder, or readers), I would simply ask a question. So, I consulted Senator Dick Minim (D. MA), a former Board Member for the Council on Foundations, and asked how he felt about "some blogs poking fun at philanthropy." He said, twirling his pinz nez on its gold chain, "Why, Phil, you know that laughing folly into good humor and good sense is a most unsporting proposition; a gentlemen just knows not to do that. Why consider the effect on poor Mummy. She almost choked on her crumpet. The last time people tried satire, in England, I believe it was, in the Augustan period, look what it led to. A Revolution here in Colonies. And it has been quite downhill ever since."

The Work of Folly (A Word to the Wise)

Over the years, frankly, whether as an Apprentice Dungeon Master to the Stars in Wealth Bondage, or here at Gifthub as Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, I have tried every excuse there is. I have hidden behind the Happy Tutor in a mask. I have made Carnival in imitation of Rabelais. I have passed myself off in all seriousness as a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families. I have explained away my whoredom in Wealth Bondage by pretending to be Born Again as a Values-based Planner. I have wandered Dallas naked at noon, in the spirit of Diogenes. I have spanked, flayed, cauterized, and operated upon Folly. I have played the Good Doctor and asked her to raise her skirts. I have followed the advice of Horace and coated the bitter pill of truth in honey. I have followed him as well in holding the distorting mirror of satire up to nature, human nature in particular, until she shrieks in horror at her own face. I have tried being as as Earnest as Oscar Wilde. I have in his honor constructed my own Defense of Lying. But in the end all that works is to Praise Folly solemnly as a Fool for the approbation of the Wise. The Feast of Fools (the Feast of the Circumcision, or Feast of Asses) was once a high holy day. Today we who hold such festivals, such mystery rites, are pretty well marginalized. I have seen the satiric sites about philanthropy come and go, and talked at length with those who have been forced to take their sites down by their immediate superiors for fear of reprisal by the Wise and the Good, or at least the Rich and Powerful. Wealth and our Bondage to it is not a subject for polite discussion, nor for satire. "Truth is a bitch who must to kennel," as Lear's Fool said.  We Trusted Advisors to Wealthy Families must all play the Fool in our own way. "Here is my way," as Seneca said, "where is yours?" (Seneca by the way, committed suicide on the request of his Patron, Nero, as I recall. There are no easy ways to get this job done, and even the best of us generally come to a bad end.)

The Emblems in this Gallery tell a story and point a moral. See if you can make sense of my Folly.

The Chronicle on Boverton Beaver's Bakery

As a reporter for The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Give and Take, you are sitting, knees crossed, and back straight, in a public relations event promoting a Double Bottom Line Social Venture Bakery in Detroit. From the window you can glimpse a prison looming like a fortress.  The meeting is run by a Harvard MBA employed by Beaverton Social Venture Foundation funded with money from a Wall Street Wizard,  Boverton Beaver, who made his billions buying and selling weapons manufacturing companies, including one that specializes in anti-personnel land-mines made to look like children's toys.  He also served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and as a lobbyist for a defense contractor. He was indicted for fraud, but found innocent via a hung jury after a prolonged trial costing millions to litigate.  He is best known for his trophy wife, a former Ms. Nude Miami Beach, now on the Board of a Conservative Think Tank, and for his contribution to the theory and practice of social venture philanthropy.

The bakery employs ex-cons and teaches them the skills needed to get a job: sweeping up, slicing bread, stoking the coal oven, running a cash register, and waiting on tables in the bakery's cafe.  The artisanal breads are sold to wealthy friends of the funder. The loaves come with a picture on the wrapper of an ex-con smiling ingratiatingly and holding out a loaf of white bread in his black hand.  The MBA is going over what she is calling "the balanced scorecard," showing how many ex-cons get jobs, what the bakery costs, what it earns, how much profit is makes, how much money it saves in social services.  She is working her way towards the line called, "Total Net Social Return on Investment," some staggeringly large number, supported by 200 pages of spreadsheets and several metaphors.  The cash on cash bottom-line shows that Boverton's Foundation is making 8% ("a Program Related Investment" as the MBA explains.) The Mayor who is active promoting "three strikes and you are out" legislation, and who owns a significant interest in the local for-profit prison business is next on the agenda, to give an award to his friend, and political funder, Boverton Beaver, for service to the community.

An ungainly Stranger, in a white leisure suit, neck open to the waist, bell-bottoms swinging, rises from the back of the room to say, "You know, my Fellow Friends of Philanthropy, I notice that all the ex-cons with brooms and other signs of servitude are  black or brown.  Talking to a few it was mostly crack that put them behind bars, and petty crimes.  Yet, I notice that you, Boverton Beaver, have a daughter in rehab. I am glad for her that her needs are met, and crimes, if any mitigated.  And you, Mayor, wasn't your wife at that clinic in the Hamptons?  Boverton, what is the double bottom line on those land-mines you manufactured, that now litter Afghanistan? How do you net money and mayhem? And those sweat-heart deals with your cronies in DC? What was the Social Return on that? Has anyone asked whether giving these penny-ante felons a crappy job after 20 years in the slammer, is tantamount to justice? Maybe we got the right bars and the wrong gaolers? Maybe we trade sides, Boverton, and you and our Mayor push those brooms? And the ex-cons make money, 8% cash on cash, on your back and they call it philanthropy?"

Of course the Stranger is hustled out by the Security Guards. "Don't tase me, Bro!," the Stranger exclaims, before he starts screaming.  As the door slams, the MBA swishes her fine mane of black hair and says, "Excuse me for the interruption. Where was I? O, yes, the balanced scorecard and our Social Return on Investment."

Suddenly, the Stranger, beaten, bloody, his white leisure suit torn, patches of it smoking, staggers back into the hall - "The scorecard? Balanced? Stacked, maybe, not balanced." Then the room goes black.  There are confused sounds of a crowd trampling on each other headed  for the Emergency Exits. When the lights come on, there you are, in the empty hall, wondering what you will write for the Chronicle. Something upbeat, something balanced, like that scorecard? Something noncommittal? Or a puff piece about Boverton Beaver? My suggestion is this: Ask your immediate supervisor for guidance. Keep your nose clean and your mouth shut. It is better to err on the side of caution, or like that Stranger, you might find yourself in small dark hole.  He will be lucky if they even let him out to push a broom some day in that bakery he defiled with speech so open in a world so closed. Remember, the most important thing in any piece about philanthropy is what you know damn well, and refrain from writing.