Gift Hub

Charles Collier on "The Practices of Effective Families"

Charles Collier, Senior Philanthropic Advisor at Harvard and author of, Wealth in Families, is one of the best philanthropic counsellors around. You can find handouts from a recent presentation of his, here at National Center for Family Philanthropy. Excellent materials if you work with people around wealth, family, and giving, or if your own family is considering your legacy and family dynamics.

Donor Intentions Crack Me Up Sometimes

Philanthropybeat:

Funny stuff over at Gifthub.org on donor intent. Discussions about donor intent are always interesting. If I had a dime for every time I've read or heard a conservative columnist say, "Henry Ford would be rolling in his grave," I'd have a pretty decent foundation that would live in perpetuity. Of course, some of Henry's true intentions are only referenced by the Ford Foundation's current critics when they want to accuse the foundation of funding terror. Only proper intentions need apply.

Thanks for seeing the humor.  Carnival is how the intentions and pretentions of the upper classes are mirrored back to them once a year on Christmas Day, in The Festival of the Ass. Far from subverting hierarchy, such humor provides the harmless vent that keeps subversion in check. Surely, we can poke fun even at the most solemn of donors and their intentions.  "No dog in America shall be homeless," is one of my personal favorites.  The donor was not herself a dog, by the way.  So in perpetuity men with catchnets on poles will prowl every American city stepping over the homeless children to get to the stray dogs. Such is the world in which philanthropy replaces public programs.

Emergence of Progressive Blogosphere

Chris Bowers and Matthew Stoller at New Poliltics Institute. The gist is that progressives are using the net with increasing success to introduce new ideas, new associations, and new political actors into the democractic progress, whereas conservative organizations are using blogs as just another pipe in the mighty whurlitzer of prepackaged messaging and talking points. While in mainstream media, progressive voices are marginal, on the web, measured by hits, they are actually outpacing their conservative competitors.

A New Capitalist Manifesto

Can we monetize progressive social change?, from Trillium Investment.

My Philanthropy Coach

Myphilanthropycoach.com, with Jay Steenhuysen:

Why be a Philanthropy Coach?

Research among high net worth clients across the U.S. reveals that high net worth families want their advisors to help and support them in achieving their philanthropic goals.

Advisors who combine strategic thinking with the tools, techniques, and processes provided by Philanthropy Coach will be able to offer unique philanthropic planning that meets client needs and creates new business opportunities.

It certainly is a growing field. I wonder if we can say that the supply of philanthropic coaches now exceeds the demand? If not, it may soon, as more and more of those who are trained and able to do it go on to train others as well. Or, perhaps, we will see a change from demand-side philanthropy (fundraising and planned giving professionals "making the ask") to supply-side philanthropy (financial advisors and philanthropic coaches developing giving plans to meet donor goals). Jay has himself gone from the demand side at World Vision to the supply side and coaching of supply side advisors. 

As a professional in this field of supply side philanthropic coaching, I welcome the trend to counsel givers to be more strategic in forming their "donor intentions" and their financial and philanthropic plans. But a part of me still stirs to a point made often and in many ways by Tracy Gary, a philanthropic advocate. Donors, she would say, are often sequestered in their own comfort zone, giving to familiar causes and driven by intentions that are parochial and class-based. There is room for a special pleader in the process, a kind of external social conscience, that specifically solicits the donor's attention and intention to address difficult and often unlovely problems for the benefit of people far outside the donor's own milieu, and even beyond the pale of the donor's immediate concern. Perhaps implicit in the concept of a philanthropic "coach" is the idea that a good coach should stretch the donor's boundaries and donor's vision a little, pushing the donor not only to reconsider means, but also ends.  I do not think, though, that this conception of donor coaching, as advocacy for those who would not otherwise be represented in the process, is well understood, well-theorized, or well-represented in our profession today. If you asked me to give a good example of such  a coach, I would say, "King Lear is a play about an estate plan and a legacy plan gone wrong. That king got advice that was good from only one child who said, effectively, nothing.   He got good advice from only one counselor, his Fool. The rest were merely flunkies, machiavels, and enablers. " Not Jay, nor his competitors in the philanthropic coaching biz would say they play the Fool. I know I do, and am proud of the motley. I only wish I got to sleep in the castle rather than the stable, though every profession, as The Happy Tutor tells me, has its professional liabilities.  To truly coach wealth and power is to live in a Dumpster, or in fear of it.

Susan Stein, Strategic Philanthropy

Strategies for Philanthropy, LLC. provides philanthropic advising services to family and corporate foundations, and to nonprofit corporations.  A lively article on Susan here. She and Tracy Gary sometimes team up to make presentations together on family philanthropy and legacy leadership.

Betsy Brill: Strategic Philanthropy

Chicago-based philanthropic consultant Betsy Brill has revamped and extended her website, Strategic Philanthropy. From her "About" page:

Our goal is to help our clients; individuals and families, corporations, family owned businesses, and established foundations, devise and manage their giving strategies so that they have the opportunity to make a real impact in their immediate and global communities....

Serving Donor Intent: Smoky Joe Via Email

Got a note from my friend from graduate school, Smoky Joe, now a Senior Good Fellow over at Rooster Foundation: Crowing in the New American Century. He was writing in response to my offer of $10 for any thinker from a certified think tank, or for that matter from a reputable K-Street lobbying firm, who would post on a blog or comment at Gifthub on serving Donor Intent, how we can, why we should. Joe emailed me as follows:

O for Christ's sake, Phil, get off my aching back. You know damn well I only write for big money, and for $10 I wouldn't  write a postcard to my mother, much less a blog post.   As for doing it on my own time as - you make me laugh - a citizen, I have better things to do, as a volunteer for my charity of choice, Smoking Hunks, mentoring young men and boys in the finer points of blowing smoke for profit. Look, to be honest with you, my mental health is not good. Years of writing dreck for Candidia, faithful to her every intention, kissing her boots, buffing them; after decades it takes its toll. I can't blog against Candidia or I would lose my job. And I sure as hell am not going to blog her talking points for free. My psychiatrist says I have to take it easy; I have lost my sense, he says, of right and wrong, now he says my I am on the verge of psychosis. I know you think I am just some kind of sock puppet for the rich, but believe me I do have feelings. I was once a reputable person, as you well know, from our days together reading literature and philosophy with Amy Kass. The soul dies hard. God, the night sweats! Anyway, keep the money, Phil. You are a good and brave man. Better than I have become. How long you will last, I don't know. I hear the NSA has you under surveillance, but Jesus you write like an angel. I wish I still had it in me. God bless you, my friend. Try to think well of me. I have my own demons. "Myself am hell, nor am I out of it," as Faust said, in Marlowe. Remember? How did it all come to this? "Was it for this the grass grew tall?" I too care about this great country. But what can I do? I serve Candidia. My hand's are tied. Besides, I don't feel so good. I gotta lay off the sauce.  Jesus, my hands are shaking.

Your friend,
Joe

Think we could get Jack Abramoff to talk on serving Donor Intent? They say his billing rate for charitable activity was $600 an hour, but maybe it has come down recently.

J.Alva Scruggs on Donor Intent

At UFOBreakfast Senior Fellow Scruggs bolsters Martin Wooster's case against liberal foundations who make the world a better place in defiance of donor intentions. Better that they be broken up into think tanks and educational institutions dedicated to serving the intentions of their wealthy funders whether the public is well-served or not. By airing these issues perhaps the public, and its elected representatives, will take an interest and we can ask the foundational questions about nonprofit organizations taking tax-deductible dollars to create ideology on demand for special interest groups.  Perhaps it is a good thing that in a free society we can have nonprofits pushing an agenda for specific funding groups.  But if it is a good thing it is a good thing all around.  I personally am happy to see so many right wing ideology factories producing policy papers, editorials, and other screeds, particularly on the subject of philanthropy, civil society, and compassionate conservatism. I just wish these enterprising intellectuals would blog out in the open where we could have a conversation. I realize that the going rate for blogging is "free," and that many of these thinkers need to make $X dollars per word if they are to hew to donor intent while making ends meet. But, hey, we are all citizens here and we all have a little free time and maybe we can all donate a few hours a week to a public discussion about the public good. If not I have $10 here I will send to the first professional thinker from any accredited right wing think tank who writes a response to this post on their blog or in the comment section here. All they need to do is give me their name and mailing address, and without regard to the quality of the post, or the length of it, or even whether or not the post forwards my personal donative intent, I will send the $10. My intent as donor is this: To raise the level of the discussion. They can do that for however many seconds my $10 buys. After that they can revert to doing whatever they do for the big money. I can't afford to raise the level of the discussion much, or for long. In the end it will only happen when  people put the good of all ahead of their own narrow interests and those of their funders.   

Abramoff, Libby and The Gift Culture of Conservative Think Tanks

I had understood that the conservative think tank thinkers battened on tax-deductible contributions from fat-cat funders, who call it "philanthropy." I had not understood that some of these same professionals also took money from lobbyists like Abramoff to fabricate "pay for play" op eds. Good piece here from Bill Berkowitz at MediaTransparency, with additional comments here from Dave Johnson at See the Forest. In other news, Scooter Libby, under indictment, is now a Senior Good Fellow at Hudson Institute. If the topic is corruption and cronyism who will do the thinking for us? Depends on how much cash there is in it for the thinker, probably. Otherwise we as citizens will have to think for ourselves.