Gift Hub

Women Lead in Philanthropy as in...... What other Femmy Topics?

A new study of affluent donor couples  conducted by Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, shows that in 80% of the cases, it it is the woman who takes the lead in making charitable decisions. Yes, I know, philanthropy is gendered female 'cuz it is so soft, warm, fuzzy, and touchy-feely, engorged with the milk of human kindness, but I wonder what percentage of women take the lead in planning the family finances, and hence the % of cash flow and assets devoted to philanthropy. My fear is that women control the charitable allowance, but the husband controls the income statement and the balance sheet. Such was the insight provided by Helen LaKelly Hunt, in her pathbreaking article, "Will Women Fund Their own Revolution?" Giving is done by women in the parlor, while her husband and father and trust officer control the family finances in the counting house. The good news is that as women find their rightful place inside the countinghouse at the planning table as leaders in their own right, the % of assets and income going into giving may well increase.  (To the extent I see this at all, it is because strong women, like Tracy Gary, have made it a point to teach me. Metanoia in Greek meant mindshift, and is translated in the King James version as "repentance."  I once was blind but now can see. Maybe philanthropy is female as are the Muses to which a male poet must listen, indeed take dicatation, if he is to amount to anything at all.)

How to Conduct the Donor Dialogue - Role Models?

The American College, my employer, has the ability to produce high quality webcasts. I am thinking of suggesting that we create an inventory of 10 minutes videos of "luminaries" from sales, financial planning, law, fundraising, and donor consulting, demonstrating for the record how they initiate and how they close the donor conversation. They can define that however they wish. I think it would be fascinating to see how a varity of professionals open the conversation about giving and where they aim to land. I am talking with Heather Gee, CAP, of the Philadelphia Foundation  about leading off.  

Enhanced Interrogation of High Value Innocent or Guilty We Don't Care Suspects

Kia on NPR's foul language: "enhanced interrogation techniques," that phrase used flatly, as war on terror, or Shock and Awe, or all the other cant phrases are used by media deadened to language, let alone ethics, and their responsibilities as journalists, not to be balanced and above the fray, but to let the humanity be visible beneath the face of the jackal. Reminds me of Peter Karoff writing about "the moral dimension of philanthropy and social action." About sleepwalkers awakening. About philanthropy being as is poetry an end in itself, as virtues are. Who is listening? Strategic philanthropy, strategic marketing, strategic use of torture. Strategy has so dehumanized us that to watch a little tv news (not news anymore but casters of news) is to wonder what species of conniving animal we have become.  In adjacent posts Kia talks about Victorian literature, her sensibility formed to another order, still capable of registering moral disgust. So old fashioned. An atavism.

Wirearchy in the Nonprofit Context

Beth Kanter discovers wirearchy.  Will Nonprofits embrace the Cloud? Will the Towers have to fall? 

Jobs.Change.org

From Ben Rattray, CEO of Change.org, via personal communication, comes word of a new website, "Jobs for Change" (http://jobs.change.org). The site, Ben, was created in partnership with more than a dozen nonprofits, including Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, AmeriCorps Alums, Echoing Green, Network for Good, and Encore Careers.  Among other things they’ve hired a team of career advisors to help people find and advance a career in social change - whether that's in the nonprofit, government, or social enterprise sectors - and are hoping to serve as a gateway for people looking to enter and advance in the sector. Ben says, 

One of our overarching goals is to help advance the growing movement toward careers in the common good, and we've written a "vision statement" about the importance of this movement and are asking top bloggers and nonprofit leaders to add their name in support. 

 

Philanthropy Issue Town and Country

The latest issue of Town and Country is devoted to philanthropy. Tracy Gary has an article in it, with upbeat stories and quotations from those bucking the trend towards giving less and playing it safe. I get cited in it. 

Libertarian Econ Blowing Away like Smoke on the Water

The Depression that Hayek Built, at Firedoglake.  Elites left free to do as they please becomes corrupt and cruel.  As Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families my clients are a welcome exception, whether because of my good work with them or because I am lying to save my business, I can't say.

Moving Clients to Focused Philanthropic Action

Tracy Gary, interviewed for an article at researchmag.com says "very few advisors in their client intake questionnaire include philanthropy. If there is one, it is typically swept into this broad question: What percentage of your current assets do you wish to leave to the community, friends, family, Uncle Sam? “That’s it? Not: What do you give to? What are your passions and interests? Do you have a special relationship in the non-profit community? What is it you would like to change or preserve in your lifetime for yourself, your family, your community? These are key,” Gary says. “These are the questions that move people along.”

Philanthropy Recollected

H. Peter Karoff is known as the man who invented or popularized the phrase, "strategic philanthropy." Now, in his writings on "The Moral Dimension of Philanthropy in  a Time of Scarcity" he suggests, "Philanthropy is an end in itself." So, Auden once wrote, chastising himself for his activist days,  "Poetry makes nothing happen." The scarcity that Peter means is money, of course, but moral imagination is pretty scarce too.  Originality befalls a person who listens to the muse, the Daughter of Memory, and is faithful to a tradition. Not legacy but recollection, as Wordsworth said poetry is. The loneliest of voices, half heard half overheard, stills the passersbye, and recalls them to community, or commemoration. This is legacy as in patrimony.

Is Charity Dead?

Noting that her friends in nonprofit circles spend most of their time looking for gifts and grants, Julia Moulden writes:

What if, I wondered, non-profits weren't charities at all - what if they didn't have to depend on catching our eye in order to continue their work? What if the world's poor didn't have to wonder if those of us fortunate enough to have been born into a place of privilege on this shared planet would ever turn our hearts and minds in their direction? What if the act of giving didn't have to please us first? Or what if we didn't think of it as "giving" in the first place? Might "sharing" be a better word?

She then goes from "sharing" to "social investing," but she also mentions "fellowship." This awareness, that we are past "have and have not" into a new era, where our life support systems, whether ecological or financial, are in peril, that social investing, and philanthropy, and charity, or taxes, or voting, will not make a difference big enough soon enough must be dawning on many of us. We are in a world now where it takes tens of trillions to maintain the fiction that we are a going concern, to reboot what is broken, to make it run through one last cycle of boom and bust. Fellowship is sharing, as it was and is among beggars. We are all beggars now.