Gift Hub

Feel Good Giving - Why You should be Ashamed of it

Guest post by Dr. Alberta Axiom, author of Wealth Bondage as a Public Good: How Inductive Logic can Save the World

As an expert in Philanthropy who follows emerging trends in giving, I was dismayed to learn from a recent study by Razoo that giving is among the three things that makes people feel best, lagging only love and hugging children (gross!). What this proves is that most donors are morons. The correct way to give is strategic. Times are hard, people, and with budget cuts coming due to austerity, and negative market externalities abounding, our world is suffering. We need to have your precious giving dollars going not to any cause, or a feel good cause, but to the charity or other social ventures that produce the most good for the lowest cost. For this we need Big Data, and Trusted Intermediaries, and Incentives. We need Backbone Organizations, staffed by experts to manage nonprofits to create Synergies across Siloes. No, this will not be fun. You are not going to bask in a warm glow. You will be working your ass off on a Global Giving Taxonomy (code name: Procrustes). Giving is serious work for serious people. It is best conducted with professional help. The quicker we can stamp out sentimentality and feel good causes, the sooner we stop giving for children and animals, for the love of God, the quicker the world will be a better place. I would recommend that you not give one dime, without first consulting Give Well's list of where a results oriented, evidence based donor should give to achieve Maximum Total Measurable Impact. We have to grow Instrumental Reason to Scale. That is the great project of the Enlightenment, yet every where we find people giving without any thought whatsoever to children and animals! Some even give to Religion, not the most effective and efficient faith, but to their own house of worship. For education, an admittedly productive cause, and a proper use of resources, if appropriately allocated, donors too often give not to the best school (Harvard, where I teach), but to the crappy school were they went to College. We have work to do, People! Your ignorance and low IQ are no excuse. You tell us the Issue Area. We will tell you where a Reasonable Person with Adequate Data would give. Then you just have to Give as Directed. We will report back with Results. The world will be better and we will tell you how  much better. Then you can give again, accordingly. If this works as well as we project, Private Giving guided by Data can supplant many government programs. This should lead to further Tax Cuts for Job Creators, further turbo-charging Capitalism 1.5 and the Philanthropy 2.0 that saves it. You, the little people must play your part. Your nickles and dimes all add up if they are guided by Rational Decisions based on Data processed by a Trusted Intermediaries, staffed by experts, and adminstered by professionals with degrees in management science. You want to feel good? Hug a child. Get a pet. Giving is rational. Any questions, stupid?

Womens' Philanthropy on the Little Grid of Community

When Big Data has optimized the social sectors, some things, some vulnerable creaturely things, will fall through the cracks, as they always do. In that zone we will find what is now called Women's Philanthropy. Women have mastered the Big Grid of Business Protocols on the national and international scene, but they still get stuck with the little grid of runny noses, the wilted flowers,  the soiled sheets, and mother dying. When organized informally, as they have always organized themselves to move in two worlds ("My kid is sick, can you cover? I have a presentation due today") these women will reconstitute the social sector and save us, if we can be saved, from the Unintended Consequences of our own Markets for Good and other data driven initiatives to turn us into moving parts in a managed system. To call it Women's Philanthropy is to honor the kindness, selflessness, and care of those without whose love we would all the stunted children of Markets, raised in a mall, and often ending in prison, or other cubicles under the surveillance cameras, rather than the eye of one whose care and example gives us life. 

Markets for Good (Good Soldier Schweik reporting for Duty, Sir)

Markets for Good: Information Infrastructure. pdf

Driven by Gates & Co. from Headquarters

What we need is a real critique of the underlying assumptions.  Seeing like a State and Discipline and Punish come to mind. “Knowledge/Power” is Foucault’s way to expressing the connection between Big Data, as we now call it and top down control by technocrats who demand a simplification of reality, including the most personal side of life, so that it fits into a database and can be managed by the numbers.

What the Information Infrastructure report sees as “Unstructured Knowledge” that needs correcting and systematizing is actually personal knowledge, intimate knowledge, tacit knowledge, skill, knack, craft, practical wisdom, the embodied knowledge of professionals (doctors, teachers, farmers, tradesman, nonprofit volunteer) that can only be acquired through long apprenticeship and is exercised face to face within a cascade of information that is seen, felt, addressed with a practiced sensibility.

By accepting as final and definitive (as all inclusive and fundamental) the terminology of Results, and the Big Data, and protocols and managers from above that comes with it, the previously, autonomous expert or volunteer becomes the drone managed by the MBA from Home Office, Data Central, Foundation Headquarters. 

So the social sector, the citizen sector, the independent sector, the voluntary sector, becomes another field to be managed like an industrial poultry farm, or an HMO, or school under No Student Left Behind.

Still, if this is where the money is, I am reporting for duty. Just show me the forms, give me the passwords and protocols, and the data taxonomy, and the authority, an ID card, maybe a badge or some kind of baton, and the incentives, and I can help you demand whatever must be demanded from the peasants. Could I have a driver for my car? That way I can do the paperwork effectively and efficiently while touring the villages we conquer, routinize, standardize, liberate, and improve. Markets for Good could be on the little flags on my desk. We could use them as pins on the map, in the War Room, showing where we have Done Most Good and mopped up the resistance.

The 'Nasty Stupid World' of High Wealth Social Investors

My friend, Tom Matrullo, finds (via email) a parallel between the world of philanthropy as described in Gifthub (a social investment of Wealth Bondage: Doing Mostly Good) and art, as described here,

Dave Hickey, a curator, professor and author known for a passionate defence of beauty in his collection of essays The Invisible Dragon and his wide-ranging cultural criticism, is walking away from a world he says is calcified, self-reverential and a hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing.

"They're in the hedge fund business, so they drop their windfall profits into art. It's just not serious," he told the Observer. "Art editors and critics – people like me – have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It's not worth my time."

It is actually much worse in philanthropy. Where in the art world do we have the equivalent of Impact Investing, where all that is holy is treated as a crass means to whatever end is of interest to the benighted social investor? Well, check that. Perhaps art is the best social investment with a double bottom line: beauty which is in the eye of the beholder and objective cold cash on cash return to the collector. Crass is good. Crass owns all, does all, all reports to Crass. And,I, Sir, am its Trusted Advisor. By Crass, I in no way mean my immediate supervisor and generous patron, she who rules us all. I have nothing but the highest respect for my boss.

Social Impact Exchange

Social Impact Exchange seeks to bring social innovation to scale by vetting nonprofits, informing social investors, and generally making a robust market.

• Investment Platforms: Exchange  members have developed investment platforms that distribute to funders a  growing number of scaling initiatives that meet a high standard of evidence and  readiness for growth – including the S&I 100, the SIF, and Funder  Group Platforms.
• Distribution to  thousands of High Net-Worth Individuals:  The Exchange is  integrating its platforms, particularly the S&I 100, with the giving  platforms of financial institutions that have aggregated large amounts of  philanthropic capital from individual families e.g. donor advised funds,  private banks, and trust companies. This allows donors who give through these  institutions to support the nonprofits on the S&I 100.
• Distribution to  thousands of Foundations: Funder group will distribute the scaling initiatives they select in  education, health and poverty to foundations that have signed up to participate  in the Broader Funder Networks.  They will also share them with a diverse set of funder affinity groups across  the country.  Click here to join a Funder Network in your  field.

How then can we bring social justice, or the order of love, to scale? I found poverty as an issue area on the exchange, but not anything that would seem to indicate an interest in subverting, supplanting, transcending, or even understanding the limits of markets as the way we conceptualize our humanity, or what we owe to one another.  Something is growing to scale, folks, and it is not social justice.

Power of the Purse Award Video

Too big an honor for me to carry without bragging about it here.

Disrupting Charity: The Role of The Leader

In my work with advisors and nonprofits I cannot help noticing that advisorsare often perceived (sometimes rightly) by nonprofits as arrogant, blind, and disruptive influences. They barge in, act domineering, push donors and management too hard, make a sale or two and move on. It takes years for advisors, often, to recognize how little they know and how crude they seem to those who have devoted their lives to nonprofit work. It was with some shock, then that I began to notice that "Disrupting Philanthropy" is a buzz phrase among leading minds with good degrees from the best schools, or worse yet, teaching the gullible but sincere high achievers at such schools.

I can see why disrupting a financial market, or a consumer goods market, and making a killing by disrupting the market for computers or phones, a la Steve Jobs, would be a highly meritocratic ideal for the up and coming strivers after wealth, power, and reknown, at small cost to themselves, since the cost is an investment returned many times over. But disrupting philanthropy? And even then should we not learn the culture of the world we disrupt, its tenor, vision, ideals, its hidden strengths, and its secret vulnerabilities, what it holds together that is precious, before we in our ignorance (often educated ignorance)  and vain glory (that of the entrepreneur and the Leader who Knows Little) actively set out to disrupt it? Cherish, cultivate, nourish, foster, protect, prune, and make fruitful what is best in us and in others, as preserved in our fragile nonprofit traditions, then when we have done that, then we disrupt, as say Jesus did the Roman Way of disrupt, measure, manage, optimize, and subordinate, via hierarchy to the Leader who Knows Nothing? At scale, love and the order of love is small, intimate, and fragile. So, later, Savonarola, Luther, Cranmer and Ridley disrupted the Catholic Church that had grown to Scale, gone global, become Market Dominant, and been taken over by a Medici Pope, optimized for wealth transfer upwards, and lost its soul.

So, we may yet disrupt Markets and the Idols of the Marketplace, commonly known as Brands, or the Uber-Brand of all Brands, Wealth Bondage (The Market as Most High), in the name of what might be called holy, where that not presumptuous in the age of Metrics. (How many nails, at what pennyweight, with how many blows?) There is hope. The Legionaires who came to disrupt were disrupted. We can only hope in time that those who are hoping to disrupt philanthropy, and make a name for themselves as Leaders, have an experience like St Paul's on the road to Damascus, struck dumb and blind by what they had not yet known, witnessed, heard of, or believed possible. Was it head down St. Paul got crucified? I wish our disrupters better luck, but the price of leadership in this area is higher than most will invest. Yet the blood shed, each drop was a seed. So as the great wheel of history turns, from the agonized and protracted suffering of the thought leaders something better may yet be born. Brethren let us pray! 

Men doing Women's Philanthropy

Women today write poetry. What is then to prevent a man from practicising Women's Philanthropy?

Hercules is all about Being Smart and Getting Results. Yet even he learned to spin and sew. It was part of his Hero's Journey - from success to significance by way of humiliation and penance for having committed murder. I am sure he would have preferred to clean the stables, slay lions, steal golden apples, and fleece the golden hind, many times over, but a man is a man for all that. The sad part is when women do Men's Philanthropy with a Stick. But then today we can all be human and get results, both at the same time, if our pride and prose permit.

The Importance of Being Earnest

“Philosopher, Know thyself” is hard.

“Physician, Heal thyself” is harder.

“Laughter is still the best medicine,” as Diogenes explained to scowling Hippocrates who burst out laughing.

Saving the world is not a topic to be taken lightly, as I was explaining to my fellow experts, who sagely agreed.  

Give Smart:Philanthropy that Gets Results- a great book but how funny? I asked Dr. Lucinda Stout, Chair in Civil Society and Philanthropy at the University of Eldorado, but she threw up her hands. "Get serious!"

As Karl Kraus said of Freud, "Pscyhoanalysis is the disease it seeks to to cure." Wittgenstein said, in effect, "Same goes for Philosophy." And, "A serious book of philosophy might consist of nothing but jokes."

Gospels of Wealth - that too could be a comedy.

Art holds the mirror up to nature, as Horace said, which is why I personally prefer to shave in the shower.

The Spring

He is thirsty, and is cut off from a spring by a mere clump of bushes. But he is divided against himself: one part overlooks the whole, sees that he is standing here and that the spring is just beside him; but another part notices nothing, has at most a divination that the first part sees all. But as he notices nothing he cannot drink. - Franz Kafka

In teaching advisors and fundraisers to ask biq questions about the donor or client's vision, or aspirations, what the donor wants to accomplish, you have at some point got to deal with teaching people to listen - and to perform what might be called an interpretation, as improbable an act as that might be during a business meeting where large sums are at issue. If touched by the right question, what will tumble out of a client or donor is not a fact, or a coherent statement, most often but a jumble, a mixed up mesh of narratives, images, reminiscences, memories, digressions, names of the long dead, resentments, furies, and yearnings. Aristotle plainly says that a drama has a beginning, middle and end. Somewhere near the end is a turning point and a recognition, as the protagonist recognizes, sometimes in horror, who he or she was, is, and will be. At least that is the pattern in tragedy, a well made tragedy. But in real life, the recognitions are "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind," as Wallace Stevens says poetry is. We speak in giving of "inspiration," as if we could conjure devils or gods at our own will, as if our vanity was fortunate. What the donor gives us when the living spirit is touched is seldom a parable like Kafka's but the narrative resists interpretation, or offers one as bogus as a wax apple. The turning point is every second of our lives. The recognition, the moment of truth in which we see our own character, is most often never. Maybe God saves our moment of recognition for Heaven or Hell. That is why when we speak of Hyperagents or Leaders, in an admiring way, we have proven ourselves the Dupe, or Knave, not the Fool. Nihil admirare. To listen is to listen for the sound of water. Had we heard water we might have drunk. Had we drunk we might have heard.