Philanthropy and the Social Economy 2013

Lucy Bernholz's Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2013 is now available for a free download from Grantcraft. Lucy's brilliance and breadth is staggering, even daunting, yet light on civil society. In her future, a digital generation turns to crowdsourcing, micro-payments, small gifts on and through the web, guided by indepth data about outcomes and impact, in order to create the world they want. They become social entrepreneurs to make money and do good. In this they are aided by impact investment firms, trusted intermediaries doing research on nonprofit and forprofit enterprises doing good, and by technologically savvy foundations like Gates and Hewlett who seed fund the evolving infrastructure of a market for good. Smart money seeks out high performining, high impact organizations, whether forprofit or nonprofit.

The vision is that of the market, and privately held social platforms that will take market share from stodgy nonprofits and from government programs. I find myself wondering, so often, what courses did these thought leaders not take in college, or what impact did their readings in political theory, ethics, sociology, religion, or the arts, not make upon them? As high level as this breathless futurism is, it still reads to me like boosterism. This is the bourgeois vision of the world we want, in which digital peons express their preferences with Like buttons, and micropayment, or investments in social impact firms, or desultory voting, but the real power is on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the thought leaders in business schools at Stanford, Duke, or Harvard.  Politicians are there to be bought, in the market for good. In the account of the rising generation of digital natives, the tacit heros of Lucy's most recent blueprint, I saw no mention of Occupy. Big data played a role there too. That too took place in the public square, but was hard to monetize, own, or control, until the FBI coordinated a nationwide crackdown. Where, then, in Lucy's brave new world do we find, rights, dignities, representation, and justice for all? These subjects just seem not to come up (other than in discussions of privacy rights vs. the need for transparency of data), despite Lucy's position at Stanford's Center of Philanthropy and Civil Society.

The moral and political philosophy behind the Future of Good is utilitarianism. Yet, for all the innovative thinking there is no thought given to the limits of rationalism, utilitarianism, materialism, and their expression in markets. What works, works, I guess. Wish it worked for me, but soon I will be getting one of those treadmill operated generators, like social entrepreneurs are building for the third world, so I can keep the lights on in my Dumpster to study Great Books deep into the night, at least as long as I run fast in place.

Comments

[web newbie]

Is there a direct link to download that thing - it's not very clear.

[Phil Cubeta]

http://www.grantcraft.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&pageId=3744

Register for free downloads there

[Jim Schaffer]

your review of the "blueprint" compliments William Schambra's latest op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy on how the philanthropy elites once embraced eugenics. Chilling, both this contemporary blueprint and the past effort to eliminate "defective protoplasm" for the good of society.

[Phil Cubeta]

Managing to outcomes. Who can be against it? Yet what do we become on the process? Buber on I/Thou as opposed to I/It. Leaving aside well managed atrocities, the very reduction of life to managed units of production it iself often dehumanizing and is one reason we have traditionally had not only the family, but civil society as a refuge.

[Cheap Shots Poorly Aimed (CSPA)]

"All of us act as both 'doers' and 'donors' in this economy"

Prosumer, meet "dodonor."

"The first section of this Blueprint 2013, Big Shifts that Matter, looks at the ways in which digital information is becoming ever more important to how the social economy works."

In one segment of the social economy, "digital information" enables Just in Time scheduling, practiced by employers who often don't give a shift.

"Foundations, donors, and nonprofits are soon to be drinking from the 'data firehose.'

"

Sounds more like a notorious old form of crowd control than a new form of crowdsourcing.

"This past year has often been called the year of 'Big Data.'"

Called that by a recursive array of links citing previous posts claiming that 2012 is the year of big data.

"Dead' 501(c)(4) organizations will litter the nonprofit landscape"

Including those pesky 501(c)(4) "employee associations."

[Phil Cubeta]

I must know you, hope I do, and hope you will come back and comment again. I assumed from your name that you were about to upbraid me for cheap shots poorly aimed Lucy. And if so I was prepared to plead guilty. My challenge is thinking straight and thinking fairly when furious.

Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, private data platorms, taxonomies of "Results" tied to funding, crowd control, yes, who is theorizing these issues in the open? Lucy to her credit does this time surface the matter of wealth and information (both valuable, both unevenly distibuted)as an issue. Perhaps she is talking to Bob Reich at Stanford whose field is politics or political theory and civil society.

What I am noticing is the speed with which business has once again assumed the role of moral leadership, heroism, of light bringer, and the force that not only is in charge, but ought to be in charge. Who else could lead us? Who else could manage us? And where would we be without top management, let alone Leaders?

[Curator]

I've known Lucy for many years. I had just landed a job at my local community foundation when one of Lucy's papers started making the rounds. In it she urged foundations to use their "knowledge resources" to better effect. I thought I detected in her writing a kind of moral center: foundations, because of their sway in a given community, had the responsibility to use all the resources they could marshal to address our society's greatest challenges. I've recommended her paper to many.

As with other people in my field, I'm not sure I know the real Lucy. I keep assuming that she, like me, has mouths to feed, and that neither of us dares speak the truth too loudly. But when I try to read her closely I don't see any hints of irony, any room for doubt, or even what I would consider an honest assessment of the space of possibilities. I suppose this is the boosterism you detect.

I'm sure she already reads your blog, even if under the cover of night. What would she say if you invited her to comment?

[Lucy Bernholz]

So I have been invited over and here I am. I think that much of what Phil says about my ideas either deliberately or mistakenly overlooks the moral and humanistic arguments contained in the Blueprint. Perhaps that is because "data" and "technology" automatically bring to mind for many people soulless business practice.

The ethics of sharing, the moral underpinnings of ownership, the normative (and legal) coda of sharing and giving - these are the values and questions and rules that we as a society need to reinvent in this age of data. These are the rights that are at stake. They are questions of good and bad, evil and generosity, corporate power and mutual support. Most recently, and most tragically, they also became issues of life and death.

http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-ground-beneath-philanthropy.html

I'm not writing about widgets. I'm writing about how we are human in the digital age.

That's what I'm getting at. Perhaps I don't write well. Or perhaps we all need to read more closely.

Lucy

[Tim Ogden]

I don't know if I've known Lucy for "many" or "a few" years. But I have no doubt that I know the "real" Lucy. What you see is what you get.

Well let me take that back. Because apparently there are people who don't see Lucy when they read her writing, they see something else entirely.

What I do know is that it would take a special kind of obtuseness to not see that Lucy is:
1) Widely read and thoughtful on ethics, political theory, sociology, religion, etc.
2) Primarily concerned with how the trends that are much bigger than philanthropy can be turned to the good of humanity and preventing the subverting of the good of humanity to market/tech/anything

[CSPA]

To make a big shift back from who lucy is to what lucy writes, interesting use of "technology" and "data."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

(of course, when you choose a profile pic that could have been framed by Rudolph Mate, the whois is apt to intrude)

[phil]

Lucy, thank you for commenting. Yes, the post on Aaron Swartz raises all the issues you mention, and in a tragic way. Yes, the ground is shifting from a commons to the ownership of data, and the control and management of others through data. In the most recent Blueprint I was pleased to see the issue of ownership of data, and the economics of data (as a kind of currency) problematized.

The Future of Good is....? Social? Innovative? Disruptive? Mediated mostly by property rights and contracts? In the hands of an elite (manager, techocrats, fund managers, charity evaluators, and pundits) trained in the best schools, driving funds to organizations that do well on standardized metrics, as part of a Taxonomy of Good?

Sounds more like Facebook, or the Panopticon, and less like the commons so important to Swartz. It sounds more like the Barracks, or the Factory, or the Clinic, than paradise. It sounds like the Dream of Reason that Goya said breeds monsters.

You write very well, in fact you are among the most lucid writers I follow. But all good writing is writing within a genre, and in a particular style, idiom, voice. Yours is, as writing, business writing, I think. "Social economy" not "social justice," not "polis," not "community," not utopia/dystopia, not "Voyage to Lagado;" the langauge is the neutral language of business, leavened with the promotional language of futurism, and yet it is meant to encompass what had traditionally been the provenance of love and justice. The public sector, the civic sector, the independent sector, third sector, the public square, the third space of conviality, is being reconceputalized as one more space to own, control, and privatize. That is, it seems to me, a power grab, from the business school and the minds they form.

My moral and political philosphy training was at Balliol, the school Jowett once ran at Oxford, to school the leaders of another empire in Classics. When I was there the head was Christopher Hill, a Marxist who had written of the Diggers movement. (Swartz would have loved him.)

The language of moral philosophy does not sound like The Future of Good, though I see some hints of int the theorizing of information as scarce resource and as power.

How ought society to distribute wealth, power and information? Ought. Can we be moving to a Future of Good that is less just?

The post on Swartz shows you are alert to this. But that post remains a bit noncommital? A bit on safe side? A bit unintegrated with social entrepreneurialism and the rest of it? Yes the ground is shifting, beware! Is that the informed clarion call? Could we maybe talk about how Impact Investing and Social Entrepreneurship helps or hurts, adds to or exploits, the commons? Could we talk about the role of social movements, from the Diggers to the present, in pushing back against the enclosure of the commons by both government and the Entrereneurs?
Anyway, I am in your debt and will be teaching your Blueprints (as faithfully as I am able not polemically) to my students. They are by far the best overview I know to the social impact space. At Stanford with Reich there, I assume this conversation about power/knowlege will heat up and become more public. I hope so.

[Phil Cubeta]

You are still reading Rawls, I am afraid.

[Phil Cubeta]

Blindness and Insight is the theme maybe. We see what we see clearly and do not see our own blindspots. I have every reason to believe that Lucy has passed exams in the subjects you mention, with high marks. My questions are more about the foundations, the new foundations of The Future of Good. I am hoping we will see more about justice. More about the commons. More about social movements. More about civic activism. More of Jane Jacobs, Rawls, Amrtya Sen, Martha Nussbaum. More about community, more about what does not scale, like love. And more about what cannot be weighed and measured by the gross. More about individual rights. This will be a shift in diction, and with it will come a shift in genre, provenance, tradition.

[cspa]

I'm not writing about widgets. I'm writing about how we are human in the digital age.

This is a bit off. To be human is to be digital: opposable thumb, toolmaking, counting on fingers, etc. The "widget" is foundational to being human. The digital age is aged.

[Albert]

What I haven't seen in the field of philanthropy (except along its farthest edges) is a willingness to challenge dogma about the free market and capitalism, to draw attention to the people whose lives have been destroyed by businesses and the business thinking that supports for-profit enterprise. Skepticism about the frame in which we produce our acts of largesse is commonplace outside the U.S. context. But my qualms about contemporary thought leadership in philanthropy go beyond this. Recasting an inquiry about the use of big data, problematizing the social economy, championing social justice grantmaking in some new way: from what source do these actions draw their power? Are they acts of intellectual virtuosity fueled by the desire to get along and get ahead? or have their authors, like St. Vincent de Paul, vowed never to forget the face of the poor? Should a session on impact investing begin with a PowerPoint or with a moment of silence?

[Jeff Raderstrong]

I'm a little concerned about this response. Not so much in what you say, but in how you say it. You appear to be saying that business thinking and writing has no component of justice to it--and by extension, economics has no place for justice.

I think you'll find, especially with the rise of social entrepreneurship, (which will never completely replace the nonprofit sector, so everyone should just calm down), that many people who are inclined to think of things in market terms can still have a strong commitment to making the world a better place. In fact, I would argue that most of the injustices in our society are actual market failures and require market solutions. I would also add that many social movements of the past had a strong economic component to them, focused on improving existing market systems (which is how I see social enterprise and impact investing.) After all, Marx was pro-capitalism.

I am a little uncomfortable when you ask "Could we maybe talk about how Impact Investing and Social Entrepreneurship helps or hurts, adds to or exploits, the commons?" I think that is a little arrogant and misguided question, and if I wanted to be similarly arrogant and misguided, I would ask you how effective the justice-based movements in the past really have been. Of course, I'm not that arrogant or misguided, so instead I'll say: Of course you can. No one is telling you different. If they are, they are wrong, and should be told so. I don't think Lucy, or most social enterprise/ social economy leaders have said we should not critically analyze the work they do. I just hope you would keep it respectful, and this post did not, I'm sorry to say.

I guess I'm a little frustrated by this post because it implies there is not room for both approaches, or a way to integrate the huge range of options out there for making the world a better place. We all have the same goal--social entrepreneurs are not looking to make the world a less just place. So why can't we get along? Instead of attacking someone's overall framework, why not try to see where yours and hers match up, and see how both approaches can take from the other and improve?

[Enrique the Gay Philosopher]

Jeff, don't want to mess up all your great themes by asking a clarifying question of little moment, but where did you get the idea that Marx was pro-capitalism? Do you mean in the same sense that many Democrats are pro-Tea Party, sensing that this group carries the seeds of the Republican Party's destruction? Just wondering what you meant.

Carry on ...

[cspa]

Has there ever been an economy that is not a social economy? What's the purpose of the maneuver where this formerly suppressed modifier is now accentuated? Marx based his explorations on the conceit "let's assume markets really do work like they say and tends towards equilibrium. Why then are there are crises?" Part of his answer was the "social." Mainstream economics reacted by trying to become an abstract science. Now we find the "social" enlisted in support of market efficiency, the return of repressed, repurposed to annul the antagonism it once demarcated.

[cspa]

"I'm not writing about widgets. I'm writing about how we are human in the digital age."

This suggests the "digital" is a break with the human. But ICT's aren't a break, they're an intensification and acceleration of the human. The problem is not how to be human in the digital age, but that the digital is human, all-to-human.

[Phil Cubeta]

Thnaks, Jeff, for the the thoughtful and temperate response. Seeing how the new and traditional approaches to the three sectors "fit" with one another is quite a challenge. I am writing a course in which I am trying to do that, and using Lucy's work as the best example of an emerging perspective. I agree that I do not yet have my own act together. As for social justice movements having succeeeded - no they have not. As for market solutions to market failures - that sounds like a work in progress.

When you talk of attacking frameworks, it is important to realize just how deep and real the potential disruption the new methods can be to the very fragile nonprofit ecosystem.

Example: Lucy in her 2013 Blueprint calls nonprofits "priviliged" under current law, and raises the possibility of leveling the playing field. She says what stands in the way is the strength of the nonprofit lobby. That is a nontrivial point of potential coflict.

The bigger issue is "Big Data," and a "linked and comparable," Taxonomy of Data, to be used to rate charities and drive the most money to the most good. That taxonomy, if it works as advertised, will make charities accountable to not results, but results-as-per-the-taxonomy. Power shifts to those who create the taxonomy. I see in the 2013 Blueprint some indications that Lucy sees this herself as a justice issue. She discusses the unequal distribution of both information and wealth.

"Why can't we all get along?" Agreed. At the same time the "natives" were here before the MBAs arrived. The culture being disrupted is fragile. What you are hearing in part is a cry of pain, not unlike what might be heard in any country colonized by a power which knows how to project power and looks upon itself as more enlightened than those it subordinates.

The word arrogance gets used in your comment, I will never outgrow that bad habit, but am trying. The better word might blindness, partial insight, partial blindness. I am learning from ongoing study of the social enterprise movement. I wish daily I could teach you all a class that included Foucault, Sen, Jane Jacobs, Martha Nussbaum, that would include Heart of Darkness, or Plutarch on Alexander the Great. I just don't see flickers in the writing I am reading of a larger intellectual context, and it continues to shock me - Harvard? Stanford? Duke? The best and the brightest educated by the best and the brightest and the range of reference is so scanty? The hero list so narrow. The mythos so unexamined? The Leader? Could we read Euripides?

[Phil Cubeta]

Well, he was pro Economics, maybe. Same difference.

[Phil Cubeta]

I suggest with Samuel Beckett, that we begin with a prayer for the dead.

[Phil Cubeta]

Social is what wilderness once was. Social is the intimate space to be sold, or sold into. The social here is the social of Facebook and Twitter, or Apple's closed platform. Social means the convergence of business and intimate spaces that can be owned and sold. A new commons to enclose.

It means this: not community, not the space marked out by the trajectory of the gift, not the order of love, not polis, not the Radiant City. Economy now encompassing the Social. Economy as the wrapper, social as surveilled, monetized, optimized controlled.

[Jeff Raderstrong]

Granted, it has been a while since I studied Marxism, but I remember learning that Marx had no problem with capitalism, as it would build up resources and the division of classes that could eventually be overthrown (and resources seized) through the Revolution. WIthout a capitalist class, there would be nothing to disrupt nor resources to redistribute.

[Jeff Raderstrong]

Thanks Phil, for your response. I appreciate the back and forth. You make an excellent point about results-based funding (or results-based privileges, that you mention, such as the charitable deduction), but unfortunately, I don't see any way around this debate. There are many many many ineffective charities out there that should not be in existence. They are simply wasting resources.

Now, I think that there are some nonprofits that don't have data to back up there work but which are doing good work, so I don't take as hard a line on this issue as some. But I do not think there's anything special about the nonprofit sector such that it should be the only organizational structure with privileges. People are very afraid about this, for not good reason, as ultimately, a "leveling of the playing field" will continue to reward those organizations that do their job well--that is, create social impact. So, in the long run, this point of potential conflict doesn't bother me. In the short run, there's a lot to work through in terms of taxonomies, lobbying, public policy, etc, which is why we need everyone to work together on this and stop infighting.

So no worries about the arrogance. I'm not concerned with people's personality styles, as I can usually determine what they stand for. Again, another reason why it's silly to argue in an "us vs. them" way, because I know you and Lucy stand for the same things. As evidence by this most recent quote I stuck up on UnSectored: http://www.unsectored.net/fridays-thoughts-shifting-injustice-to-a-different-venue/

[CSPA]

"Social means the convergence of business and intimate spaces that can be owned and sold."

Right, but that's not new.

[cspa]

Right? It's precisely the language of "needing to reinvent" in this "new digital age" which functions as the alibi...

[Phil Cubeta]

One person's positive social impact is another person's anatema. The idea that impact can be measured requires more thoughtful analysis than it has received. (Fewer women working so more can stay home as mothers and wives - positive or negative? More students outgrowing the primitive superstitions of faith, and becoming more enlightened and scientific? Positive or negative? Good is not like a lump that can be broken into bits and measured. Nor do nonprofits exist only for "impact," as means to an end. Nonprofits are also safe spaces, in some case, sanctuaries, outside the market, family, and government where we can cultivate our humanity. Had we all done so, the debate on metrics would be very different. But the impact of bad education, of blindness, cascades in all directions.

[Phil Cubeta]

Who owns the platform of the social, who governs it, and who has what rights? That is not a digital issue only, but Facebook, etc certainly brings them to the forefront.

[cspa]

Who owns the platform of the social was surely a forefront issue for the Master of Monticello and his servants; for the patroons of New Netherland and their tenants; for George Pullman and the residents of Pullman, Ohio; for the French soldiers in New France demobilized to the Seigneurial estates of their former officers; for musicians forced into a shitty deals with a record label, a club owner, Ticketmaster, or a drug dealer; or for anyone who's dealt with a lousy landlord or boss.

Facebook differs in velocity and scale, not in kind nor cognizance.

There's never been an economy that wasn't a social economy, investing that wasn't impact investing, a business that wasn't a social business. Forefronting the "social" is a strategy to "navigate the tensions" of the social by attempting to make omnipresent historical tensions disappear by recasting them as new.