Over three billion people—almost half the world’s population—live on less than $2.50 per day. Nearly one billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. Even in the United States, more than three million people experience the indignity and desperation of homelessness each year and nineteen percent of children are living in households below the federal poverty level.
And poverty is just one of many challenges humanity faces.
Philanthropy will never solve these challenges.
Let me clarify: Traditional philanthropy will never solve these challenges. Traditional philanthropy, composed solely of donating time and money to charitable causes, will never solve challenges of this magnitude in anything close to an acceptable time frame given the extent of human suffering they represent. As William Easterly argues in great detail in his book, White Man’s Burden, it’s unclear whether the billions of dollars poured into aid by governments and NGOs over the years have had any kind of sustainable positive impact on the lives of the people they were intended to benefit.
So, if traditional philanthropy isn’t the answer, what is? Well, it probably isn’t too surprising that I’m going to suggest that we need to find ways to be more inclusive of business and government and find ways to leverage the strengths of those sectors, along with the nonprofit sector, to create social change.
Some might question whether the activities of business and government can really count as “philanthropy.” But let’s look at the etymology of the word: it comes from the Greek philanthropos, a combination of philos, or “loving” in the sense of benefiting, caring for, nourishing; and anthropos — “humankind”, “humanity”, or “human-ness”. So: “love for humanity.” Business and government may not always express a love for humanity, but they certainly can in some cases, so let’s take full advantage of that where we see an opportunity.
But it’s not enough to simply open our hearts and our minds to accepting a broader definition of philanthropy. We need full-bore, pedal-to-the-metal commitment to finding what works and doing whatever it takes to make our vision of the world a reality. We need people like Dan Pallotta, who started Pallotta Teamworks, a for-profit event management that produced multi-day fund raising events such as AIDSRides and Breast Cancer 3-Days, raising over half a billion dollars and netting over $300 million for those causes in nine years. We need people like Kjerstin Erickson, Saul Garlick, and Jon Gosier, three young social entrepreneurs who have formed the Thrust Fund to offer up a percentage of their future earnings in exchange for the unrestricted capital investments they need to scale their ventures right now. Basically, what we need are people who take a no-holds-barred, everything-is-on-the-table approach to philanthropy, where the two questions that matter are “Does it work?” and “Does it work better than whatever alternatives are available?”. We need, as I like to think of it, Full Contact Philanthropy.
To quote Deng Xiaoping: “I don’t care if it’s a white cat or a black cat. It’s a good cat so long as it catches mice.”
Let’s all stop caring about the color of the cat and focus on how we can best identify and nurture the cats that demonstrate that they can (or someday will be able to) catch the most mice. And if you’ve got a dog or a wombat that somehow manages to catch even more mice, heck, let’s find a way to nurture those too!
(Photo by sselbein2007)
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