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)
Dan Elitzer is a social enterprise consultant, currently working in Washington, DC. Dan has developed social enterprise and social franchise strategies for dozens of leading domestic nonprofit organizations, is a 
Awesome post, keep them coming!
Very true. Without real scale growth, there’s no chance that any recipients of traditional philanthropy will ever be able to solve problems on their own. Thus far there have been no successes to point to of a developing economy rising from poverty due to foreign aid… somethings wrong with that.
Good point, George. I agree that enabling individuals and countries to lift themselves out of poverty via stronger national economies is ultimately what foreign aid should be aiming to accomplish. Everything else is just a stepping stone along the way. See the comments on David's recent post (http://www.fullcontactphilanthropy.com/2010/02/do... for andiscussion on outcomes measurement and poverty alleviation vs. poverty reduction.
For the last 5 years, I have been straddling the line that I have come to identify as being a social entrepreneur. I have , in one sense, did so early on by having a full "for profit" career while at the same time starting up and incubating a separate non-profit group. Each were founded much in the same way in so far as I saw something that set off the inner entrepreneur in me, but I believe the reason why I have been able to succeed this far is that I have come to understand that the model we have come to rely on for many community based programs was incomplete.
That, unlike a for profit firm that has the resources, more non-profits are not out actively conducting market research to see if their own product/ service is market competitive, what the market value of that product/ service is, who is best qualified to (1) pitch the product/ service (2) what resources will be required to commercialize it (3) what internal structures are needed to manage it and (4) what are the external connections to other stakeholders.
Quite often, and I speak primarily of my experiences in China, what you see is a group (individual) that correctly identifies an issue, but builds a platform that is event based rather than program based. Perhaps due to a market that has a short attention span for long term programs, and thus a lack of funding, or perhaps due to their own inability/ immaturity, this is a choice that can hold many well funded programs back.. because at the end of the day the money flows into a gypsy like organization that is constantly try to put together a program that offers external appeal rather than real internal strength.
So, when it comes to Easterly, and to the wider point of this post (which was very good), I think it is important that to understand that not only are there the structural problems related to efficiency and effectiveness, there is really a much wider problem set that is both internal and external. Problems that, were the stakeholders truly tied together into a single platform, could be systematically worked on, mitigated, and removed from the equation.
Which, theoretically would result in an improvement of the system itself. Improving the quality of programs, the depth of impact, the long term stability of the platform, and the likelihood that positive changes would be capture on a generational time frame.. .rather than on the quarterly / yearly / project cycle we often chose to measure.
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http://www.collectiveresponsibility.org
Very true. Without real scale growth, there’s no chance that any recipients of traditional philanthropy will ever be able to solve problems on their own. Thus far there have been no successes to point to of a developing economy rising from poverty due to foreign aid… somethings wrong with that.