Understanding Philanthropy: Its Meaning and Mission

Notes

Notes 1. Introduction 1. Rick Bragg, “She Opened the Door to Others; Her World Has Opened, Too,” New York Times, November 12, 1996, A1. 2. Lauren Gard, “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Gifts,” Business Week, November 29, 2004, 94. 3. Zlata Filipovic, Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, trans. Christina Pibichevich-Zoric (New York: Viking, 1994). 4. Donald Schön, Reflective Practitioners: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 5. For example, Peter Frumkin’s Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) offers a useful and sophisticated model—informed by empirical findings—for understanding and improving the effectiveness of giving. Our theory of philanthropy is meant to address a different though complementary set of questions about why giving exists and what is essentially distinctive about it as an activity. 6. There is widespread agreement that this field is in need of much more theoretical development in general. Helmut Anheier and Lester Salamon, reviewing research findings on voluntary sector activities in many countries outside the United States, make the interesting point that theories developed in the West do not hold up so well in the face of international evidence. They suggest we need theories that better account for varying cultural, religious, social, and political conditions. See Helmut K. Anheier and Lester M. Salamon, “The Nonprofit Sector in Comparative Perspective,” in The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, 2nd ed., ed. Walter W. Powell and Richard Steinberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 89–114. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [original French publication, 1991]), 2. 8. Robert L. Payton, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action for the Public Good (New York: American Council on Education/Macmillan, 1988). 9. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 15. 10. On the challenges confronting and shaping this field, see Charles T. Clotfelter and Thomas Ehrlich, ed., Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector in a Changing America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 11. We should be clear that joining together to create the biggest foundation was not their original strategy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was already well established and already the largest before Buffett, in 2006, decided to break with the norm and give the bulk of his philanthropic money to the Gates Foundation instead of forming his own separate foundation. 12. This dollar estimate and the prediction of a “golden age” has come notably from researchers at the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College. See John J. Havens and Paul G. Schervish, “Millionaires and the Millennium: New Estimates of the Forthcoming Wealth Transfer and the Prospects for a Golden Age of Philanthropy,” research report, Social Welfare Research Institute, Boston College, October 19, 1999. 13. See Burton Weisbrod, ed., To Profit or Not to Profit: The Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14. See Alex Nicholls, ed., Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 15. See Peter Frumkin, “Inside Venture Philanthropy,” Society 40, no. 4 (2003): 7–15; and Michael Moody, “‘Building a Culture’: The Construction and Evolution of Venture Philanthropy as a New Organizational Field,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, in press. Venture philanthropy is sometimes connected to or relabeled “high-engagement philanthropy”; some practitioners prefer the latter term. See Mario Morino and Bill Shore, High-Engagement Philanthropy: A Bridge to a More Effective Social Sector (Washington, D.C.: Venture Philanthropy Partners and Community Wealth Ventures, 2004). 16. For a sum of recent research on the global associational revolution, see Anheier and Salamon, “The Nonprofit Sector in Comparative Perspective,” 89, 95–103. 17. See Lester Salamon, The Resilient Sector: The State of Nonprofit America (Washington , D.C.: Brookings Institution Press and the Aspen Institute, 2003). Salamon borrows the term distinctiveness imperative from Bradford Gray and Mark Schlesinger. 18. In 2005, 76.5 percent of charitable contributions were classified as coming from living individuals, and 6.7 percent came from bequests. These figures are from Giving USA (Glenview, Ill.: Giving USA Foundation and Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, 2006). 19. The exact amount or percent of revenue coming from various sources for the entire set of nonprofit organizations in the United States cannot be reported here because of limitations in the data available and because...