Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift of a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity’s golden ladder.
—Maimonides1
Clearly the answer to that question is both. (And if this book’s publisher had not feared unduly complicating the title of this volume by giving that secret away, the title would have read so.) By definition, one cannot deal with today’s great social needs without simultaneously benefiting the future. Nor can one invest wisely for the future without learning the ropes today. Every major philanthropist who decided at some point to create a presumably perpetual foundation initially began by acting philanthropically to benefit present society. That is undoubtedly the reason the unlimited-life foundations they later established usually got off on the right foot and have continued performing so well. Similarly, it is inspiring to witness today’s burgeoning class of wealthy individuals who seem eager to tackle the great problems of today. I would be willing to place a (small) bet, however, that many of those who have publicly declared their intentions to give away their wealth during their lifetimes will change their minds somewhere along the way, as did Andrew Carnegie and George Soros, and instead create foundations to carry on their philanthropy after their deaths.
Other wealthy individuals will come to the conclusion that the problems they care most about cannot be solved during their lifetimes, but even they will start tackling them today because they recognize that, for any continuing social problem, dealing with it effectively in the present will likely diminish its harm in the future.
As noted earlier, the Bridgespan Group focuses on helping nonprofit organizations and foundations develop and scale solutions to social problems affecting America’s underserved. Yet, at a symposium on April 6, 2016, at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy’s Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society, Thomas Tierney, Bridgespan’s founding board chair, and Jeff Bradach, its cofounder and president, drew from Bridgespan’s experience a significant conclusion: Despite its clients’ successes, the number of people who benefit directly from these philanthropic initiatives is invariably a very small fraction of the overall population affected by the problems the initiatives are intended to solve or mitigate. That is both a great national shame and a tremendous opportunity.2 Moreover, Results for America, a bipartisan organization, has been created with the mission of “improving outcomes for young people, their families, and communities by shifting public resources toward evidence-based, results-driven solutions.”3
Tierney’s and Bradach’s point leads me to the following conclusion for this book: the most urgent, as well as the likely most effective, use of financial resources over the short run is for advocacy aimed at decisions to deploy public funds to take to the largest possible scale the proven solutions to major socioeconomic problems, such as the educational and health components of racial inequality in America. The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has made the scaling of nonprofit solutions to some of such problems its primary mission and has succeeded in achieving impressive results. In persuading other foundations as well as individual philanthropists to partner with it in its most recent fund, Blue Meridian Partners, discussed above—which has a goal of raising $1 billion to be used in scaling already successful organizations—the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation’s experience underscores the huge gap between what philanthropy and nonprofits can achieve and what American society’s pressing needs are.
To succeed in filling that gap requires three indispensable ingredients:
1. Advocacy success in persuading the public and lawmakers to make available from government revenues the necessary funds to deploy in scaling to meet the full need;
2. Advocacy success in recruiting and training the nonprofit/public entrepreneurs to be charged with administering the scale-up process as well as the public/private ventures that will implement the scaled-up programs; and
3. Great patience, because a great deal of time will be required to persuade the public and the lawmakers as well as to train the implementers. Deeply rooted, resistant attitudes almost always require decades to change.
The success of such policy advocacy to achieve the scale-up-to-need will surely depend on much greater political participation by those in the center and on the left of the political spectrum to counter the massive, professionally implemented political and policy funding network created by right-leaning donors and foundations. The latter have been overwhelmingly successful at maintaining broad-scale opposition to government provision of funds to strengthen America’s safety net for the poor, while funders on the left have not been nearly as effective in counteracting their influence.
This is not the same as arguing that American philanthropy needs to be more left-leaning. It is to say, rather, that institutions whose purposes do incline toward reducing poverty and inequality or expanding the social safety net need to be more effective in delivering that message to policy-makers and to the broad public. Conservative opponents of such ideas—including some foundations I have cited admiringly in this book and elsewhere for the focus and effectiveness of their work—have shown no reluctance to wage vigorous campaigns of both public advocacy and pressure on government. On the contrary, they have both excelled at these practices and shown extraordinary willingness to cooperate with one another to achieve their ends. (For an angry but compelling description of this success, see Jane Mayer’s brilliant, meticulously researched Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.4) Donors and foundations with a more progressive social agenda need to move from decrying their adversaries’ success to emulating their methods.
Rebalancing America’s politics is the single most important precondition for restoring sanity to American public policy. The recent triumphs of the radical right have short-circuited America’s capacity to maintain its nearly 300-year history of achieving an ever-greater measure of social justice for our least well-off residents and citizens, while at the same time fostering equal opportunity and freedom for all Americans to realize their full potential as human beings. The only way to rebalance our politics is for progressive-leaning wealthy Americans, who are far more numerous than the wealthy of the radical right, to put their energies and wealth into the political process to counter the attack on that vision of equality.
Such extensive political engagement cannot legally be done by America’s many law-abiding perpetual foundations because the Internal Revenue Code contains limits on what foundations can do. But it can be done by individuals who have created foundations and who are willing to devote non-tax-benefited dollars to lobbying and support for political candidates, which is what their counterparts on the right have been doing for decades. Some of the wealthy foundation founders of the left and center, such as George Soros, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Pierre Omidyar, Jeff Skoll, and Tim Gill have already been engaging in more extensive political participation, often with significant success. Other liberal donors have recently come together in The Democracy Alliance and often coordinate their efforts to help elect their desired political candidates.
Most of the wealthy who express the intention of “giving while living” are contemplating solving or making a significant dent directly in major social problems. As I have written, I fear too frequently in this book, such head-on attacks on complex problems pose great risks of failure and, in any event, with respect to large, complex problems, such impact as is achieved will be, by definition, years or decades in the future. Large investments in political campaigns, on the other hand, can achieve major impact in the short run with the election of supported candidates. The experience of donors on the political right has proven that this is so. What other form of socially beneficial investment can be rewarded with significant impact in two, four, or six years, which are the durations of most political offices in the United States?
In a very real sense, carefully directed political giving is the gift that goes on giving long after an election is over. Giving for policy advocacy and in support of candidates who promise to effect desirable policy changes constitutes the greatest opportunity to achieve impact from intended socially beneficial giving, whether from tax-benefited dollars or from after-tax dollars. Moreover, unlike large substantive problem-solving initiatives, policy advocacy and political elections can not only benefit from huge infusions of cash over the short run and demonstrate clear impact but are likely to help rebalance American politics for decades to come. Unlike any other uses of “giving while living” funds, these purposes have to be the highest priority for anyone with the wealth and the passion for a fairer, freer, and more just America.