American Philanthropy and the World’s Communities
During the Cold War, when America’s national objective was to combat communism, philanthropic institutions tended to align their activities abroad with those of their government. When finally free from Cold War commitments, they joined an unstable but powerful associational movement that has reshaped civil society in many parts of the world.1 The collapse of the Soviet Union and the loosening of its grip on its client nations simultaneously freed voluntary energies and reawakened the possibilities of a market economy and free associations in places where these had been repressed.2 American philanthropies therefore saw opportunities to promote capitalism and civil society as engines of democracy.
Whether the task was long-term poverty reduction or humanitarian intervention, philanthropic institutions have assisted in laying the foundations for stable civil societies. They have helped international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) originating in rich countries reach populations in need, and they have fostered the emergence of indigenous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the developing world. This is an important contribution, perhaps on a par with the open-ended philanthropy of a century ago and with the consolidation of the nonprofit sector at midcentury.
The Ethiopian Famine as a New Departure for International Humanitarian Aid
No case study perfectly illustrates how the humanitarian movement fostered the advent of a global civil society, but the mass philanthropic response to the 1984 Ethiopian famine gives a sense of how the world could mobilize for disaster relief and of Americans’ special role in that particular effort. The Ethiopian rescue played a major role in promoting the idea that humanitarianism should cross borders and transcend politics. The French group Doctors Without Borders made the case forcefully, contravening traditional Red Cross policy of respecting an individual nation’s prerogatives with their actions in Biafra in 1968; other NGOs reaffirmed cross-border humanitarianism in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Some American aid workers had already rebelled against serving as an extension of American propaganda during the Vietnam War (the “shirtsleeve war” of civilian good works, as Vice President Hubert Humphrey called it) and even crossed to the North in ways unthinkable in previous conflicts. But the new efforts for Ethiopia went far beyond such limited displays of independence towards governments in the name of humanitarianism. For American philanthropy, the Ethiopian emergency was the occasion for nonprofits to trump cold war dynamics and act independently from the administration. In joining global efforts to end the famine, philanthropy claimed its independence from foreign policy.
Ethiopian peasants have endured recurrent famines, but that of 1972–74 was especially severe. Merchants and rich landlords hoarded grain from good harvests in parts of the country. Peasants left the land. Students and workers demonstrated against the imperial government in the capital. But Emperor Haile Selassie persisted in denying the reality of the famine even as conditions worsened amidst secessionist wars in Eritrea and peasant revolts that made agricultural activity impossible in northern and southeastern Ethiopia.3 Although Ethiopia had been a major center of American aid during the early Cold War (see chapter 6), Washington later kept its distance from an increasingly alien regime. The U.S. Congress approved some emergency supplies after much political wrangling, but little was ever delivered to the starving population.
The imperial government’s failure to prevent 600,000 deaths led to the military revolution of 1974. A Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army, known as the Derg, took power and eventually elected Major Mengistu Haile Mariam as its chair. His All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement and its Worker’s Party of Ethiopia nationalized all land and redistributed it to peasant associations, which were instructed to turn the harvest over to state-sponsored cooperatives.4
In reflecting on these events in Ethiopia, Indian economist (and Nobel Prize winner) Amartya Sen showed the deprivation to have been as much the outcome of food withheld as of real scarcity.5 Sen saw communal development as a means of overcoming the inequity of government distribution, but the U.S. government had no incentive to directly help local Ethiopian communities. Despite disturbing evidence that the socialist regime was guilty of grave human rights violations, a new administration in Washington was briefly open to working with the Ethiopian regime’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission.6 The U.S. funded road construction, resettlement projects, and early-warning systems for famine, but the revolutionary government was suspicious of U.S. activities, believing that they were covert operations to thwart the revolution. It permitted U.S. humanitarian operations to continue, but it tried to direct those programs towards bolstering its own power. The military government harassed U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) workers, limited their operations, and failed to provide an accounting for U.S. relief dollars and for those raised through the sale of U.S. food items.7 Reacting to the collectivization program, political repression, and uncooperative action, the Carter administration rapidly reverted to the older policy of limiting U.S. assistance to immediate famine relief. Wary of doing too much to support the new Provisional Military Administrative Council while other armed groups actively opposed it, U.S. policy had reached an impasse.
The U.S. government continued some humanitarian relief aid but did its best to ensure that it was no longer used for long-term initiatives. In July 1979, President Carter suspended official development assistance to Ethiopia and also opposed multilateral loans from the World Bank and African Development Bank.8 Soon, no Western aid infrastructure capable of even short-term humanitarian aid was left in Ethiopia. This eventually created conditions that called for a completely new approach from international philanthropy.
The political situation was steadily deteriorating, especially in the embattled provinces of Eritrea, Tigray, and Wollo, and the Derg was able to suppress a Somali-funded secession movement, which emerged in Ogaden in the west, only after receiving large military aid from the Soviet Union.9 At the same time, the revolutionary government carried out massive population transfers, moving people from drought-affected regions in the north to the more fertile, less densely populated areas of the south and southwest. The motive was in part to depopulate the rebellious North. The populations of entire villages were loaded onto convoys of trucks and buses, escorted by soldiers and local peasant militias. Resettlement involved clearing land for new villages, decimating tree cover and essential vegetation, and devastating wildlife. In addition, northern farmers brought with them their techniques of slash and burn farming, which further damaged the landscape. The ultimate result of the resettlement was a radical reduction in levels of agricultural production. Concentrating rural population in villages in hopes of encouraging a more collectivized society further lessened productivity. Continued warfare and new insurrections in the north, combined with poor rains and harvests, intensified famine conditions and led to the largest campaigns of forced migration ever in African history.10
Reluctant to send provisions directly to Ethiopia, the Reagan administration in 1983 channeled only 4,000 tons of badly needed food through Catholic Relief Services, and another 1,500 tons to Ethiopian refugees in Sudan. By comparison, the Soviet Union, which was a food importer itself, donated 9,000 tons of food in June 1983 alone.11 The U.S. then cut its food assistance commitment to zero for fiscal year 1984 by ending its appropriation to Catholic Relief Services. The administration’s difficulties with anti-American rhetoric in multilateral organizations compounded the problem. When a new Ethiopian famine that began in 1983 made headlines in the fall of 1984, tensions between the U.S. government and the U.N. were running high. In 1985 the United States withdrew from UNESCO, where anti-American feelings were also rampant, and cut its aid drastically to the World Bank’s International Development Agency, the primary funder of development projects.12 As a result, what little Western help was given to Ethiopia, which was again experiencing famine, came from the U.N. World Food Program and from the European Community, despite their doubts about the Ethiopian government’s willingness to distribute it.
Then events took a turn so dramatic that it unleashed a worldwide humanitarian movement. The BBC filmed the famine, and the world discovered it. In October 1984, viewers in America and many other countries saw their first footage of starving Ethiopians on the evening news. By that time, it was estimated that between 10 and 12 million people (out of a population of 42 million) were starving or on the verge of starvation. This catastrophe coincided with the tenth anniversary of the socialist revolution, which the regime celebrated lavishly in Addis-Ababa, willfully ignoring the human disaster around it.13 While Ethiopian officials engaged in ceremonial self-congratulation, an estimated 400 million viewers across sixty countries watched the broadcast of the July 1985 Live Aid rock concert held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia to raise money for the famine. Other benefit concerts took place around the world. Michael Jackson’s fundraising song “We Are the World” was the number one hit song of 1985.14
This intervention to lessen the severity of the Ethiopian famine marked an important moment in the growth of the global humanitarian movement. For Americans, there was a special added dimension. They were knowingly supporting a humanitarian cause in a country the U.S. government had declared off limits. By October 1984, there were only four American agencies left in Ethiopia: the American Friends Service Committee, World Vision, the Mennonite Central Committee, and Catholic Relief Services. Twelve European agencies were also operating, but they were limited in their resources and ability to intervene. But once the news of the famine broke on the international scene, aid workers rushed to Addis Ababa. Catholic Relief Services and the Lutheran World Federation, along with local Catholic and Lutheran churches, organized a new group (Churches Drought Action-Ethiopia) to coordinate the work of all agencies and avoid duplicate overhead costs. By March of 1985, thirty additional agencies had arrived from different countries and were working through the new Catholic Relief Services/Lutheran World Federation unit.15
These organizations relied heavily on massive fundraising from all possible donors: individual governments, international organizations, and the broad public touched by media reports of the magnitude of the famine. They distributed 20,000 tons of food to two million people each month. They raised between $50 and $80 million in six months, an unprecedented total. The average donation was $40.16 CARE negotiated a contract with the Ethiopian government to provide 50,000 tons of food and $10 million in other forms of assistance.17 INGOs received a windfall of donations that allowed their Ethiopian programs to grow by huge margins. World Vision’s total allocation in 1984 was $7 million. Between November 1984 and October 1985, it had allocated $25 million in cash and $40 million in food commodities.18 American donors, big and small, embraced the universalistic mission the INGOs promoted of stopping mass hunger, and in so doing they trumped late Cold War political divisions.
With the broad American public supporting INGOs in Ethiopia, the Reagan administration changed course. Responding to public sentiment and the philanthropic activity that signaled it, the administration approved $45 million for USAID to buy and transport 80,000 metric tons of food, all of which was to be delivered only to INGOs. Shortly after, USAID agreed to send an additional 50,000 tons of food, this time to the Ethiopian government.19 In the course of the rescue operation, the Ethiopian government had ceased to be the major intermediary for American or other foreign help. In 1985, the government handled only 30 percent of all the aid flowing into the country.20 A similar change affected other countries where local governments, instead of being the major beneficiaries of philanthropy, were reduced to the lesser role of authorizing local indigenous organizations to be grantees of foreign organizations.
With the Ethiopian crisis, American philanthropies thought of short-term aid not as a one-time stopgap measure but as an essential step in a program to support long-term economic and social gains. This put them further at odds with their government, which wanted to make sure that its assistance to a socialist country was devoted exclusively to emergency relief, not to structural development. INGOs received U.S. food from USAID on the condition that they adhere to the distinction between relief and development, but they ignored this requirement. Congressional hearings in 1985 found that Catholic Relief Services had contributed as much as $30 million to agriculture, water, and sanitation projects. USAID argued that that money should have been used instead to defray transportation costs for delivering food relief. Such difficulties were eventually eliminated in 1985 with the passing of the African Relief and Recovery Act, whereby aid for “rehabilitation” was deemed by Congress to be within the law.21 Ultimately, INGOs were able to carve out a position of independence (at least for a while) from the U.S. government and the Ethiopian government’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, successfully lobbying for more U.S. aid and taking it upon themselves to organize and execute relief operations in Ethiopia.
The INGOs launched long-term projects for rehabilitation, including irrigation projects; supplying people in camps with seed and tools to re-establish their farms; training local people in basic health/paramedic skills; and, lastly, encouraging wage work within the camps to help keep people active and hopeful. By now, four kinds of nongovernmental relief organizations were operating in Ethiopia: church-based organizations like Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief, and groups sponsored by Seventh Day Adventists, Baptists, and Presbyterians; non-denominational but religion-inspired agencies like World Vision, Friends of Africa, and Mercy Corps, which had sprung up in the previous decade and were not officially attached to a church; traditional non-sectarian agencies like CARE, Save the Children, and Oxfam; and specific focus agencies, like Technoserve, Women’s World Banking, EnterpriseWorks/VITA, and the African-American Labor Conference, many of which dealt in technical assistance and support for entrepreneurial activity.22 INGO leaders initiated negotiations with the Ethiopian government to set up relief camps, including one in Alamata that was run entirely by World Vision, and one in Korem run by Catholic Relief Services.23 The INGOs were granted access to the worst suffering rural areas, and they developed a high profile in the media until Mengistu expelled them all in the early 1990s prior to his own demise.
INGOs in Ethiopia were influential providers of welfare and relief services, but their influence was also felt in their support for indigenous NGOs. In 1986, the U.N. General Assembly held a special session to review the Ethiopian drought emergency, and U.N. workshops recognized the growing strength of African NGOs. By the early 1990s, the number of homegrown NGOs in Ethiopia began to outnumber INGOs. At the end of the decade, they made up 72 percent of all NGOs in the country.24 Similar developments took place in other parts of Africa, and also in Latin America, and in Asia.
Exporting the Textbook: American Democracy in Eastern Europe
American philanthropic organizations operating abroad were thus freeing themselves from Cold War strictures and investing directly in destitute communities even before the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave them a new and historic opportunity to export American principles to the many communities that had been directly under Soviet control. Here the prioritiy was not to end starvation but to aid in creating lasting means of generating wealth and civic life. The collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War coincided with a return of prosperity to the United States. Americans therefore claimed not only the victory of freedom but also that of capitalism over communism. Their faith was renewed in the transforming power of capitalism, which they could now export free from ideological alternatives.
Given these circumstances, what should be the response of American philanthropy? Established American philanthropic institutions had long used their resources to fight communism. Now the old enemy had vanished. Peoples of the former Soviet bloc were looking for alternative models to Marxism. American philanthropies readily settled on two ideas: to promote market mechanisms for the democratization of wealth in place of an economics based on redistribution under state control; and to stimulate associational life to support a strong civil society, independent of the state and respectful of cultural differences. It was a great opportunity to export the American textbook formula: a mix of capitalism and community. Could it work, and how long would it take? That was another issue.
Some important American foundations—making up a small but influential part of the nonprofit sector—vied with the American government, international organizations, and the European Union for a say in rebuilding the former Soviet republics. What these American foundations could spend on such a vast territory was limited. If measured quantitatively in dollars, their contribution was small. In 1990 all American foundations together provided only about “one tenth of what the U.S. government gave through USIA, Department of State, Department of Education, and the National Endowment for Democracy,” a Reagan initiative started in 1983 to promote democracy abroad; “one hundredth that of the IMF; one two-hundredth that of the World Bank.”25 But American foundations had their niche. They were independent of congressional appropriations and could act quickly to seed promising new ideas.26
Only two years before the Berlin wall came down, Americans had celebrated the bicentennial of their Constitution. Now, various East European countries were rewriting their own constitutions, one after the other, incorporating the language of rights and decentralization, and often adopting principles embodied in the American Constitution. One thinks of the balance of power principles that found their way to Bulgaria and Romania, the first countries to approve new constitutions.27
Eastern Europeans were also recovering the tradition of civil societies and advocacy groups that had once flourished within their borders—but had been largely silenced. As Eastern Europeans searched for a conceptual model, they looked to the United States, but also to their immediate neighbors in Western Europe, who were deeply concerned that the democratization of the former Soviet bloc not derail. In the process, Eastern Europeans discovered the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, and in doing so they entered into dialogue not only with the Americans (who have regarded Tocqueville as their theoretician of civil society) but also with the French, and at the same time they found a narrative that illuminated events unfolding in their own countries. Eastern Europe’s revolutionary moment resonated with Tocqueville’s story of the collapse of an old regime and the urgent need to rediscover a civil society that had been repeatedly suppressed. Other giants of Western thought also appeared on the East European scene. As one observer remarked, Locke, Hume, and Ferguson came back “with a Polish and Hungarian accent.”28
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was translated into all the East European languages in the 1990s, first in fragments and then in full. A Bulgarian scholar provided a translation of the introduction to Democracy in America (taken from the English translation) in 1989, and by the end of the year, the vice president of the Bulgarian republic was presiding over a Tocqueville symposium. Bulgarian intellectuals integrated Tocqueville into the history curriculum at their universities. Polish intellectuals quoted Tocqueville on the difficult apprenticeship of liberty and on complexities involved in exercising newly acquired political rights.29 East European intellectuals, like Americans before them, highlighted Tocqueville’s praise of voluntary associations and his attack on centralization. With Tocqueville, they embraced the idea that liberty, and the responsibilities that go with it, required boundless energy on the part of civil society. In words he might have borrowed from Tocqueville, a Romanian historian wrote in 1990: “This is a world of energy … at no point in life can one rest.”30 All this energy of a civil society in the making appealed to American philanthropists, big and small, who eagerly embraced the challenge of building a non-communist world in Eastern Europe.
American foundations had an opportunity now to help invent a flourishing civil society in countries where only a few years previously the state had reigned. In doing so they built on their previous involvement in these countries, where they had funded organizations that bore witness to repression. Helsinki Watch, a private American organization created in 1978 (with Ford Foundation money), monitored implementation of the Helsinki Accords and generated pressure on abusive governments. The organization kept tabs on the countries that had signed the (renewed) 1985 accords: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany, Poland, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Among its achievements was helping to bring about the release of political prisoners and also pressing for a greater awareness of human rights abroad in the U.S. Congress. In 1986, Helsinki Watch focused on Soviet abuses in Afghanistan. In 1988, the organization changed its name to Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Americas Watch, were the most visible agencies.31 Also important was the International Commission of Jurists, once presided over by Seán McBride, Irish activist turned statesman and 1974 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and one of the founders of Amnesty International.32
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, participation in Soviet and East European affairs replaced “watching.” American philanthropy reignited old associational networks. Philanthropists also became private diplomats. Already in the early 1980s, under its president David Hamburg’s leadership, the Carnegie Corporation had initiated a dialogue on arms control and security issues at the highest level of government, with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, that helped build bridges between the American and Soviet administrations.33 Now came a massive investment in civil society. At home conservatives were vowing to defund the left (see chapter 8). They changed their tune when working in communist countries. In Eastern Europe, the opposing philanthropic camps acted in concert, regardless of whether they were perceived at home as conservative or liberal. American foundations in the former Soviet Union all wanted the same thing: the mutual strengthening of capitalism and community. They could not predict when capitalism would succeed, but they promoted conversion to a free market economy and fostered managerial training. They simultaneously championed human rights, the rule of law, and the strengthening of civil society. They found a ready audience among the professionals, and intellectuals who made up the middle classes of the fallen socialist regimes, if somewhat less enthusiasm among members of the higher state nomenclatura.34
George Soros emerged as the first, most emblematic, and most committed of the foundation leaders. Soros, the richest of Diaspora philanthropists, took an approach towards his native Hungary that was much like Andrew Carnegie’s towards his native Scotland a century before. But the stakes were so much higher in Hungary, where Soros had learned firsthand the damage that totalitarian regimes could do. As a young Jewish boy, he had survived the Nazis, and as a man he had fled the communists.
In America, Soros had made the lion’s share of his fortune as an unblinking currency speculator. In 1979, he created The Open Society Fund, partly to leave his children some good work to do and partly to enjoy a tax break. But behind what might have been at the time a routine investment in philanthropy on the part of a wealthy American was a larger idea. Ever since Soros had fled totalitarianism, he had reflected on the need for liberty and openness. As a student at the London School of Economics, he had deepened these thoughts in reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Both men were his teachers. They had fled Nazi Austria and loomed large in defending the values of freedom against totalitarian regimes. In their fight against economic controls and for an open society, they were an inspiration to Soros much as, a century earlier, Herbert Spencer had been in justifying the gospel of wealth to Carnegie.
In the 1970s, Soros joined the Ford Foundation in backing Helsinki Watch. In the 1980s, he established Popper Fellowships at Columbia and New York University, and helped dissidents travel out of Eastern Europe and develop contacts in the West. In 1985, he opened a Soros Foundation in his native Hungary, which had retained the least repressive regime in the Soviet bloc.
Soros used his funds wisely. Because the Hungarian forint was not convertible, the Soros Foundation initially spent U.S. dollars on imports such as medical equipment, which the hard-pressed communist regime could not afford, and also Xerox machines that were important tools in circulating information. The state hospitals then paid the Soros Foundation in forints for the medical equipment, and the foundation channeled the forints back into cultural projects, buying books for local libraries, funding renovations of small-town churches, and funding research projects in universities.35
Soros created other foundations throughout Eastern Europe: Charter 77 for US-Czech relations; Stefan Batory in Poland; and the Open Society Funds in Bulgaria and Romania. He also started a fund in Russia but was constantly harassed by its tax authorities.36 Despite its genuine renaissance, Russian civil society remained vulnerable to abuses of power in the name of resistance to American intervention.37 Eventually Soros left Russia and moved some of his resources to African countries. He has been credited as a one-man Marshall Plan, and his influence over Eastern Europe is widely recognized.
There were other foundations on the ground. Those based in Europe focused on education and social welfare, with German foundations concentrating their resources on the former GDR. Soros and the other American foundations were remarkably consistent in exporting the kind of educational, political, and economic programs that mutually reinforced capitalist practices and civic life. The Soros Foundation Hungary, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation promoted market economics by funding the International Management Center in Budapest, the first business school in Central Europe modeled after an American one. The John M. Olin Foundation invested in legal issues, such as revising constitutions and improving the practice of law; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation worked towards establishing a non-profit sector; the Smith Richardson Foundation committed itself more generally to promoting democratic institutions.38
All made a critical effort to nurture local NGOs. They were conscious of living in a historic moment, of providing for the first time assistance to organizations that were not instrumentalities of the government or the party. Board members of these organizations were no longer apparatchiks but community members, professionals, academics, journalists. Some, like Hungarian economist Zsuzsa Ferge, who worked on poverty, did not see the connection the Americans were making between capitalism and community. They objected to the “one size fits all” theories they often heard at the table, but nonetheless it was a new era. Local initiatives were finally tangible.39
The emphasis on investment in local initiatives led some American foundations to promote the community foundation, on the model that had been perfected at home since its modest beginnings in Cleveland just before the First World War (see chapter 2). The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Soros were key players in this effort to stimulate philanthropy and civil society with modest local resources. “I was very skeptical that volunteerism would ever exist here again,” observed Tomáš Krejčí, head of the community foundation in the Czech city of Ústí nad Labem. But Krejčí was pleasantly surprised when “people started turning up to donate their time and skills to projects supported by the community foundation and other charitable efforts.”40 Local community foundations worked for the tolerance of minorities, the legal defense of victims, and, they hoped, a burgeoning nonprofit sector.
A political consensus began to emerge on democracy and human rights, but turning these ideas into real economic and social change was more challenging. The more liberal American foundations pushed political pluralism through women’s rights, but a women’s movement was a hard sell in the East. Lenin was still remembered for saying “equality is not sameness.” Minorities also struggled for recognition, and a subset of foundations put a substantial amount of money into minority integration. Ford, Mott, and Soros funded the Autonómia Foundation in Budapest, which was dedicated to ending discrimination against the poor Roma community. “Plowing is not for gypsies,” says an old Hungarian proverb, but the foundation’s objective was to turn gypsies into small landholders and to help them buy seedlings and elementary tools. The Autonómia Foundation also helped minority entrepreneurs with some loans; the 1993 loan repayment ratio grew by 400 percent compared to 1992, but still only one third of payments due were made. The foundation also provided some of the poor with housing in former Soviet army barracks and cleaned up some dumping grounds to prevent prevailing winds from blowing refuse into residential communities.41
Foundations were not the only American philanthropies exporting American ideas. Mass philanthropy participated too, with Diaspora giving playing an important role. For American mass philanthropy, 1989 was the opposite of 1947 in every way. In 1947, Stalin had closed the Soviet Union to Western money. He had denounced the Marshall Plan as American imperialism, saying he wanted no part of it. But the consequences of the Iron Curtain were much greater than foregoing American tax money. Local populations also lost the large amounts coming in from the vast Russian and Eastern European Diaspora in the United States. For the impoverished population of devastated postwar Poland, the rich American was not the U.S. corporate mogul but a brother or an uncle who worked on an assembly line in Detroit and lived in an unassuming home in Hamtramck, the Polish neighborhood of Detroit. In the Michigan winter, his modest balloon-frame house, its small front lawn adorned with a statue of the Virgin Mary, did not look like much. But though unpretentious, the house was stuffed with appliances purchased with the high wages and high benefits the UAW had negotiated with the auto industry. In the immediate postwar, the American worker began sending some of his surplus income as remittances to family members in the old country to help with the rebuilding. Stalin ended this American intrusion.
When the wall came down in 1989, American mass philanthropy was once again available to a vast East European and Russian population, even though only older Americans had personal memories of the old country. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which once counted a great Slavic population in its steel mills, was still home to 2,000 Czech-American families in the late 1980s. Pittsburgh also had the twelfth largest community foundation in the U.S., which administered 325 donor-advised funds. To help with the Czech-American effort, the Heinz Endowment contributed to a “Friends of the Czech Republic Fund.” Money flowed again from Pittsburgh to towns and villages in Czechoslovakia, and to many other places once behind the Iron Curtain.
This mode of giving is important in another respect. In appraising American overseas philanthropy, it is customary to point to the low percentage of GNP that Americans direct abroad compared to other wealthy countries. But Americans fare better in these comparative statistics when one adds in estimates and figures of Diaspora philanthropy. Millions of ordinary Americans with family and roots abroad participate in a global movement that the Internet further facilitates.42
Completing the Textbook: “Maximum Feasible Participation” Worldwide
In the 1980s, the philanthropic organizations that had for so long entrusted their resources to the governments of developing countries, only to experience bureaucratic bottlenecks and state corruption, decided instead to channel their funds directly to communities.43 This was a significant move. There was ample evidence that state actors had not performed well, but would local NGOs give a better return on their investment? The only reason the philanthropies had for hoping so was a strong ideological belief in the power of community. That belief became the new orthodoxy in international aid circles as key figures in development like microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus and economist Amartya Sen also embraced it.
The experience a few American foundations had acquired in defining the War on Poverty at home was critical in shaping the idea of direct investment in disadvantaged communities. What these foundations pushed for was in essence a worldwide adaptation of “maximum feasible participation” of the poor; in other words, a principle of providing those in need with the assets required to effect their own economic development (chapter 7). The plan was to turn an infinite number of small communities around the globe into instruments of economic progress and human rights.
It is important to remember in this regard the pioneering part played by the Ford Foundation as the initial backer in 1980 of Yunus and his Grameen Bank, both recipients of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for launching microcredit in Bangladesh. Yunus returned to Bangladesh from his years as a Fulbright scholar and economics professor in the United States in the early 1970s with some important ideas gleaned from the Civil Rights movement. Chief among them were the program-related investment strategies that the Ford Foundation had developed. At that time, the Ford Foundation renamed its own Governance and Public Policy Division the “Governance and Civil Society Division” to signal the commitment of its president Franklin Thomas (previously the head of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation) to small communities around the world.
Yunus transformed lending to the poor from an unacceptable risk to a reasonable bet. The innovative part of his approach to microlending consisted in extending credit to communities of borrowers rather than individuals, with the loans to be repaid in small weekly installments over the course of a year. Yunus started by making a few loans from his own pocket in the later 1970s. Having developed some contacts at Ford, he worked with the foundation’s representative in Bangladesh, and this led to a loan guarantee of $800,000 from the foundation that went a long way towards convincing still-dubious commercial banks to provide capital for his experiment.44 Yunus tailored his Grameen Bank to conditions in Bangladesh, focusing on local civic organizations, economic development, and social justice. Community solidarity helped ensure that more than 98 percent of the loans were eventually repaid. This initial success convinced banks, which had earlier dismissed Yunus, to join the venture.45
Yunus’s success led to more cross-fertilization of ideas with American philanthropy. Early on, Ford Foundation officials had Yunus consult with officials from Chicago’s ShoreBank, which Ford had helped start in the early 1970s to make loans in the city’s low-income neighborhoods. Yunus later advised Governor Bill Clinton on setting up a microlending program in Arkansas.46 When president, Clinton adopted the idea in setting up his Community Development Financial Institution Fund to revitalize distressed communities in the United States.
Yunus also pioneered in helping women. While the American civil rights movement-era Program Related Investments were geared towards male entrepreneurs, Grameen Bank used microcredit to pursue social justice for Bangladeshi women. Yunus understood that women bore the brunt of poverty and suffered from intense oppression in a society rigidly dominated by men; he also believed that women would use microloans more effectively than men to lift their families and communities out of poverty. Although Yunus faced opposition from angry husbands and even educated bankers who wanted to restrict women’s roles in business, within six years, half of his borrowers were women, and today nearly all of Grameen’s loans are made to women.47 Ford continued supporting Grameen through the early 1990s, and the foundation later expanded its microfinancing philanthropy to Mexico and India.48 Having succeeded so brilliantly in launching microcredit, Yunus has become the advocate for a larger field of nonprofit social enterprises with high social returns. He shares ideas of extending credit to individual entrepreneurs working for the benefit of disadvantaged communities with other American promoters of social entrepreneurship such as Bill Drayton, founder of the now well-established Ashoka foundation, and eBay’s Jeff Skoll.49 With its roots in Bedford-Stuyvesant and later Bangladesh, the practice of microcredit as a means of helping the poor become entrepreneurs is now being promoted around the world by the U.N., the World Bank, and European organizations. Yunus’ idea has been so successful, in fact, that it has spurred the emergence of a for-profit microfinance industry that is now in need of significant regulation.50
The strategy of underwriting a multitude of indigenous organizations in the developing world instead of working primarily with governments has found its most powerful theoretical expression in Amartya Sen’s work following his historical study of famines. Sen has captured the great coming together of market and civil society principles. With his 1999 Development as Freedom, where he synthesized much of his earlier work, he joined a long tradition of political economists who underscore the “freedom of exchange” intrinsic to the market as one of “the basic liberties that people have reason to value.”51 Like Yunus, Sen also saw women’s agency as a central ingredient in development and social change, but he insisted also on championing their rights. He argued that it is not enough to be concerned about women’s ability to engage in economic activity.52 The degree to which they have social, political, and economic freedom is itself a leading indicator of development.
Sen promoted individual agency and community as the means to rising out of “deprivation.” This would be possible only if institutional arrangements guaranteed freedoms rather than hampering individuals with “unfreedoms.”53 Development, then, is not about raising GNP or generating wealth, but about helping to create institutions that give people economic opportunities, political freedom, social facilities (health care and education), transparency (of government and market arrangements), and protective (i.e., social) security. Sen argued that these are not luxuries that must be postponed in order to achieve development, but rather the very elements that constitute development.
Such ideas became salient in international organizations in the second half of the 1980s. At the U.N., commitment to working with local communities translated into a “New Policy Agenda.” In 1986, the U.N. established a special division for NGOs. In 1988, it launched a program to provide direct support for the small-scale activities of NGOs and community-based organizations. In the 1990s, the U.N. even shifted its rhetoric from supporting NGOs to building “sustainable partnerships” with civil society. Counting only the organizations operating internationally, there were 1,600 INGOs in 1980, 2,500 in 1990. The number of American-based INGOs jumped from fifty-two in 1970 to more than 400 by 1994.54 Despite the many failures that have been reported, these organizations have carried out development projects and with them have fostered a degree of community empowerment around the world.
The World Bank also acted on a commitment to civil society. Its Civil Society Unit arose out of the NGO Unit that was established in 1989, partly in an effort to make the bank appear more attuned to local concerns. Bank President James Wolfensohn encouraged frequent consultation with NGOs. By 1996 the World Bank had civil society liaisons in half of its resident missions.55 The Bank and other regional development banks established over forty investment funds devoted to disbursing small grants to NGOs and community-based organizations in support of infrastructure projects like roads, bridges, and water systems.56 More often than not, indigenous NGOs have gained World Bank funding only after having been supported (and thus certified) by a small grant from the Ford Foundation. In parts of the world, they have become indispensable to the economy and society. Some observers of Bangladesh have gone as far as saying that indigenous NGOs constitute not a civil society but a “virtual parallel state.” In the early 1990s, their programs reached between 10 and 20 percent of the poor population (or between 13 million and 26 million people). American developmental agencies have followed the same path. In 1981, Congress required that USAID channel at least 12 per cent of expenditures through NGOs, a sum raised to 13.5 per cent in 1986.57
Critics have been prompt to point out that international organizations cannot arbitrate conflicts among so many stakeholders and are basically powerless if such conflicts should turn into humanitarian tragedies.58 But whatever the caveats, the shift to helping smaller communities rather than nation states is an established trend of our times. Among American philanthropists, Ted Turner sanctioned the new internationalism in 1997. In a landmark grant to the U.N., he gave $1billion over ten years on condition that it be used for women and children and other humanitarian projects; this at a time when the U.S. government was still withholding its dues. (Reporters pointed to CNN as the epitome of Turner’s belief in global networks.) Turner felt that the U.N.’s global mission and the many projects it operated around the world offered the best place to make a difference. He did not want the gift to go towards the U.N.’s operating budget or other bureaucratic costs and proposed instead to use the U.N. to channel money to the many communities in need.59 Then Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched the U.N. millennium goals, widely publicized in his 2000 address, “We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century.” Secretary Annan challenged “member states” to work with “the vibrant constellation of new non-state actors” and to tackle together the eradication of extreme poverty, pandemic diseases, and environmental disasters.60
Making the Connection between the Global and the Local: The Role of the Gates Foundation
There remained the very large problem of combining the available funding from international organizations, nation states, and global capitalism, and making it available to the many small communities in need but excluded from economic networks. In the language of the United Nations, a U.S. foundation operating abroad is merely another INGO, but in fact large American foundations have been critical agenda setters. The newest and largest of them has been especially important in finding ways to support communities while bypassing local bureaucratic bottlenecks. The foundation that Bill and Melinda Gates created in 2000 with their Microsoft fortune, reinforced by investor Warren Buffett’s gift of part of his own fortune to it, is the world’s largest philanthropic foundation, today’s counterpart to the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and the Ford Foundation in the 1960s.61
Very large profits in high-tech industries and on Wall Street have generated a new wave of exceptionally wealthy philanthropists. With this resurgence of extremes of wealth, the turn of the century has been dubbed a second “Gilded Age.”62 The new rich became philanthropists of a new stripe. Before the bubble burst, they captured the headlines with a concept they called “venture philanthropy.” The idea was to invest not only in philanthropic programs but also in the organizational capabilities and financial health of the nonprofit agencies dedicated to carrying them out.63 Some promoted hosting for-profit and nonprofit activities under the same corporate roof, which they did until the collapse of the NASDAQ and then the larger financial debacle of 2008.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation emerged from this environment, but it adopted more conventional procedures. Bill Gates, arguably the most successful entrepreneur of his generation, is now its head. By investing his foundation’s vast resources, Gates has acted as a catalyst bringing together various public and private actors in the arena of global aid. A recent survey indicates that Gates spearheads a larger American trend of giving internationally. The Foundation Center reports the creation of 143 new foundations between 1995, the year the Gates Foundation came into being, and 2008, with international giving growing at a pace faster than overall giving.64
With means equal to that of a nation state, and access to a vast network of experts, the Gates Foundation has enormous leverage, hence the importance of following its work. In conversation with other foundations and a cast of influential brokers committed to the millennium goals—Presidents Clinton and Carter, international rock star Bono among entertainment personalities, and others—the Gates Foundation has invested in civil society in remote areas of the world with the hope of eventually turning over control of stable programs to indigenous communities and their governments.65 Two of its projects—a second green revolution for Africa, and the worldwide fight against HIV/AIDS with special attention to India—will serve to illustrate the impact of big-money philanthropy’s direct investment (with carefully selected partners) on local communities worldwide.
In 2006, the Gates and Rockefeller foundations began collaborating on a second green revolution, this time directed at Africa. It is a partnership between one of America’s newest foundations and one of its oldest, which has acquired over the years much expertise in agricultural work. Both are responsive to criticisms that the original green revolution in Asia and Latin America (see chapter 5) fed the continents but harmed small farmers because of its excessive reliance on agribusiness without community participation. The two foundations launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), designed to increase African farmers’ access to seeds, farming and irrigation technologies, and markets and financing. Gates initially committed only $100 million and Rockefeller $50 million.66 Retiring U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was named the first chairman of the initiative.67
AGRA takes a realistic view of the need to work with governments. In its first year of operation, it made more than 10 initial grants to several ministries of agriculture, as well as to prominent African plant breeders, soil health experts, and leaders of agriculture extension programs. In Kenya, for example, AGRA partnered with Equity Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture to provide loans totaling up to $50 million to 2.5 million farmers and 15,000 rural shops, fertilizer and seed wholesalers, grain traders, and food processors.68 As part of the program, the Ministry of Agriculture contributes millions of dollars in subsidies to Kenya’s most vulnerable farmers. Kofi Annan announced in 2008 that AGRA had launched a new partnership with the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation, the agency President Bush created to dramatically increase American government aid abroad.69 Collaboration between the Gates Foundation and the U.S. government has continued with President Obama’s launch of a Global Agriculture and Food Security Program unveiled in April 2010. Four countries—the U.S., Canada, South Korea, and Spain—are partnering. As the fifth member, the Gates Foundation is in effect another state.70
AGRA’s approach consistently emphasizes local small farmers as the recipients of its aid. Almost three quarters of Africa’s land is being farmed without fertilizers or improved seeds. The program therefore develops seeds and fertilizers at U.S. and African research centers and universities that small farmers can afford. It is seeking to create new supply chains, including the establishment of rural seed shops or kiosks to replace government distribution mechanisms.71 AGRA channels money to NGOs in Africa, which then recruit and train local merchants to become agrodealers. Training in becoming a small capitalist includes basic courses in business and accounting; other assistance includes inducing fertilizer and seed supply companies to distribute their products to poor farmers on credit with guarantees from the NGO. These local dealers can then supply surrounding farmers who no longer have to travel long distances or pay high transport costs to deal directly with wholesale supply companies. In this way, Gates and Rockefeller money find its way to local recipients, stimulating market development and community regeneration. Even though NGOs have proven no more immune to corruption and inefficiencies than government bureaucracies, and coordination has remained a difficult issue, the expectation nonetheless persists that global philanthropic resources can effectively reach local communities.72
As a major funder of the worldwide fight against HIV/AIDS, Gates and his foundation operate both on a global level, and as we shall see in the case of India, at a local level as well. They have helped build multinational funding strategies. Bill Gates’s announcements to fellow global capitalists, who meet annually in the ski resort of Davos, Switzerland, of large gifts to the medical establishment have been widely advertised. Gates was instrumental in launching the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, designed to fund research with predictable and legally-binding financial commitments from governments against which money can be borrowed on capital markets. Another fund Gates helped launch is the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative in 1996. From its inception, Gates has contributed to the Global Fund United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched in 2001 at an Organization of African Unity summit in Abuja, Nigeria. The fund, organized as a nonprofit agency in Geneva, promotes partnerships between donor and recipient governments as well as NGOs, businesses, and philanthropic foundations in attacking HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. Public and private “stakeholders” (government agencies, academic and research interests, civil society organizations) determine the fund’s disbursements to various countries.73
With other American foundations, especially the Rockefeller and Clinton Foundations, Gates has generated so-called product development partnerships (PDPs), with large pharmaceutical firms.74 The Rockefeller Foundation, invested in medical research and public health since its inception, was the first to promote PDPs, and the Gates and Clinton Foundations have greatly expanded them. PDPs are essentially non-profit pharmaceutical companies. Two dozen currently focus on diseases that include HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, Dengue fever, hookworm, pneumonia, meningitis, and others. Gates provides about 50 percent of all funding, private philanthropy as a whole 80 percent. President Bill Clinton has not invested a personal fortune (which he does not have) but rather has enlisted wealthy partners around the world—especially the new rich in countries where these diseases are threatening—to contribute to the relevant funds, and he has negotiated drug production agreements and overseen distribution mechanisms for drugs once they have been tested and approved for the market.75
It seems natural that the head of Microsoft should direct a big part of his philanthropy to India, a country that he has come to know well and that has provided his company with much talent. But it has not been an easy proposition. The New York Times reported that India was ambivalent toward “a foreigner’s bankrolling prevention of an epidemic that officials have sometimes seemed reluctant to acknowledge.”76 The Indian government has indeed substantially downplayed the epidemic, and most of the money it has spent to quell it has come from outside India.
In 1987, India created a National AIDS Control Program and, in 1992 a division within its Ministry of Health called the National Aids Control Organization (NACO), along with a collection of autonomous state AIDS control societies. NACO established blood banks and STD clinics throughout the country. Local Indian NGOs took on the task of HIV awareness and education. In 1999, with funding largely from the World Bank and USAID, NACO enlisted local NGOs to reach out to high-risk groups. These early efforts of the Indian government seemed ineffective to many observers due to discrimination against the victims that is based on the same kinds of prejudices that have hampered relief efforts in other parts of the world.77 In countries where the epidemic has afflicted over 30 percent of the population, as in Botswana, for example, it is impossible for authorities and ordinary people alike to look the other way. But when the epidemic is still limited to high-risk populations, it is easier to engage in discrimination and ostracize victims, especially in a stratified society like India. The sick and high-risk groups have become the new untouchables.
The segregation of AIDS victims makes it much harder to control the epidemic. As Amartya Sen points out, the fear of retribution drives the gay community underground, where it is much harder for efforts to prevent the spread of the disease to reach.78 Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a leftover of British colonial rule still on the books until July 2009, prescribed ten years in jail as the penalty for sodomy. The law was applied arbitrarily. Policemen used its threat to extort money from wealthy gay men. Arrested gay men reported being beaten “worse than stray dogs,” forced to perform oral sex on policemen, and being tortured with electroshocks to the testicles.79
In facing this discrimination, the Gates Foundation committed itself to what one might loosely describe as philanthropic vertical integration, that is, the foundation would coordinate all levels of the campaign against HIV/AIDS until such time as the campaign could be entrusted back to the Indian government. As we have seen, the foundation steers global financial flows towards scientific research. At the same time, at least in the case of India, it takes the next step and fosters basic prevention measures such as the distribution of condoms and syringes among the ostracized populations. The foundation has found it helpful to use its leverage not only in major international partnerships, but also on the ground. A century ago, Frederick Gates advised John D. Rockefeller, Sr., to trust grantees with big projects, what he called wholesale philanthropy, and avoid micromanaging or retail giving (see chapter 1). In fighting HIV/AIDS in India, the Gates Foundation is, however, finding that it needs to combine wholesale and retail to achieve the necessary connection between the global forces of capitalism and action at the level of communities.
In 2003, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation created a new organization, Avahan, to fight AIDS in India and do so specifically at a grassroots level. Much of Avahan’s program consists of efforts to organize prevention campaigns directly, take the sick out of hiding, and sustain community strength through advocacy for open treatment. In establishing Avahan, Bill Gates and his wife Melinda themselves met with small groups of sex workers in India to talk about the spread of the disease and what they could do together to stop it. The Gateses recorded their impression of one such meeting with a dozen sex workers in Chennia, India, who wore for the occasion “their best saris, gold necklaces, and bindis on their foreheads” and talked about “the things they wanted for themselves and their children” as if they came “from any walk of life.”80 The women expressed these hopes even though they were carriers of a deadly disease, as well as subject to recurrent violence at the hands of the police, pimps, and clients alike. Cynics may call this kind of dialogue posturing on the part of very rich Americans. But what is striking instead is the ways in which the Gateses are attempting to open a road that goes as directly as possible from the halls of high global finance, where much of the world’s wealth is generated, to the red light districts of Mumbai or to truck stops along Andhra Pradesh highways.
The Avahan organization has all the features of a twenty-first century global enterprise. An international panel of experts on HIV programming, a board of directors, and a World Health Organization evaluation advisory group provide technical advice on measuring results, as do state advisory committees and NGO partners. Avahan has also brought in a number of philanthropic partners in order to evaluate and monitor the success of its programs, including Yale and Duke universities, Family Health International, and Corridors of the University of Manitoba. Locally, Avahan claims to be not an operating organization but a “conduit” to help existing efforts scale up their operations. Nonetheless it is hands-on. From its office in Delhi, Avahan director, former McKinsey & Company executive Ashok Alexander, has worked with Indian authorities to identify key districts where Avahan could intervene.81 Six Indian states, with a combined population of 300 million, account for 83 percent of the country’s HIV infections. In each state, the lead implementing partner takes charge of enlisting local NGOs and recruiting peer outreach workers to educate and raise awareness among high-risk groups.
Alexander has initially committed the bulk of the money not to the Indian government’s NACO but to partners of his own choosing. Some are INGOs like the International AIDS/HIV Alliance, Family Health International, Pathfinder, and CARE. A few are indigenous NGOs like the Hindustan Latex Family Planning Promotion Trust (founded in 1992), the India HIV/AIDS Alliance, founded in 1997, and the LEPRA Society (originally the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association). Vasavya Mahila Mandali, a nonprofit Ghandian organization founded in 1969 dedicated to women and child welfare, is the lead partner in Andhra Pradesh. In the same state, Avahan has funded (via CARE) a program named Saksham (“self reliant” in Sanskrit) that builds self-sustaining organizations in the East Godavari District to curb risky behaviors and help victims voice their needs.82
Reaching high-risk groups requires an extensive awareness campaign on the part of the Gates Foundation. The office in New Delhi recruits national film celebrities, sports stars, and business leaders to reach millions of people through public service announcements on TV and radio, in movie houses, and on billboards. Then Avahan associates work along 8,000 km of primary truck routes through large tracts of the interior in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, to reach a mobile population of two million truckers. The teamsters represent an important bridge population of persons who have sex with both sick and healthy partners. They transmit the diseases to their wives, who pass it on to the next generation through pregnancies, putting a much larger population at risk.
At truck stops, far from the halls of high finance and pharmaceutical PDPs, Avahan associates organize educational meetings through drama, street theatre, entertainment shops, and competitions. In the cities, they concentrate on the red light districts. The network of local NGOs recruits sex workers and turns them into part-time social workers and educators among their peers (and compensates them for lost income). Peers are issued identity cards to show that they are associated with HIV prevention programs, and some police directors have signed these cards to endorse the sex workers’ newly earned status. As a by-product of its AIDS prevention campaign, Avahan has thus created a crisis network that can respond to violent incidents against sex workers at the hand of pimps, customers, gang members, and the police. The Hindustan Latex Family Promotion Trust distributes a crisis response card with an 800 number, written in Telegu for Telegu-speaking areas of Southern India. Stopping the violence is a precondition of prevention and treatment.
The sex-workers-turned-health-workers bring others to counseling centers where Avahan-supported groups provide physicians and nurses as well as counselors and also lawyers. When in the village of West Godavari, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, a peer outreach worker employed by the Hindustan Latex Family Planning Promotion Trust was beaten by villagers who thought she was inducing young women into sex work, the local NGO partner approached the village president and the village council to stop the violence, and, in the end, the village opened a drop-in center and joined the AIDS battle. By December 2005, Avahan was supporting 134 grassroots NGOs in 533 Indian towns. They had reached 65 percent of the high-risk population. It is not possible to say how much of AIDS containment in India has been the direct outcome of the Avahan campaign, but there is no doubt as to its visibility and influence.
The Gates Foundation’s approach differs from that of other public and private American funders in its emphasis on the pragmatic. Although the U.S. government has been quite generous in joining the battle against HIV/AIDS, especially in Africa, USAID workers are prevented by law from mentioning the possibility of abortion to pregnant women who had contracted the disease.83 Launched in 2003 by George W. Bush, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEP-FAR) reinstituted this Reagan-era policy, which President Clinton had ended. The consequences are at times surreal. In a one-room AIDS clinic in Haiti, doctors afraid of losing their U.S. government funding if they contravened the gag rule, divided the room into two halves, one for patients helped with Gates Foundation money, and the other for those being served with PEPFAR funds. They marked the chairs accordingly. Patients at Gates chairs could be advised about the use of condoms or, when appropriate, the possibility of an abortion, but not those in PEPFAR chairs.84 The Obama administration has again rescinded the rule. Similar limitations have affected the private sector. Many of the medical missionaries sent to Africa by American evangelical groups to help HIV/AIDS patients have insisted on preaching abstinence and on distributing medicine only after a prayer. But Gates is independent of American taxpayers’ money as well as funding from evangelical sects. His more pragmatic assessment of the spread of diseases gives the global movement its progressive cast.
In the 1980s, it was the mass philanthropic response to the Ethiopian crisis that signaled a new independence from Cold War strictures on the part of INGOs. The Soviet Union collapsed soon after. A large communitarian movement became the primary recipient and generator of private philanthropic international aid. While large foundations have contributed innovative ways of making global funds available to these communities across the world, and of limiting the role of state intermediaries, the turn-of-the-century technological revolution has very much helped mass philanthropy contribute to the same trend.
It is now possible for every citizen willing to spend a little money to respond directly and almost instantly to world emergencies simply by sitting down at a computer or picking up a cell phone. The great beneficiaries of the new superfast mass philanthropy are the larger charities and INGOs, for they have the know-how to intervene where needed. Kosovo in 1999 was the first international crisis to generate significant online gifts. The trend has since gained momentum at an exponential rate, with text messaging providing additional speed.85 Ironically, the Internet and related high-speed communications, which are the most impersonal of means, have brought personal financial participation in the global associational revolution within reach of practically everybody.
To achieve its mission, modern philanthropy has embraced communities around the world and bypassed states. But its means can never be adequate to its most ambitious goals. The newfound speed in sending donations and the high creativity of progressive organizations cannot substitute for state resources in the process of rebuilding after a major disaster or for making inroads on any of the millennial goals. While global philanthropy has bet much of its resources on the mutual reinforcement of individual agency and community, a strong civil society only exists in the context of a reliable state. If states have been obstacles to progress or, as in some cases, collapsed altogether, returning them to their proper role remains a challenge that global philanthropy cannot ignore in our new century.