Walker writes that is a tension and contradiction between “philanthropic efforts to address inequality and the structural economic realities that make it possible for foundations to exist at all.”
in 1889, Andrew Carnegie, of the Carnegie Libraries, authored a famous essay that came to be known as the “Gospel of Wealth.” It laid the foundation for modern philanthropy and led to an era of philanthropic efforts around the world.
In his essay, Carnegie argued that extreme inequality was an “unavoidable condition of the free market system and that philanthropy is one effective means of ameliorating the conditions the market produces.” Warren revisits this premise to examine what the present day realities and responsibilities are in the world of Philanthrophy.
Rethinking the Gospel of Giving
“Philanthropy is commendable,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary” — and beyond that: he underlying structures and systems, the roots of injustice, the causes of human suffering, and the sources of our own privilege.
A 21st-century view of inequality
“Where Carnegie might have identified illiteracy as a source of inequality, for example, we now understand that the reverse is true—or, at the very least, that a complex symbiosis is at work. We understand, in a way he did not, that social, cultural, political, and economic inequalities set in place reinforcing conditions from the very start of life—in homes, in neighborhoods, and in schools—that create cycles of poverty, illiteracy, and lack of opportunity.”
Three steps toward reducing inequality
1 – We need to open ourselves up to more critical, honest discussions about deeply rooted cultural norms and structures, including racial, gender, ethnic, and class biases.
2 – Foundations need to reject inherited, assumed, paternalist instincts—an impulse to put grantmaking rather than change making at the center of our worldview.
3 – We need to interrogate the fundamental root causes of inequality, even, and especially, when it means that we ourselves will be implicated.
“How does our work—our approach to awarding grants, our hiring and contracting policies, even our behavior toward our partners and grantees—reinforce structural inequality in our society? Why are we still necessary, and what can we do to build a world where we no longer are as necessary?“
Our obligation to capitalism
Admin Smith, author of Wealth of Nations, argued: “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
Additional Notes
“…the more excluded people are, the harder it is truly to hear them.”