Bigthink - Category Features and Ideas Feed

This is a test

Bigthink — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:34:51 +0100

: This is the Swedish Chef, cooking up a dish of ideas...

NGOs - The Self-Appointed Altruists

Bigthink — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:48:34 +0100

: Their arrival portends rising local prices and a culture shock. Many of them live in plush apartments, or five star hotels, drive SUV's, sport $3000 laptops and PDA's. They earn a two figure multiple of the local average wage. They are busybodies, preachers, critics, do-gooders, and professional altruists.

Always self-appointed, they answer to no constituency. Though unelected and ignorant of local realities, they confront the democratically chosen and those who voted them into office. A few of them are enmeshed in crime and corruption. They are the non-governmental organizations, or NGO's.

Some NGO's - like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Amnesty - genuinely contribute to enhancing welfare, to the mitigation of hunger, the furtherance of human and civil rights, or the curbing of disease. Others - usually in the guise of think tanks and lobby groups - are sometimes ideologically biased, or religiously-committed and, often, at the service of special interests.

NGO's - such as the International Crisis Group - have openly interfered on behalf of the opposition in the last parliamentary elections in Macedonia. Other NGO's have done so in Belarus and Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Israel, Nigeria and Thailand, Slovakia and Hungary - and even in Western, rich, countries including the USA, Canada, Germany, and Belgium.

The encroachment on state sovereignty of international law - enshrined in numerous treaties and conventions - allows NGO's to get involved in hitherto strictly domestic affairs like corruption, civil rights, the composition of the media, the penal and civil codes, environmental policies, or the allocation of economic resources and of natural endowments, such as land and water. No field of government activity is now exempt from the glare of NGO's. They serve as self-appointed witnesses, judges, jury and executioner rolled into one.

Regardless of their persuasion or modus operandi, all NGO's are top heavy with entrenched, well-remunerated, extravagantly-perked bureaucracies. Opacity is typical of NGO's. Amnesty's rules prevent its officials from publicly discussing the inner workings of the organization - proposals, debates, opinions - until they have become officially voted into its Mandate. Thus, dissenting views rarely get an open hearing.

Contrary to their teachings, the financing of NGO's is invariably obscure and their sponsors unknown. The bulk of the income of most non-governmental organizations, even the largest ones, comes from - usually foreign - powers. Many NGO's serve as official contractors for governments.

NGO's serve as long arms of their sponsoring states - gathering intelligence, burnishing their image, and promoting their interests. There is a revolving door between the staff of NGO's and government bureaucracies the world over. The British Foreign Office finances a host of NGO's - including the fiercely "independent" Global Witness - in troubled spots, such as Angola. Many host governments accuse NGO's of - unwittingly or knowingly - serving as hotbeds of espionage.

Very few NGO's derive some of their income from public contributions and donations. The more substantial NGO's spend one tenth of their budget on PR and solicitation of charity. In a desperate bid to attract international attention, so many of them lied about their projects in the Rwanda crisis in 1994, recounts "The Economist", that the Red Cross felt compelled to draw up a ten point mandatory NGO code of ethics. A code of conduct was adopted in 1995. But the phenomenon recurred in Kosovo.

All NGO's claim to be not for profit - yet, many of them possess sizable equity portfolios and abuse their position to increase the market share of firms they own. Conflicts of interest and unethical behavior abound.

Cafedirect is a British firm committed to "fair trade" coffee. Oxfam, an NGO, embarked, three years ago, on a campaign targeted at Cafedirect's competitors, accusing them of exploiting growers by paying them a tiny fraction of the retail price of the coffee they sell. Yet, Oxfam owns 25% of Cafedirect.

Large NGO's resemble multinational corporations in structure and operation. They are hierarchical, maintain large media, government lobbying, and PR departments, head-hunt, invest proceeds in professionally-managed portfolios, compete in government tenders, and own a variety of unrelated businesses. The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development owns the license for second mobile phone operator in Afghanistan - among other businesses. In this respect, NGO's are more like cults than like civic organizations.

Many NGO's promote economic causes - anti-globalization, the banning of child labor, the relaxing of intellectual property rights, or fair payment for agricultural products. Many of these causes are both worthy and sound. Alas, most NGO's lack economic expertise and inflict damage on the alleged recipients of their beneficence. NGO's are at times manipulated by - or collude with - industrial groups and political parties.

It is telling that the denizens of many developing countries suspect the West and its NGO's of promoting an agenda of trade protectionism. Stringent - and expensive - labor and environmental provisions in international treaties may well be a ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labor and the competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries and their political stooges.

Take child labor - as distinct from the universally condemnable phenomena of child prostitution, child soldiering, or child slavery.

Child labor, in many destitute locales, is all that separates the family from all-pervasive, life threatening, poverty. As national income grows, child labor declines. Following the outcry provoked, in 1995, by NGO's against soccer balls stitched by children in Pakistan, both Nike and Reebok relocated their workshops and sacked countless women and 7000 children. The average family income - anyhow meager - fell by 20 percent.

This affair elicited the following wry commentary from economists Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and Robert Stern:

"While Baden Sports can quite credibly claim that their soccer balls are not sewn by children, the relocation of their production facility undoubtedly did nothing for their former child workers and their families."

This is far from being a unique case. Threatened with legal reprisals and "reputation risks" (being named-and-shamed by overzealous NGO's) - multinationals engage in preemptive sacking. More than 50,000 children in Bangladesh were let go in 1993 by German garment factories in anticipation of the American never-legislated Child Labor Deterrence Act.

Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, observed:

"Stopping child labor without doing anything else could leave children worse off. If they are working out of necessity, as most are, stopping them could force them into prostitution or other employment with greater personal dangers. The most important thing is that they be in school and receive the education to help them leave poverty."

NGO-fostered hype notwithstanding, 70% of all children work within their family unit, in agriculture. Less than 1 percent are employed in mining and another 2 percent in construction. Again contrary to NGO-proffered panaceas, education is not a solution. Millions graduate every year in developing countries - 100,000 in Morocco alone. But unemployment reaches more than one third of the workforce in places such as Macedonia.

Children at work may be harshly treated by their supervisors but at least they are kept off the far more menacing streets. Some kids even end up with a skill and are rendered employable.

"The Economist" sums up the shortsightedness, inaptitude, ignorance, and self-centeredness of NGO's neatly:

"Suppose that in the remorseless search for profit, multinationals pay sweatshop wages to their workers in developing countries. Regulation forcing them to pay higher wages is demanded... The NGOs, the reformed multinationals and enlightened rich-country governments propose tough rules on third-world factory wages, backed up by trade barriers to keep out imports from countries that do not comply. Shoppers in the West pay more - but willingly, because they know it is in a good cause. The NGOs declare another victory. The companies, having shafted their third-world competition and protected their domestic markets, count their bigger profits (higher wage costs notwithstanding). And the third-world workers displaced from locally owned factories explain to their children why the West's new deal for the victims of capitalism requires them to starve."

NGO's in places like Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Albania, and Zimbabwe have become the preferred venue for Western aid - both humanitarian and financial - development financing, and emergency relief. According to the Red Cross, more money goes through NGO's than through the World Bank. Their iron grip on food, medicine, and funds rendered them an alternative government - sometimes as venal and graft-stricken as the one they replace.

Local businessmen, politicians, academics, and even journalists form NGO's to plug into the avalanche of Western largesse. In the process, they award themselves and their relatives with salaries, perks, and preferred access to Western goods and credits. NGO's have evolved into vast networks of patronage in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

NGO's chase disasters with a relish. More than 200 of them opened shop in the aftermath of the Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999-2000. Another 50 supplanted them during the civil unrest in Macedonia a year later. Floods, elections, earthquakes, wars - constitute the cornucopia that feed the NGO's.

NGO's are proponents of Western values - women's lib, human rights, civil rights, the protection of minorities, freedom, equality. Not everyone finds this liberal menu palatable. The arrival of NGO's often provokes social polarization and cultural clashes. Traditionalists in Bangladesh, nationalists in Macedonia, religious zealots in Israel, security forces everywhere, and almost all politicians find NGO's irritating and bothersome.

The British government ploughs well over $30 million a year into "Proshika", a Bangladeshi NGO. It started as a women's education outfit and ended up as a restive and aggressive women empowerment political lobby group with budgets to rival many ministries in this impoverished, Moslem and patriarchal country.

Other NGO's - fuelled by $300 million of annual foreign infusion - evolved from humble origins to become mighty coalitions of full-time activists. NGO's like the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and the Association for Social Advancement mushroomed even as their agendas have been fully implemented and their goals exceeded. It now owns and operates 30,000 schools.

This mission creep is not unique to developing countries. As Parkinson discerned, organizations tend to self-perpetuate regardless of their proclaimed charter. Remember NATO? Human rights organizations, like Amnesty, are now attempting to incorporate in their ever-expanding remit "economic and social rights" - such as the rights to food, housing, fair wages, potable water, sanitation, and health provision. How insolvent countries are supposed to provide such munificence is conveniently overlooked.

"The Economist" reviewed a few of the more egregious cases of NGO imperialism.

Human Rights Watch lately offered this tortured argument in favor of expanding the role of human rights NGO's: "The best way to prevent famine today is to secure the right to free expression - so that misguided government policies can be brought to public attention and corrected before food shortages become acute." It blatantly ignored the fact that respect for human and political rights does not fend off natural disasters and disease. The two countries with the highest incidence of AIDS are Africa's only two true democracies - Botswana and South Africa.

The Centre for Economic and Social Rights, an American outfit, "challenges economic injustice as a violation of international human rights law". Oxfam pledges to support the "rights to a sustainable livelihood, and the rights and capacities to participate in societies and make positive changes to people's lives". In a poor attempt at emulation, the WHO published an inanely titled document - "A Human Rights Approach to Tuberculosis".

NGO's are becoming not only all-pervasive but more aggressive. In their capacity as "shareholder activists", they disrupt shareholders meetings and act to actively tarnish corporate and individual reputations. Friends of the Earth worked hard four years ago to instigate a consumer boycott against Exxon Mobil - for not investing in renewable energy resources and for ignoring global warming. No one - including other shareholders - understood their demands. But it went down well with the media, with a few celebrities, and with contributors.

As "think tanks", NGO's issue partisan and biased reports. The International Crisis Group published a rabid attack on the then incumbent government of Macedonia, days before an election, relegating the rampant corruption of its predecessors - whom it seemed to be tacitly supporting - to a few footnotes. On at least two occasions - in its reports regarding Bosnia and Zimbabwe - ICG has recommended confrontation, the imposition of sanctions, and, if all else fails, the use of force. Though the most vocal and visible, it is far from being the only NGO that advocates "just" wars.

The ICG is a repository of former heads of state and has-been politicians and is renowned (and notorious) for its prescriptive - some say meddlesome - philosophy and tactics. "The Economist" remarked sardonically: "To say (that ICG) is 'solving world crises' is to risk underestimating its ambitions, if overestimating its achievements."

NGO's have orchestrated the violent showdown during the trade talks in Seattle in 1999 and its repeat performances throughout the world. The World Bank was so intimidated by the riotous invasion of its premises in the NGO-choreographed "Fifty Years is Enough" campaign of 1994, that it now employs dozens of NGO activists and let NGO's determine many of its policies.

NGO activists have joined the armed - though mostly peaceful - rebels of the Chiapas region in Mexico. Norwegian NGO's sent members to forcibly board whaling ships. In the USA, anti-abortion activists have murdered doctors. In Britain, animal rights zealots have both assassinated experimental scientists and wrecked property.

Birth control NGO's carry out mass sterilizations in poor countries, financed by rich country governments in a bid to stem immigration. NGO's buy slaves in Sudan thus encouraging the practice of slave hunting throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Other NGO's actively collaborate with "rebel" armies - a euphemism for terrorists.

NGO's lack a synoptic view and their work often undermines efforts by international organizations such as the UNHCR and by governments. Poorly-paid local officials have to contend with crumbling budgets as the funds are diverted to rich expatriates doing the same job for a multiple of the cost and with inexhaustible hubris.

This is not conducive to happy co-existence between foreign do-gooders and indigenous governments. Sometimes NGO's seem to be an ingenious ploy to solve Western unemployment at the expense of down-trodden natives. This is a misperception driven by envy and avarice.

But it is still powerful enough to foster resentment and worse. NGO's are on the verge of provoking a ruinous backlash against them in their countries of destination. That would be a pity. Some of them are doing indispensable work. If only they were a wee more sensitive and somewhat less ostentatious. But then they wouldn't be NGO's, would they?

Re: If you had $100 billion, how would you spend it?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:21:05 +0100

Whores and charity, Huebel says.

Transcript: If I had a billion dollars? Oh, man. Whores. No. I actually don't need a billion dollars so what I would do is, like, give it away to charities and some-- I would try to knock out, like, one problem, like, I don't even know. That's not enough to feed the world but maybe, like, clothes for everybody in the world. I would buy clothes. Just knock that out. So now everyone has clothes. That problem is solved. And then, just to be a jerk about it, I would, like, tell everyone that I did that, like, look what I just solved. That problem is non-existent any more thanks to me. I'd be one of those assholes that, like, tries to get a lot of publicity for, like, doing good things like Richard Branson.

Recorded on: 4/1/08

Re: What is DonorsChoose.org?

Bigthink — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:32:48 +0100

Connecting classrooms in need to people who want to give.

Question: Why did you leave teaching to start DonorsChoose.org?

Transcript: During my first year of teaching, I noticed that my colleagues and I were always having the same conversation in the teachers lunchroom about books that we wanted our students to read, we would talk about feel trip that we knew what really excite our students about the subject matter, we would talk about art project we wanted to do, if only we had certain arts supplies. Most of us would going to your pockets to buy copy paper and pencils, but all that really great ideas that we came up with for projects that would bring learning to life, never went beyond the teachers lunchroom, because we didn’t have any access to funding and at the same time that my colleagues and I where griping about that state affairs, I figured there were a lot of people who wanted to help and prove our public schools, but they were just getting skeptical about writing a $100 check to a big institution and not really knowing how their money was spent. So, I figured if we could match up teachers like us, who had these great ideas, for exactly the resources that their students most needed, along with donors who can come from all walks of life, and maybe somebody would only have $10 to give, but they would have a chance to really be a philanthropist and choose a project that spoke to them and see where there money was going. So it was in the teachers lunchroom that the idea came.

DonorsChoose.org is a website, where public school teachers can post classroom projects that need funding, it could be $200 classroom library, it could be $1000 field trip, it could be $400 set of butterfly cocoons and then donors can come to the website and choose the classroom project that they want to support, knowing that not only are they going to see exactly where their money's going, but they are going to hear back from the classroom, that they choose to help in the form of photographs and thank you letters.

Well I had the idea for DonorsChoose.org and my mom made desert for my colleagues, and I put this dessert in the teachers lunchroom, and I told my colleagues who ever eats this dessert has to go to this newly created website and ask for whatever it is most want for your students right now, and eleven of colleagues, ate my mom’s dessert, and they went on to the website and they submitted the first eleven projects to DonorsChoose.org and the health teacher, she wanted baby think it over dolls, which are life size, light weight dolls that cry 3 in the morning and show a teenager what it would like if they had a kid, and art teacher she wanted to do a quilt-making project, and I could see right there, that if you take this kind of open source approach, and enable people on the frontlines to come up with microsolutions, for the very people they serve, they are going to come up with smarter ideas than any kind of top-down program. We are still trying to figure out what compels donors to pick certain projects on our website. I was talking to a donor just the other day, who I was really interested in saving the salmon in specific Northwest and you'd never think there would be any project on DonorsChoose.org matching that area of interest, but he typed in keywords "salmon" and up came five projects on DonorChoose.org having to do with Samoan. The top one was from teacher of an island of Alaska who said that all of her students where native of Alaskans, and that she was 45 minutes away from the nearest store by airplane and that her native Alaskans students had recorded folk tales and written recipes and written stories about salmon, and her students needed to print their work in color, and for that they needed to color printer, that was a request on her site, and there was a second project from an Oregon teacher, a high school teacher who had created a salmon hatchery and he needed waders for his students to maintain that hatchery and here was a person who was coming to our site, saying that they wanted to find out about salmon projects and they are actually were results for that. That gives you an example of the long tail, of match-ups happening at our site. There are lot of parents of autistic kids who come to our site and they search for projects for autistic students. We know there are some donors who want to fund in their own hometown, a lot of our donors want to contribute, where the need is greatest. They want to support students who come from low-income communities. We are still struggling to figure out, what is going on in donors minds when they pick certain projects, some donors come because maybe a relative has died and they want to support a project that honors their relative, you know, maybe their relative was a painter and so they want fund a painting project, that really kind of fascinating seeing the match-ups and we’re trying to just figure out what the dynamics are.

Question: How much money have you raised?

Transcript: People in all 50 states, we call a donors citizen-philanthropists, because they come from all walks of life, and with $10 they can really be philanthropists and all told they have given more than 20 million dollars to classroom projects at DonorChoose.org. They brought a life 44,000 classroom projects that have benefited a million students from low-income families and so to think that this website that my colleagues helped to get off the ground and my students helped to get off the ground that 7 years later that, we've delivered materials an d experiences to a million kids. So, its really cool feeling. We’re starting the climb in terms of our impact on the whole picture. A million students is an actual percentage of all of the public school students in this country, but it’s certainly not the majority and we have a really long way to go, we won’t feel satisfied until we’re driving a 100 million dollars a year through our website, because so many teachers are still going into their own pockets to buy basic materials and so many classroom ideas are going unrealized, because teachers don’t a have way to innovate, don’t have to wait get funding for the projects that will really bring learning to life. So, even now I think we would probably still describe ourselves as just as starting the scratch surface of the problem. To get DonorsChoose.org to scale, we first need to increase the viral appeal of our website. To give you an example right now all of the project proposals on DonorsChoose.org are entirely written, it’s all text, we want to have photographs of the classroom viewable for the donor and we just launched photo-uploading technology. We want to extend that by digitizing the feedback that the donors receive from each classroom the thank you letters and the photographs that they would receive ought to be shareable via the web and that’s just sort of one slice of how we could make DonorsChoose.org much more viral beast than it already is. We need to make some improvements to our operations, we do a lot of work to ensure the integrity of our philanthropic marketplace, we validate each project before posting it, we fulfill the project, purchase some materials have them shipped to the classroom, rather than giving the teachers direct cash, we process these thank you letters with photographs and all of that work wants to be really labor-intensive and threatens to make DonorsChoose.org un-scaleable cause we spend all this time on each project, but by using technology we have managed to automate and streamline a lot of that work and enable a really small team, a really small operations team, to fulfill tens of thousands of classroom projects.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

How do you Make Money and Change the World?

Bigthink — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:14:37 +0100

: .

Re: If you had $100 billion to give away, how would you spend it?

Bigthink — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 06:38:34 +0100

: Whether it's $100 billion or $100...chances are I'll do what I'm doing now. Fruit does not fall far from its tree. I think that I would need to ponder this thought sitting at the feet of much counsel...

Re: Re: How do you deal with your success?

Bigthink — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 06:25:06 +0100

: FATCAT...I love that...Great illustration. The Bible says that "May I not be too poor that I might steal or too rich that I might forget the name of God."-mega paraphrased but you get the point. I believe that Rick has a wonderful outlook. I don't envy his position...Excessive Money & Excessive Fame are brutal on the wallet and ego. My hats go off to the Warren's. The point we must face is that no matter where we are at...in plenty and in want...we should center ourselves in contentment. Apostle Paul was an awesome model of this expression. Was it in prision that he wrote this? Anyway...It has taken me ages to find my center...balance...and no...never do I want to be a FAT CAT....

Re: Re: How do you deal with your success?

Bigthink — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 06:24:03 +0100

Re: Do the rich have a responsibility to the poor?

Bigthink — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 06:04:44 +0100

No...I don't believe that anyone has an obligation...but the right...the freedom to do so...yes!!!! In that, when someone does give... it is a privelege to be on the receiving end. Society receives...but the greater joy is from those who give, share, and inspire others. That is what Jesus modeled. I am a recipient of the government, society, churches, individuals, organizations, and a precious lineage that have gone before me. I am overwhelmed with such kindness that I have given the past 10 years to charity. I'm unknown...and I'd like to keep it that way. I want to pay it forward to the next generation...this love...extending it in multitudes. The rich have no obligation but opportunity to express themselves due to their area of influence. GO FOR IT! GIVE...

Re: Re: Do universities have a philanthropic obligation?

Bigthink — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:49:17 +0100

: No...I don't believe that anyone has an obligation...but the right...the freedom to do so...yes!!!! In that, when someone does give...such as the universities, it is a privelege to be on the receiving end. Society receives...but the greater joy is from those who gives, shares, and inspires others. That is what Jesus modeled. I am a recipient of the government, society, churches, individuals, organizations, and a precious lineage that have gone before me. I am overwhelmed with such kindness that I have given the past 10 years to charity. I'm unknown...and I'd like to keep it that way. I want to pay it forward to the next generation...this love...extending it in multitudes. Universities have no obligation but opportunity to express themselves due to their area of influence. GO FOR IT! GIVE...

Celebrity Do-Gooding

Bigthink — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:32:13 +0100

: Celebrities don't have to do charity work.

Re: What is the Yele Foundation?

Bigthink — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:32:09 +0100

: Restoring Haiti's self-esteem.

The End Game of Philanthropy

Bigthink — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:10:57 +0100

While I admire the efforts of the Gates Foundation and others like them who are intent on eradicating diseases, is that the end game?

What happens to the millions of lives saved from malaria, TB, and water-borne diseases if their resources become stretched thin? If these disease curing crusades aren't supplemented by microfinance or agricultural programs, will their governments and economies supply them enough education or jobs?

asst.caretaker for speech and hearing camp

Bigthink — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:15:51 +0100

Has anyone ever given the thought of how important basic communication is and that there are only 3 camps in the united states to offer therapy camp and that the camps themselves helps with the education of future therapists.Meadowood Springs speech and hearing camp in Oregon is a big believer in music as a therapy tool. Is there anyone out there who is interested in the support of such camps as ours is nonprofit and always in need of help. Anybody in the music industry??? Please see our website at Meadowood springs.com.

The Kids always need help and the economy makes it hard for most people with disabled children to be able to afford to send their child to a therapy camp

SWeetie

Starving kids in Alpha Centauri - Please Donate!

Bigthink — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:20:17 +0100

How far should Charity go?

Maybe we should focus our efforts on the people around us before we try to help people in far away places?

Philanthropy and social change

Bigthink — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:45:16 +0100

Philanthropy: it helps you stand on your own two knees. What does this mean?

Philanthropy

Bigthink — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:45:57 +0100

Allocating our talents efficiently.

Transcript: If you look at the volunteer programs, what you find is that a lot of the times people are really volunteering their labor and their caring, but they’re actually not utilizing their real skills. So the example I like to use – and I don’t want to pick on them – ________ . . . you know, the U.S. branch of Shell has wonderful volunteer programs. And they’ve got these PhD petroleum engineers out raking trash on the beach as part of the environmental cleanup campaigns and so forth. Okay on one level that’s very, very laudable. These people are being generous. They’re donating their time; but are they really using their professional talents? Do we really want petroleum engineers raking the beach? Or do we want petroleum engineers and others thinking about how, in their areas of unique expertise . . . in their areas of knowledge, and contacts, and relationships, how they can impart that towards addressing the needs of the disadvantaged community, or addressing some kind of social problems. So I think our challenge as individuals is to find ways where we can use our most precious talents and our most unique skills to actually add value to society.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Re: If you had $100 billion to give away, how would you spend it?

Bigthink — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:45:53 +0100

"It's not the money; it's the ideas."

Transcript: And I mean I think the general principles of philanthropy are that giving the money is not what’s important. It’s actually what the money enables you to do, and the ideas that the money stimulates developed. So what we have to do is we have to invest these resources in solutions to these very difficult social problems that are . . . first of all, that are implementable and scalable. So you know, we don’t want to create little projects that are wildly successful but they cost $100,000 per person benefitted. We’ve got to find ways of doing things that are scalable. We’ve gotta find ways of doing things that can be implemented. And I also believe that the best philanthropy that could be invested is philanthropy that starts to work out and prove some of these models of value that I was talking about. So again, with enough resources, you can solve almost anybody’s problem. You can give them all the food they need. You can give them housing. You can give them, you know . . . You can even pay for their healthcare. You can provide free medicine. You can . . . But that’s not sustainable. What you’ve gotta do is you’ve gotta find ways of equipping people with the skills, and the talents, and the attitudes, and the orientations, and the access to create their own solutions to their own problems. And that sometimes . . . That means some different kind of investments. So I worry about philanthropists who are too caring and too focused on really wanting to help people and demonstrate that they’ve . . . you know, that they’ve fed this many children, or they’ve provided this many mosquito nets. And I think . . . The Gates Foundation, I think, is starting to come into its own in terms of understanding that its greatest contribution is about ideas. It’s not the money; it’s the ideas. It’s finding and validating some sustainable models that they can . . . they can scale, but others can join. So I don’t know if that answers exactly the question of how you give this kind of vast resource, but it’s certainly the answer that I would give. I would also say that there’s a tremendous tendency in philanthropy – for example, in healthcare – to give the money for the science. You know to fund that researcher who’s gonna come up with that cure for cancer. But I think equally we have to understand that some of the most important problems of human society are not so much about the scientific, or the technical, or the tools, but they’re about the application. And so I guess I’d like to see more. I would put more – if I had it – resources into those areas.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Re: Re: Do universities have a philanthropic obligation?

Bigthink — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:58:18 +0100

I know that I greatly value my University experience, and I took away a desire to promote a love of learning and commitment to engage authentically with the community on a "philanthropic" level if you will.

I wonder if web based courses are going to instill the same sense of community responsibility?

This is not a criticism of MIT's web-course; I adore that idea. I am just asking a critical question.

is philanthropy the answer to the worlds problems?

Bigthink — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 01:34:55 +0100

: because relying on governments to try and change the world is becoming a lost cause is philanthropy our last hope?