When Charles Feeney donated the last portion of his more than $8 billion fortune last December, he set an amazing record — giving all of his wealth away while he is still alive. When he first made clear to his foundation boards his intention to do so in 2001, it was uncommon for the ultrawealthy to adopt this “giving while living” philosophy.
Now it has become the idea of choice for many of today’s donors, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, Warren Buffett, Tim Gill, and many others.
The impulse is understandable given the scale of problems facing the globe — and I clearly see value in the approach. After all, I devoted 10 years to working for Chuck Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies, although that was before he decided to give all of his and his foundations’ wealth away during his lifetime. But I do have serious concerns about whether it is wise to spend all of one’s philanthropic wealth in the short run.
I would be willing to place a (small) bet, however, that many of those who have publicly declared their intentions to give away their wealth during their lifetimes will change their minds somewhere along the way, as did Andrew Carnegie and George Soros, and instead create foundations to carry on their philanthropy after their deaths.
One key reason is that a great many societal problems that may seem solvable in the short run eventually prove to be more complicated, stubborn, and elusive than they appeared at first. It is not uncommon in philanthropy for a 10-year dash to turn into a 40-year slog — or longer.
In any case, because so many donors today are focused on problems they think they can solve in their lifetimes, it’s worth looking at the areas where a long-term focus from foundations designed to live forever could make a difference. Here are a few:
Medical care: Everybody needs a doctor at some time or other. As our population ages, more people will need to see doctors more frequently.
One of today’s neglected issues in the field of health and medicine is the by-product of America’s system of managed care, which insistently rations doctors’ time available for talking to patients. This urgent problem was powerfully called to my attention by Celeste Robb-Nicholson, a primary-care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was the founding editor of the Harvard Women’s Health Watch.
Problems that seem quickly solvable eventually may prove more complicated and stubborn than they first seemed.
In an era when doctors now routinely spend only 15 minutes examining each patient, she says, it is of supreme importance that medical students be trained to devote adequate time to listening to their patients. Donors and foundations that care about the quality of health-care delivery should focus their advocacy and experiment-devising efforts on ways to enrich the training of physicians to foster more effective communication between patients and physicians.
Religion: The combination of insistently growing secularism, hand in hand with the distraction of 24/7 media and a great deal of salacious, seductive entertainment trash, is steadily undermining the individual and social norms that grew out of the teachings of most religions as well as secular humanism and moral philosophy — norms that constitute the foundations of most civilized societies.
As the authority of organized religions has grown weaker, the effects of religion’s waning influence on human behavior dramatically show themselves in various forms of destructive individual and social behavior.
Many think that religion itself should be strengthened. Many others think that secular substitutes — moral philosophy, character education, ethics, psychology, humanitarianism, humanism, to name but a few — should be somehow strengthened to compensate for religion’s decline. Perhaps many remedies should be tried. There is a great need for experimentation in new ways of establishing and strengthening social norms of civilized behavior.
Politics: It will take a great deal of work to understand the dysfunction of democratic governments around the world and the polarization of politics, especially in the United States, and to understand how to soften the edges of polarization to make space for collaboration.
Solutions can come about only by identifying, recruiting, and supporting leaders who resist the steady hardening of differences among us and instead seek respectful, civilized consensus on how to solve society’s most urgent problems collaboratively.
That can be done only through the facilitation of leaders whom we know well enough to trust and who appeal to our better angels rather than our ever-present and ever-more-insistent internal devils nourished by today’s secular culture.
Our democracy has an absolutely desperate need for such leaders, for people of all ethnicities, genders, races, and religious backgrounds who are animated by ethical and moral norms that guide their behavior in all things.
A group of perpetual foundations under the leadership of the Hewlett Foundation has formed a multimillion-dollar collaborative effort called the Madison Initiative to strive for a better understanding of the reasons for the extreme political polarization in America and also to experiment with practical ways of diminishing such polarization.
This problem is so pervasive that there is plenty of room for other foundations to seek to remedy it. Its origins and seemingly ever-greater severity are likely the result of the increasingly large amount of money being poured by wealthy individuals, cash-rich corporations and their related foundations, and nonprofit organizations into narrowly based radical-right positions that demand adherence to the “one true way” and resistance to any compromise or negotiation with those who disagree with them.
Character building: For many Americans, democracy has increasingly come to mean raw and unbridled self-expression and self-serving of all kinds with few or no social restraints, whether by words or by guns or knives. Schools and colleges have gradually abdicated any responsibility for teaching their students self-discipline and for trying to enable their students to discriminate between better and worse behaviors. The uncouth language and uncivilized behaviors rampant in popular culture have legitimated the use and spread of what were formerly regarded as four-letter obscenities disdained by civilized peoples. What to do to stem this cheapening of culture — and indeed of human life itself — is a subject that only a perpetual foundation is likely to explore. The long-run perspective and a devotion to long-lived values are particular virtues of long-lived institutions.
Performing arts: It is rare that time-limited donors pursue these more timeless endeavors.
As in many other fields, perpetual foundations’ missions include grant making that is countercyclical to any given period of time. Sustaining and furthering the values of the fine arts is therefore a mission especially appropriate to foundations with unlimited lives. If no new perpetual foundations are created, where will the funds come from to ensure a thriving arts culture in America?
Think of perpetual foundations as America’s social sector investment banks.
Foundation-government collaboration: In years past, many large perpetual foundations frequently collaborated with federal government agencies in piloting new initiatives, often combining their funds with those of the federal and/or state government. For example, the Ford Foundation’s community-development program of the 1970s became a blueprint for the Carter administration’s urban-development policy. The network of community-development organizations that was created under the foundation-government collaboration has remained a significant part of urban policy for decades. It was integral to the creation of community-development financial institutions in the Clinton administration and to the Obama administration’s Neighborhood Stabilization and Promise Neighborhoods programs, among other things.
The Ford Foundation’s one-time focus on forming partnerships with the federal government reflected the era’s belief that change — including turning around declining cities — must emanate from Washington. Since Darren Walker has become president of the Ford Foundation, that foundation has begun to resume collaborating with the federal government in a modest way, but the need for foundations to open themselves to such entrepreneurial initiatives today — with all levels of government — is greater than ever.
Research and advocacy: It was the Carnegie Corporation that financed Gunnar Myrdal’s pioneering research and searing critique of race relations in the United States, published in 1944 as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. It quickly became an intellectual platform of the Civil Rights movement and influenced the struggle for racial equality from the grass roots all the way to the Supreme Court, which cited Myrdal’s work in its 1954 ruling against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.
Many other perpetual foundations have financed similar reports with wide-ranging consequences. Moreover, perpetual foundations have been increasingly ready to mount advocacy efforts to battle problems that were documented in research funded by others.
The problem of global warming has enjoyed significant perpetual-foundation support to document the problem and advocate action to help mitigate it.
One wishes that foundations would make support available to advocate public action to remedy such problems as the vulnerability of America’s electric grid, as documented in Lights Out, by Ted Koppel. Jeff Skoll’s support for widely viewed films on major problems, such as An Inconvenient Truth on global warming and Waiting for Superman on education reform, illustrate what many other foundations could do to help generate some action on the part of the public to address lingering, simmering national or state problems.
Infrastructure in a digital age: The backbone of the internet was created by several government agencies to support the work of the defense department and scientific research. It has subsequently become the dominant frontier for commercial ventures and in doing so has created great wealth and dramatically altered how people live, shop, and communicate.
But many bridges between nodes of this still-emerging network will not be supported by the market. Access to the internet is considered essential for individual progress, but affordable access to the web (within the United States and around the world) is far from guaranteed. Standards of conduct and evolving norms of behavior and laws need to be derived in ways that are not entirely driven by the market. Organizations are working to derive solutions for long-term questions about infrastructure, access, data permanence, and civil society — all questions that the digital age cannot afford to leave only to market players to resolve.
Plenty of other areas could command attention, but these demonstrate why it’s no exaggeration to think of perpetual foundations as constituting America’s social-sector investment banks. You do not want to have to create such a bank when an unexpected social problem arises; you want these institutions to be in existence to be drawn upon when needed.
Perpetual foundations are the primary engines of peaceful social change in America’s civic sector. They provide a continuing stream of fuel to start and nurture efforts by public-interest-motivated individuals seeking to change society for the better. Without that fuel, America’s social engine is bound to slow down.n
Joel Fleishman is director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at Duke University. From 1993 to 2001, headed the American program staff of Atlantic Philanthropies. This article was excerpted from Putting Wealth to Work: Philanthropy for Today or Investing for Tomorrow?, which is being published this month by PublicAffairs, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group.”
