We are living in an age of catastrophe, and a business-as-usual response from philanthropy is not acceptable.
Consider the crises of the past 18 months: the coronavirus pandemic, the assault on the U.S. Capitol, the intensification of destructive climate events. These are not anomalies. They are instead symptoms of deeper challenges that threaten the social order, including global warming, the unraveling of democratic norms and institutions, the rise of authoritarianism, and a growing refugee and migrant crisis. The philanthropic world must radically shift its mind-set and practices if it is to play a meaningful role in addressing these threats and in safeguarding our society for future generations.
A field characterized by financial caution, decentralized activity, and aversion to politics must make massive and immediate investments in crisis prevention; coordinate efforts and pool resources; and engage in the political arena to activate the power and resources of government.
While many societal challenges and inequities require attention, the harms caused by these crises are so certain, widespread, and existential that an extraordinary moonshot approach is needed. Each requires:
- Large-scale, societywide action.
- Early preventive measures to significantly head off tremendous future costs.
- Philanthropic capital to drive meaningful change in areas where government and business are falling well short.
The two areas that meet these criteria most clearly are climate change and threats to democracy. Climate change, if left unchecked, will disrupt our food systems, render large portions of the earth uninhabitable, and generate a massive refugee crisis that will destabilize our political systems and social cohesion. Similarly, declining trust in government and democratic norms, the growth in political extremism and violence, and the rise of authoritarian nationalism will make it nearly impossible to effectively address massive challenges like climate change and a multitude of inequities that are harming and destabilizing our world.
The failure to act quickly and boldly to address these twin crises will leave us facing irreversible harms to the social and political order and to the systems that sustain human life. While a few of the world’s wealthiest men engage in their own personal space race, the larger philanthropic community needs to chart a course toward a healthy and sustainable society on planet earth. Here’s a guide to get started:
Spend more now to prevent future catastrophes. Confronting moonshot challenges requires that foundations spend generously on preventative action rather than stewarding their resources for the future.
The pandemic sparked a spirited debate within philanthropy about whether donors should increase the percentage paid annually from their endowments. Some argued that foundations were too focused on their own sustainability in the face of an urgent crisis, while others pointed to the importance of preserving foundations’ ability to address future as well as present needs.
While increasing short-term payouts decreases the capital a foundation can deploy in the future, philanthropists must also consider the relative return on near-term versus future investments. In the case of existential threats like climate change, a failure to take preventative action now produces exponentially increasing harms that will be much more difficult to mitigate in the future. The value of a dollar spent on prevention is therefore much greater than the value of a dollar spent on future remedial action — what I call the time value of social investment.
The most recent United Nation’s report on climate change warns that we are on pace to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming in the next two decades and that we must take immediate and radical action to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of global temperature increase. In this circumstance, what is the logic of preserving a foundation’s endowment to address needs 50 years in the future? And what possible excuse is there for the wealthiest Americans devoting less than 1 percent of their wealth annually to philanthropy?
Similar calculations should apply to protecting and strengthening democratic institutions. Taking action now offers greater prospects for success and is far less costly than trying to rebuild our democracy in the wake of an authoritarian takeover or civil breakdown.
Come together around coordinated action. No single philanthropist or foundation has the resources or influence on its own to solve the climate crisis or fix our democracy. Confronting these challenges requires grant makers to combine their resources and coordinate strategies across the philanthropic and nonprofit world. Yet coordinated action runs against the field’s decentralized structure and its culture of individualistic experimentation and legacy building.
The practice of strategic philanthropy has encouraged foundations to identify gaps in philanthropic activity where their investments can have a clear impact. However, to solve big challenges, grant makers must be willing to make a small contribution to a much larger collective effort, rather than carve out a singular legacy for their work.
Such collaboration is not without challenges. There are more than 86,000 foundations in the United States. Coordinating investments and strategies across this diverse group of organizations requires difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes messy work to build relationships, trust, and consensus. But there is precedent for this type of collaboration. During the 2020 election, donors worked together to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars in aligned, philanthropic investment to protect voting rights and safeguard the integrity and security of the elections.
Large, institutional donors such as the Democracy Fund provided leadership for this effort, working in close collaboration with major nonprofit organizations focused on voting rights, elections administration, and civic engagement. A wide range of individual and family donors stepped up as well. Arguably, this coordinated, moonshot approach helped save U.S. democracy from its greatest internal threat since the Civil War.
Build political will and unlock the power of government through advocacy. Moonshot challenges such as climate change and the crisis in democracy are political problems even more than they are technical challenges. Solving them requires building broad political consensus, overcoming entrenched and powerful interests, and engaging in a complex, societywide renegotiation of how we organize and regulate our economy and structure our political institutions. Doing this effectively will require large-scale investments in grassroots movements and advocacy strategies to build the political will among government leaders to enact lasting structural solutions.
Consider that U.S. foundations collectively hold some $900 billion in assets. Would disbursing all that money during the next 10 years truly help solve the climate crisis? If the focus is on technical solutions to global warming, that investment would likely have only a nominal effect.
Instead, philanthropists could channel billions into movement-building, organizing, and civic-engagement strategies aimed at radical governmental action to curb emissions and transform our energy economy. The impact of such efforts would be enormous. The Biden administration has set bold targets for greenhouse gas reduction. But it will take a powerful mass movement to hold policymakers accountable to these ambitious goals and defend them against influential industry and ideological opponents. Philanthropy can infuse civil society with the resources to make this happen.
The events of the past year-and-a-half were a wake-up call. But as the ongoing pandemic, raging wildfires across the world, and continuing efforts to overturn the presidential election remind us, the age of catastrophe is only beginning. As daunting and novel as these challenges are, we can look to our nation’s past for inspiration and resolve to meet them.
In the 1930s, the generation of our grandparents and great-grandparents faced threats that were equally existential: economic depression, totalitarianism, industrialized warfare, and genocide. They, too, were a society riven by division and stymied by voices of denial. They were slow-footed and stumbled out of the gate. But when they acted, it was with boldness, determination, and at a massive scale. They faced down the calamities of their generation and prevailed, safeguarding a better future for the generations that followed. If we follow their example, we can do the same.
