Philanthropy Does a Lot of Navel-Gazing. Is That Accomplishing Anything?

Every professional sector has its own specialized practices, jargon and internal debates, and philanthropy’s no different. Just as marketing pros puzzle over the merits of social media ad strategies, or just as parking minimums and building height limits preoccupy urban planners, philanthropy grapples over things like project versus general support, evaluation, payout and perpetuity.

All this industry-specific lore and debate typically means very little to people on the outside, and when some hapless interloper does see fit to inject their views (online, or worse, face-to-face), eye-rolling and head-scratching can ensue.

In many professional niches, such insularity is inevitable and relatively harmless. After all, there’s no reason for most of us to pay attention to the intricacies of, say, the hospitality business or automobile manufacturing. It’s enough to know that you can make it from the airport to your hotel, and that your stay is reasonably hassle-free.

Philanthropy’s a bit different, though. For one thing, charitable giving and nonprofit grantmaking are enterprises for which universal questions of morality and ethics are central from the get-go. For philanthropy, doing the right thing isn’t just a side matter of regulatory compliance or corporate social responsibility — it’s the whole point.

On top of that, philanthropy’s goals and ambitions are far more society-spanning than those of other professionalized niches. A hotelier might talk about providing a great guest experience; a philanthropist talks about ending homelessness. An architect might design an office building; a philanthropist puts forward a plan for intersectional systems change.

As a result, what we see in the philanthrosphere, more so than elsewhere, is a whole lot of ponderous introspection, self-examination and navel-gazing. One only need point to the endless cycle of resource- and time-intensive strategic planning at many grantmaking organizations, or to prominent sector debates about things like “philanthropic pluralism” — an important issue, no doubt, but one that I can’t imagine ranks very high on the average person’s list of things to worry about.

To make matters worse, philanthropy’s intrinsic moral dimension and its wide-reaching aims give it a tortured adjacency to politics, and that produces insularities and myopias of its own. In progressive funding circles, for instance, extensive hand-wringing over how to manifest the finer points of racial or gender justice risks crowding out chances to take concrete action on things like, I don’t know, actually pushing policy to reduce racial and gender wealth gaps.

Something similar goes for conservative funders, whose preoccupation with ideological totems like a free market and “freedom” in general — and more recently, unabashed Trumpism — crowds out more grounded activities that might help safeguard American prosperity and opportunity.

All of these peculiarities, topped off by the fact that philanthropy is dominated by extremely wealthy people, leads to a field that is often self-obsessed and even paranoid about the work it’s doing and how it is perceived.

What we habitually see across the board are efforts — some clumsy, others less so — to preserve the status quo around foundations, donor-advised funds and all the rest, to shield them from scrutiny and rebuff efforts to increase their transparency. I recently wrote about philanthrosphere organizations’ lack of energy around confronting the increasingly jarring role of DAFs in the sector, and that’s just one example.

Although it’s never articulated this way, the idea appears to be to lean into insularity, not away from it, to spend as little time as possible contending with opinions and realities that actually challenge one’s assumptions. Insularity and parochialism are too often treated not as a yoke to throw off, but as a safety blanket to cling to.

The big irony is that judging from its own professed values and mission statements, philanthropy isn’t supposed to be parochial, especially on the national (and international) level. It’s tackling major challenges affecting all Americans, often all of humanity. And in that sense, such a high degree of navel-gazing and inward-turning is particularly nonsensical.

That’s not even getting into the fact that in this country, philanthropy is subsidized by taxpayers — who, I imagine, don’t much care for those subsidies going toward endless strategic planning and other forms of organizational agonizing that would matter very little to the vast majority of outside observers.

Luckily for lots of philanthropic stakeholders, the one great advantage of insularity and artificial complexity is that most people can’t be bothered to look deeper, and at least some of those who do will end up spouting conspiracy theories and discrediting themselves in the process (one hopes). That leaves those of us actually interested in honest, grounded critique, and that’s precious few. One recent study by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy unsurprisingly found that most Americans know very little about philanthropy — no doubt a comforting thought to those who cling to insularity as a safety blanket.

To be fair, there are funders out there trying to escape their bubbles of introspection. One example that comes to mind is the Libra Foundation, which a few years back moved out of a “hermetically sealed” high-rise office building and into a converted home in a San Francisco neighborhood. It was an effort on the part of leadership to make the foundation more comforting and accessible to the community — part of it, instead of towering above it. Somewhat symbolic, but encouraging.

Most funders, however, remain fairly isolated and puzzling to the outside world. The question to ask, then, is that given philanthropy’s many worthy ambitions for the betterment of humanity, what exactly does it say about its impact that it remains so little known? And to achieve greater impact, might it not be better to spend more time looking outward than inward?

Featured