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Textbook Money Well Spent A Strategic Plan For Smart Philanthropy Second Edition Paul Brest Hal Harvey Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Money Well Spent A Strategic Plan For Smart Philanthropy Second Edition Paul Brest Hal Harvey Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Advance Praise for the Second Edition
“Paul Brest and Hal Harvey offer a lucid, reader-friendly, and persuasive
case for why rigorous strategy is indispensable for anyone
using philanthropy to make the world a better place.
It is the best guide available today, bar none.”
—JOEL L. FLEISHMAN, Duke University, author of Putting Wealth to Work
Introduction 1
2. Problem Analysis 31
3. Developing Solutions 48
Afterword 315
Acknowledgments 319
Notes 321
Index 359
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Even before Warren Buffett’s $31 billion gift to the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation garnered huge media attention, the twenty-first
century was on its way to being the century of philanthropy. In
the decade since the first edition of this book, other huge philan-
thropies, some in the form of limited liability partnerships rather
than tax-exempt foundations, have appeared on the scene—for
example, the Emerson Collective, founded by Steve Jobs’s widow,
Laurene Powell Jobs; the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by
Priscilla Chan and her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, a cofounder
of Facebook; and Good Ventures, founded by Cari Tuna and her
husband, Dustin Moskowitz, also a Facebook cofounder.
In 2010, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet began recruiting the
wealthy people of the world to contribute a majority of their
wealth to philanthropic causes during their lifetimes or in their
wills. As of 2017, the pledge has 158 signers, either individuals or
couples. Most of the signers of the pledge are billionaires, with
their pledges totaling more than $365 billion.1
Today, there are almost ninety US foundations with assets over
$1 billion; more than two hundred with assets over $500 million;
and myriad foundations with assets over $1 million.2 Transfers of
wealth by gifts and bequests are predicted to increase greatly in
the coming decades, with significant portions of the monies go-
ing to philanthropy. The philanthropic sectors in China and In-
dia and some other countries are also growing. And there also is
a growing global interest in novel finance mechanisms, includ-
xii Preface to the Second Edition
INTRODUCTION TO
STRATEGIC PHILANTHROPY
THE PROMISE OF
STRATEGIC PHILANTHROPY
may benefit from an inquiry like the famous What Color Is Your
Parachute? approach to choosing careers.
Without suggesting that you should follow Cari Tuna’s and
Dustin Moscowitz’s particular path, you may find these young
Giving Pledgers’ approach evocative. At the time they made their
pledge, Dustin, a cofounder of Facebook, wrote that he viewed his
good fortune “not as personal wealth, but as a tool with which I
hope to bring even more benefit to the world.”3
While Dustin devoted attention to building another company,
Cari undertook a several-year exploration of their philanthropic
goals and approaches. In her own words, Cari wondered “how
many excellent causes I and other U.S. donors might be over-
looking because we had never encountered them personally.”4
She joined forces with the cofounders of GiveWell, which rates
charities that address global poverty, to have in-depth conversa-
tions with a broad range of practitioners and funders, and she co-
funded grants with more experienced foundations to learn about
grantmaking and get a direct sense of the activities and impact of
grantee organizations.
Cari and Dustin created the Good Ventures Foundation and
the closely allied Open Philanthropy Project.5 While the precise
language of the foundation’s underlying values has changed over
the years, they are captured on its current website:
The primary goal of our giving is to improve the lives of as many people
as possible as much as possible. We believe that all lives are valuable,
including future lives. These guiding principles have big implica-
tions for the foundation’s approach to grantmaking.
Some donors prefer to give closer to home. Some find it help-
ful to limit their scope to a particular country or region. We
think being open to giving in any region is a comparative advan-
tage of ours. Much of the foundation’s grantmaking to date has
been focused on the poorest places in the world, where dollars go
further toward saving and improving lives. But we’re also fund-
The Promise of Strategic Philanthropy 9
wide learning that came from it, the prize became a sought-after
honor rather than a mark of opprobrium. For the same reasons
that the foundation’s grantmaking improved by telling it like it
was, we believe that yours will as well.
In most instances, it’s pretty obvious when a strategy has failed:
the activities necessary to implement a strategy were not carried
out or, if they were, did not create the sequence of events nec-
essary to achieve your intended outcome. Seemingly successful
outcomes present a particular problem, however. It is often diffi-
cult to determine whether a good outcome was the result of your
grantee’s intervention or whether it would have happened in any
event—what’s called the “counterfactual”—as a result of other
forces.
Why does it matter? Not mainly so that you can feel good
(or bad) about your accomplishments—though we wouldn’t be-
grudge anyone those feelings—but rather so that you and others
can learn what works and doesn’t work in order to improve your
own performance and that of your grantees.
As we see in Chapter 5, there are some robust methods for
testing causality in interventions that provide goods and services
such as food, health, and education. It’s far more difficult, how-
ever, to assess causality in efforts to influence legislative policy
and corporate behavior. To some extent this is inherent in the
complex social and political dynamics intrinsic to these interven-
tions. But it’s also a product of the poor level of analysis and trans-
parency of many philanthropic efforts and the tendency, not dis-
couraged by philanthropists, their supplicants, and their peers, to
be self-congratulatory.
One noteworthy effort to bring rigor, including counter-
factual analysis, to these stories is the Open Philanthropy Proj-
ect’s commissioned case studies of the history of philanthropy.16
Our book draws on several cases from this nascent collection.
With this background, we examine some examples of different
modes of philanthropy with successful, unsuccessful, and ambig-
uous results.
The Promise of Strategic Philanthropy 13
The ratios are useful guides but they are imprecise. They amount
to one of several tools in a funder’s tool kit. Smart funders would
no more make grant decisions based solely on the arithmetic of
benefit/cost ratios than smart admissions officers at competitive
undergraduate colleges would make decisions based solely on
the arithmetic of SAT scores. . . . Along with other information,
benefit/cost ratios steer a funder toward grantees with the best
chance to fulfill its mission.19
14 Chapter 1