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| Industry View |
Behind Buffet's Beneficence
Michael Seltzer
12/01/2006
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Others are like Helen LaKelly Hunt, the founder and president
of the Sister Fund, a private women’s fund dedicated to the social, political,
economic and spiritual empowerment of women and girls, and the author of
Faith and Feminism: A Holy
Alliance. They are driven in their life work
through their interpretation of any number of sacred texts, along with the work
of leaders such as Sojourner Truth, suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker. Truth escorted numerous slaves
to freedom in the North on the Underground Railroad, and, in the following
century, Day ran a residence for generations of poor men and women on New York’s
Lower East Side. In each case, these women were spurred first and foremost by
their faith.
Inheritance
For the Rockefellers, the most extended multigenerational
family of givers in American history, the ethos of citizenship, expressed either
through public service or philanthropy, is a concept that mothers and fathers
pass on to their children as the most natural of birthrights. That same
phenomenon can be seen in the descendents of Julius Rosenwald, one of the
founders of Sears, Roebuck and Co., the Tata family in India and other families
whose contributions to the nation and the world extend over centuries.
Direct Personal Experience
Many philanthropic activists are propelled in their work by
what authors Cheryl and Jim Keen and wife/husband Sharon Daloz Parks and Larry
Parks Daloz describe in their book, Common Fire: Lives of Commitment, as
"experience of the other." At some point in their lives, these individuals have
seen firsthand the hardships of those who live in very different social and
economic circumstances than their own. In some instances, those experiences will
occur within a few miles of their homes; in others, it will take place thousands
of miles away in Africa, Latin America, Asia or the South Pacific, through
semesters abroad and programs such as the Peace Corps, VISTA and Operation
Crossroads Africa. When one hears the Gates talk about their giving, the
listener is immediately transported to a hut in a rural village in Zambia or a
health clinic in India where the couple has directly witnessed the hardships of
some of the more than 1 billion people in the world who live on less than $1 a
day.
Others, like Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, whose Russell Sage
Foundation, named after her husband, predated Rockefeller and Carnegie, drew
their inspiration from direct experience in areas such as the teeming tenements
of New York. Sage, like many women of her background, worked in the settlement
house movement, giving respite and training to the large numbers of immigrant
families that settled in America’s urban centers at the turn of the 20th
century.
Paul Ylvisaker, former Ford Foundation executive and dean of
the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who served as a mentor of many of
today’s foundation leaders, once noted how organized giving enables communities
to create better lives for their residents—in essence, serving as a society’s
"passing lane" and as the R&D arm of a democracy. While it cannot supplant
government, it can act as a lightning rod that prompts government action.
In an era when skepticism toward institutions of any sort
abounds, Buffett’s action is a powerful statement that foundations can be
effective vehicles for positive social change. Donors can always choose to
donate their assets to endow a graduate school at their alma mater, build a new
medical research center or give substantial gifts to their favorite
organizations, such as National Public Radio and the Salvation Army, which Joan
Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald’s, chose to support. Or they may
choose with confidence to create a new foundation or contribute to an existing
one.
Those of us who work every day in the world of foundations
would certainly be overjoyed if 2006 is remembered as the beginning of a new
golden age of philanthropy, when many others will soon discover how giving in an
organized manner can help birth a new world of more equity and justice for all.
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