Michael Seltzer has worked in the field of philanthropy and in the nonprofit sector since 1968, most recently as the president of the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers.

Warren Buffett entered the philanthropic stratosphere overnight in June when he declared his intention to contribute in excess of $30 billion to five foundations. His gifts represent the latest phase of his plan to give away 85 percent of his fortune.

MICHAEL SELTZER with Helen LaKelly Hunt of the Sister Fund. (Photograph by Stan Schnier.)

At the New York Public Library, the venue he chose for his announcement, Buffett noted that Bill Gates had given him a copy of Andrew Carnegie’s article, "Wealth," first published in North American Review in June 1889. In it, Carnegie noted that the rich are "intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself." Buffett also referred to the World Development Report, an annual World Bank publication, which Gates had also given him. It was clear that both publications had directly influenced his thinking.

So, with one intellectual foot planted in the 19th century and another in the modern world, Buffett embarked on the path that has led others to create more than 68,000 foundations in the United States. American society today is certainly very different from the 19th century’s Gilded Age when Buffett’s philanthropic forebears—most prominently, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie—amassed their wealth. One clear difference is the extraordinary increase in the number and magnitude of great fortunes. A 2006 survey published by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch reports that there were 85,000 people with more than $30 million in assets last year. Close to 9 million individuals around the globe have liquid financial assets of more than $1 million. Taken together, their assets total $33 trillion. The scope of today’s wealth is unparalleled in human history.

Carnegie noted that the rich are "intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself."

How many of these men and women of inherited and earned wealth will follow the lead of Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates? What driving forces will influence them?

Fellow Players
Peers past and present have certainly influenced Buffett’s strategy. During the New York Public Library announcement, he credited Carnegie, Rockefeller and New York philanthropist Irene Diamond (who died several years ago after spending down all of the assets of the Aaron Diamond Foundation on such initiatives as AIDS research and public education) for setting important examples. Buffett also acknowledged the influence of the work of his friends and fellow players, the Gates.

Vartan Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corp. of New York, noted: "Andrew Carnegie believed deeply that private wealth should be used to advance the public good. Warren Buffett’s extraordinary gift epitomizes that idea. It also highlights both the sense of responsibility that dedicated philanthropists feel toward their fellow men and women and the desire of some donors to see the effects of their legacy during their own lifetime."

The World of Ideas
In explaining the rationale behind his extensive largesse, George Soros is quick to reference philosopher Karl Popper, author of the 1945 book, Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper’s writings inspired Soros to both name his foundation the Open Society Institute and to make his faith in democracy and civil society a cornerstone of his giving.

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.