February 3, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
With the world’s economic crisis grabbing the headlines, observers wondered: would philanthropy be played down during the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland?
For two well-known social activists who attended last week’s meeting, the answer is mixed.
Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, writes that the “embrace of philanthropy … infused much of the conversation at Davos.”
On The Huffington Post, she writes that one discussion, titled “From Philanthrocapitalism to Philanthrocrisis,” attracted a crowd of people and featured a luminary panel of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Muhammad Yunus, and Jet Li.
“Not a bad little group to have lunch with.” she writes.
But the Rev. Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, an antipoverty group in Washington, writes that the interest in fighting social ills during the event seemed lackluster.
One “extraordinary session” he attended at Davos was “full of the insights of social entrepreneurs and innovative philanthropists, all discussing new patterns of social enterprise — where capitalism is again in the service of big ideas and big solutions, not just making money,” he writes on the God’s Politics blog.
“But the session was held in a small room, not a big hall. And it wasn’t full. New ideas of business with a social purpose have surfaced here at Davos before, but, as in the global economy, social conscience is a sidebar to business. Social purposes have become ‘extracurricular’ to business. It’s time for the sidebar to become mainstream and move to the main hall of discussion and to the center of the way we do business,” he writes.
What do you think? Does the Davos meeting produce substantial discussion about philanthropy or helping the world’s poor? Click on the comment button to share your views.
