Grant Makers Urged to Think Globally and Collaborate Across Their Regions

Grant makers around the world will increasingly be called upon to think globally and collaborate regionally in helping to overcome the suspicions of people living in a divided world, a former president of the Council on Foundations told an international conference here last month.

“Very little attention has been given to what it means to live in an interdependent world that is integrating and fragmenting at the same time,” said James A. Joseph, who is now a professor of public policy at Duke University. “The more interdependent we become, the more people are turning to smaller communities of meaning and memory.” Although some people lament that trend, he observed, “as I travel around the world, I hear more and more people saying that until there is respect for their primary community of identity they will find it difficult to identify with larger communities.”

Yet as some groups reinforce their sense of identity, organized philanthropy is burgeoning even in unlikely places, he noted, because “it is increasingly clear that where people feel a sense of belonging they are likely to also feel a sense of obligation.”

Demographic changes, Mr. Joseph said, are creating “a demand for a new group of leaders who seek power in order to disperse it rather than simply concentrate it.”

At the same time, he said, “our ability to address large social problems will increasingly be determined by the ability to forge partnerships” involving nonprofit groups and their beneficiaries as well as government and businesses. “The time is right and the opportunity great for organized philanthropy to take the lead in developing new ideas and new ways of thinking about partnerships.”

But Mr. Joseph, who was U.S. ambassador to South Africa from 1996 to 2000, warned against the pitfalls of promoting “the new romance of civil society,” which is sometimes credited with great powers by those who advocate a more limited social role for government. “Civil society carries the potential to reshape and unite a divided world,” he said, “but those of us in organized philanthropy must not oversell its strength or over-idealize its intentions.” He reminded his audience of the dark side of international civil society, such as the hate groups and criminal enterprises that have extended their reach across national borders.

Mr. Joseph was the keynote speaker at a three-day gathering sponsored by Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support, or WINGS, an international network of more than 85 national or regional associations of grant makers and groups that support philanthropy.

The 110 conference participants from more than two dozen countries offered a useful reminder, if one were needed, that international philanthropy “is not about America teaching the world how things ought to be done,” said Robert L. Buchanan, director of international programs at the Council on Foundations, in Washington, and a coordinator of the WINGS meeting.

“In America, we’ve become a bit stodgy in some of our ways, and maybe we need to be learning how to be a little more nimble when it comes to aspects of our international approach,” said Mr. Buchanan.

Established formally in 2000, the organization grew out of a shared conviction that grant makers around the world need regular forums to swap ideas. The group’s primary supporters are the Charles Stewart Mott and Ford Foundations. Today, its membership hails from roughly 60 countries and territories and includes such groups as the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium, the Slovak Donors Forum, the Southern African Grantmakers Association, and Third Sector Foundation of Turkey.

Much of the discussion at the meeting focused on the problems facing charities in many countries, such as achieving financial sustainability and enjoying official recognition by governments.

In one of the conference’s liveliest sessions, four speakers expressed different views on the philanthropic needs of Australia’s own aboriginal population, roughly comparable in percentage terms to that of American Indians within the United States. While many visitors may have marveled at Australia’s fast-growing economic bounty, the fact remains that “we also have the world’s fastest-growing gap between rich and poor,” said Charles Lane, chief executive of the Myer Foundation in Sydney, speaking with black Australians in mind.

Another panel member at the same session, Lillian Holt, director of the University of Melbourne’s Center for Indigenous Education, challenged the locally drawn attendees outright. “What has degraded me as an aboriginal woman has degraded you white Australians as well,” Ms. Holt told the gathering, comparing the country’s racist past to a “gangrene of the soul.”

As to the question of how she remained committed to philanthropy while retaining an admitted anger toward some of her own countrymen, Ms. Holt quoted from the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw: “Indignation at the world’s woes is really the greatest form of love.”

In another session on global issues, a number of indigenous panelists spoke about grant-making activities in “the South,” or countries outside of what one participant dubbed the “Euro-American loop.”

Noshir H. Dadrawaia, executive secretary of India’s Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy, in Bombay, said the number of charitable organizations in India had swelled to as many as 400,000 in recent years, with 60,000 in Mumbai alone.

“God alone knows how many of those are fully functional,” said Mr. Dadrawaia. Keeping track of exact figures was hard in a country that “adds the population of Australia to its overall population every year,” he said.

The challenges arising from such dynamic growth are serious, Mr. Dadrawaia told delegates. Monica Mutuku, executive secretary of the Kenya Community Development Foundation, in Nairobi, saw the current grant-making scene in her own country moving at a quieter pace. East African philanthropic culture has reached a point where “we can talk openly with people about things like endowments, although we never use words like ‘endowment.’” In Kenya, said Ms. Mutuku, “we talk to people about what they want, about how we can help.”

Asked by one audience member to name a significant obstacle in how organizations in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres go about their grant making in an increasingly globalized world, Mr. Dadrawaia said that while developed countries tended to emphasize the finding of a “common process, we tend to look more for common values.”

Regardless of those differences, however, Mr. Joseph told conference participants, their challenge is “to help create a new world where people from all sectors of society work together to transform the laissez-faire notion of live and let live into the moral imperative of live and help live.”