Group Urges Foundations to Make More Grants Abroad

A new group is encouraging U.S. grant makers to do more giving overseas.

The organization, Grantmakers Without Borders, contends that the United States should be doing far more to help the developing world. Less than 2 percent of all U.S. philanthropic giving supports international programs, it notes — and much of that money goes to institutions in North America or other developed regions.

Most of the world’s poorest and neediest people, it says, have little or no access to the world’s largest pool of philanthropic capital.

“From an ethical standpoint it doesn’t make sense, because we have all these resources and aren’t sharing them,” says John Harvey, the organization’s national coordinator. “And from a strategic standpoint, there’s a lot of issues you’d have a much greater impact on if you were doing cross-border funding.” Problems as varied as global warming and human rights cannot be dealt with effectively without engaging with and supporting groups in developing countries, he says.

Grantmakers Without Borders grew out of a collaboration between the International Working Group of the National Network of Grantmakers and the International Donors’ Dialogue, a group of donors in the San Francisco Bay area.

The new group plans to operate as an “activist network” that hopes to show other grant makers both why giving overseas is important and how it can be done effectively. It wants to attract not only private foundations but also charities and wealthy donors interested in the group’s mission.

More information is available online at http://www.internationaldonors.org or by writing to P.O. Box 181282, Boston, Mass. 02118.