Borderless Giving Crucial to Solving Global Strife, Experts Say

The world’s most crucial problems require a strong international response from philanthropic institutions, several speakers suggested at a conference here this month. And last September’s deadly attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center highlighted the potential stakes if people and institutions in the industrialized Northern Hemisphere continue to ignore the worsening plight of those in the developing Southern Hemisphere.

“We have literally billions of people being left out of the great global opportunity that has touched the lives of so many in the North and South alike,” said Mark Molloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program. “We are developing a two-class world at an extraordinarily dangerous moment, because it’s the same moment we’ve developed a borderless world,” he said.

Mr. Brown made his remarks at a conference on “borderless giving” organized by the Global Philanthropy Forum, a collaborative project of four institutions including the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where the meeting was held. The invitational session drew more than 300 donors, foundation executives, and nonprofit leaders for two days of talks focusing on expanding the role and influence of international philanthropy.

Organizers had arranged the conference partly out of concern that during an economic recession, “overseas giving would be the first to go,” said Jane M. Wales, president of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, one of the sponsors. They also had noticed that, while philanthropy among Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies was growing rapidly, little of the money was apparently making its way overseas.

Promoting a ‘Shared Vision’

Although the conference was planned long before last fall, the terrorist attacks colored many of the sessions.

“The events of September 11 shook this country and its sense of security and exceptionalism,” said Kavita N. Ramdas, president of the Global Fund for Women. “We can no longer work and operate in ways that separate us from the rest of the world.”

Those attacks have prompted divergent responses, she said: While some people have chosen to reach out and engage more fully with the rest of the world, others have pulled back in fear or have reinforced their sense of identity with a particular group.

“The most recognizable language right now in the world is one of violence,” said Ms. Ramdas. “And the voices that are calling for a different way of doing things are remaining relatively unheard and unheeded.” The challenge for grant makers, she said, is “to strengthen those voices that are talking about one world, that are talking about a shared vision.”

To that end, Ms. Ramdas urged donors to consider supporting the efforts of women, whom she likened to the canaries used to monitor safety conditions in mines. In countries like Afghanistan, she said, “the status of women, the situation they find themselves in, the lack of opportunities that are available to women and girls, are a sure and clear indicator of other values in those societies.”

Money Goes a Long Way

Several speakers noted that grant dollars can go much further in developing countries.

The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls, for example, is building a women’s center in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, using a $50,000 anonymous gift, said Mavis Nicholson Leno, the foundation’s chairwoman. The center will house legal and health clinics, a vocational training workshop, and a shelter for abused women.

“Where I live in Los Angeles, you can’t build a Fotomat for $50,000,” she quipped. “We can do so much good here for so little money.”

The scope of the need is great, Ms. Leno observed, in a country where schools, hospitals, and other public institutions suffer from decades of neglect. But Afghan women make courageous and resourceful partners, she said, adding, “these women could set up a home school and keep it running for a year for $500.”

Also championing the benefits of small grants overseas was Chet Tchozewski, executive director of the Global Greengrants Fund, which supports grass-roots environmental organizations in developing countries.

“The best return on investment on philanthropic dollars for environmental donors is overseas, which is where many of the greatest problems are, too,” he said.

Focusing on Central Asia

Several other speakers focused on central Asia, where the world’s attention has been riveted since last September. The region presents daunting problems for grant makers, acknowledged Charles William Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation, which works in the former Soviet republics.

“What was once an integrated market has been broken up into five noncooperative markets,” namely Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, Mr. Maynes said. “Neighbors cannot talk to neighbors, much less trade with them. World markets are thousands of miles away. Subsidies from Moscow have been lost.” As a result, he said, health standards have collapsed, and literacy rates are plummeting. And governments, peopled largely with holdover functionaries from the communist era, have little capacity to reverse those downward trends.

“For foundations and nongovernmental organizations, the opportunities lie at the grass roots,” Mr. Maynes said. “In the current political climate, it is unlikely that we’re going to see much reform at the top without much more progress and ferment at the bottom.”

Until the frozen top tiers of those societies thaw out, he said, “the role of foundations and nongovernmental organizations is to train and sustain the people who are going to bring positive change when the inevitable political transformation takes place.”

Mr. Brown, of the UNDP, observed that while some countries have collapsed entirely, many others are barely able to provide their citizens with basic services like education or health care.

“Your most strategic interventions should be in failing states,” he told the donors. “There are a lot of them.”

More than a million young men each year are graduating from Islamic schools in Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere with a poor education and slim job prospects, Mr. Brown said, and under political systems that give them little voice or hope.

In the face of this demographic trend, he added, substantive change will not occur from donor institutions’ supporting schools or health clinics, but rather, “it will come from our power of advocacy, to realign politics in North and South alike behind addressing this crisis.”

Public advocacy was also championed by Timothy E. Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, who urged grant makers to devote more time and resources to a responsibility that he said many foundations had “largely ignored, either out of fear of our boards, fear of the IRS, or just general timidity.”

Although it is illegal for foundations to lobby for specific pieces of legislation, Mr. Wirth noted, it is entirely appropriate for them to help shape broader public opinion. The “disgracefully low” American expenditure for overseas development aid, the U.S. government’s refusal to sign the treaty to ban land mines, the nuclear test ban treaty, free-trade agreements, global climate change — “these are all issues we believe we have a responsibility to take on and to help with,” he said.

Such advocacy is particularly important, he said, to counter political efforts in the United States to curtail federal funds for family planning and reproductive health measures, for example, as well as claims that arguments linking climate change to human activity are based on faulty science.

Philanthropic resources should generally not be used, Mr. Wirth said, to respond to desperate crises involving delivering food aid or helping refugees, which he said was the responsibility of governments and the United Nations system. “The limited resources we have,” he said, “should be directed to addressing clearly what government should do.”

AIDS Vaccine

The Rockefeller Foundation, for its part, has chosen to focus its efforts on areas where government and business are not doing enough, said its president, Gordon R. Conway. It is supporting the improvement of food crops for the poor, for example, and the creation of microbicide foams or gels to prevent the transmission of AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases. Neither are areas in which large biotechnology companies or pharmaceutical corporations have any commercial interest, Mr. Conway said.

Rockefeller is also helping to underwrite research on an AIDS vaccine for poor countries. “The most obscene inequity is the birth of infants with HIV,” Mr. Conway said, “because we know how to prevent the transmission from mother to infant.” Such transmissions occur in about 200 cases a year in the United States, he said, compared with some 600,000 in Africa.

Other speakers pointed to additional roles that grant makers could play.

“We really need to be the venture capitalists of social innovation,” said Stephen B. Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. To do so, he said, requires assuming more risk than many foundations are comfortable doing, and embracing occasional failures as chances to learn and improve. “If we don’t take the risk,” he asked, “who will? Where’s the capital going to come from that’s going to bet on the new leadership, the new institutions, and the indigenous ideas?”

One example of a successful effort to cultivate homegrown talent, he said, is the Carpathian Foundation, which makes grants in five central European countries that have often been riven by ethnic divisions: Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The foundation, run entirely by people from the region, makes grants of $500 to $1,000 to help improve poor communities in the region. Although its initial support came from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Mr. Heintz said, the Carpathian Foundation now draws half its income from sources outside the United States.

The focus for grant makers, abroad and at home, should be on creating the sense of community and mutual responsibility that is necessary if democracy is to flourish, said Mr. Heintz. “We have what I would call the mirage of democracy at the end of the 20th century, rather than the community of democracy that we need,” he said.

Community Foundations

Peter Hero, president of the Community Foundation Silicon Valley, recommended community foundations as suitable partners for donors and grant makers hoping to make an impact either in the United States or abroad. Such institutions, which raise and distribute money within defined geographic areas, are taking root in places as diverse as Brazil, India, Slovakia, and South Africa, he said, because they enable people to mobilize local resources to help shape their own futures.

Such institutions, he suggested, can help “end the cycle of poverty, hopelessness, despair, and, too often, of rage, which emerges when local citizens, whether in the Mideast or in south central Los Angeles, feel they don’t have the access to power, the resources, the leaders, the voice, or the opportunity to make their children’s lives better than their own.”

Conference organizers said they hope to hold another meeting next year. They also plan to expand the Global Philanthropy Forum’s Web site, http://www.philanthropyforum.org, to provide additional resources for donors. And in association with the Tides Foundation they announced the creation of an International Fund for Women’s Economic Empowerment, which will focus on microcredit programs in Afghanistan.