The Dawning of ‘Post-Modern Philanthropy’

Privately financed school-choice programs, which provide hundreds of millions of dollars to enable thousands of children to attend private schools, have become one of the most rapidly growing arenas for philanthropy. They also represent a new approach to giving whose roots can be found in traditions once thought to have been passe.

Modern philanthropy, at least to the most prominent foundations and donors, has not aimed merely to relieve individual needs or to underwrite worthy organizations. Its goal usually has been to deal with the causes of problems rather than their symptoms. Thus, it has sought to promote institutional or systemic change.

To be sure, many donors blissfully ignored that approach. However, from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller to most of today’s leaders, philanthropy designed to meet individuals’ needs was deemed to be unimportant, ineffective, or even wasteful. Scarce philanthropic dollars, the leaders argued, could be better spent on promoting new public policies, social and economic reforms, or scientific advances that offered the prospect of widespread improvements in the human condition.

The school-choice programs, though perhaps the most visible, are not the only ones to challenge that way of thinking in recent years. Mentor projects and support for grassroots groups have enjoyed a revival of interest in the philanthropic world. And earlier this year, the Ford Foundation, long a bastion of the institutional-change model, announced that its largest grant would be a $50-million commitment to help low-income families obtain home mortgages. That followed the creation of another Ford program to help impoverished families establish “individual development accounts,” which would increase the assets available to them to use for education, business development, or other purposes.

Both of the Ford Foundation’s efforts are undoubtedly meant to show that such programs help reduce poverty and ought to be widely copied. What is different about them, however, is that the changes they aim to foster are in how individuals and families behave, not in how public policies or social and economic institutions operate.

What accounts for this switch in emphasis, this rise in what could be called a “post-modern” model of philanthropy?

The shift in the nation’s political culture away from a willingness to try social experiments surely had something to do with it. So too did the generally dismal record of earlier philanthropic efforts to promote systemic change. More than a few grant makers discovered — and some even admitted — that problems such as educational failure, teen-age pregnancy, poverty, and urban decay were surprisingly resistant to the ambitious ideas they had crafted and had been testing.

The fault, though, lay not just with the plans, but also with the modern style of philanthropy. While efforts to identify underlying causes and foster comprehensive solutions made sense in some fields — such as improving medical care or developing hardier strains of rice — they were ill-suited to others. In education, for example, most system-wide changes — such as increasing per-pupil spending — bore much less relationship to improving student achievement than did greater parental involvement and higher expectations at school.

Likewise, most public-policy reforms — for example, promoting affirmative-action programs — had much less effect on the employment prospects for inner-city youths than did the kinds of skills they possessed, the network of people with whom they associated — or even the frequency with which they attended church.

Helping people and changing their behavior, then, increasingly looked like the most — perhaps the only — effective way for donors to go. Yet, in view of the scale of the problems, traditional charity seemed like an insufficient response.

Thus was born the post-modern model of philanthropy of large-scale efforts to help individuals. Although some sponsors of the school-choice programs view them as a step toward government-financed vouchers, others — including the financier Theodore Forstmann, whose recent challenge grant triggered a major expansion of the programs — regard them simply as ways to offer help to needy schoolchildren. Rather than trying to change failing school systems, those philanthropists hope to increase the opportunities available to as many students as possible by enabling them to leave the failing public-school systems. Instead of promoting education reform en masse, they are looking to improve educational achievement one child at a time.

In a sense, these private funds are no different than scholarships, a traditional form of charitable giving. But by banding together and amassing considerable support behind them, their sponsors have fashioned a new model of philanthropy that seeks to influence society by focusing on a large number of individuals, rather than on a small group of institutions or lawmakers.

Skeptics might still wonder whether even charity writ large is up to the challenge of rescuing more than a small proportion of children from woeful schools or families from blighted neighborhoods. (How to “go to scale” is a frequent topic of discussion among post-modern philanthropists.) And there is no good answer to the question of what to do about those people, often the most disadvantaged or troubled, who cannot or will not take advantage of the help offered through vouchers, mentor projects, and similar programs. (That problem, of course, is not confined only to the new style of grant making.) Critics of the post-modern approach also question what would happen if the donors cut back on their largesse, perhaps because the economy has slowed down.

One of the arguments of modern donors for focusing on causes rather than on symptoms had been that success in doing so would make the beneficiaries less dependent upon continued philanthropy. But that often turned out to be wishful thinking.

On the other hand, post-modern philanthropy might well produce changes — for example, in the attitudes of low-income parents toward education or homeownership — that outlast the programs that generated them. The private-school scholarship programs will provide a good test of this, as well as of how appealing the new model is likely to be to the rising generation of philanthropists.

In its emphasis on a direct connection between donor and beneficiaries, its distaste for bureaucracy and social engineering, and its insistence on measurable results, the post-modern style of grant making looks remarkably like the way in which today’s most successful entrepreneurs run their companies. As a result, it may well become as influential among the philanthropic leaders of the future as the “big-business” model of Carnegie and Rockefeller was in the past.

Leslie Lenkowsky is professor of philanthropic studies and public policy at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, in Indianapolis, and a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is llenkows@iupui.edu.