Monday, March 7, 2016

Great read on philanthropy and impact

I'm a big fan of Michael Hobbes. Okay, I've only ever read two things that he's written, but they've both been spot on. You should go read his recent piece How Mark Zuckerberg Should Give Away $45 Billion. A couple of the money quotes:

$45 billion, as a former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantee put it, is "a 1,000-pound gorilla." You don't give away that much money without changing the places and institutions and people you give it to, sometimes for the worse.
They told me about their own [failed philanthropic efforts]: Promising ideas scaled into oblivion, donations that disappeared into corrupt governments, groupthink disguised as insight. But they also told me about projects that worked, that scaled, that matched the ambitions of the new philanthropy while avoiding its blind spots. And it turns out that some of the best ideas are the ones Zuckerberg is the least likely to hear in Silicon Valley. 
Most legacy foundations pay consultants millions of dollars to study and re-study problems before they give grants toward solving them. The Ford Foundation spends nearly $1 for every $4 it gives away. In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation’s largest grant recipient (other than its offshoot, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), was Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a consulting firm.
The whole piece is a ten minute read and I really encourage you to go and check it out. Also, you should read this other piece by Michael Hobbes from 2014 - International Development Is Broken. Here Are Two Ways to Fix It.

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