Non profit
America’s philanthropic elite
Billionaires are pledging 50% or more of their fortunes to charity but how much good will they actually do?
di Staff
Forty American billionaires wanting to give something back to society have signed a landmark pledge to give at least half of their fortunes to charity. The head spinning figure this combined gesture could amount to – anywhere between 200 and 600 billion dollars – is bound to go a long way in overcoming America’s and the world’s social problems. Right? According to philanthropy expert, senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute and regular columnist for the Chronicle of Philanthropy Pablo Eisenberg, the link between big giving and social change is not quite that obvious. In fact, large donations may do little more than highlight the gap between rich and poor and between large non profits and small non profits.
The new philanthropic elite
The faces behind America’s gang of big donors are not new to giving. There are the usual suspects, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg and hotel magnate Barron Hilton. There is the Hollywood director George Lucas, CNN’s Ted Turner and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Missing from the list are some of America’s wealthiest people, like the founders of Walmart, the Waltons, and Google, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, all of whom make the USA’s top ten rich list.
Their intentions certainly sound good. “We’re hoping that America … becomes more generous over time”, said Buffet. But being generous is one thing, making sure that money makes it to those who need it the most is another.
“All the evidence shows that the very wealthy donors give almost entirely to the big institutions of higher education, medical centres, hospitals and to culture and the arts”, explains Pablo Eisenberg. “Very little money is given to social change organizations working in the field of low income families, AIDS, disability, or women and children at risk”. This pattern of giving, he goes on to say, is well established: “on that premiss it is safe to say that if you have this huge increase in giving by billionaires you are likely to get a similar pattern as they have shown in the past … and its going to further the gap between rich and poor, between large non profit and small non profits and those institutions that serve the needy and those that serve the rest of society and you could argue, in the case of arts and culture institutions, that primarily serve the rich and the wealthy”.
Look out for the full length interview with Pablo Eisenberg out in September.
