- Foundations and philanthropists should be encouraged to make loans to charities, back nonprofit bonds, and use other financial tools outside of traditional philanthropy, writes Alexander Friedman, who recently stepped down as chief financial officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In an opinion article in The Financial Times, he says governments should provide tax incentives to get more people and institutions involved in so-called social investing.
- The idea proposed by some British politicians that government support for the arts could be supplanted by American-style philanthropy is wrong headed, writes Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer for The Guardian. “I can think of no one in the arts who thinks fundraising from private sources is a bad idea,” she writes. “But the U.S. has a philanthropic tradition, embedded in its culture. We do not; nor can it be created in the span of a parliament.”
- Sean Stannard-Stockton, a Chronicle contributor and a donor adviser, writes on his blog Tactical Philanthropy about another donor adviser’s guilt over giving a donation to an animal charity to please his daughter even though he’d previously suggested the group received too much money compared to other causes. Mr. Stannard-Stockton calls this sentiment the “neo-guilt of the non-optimized social investor” and says that social investors can take analytical thinking too far.
- Drawing inspiration from last night’s Academy Awards, William Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University, says Oscars often fulfill “Hollywood’s hypocritical self-fantasy” about what it thinks films should be about, a mind-set that international aid efforts also face. On his blog, Mr. Easterly argues that aid work and filmmakers should focus on what they are good at, not what they think they should do to please others.
