From today until Saturday, June 4th, the ninth biennial Policy History Conference is taking place at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. And just this moment, a wonderful group of scholars has gathered to discuss private foundations and public policy: ______________________________ Private Foundations and Public Policy: How Modern Philanthropy Has Shaped Credit, Labor, and Population Policies (3:15pm-4:45pm) Chair … Continue reading
Category Archives: Current Events and Philanthropy
Edwin Embree as Exemplar: How one Philanthropic Leader Confronted Racial Prejudice during the Second World War
Editors’ Note: Alfred Perkins highlights the leadership of Edwin Embree, who served for two decades as president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, in advocating for the rights of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. The current presidential campaign has brought again to the surface the hostility to cultural differences long an element in the American emotional … Continue reading
Charity’s No Stranger to Political Advocacy
Editors’ Note: Andrew Purkis concludes this week’s focus on governmental reform of charities within the UK, as part of HistPhil’s forum on philanthropy and the state. The other two pieces on this subtopic were authored by Rhodri Davies and Peter Grant. England has a proud history of non-party political campaigning for charitable causes, with roots deep in the … Continue reading
Crisis and Response: What History Tells us about the Challenges Facing UK Charities
Editors’ Note: Rhodri Davies continues this week’s focus on governmental reform of charities within the UK, as part of HistPhil’s forum on philanthropy and the state. The charity sector in the UK is currently going through a torrid time. A series of issues with the way charities operate and fundraise have recently come to the … Continue reading
Charities in the Firing Line
Editors’ Note: As part of HistPhil’s forum on philanthropy and the state, this week we bring you a series of posts on the situation in the UK, where a series of controversies in the charitable sector has led to calls for increased governmental regulation. Peter Grant opens the discussion. Both charities in general and fundraisers in particular have … Continue reading
Historical Context to $2.1 Million Grant to Women’s Philanthropy Institute
Editors’ Note: In early January, Inside Philanthropy announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had gifted $2.1 million to the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Below, the Institute’s Director Debra Mesch and Associate Director Andrea Pactor provide some historical perspective to the grant. While the history of women’s activism through philanthropy is … Continue reading
Let Down at the Ford Foundation
Editors’ Note: Against the backdrop of Ford Foundation President Darren Walker’s announced efforts to address inequalities on the global stage, HistPhil hosted a conversation this past August on the ability of philanthropy to address societal-wide inequities. At the Ford Foundation offices in NYC earlier this month, Walker discussed further his vision for the organization with Stanford political scientist Rob Reich (The … Continue reading
Ford Tackles Inequality?
Editors’ Note: Against the backdrop of Ford Foundation President Darren Walker’s announced efforts to address inequalities on the global stage, HistPhil hosted a conversation this past August on the ability of philanthropy to address societal-wide inequities. At the Ford Foundation offices in NYC earlier this month, Walker discussed further his vision for the organization with Stanford political scientist Rob Reich … Continue reading
To be Young, Rich, and Philanthropic
A few weeks ago, on the NCRP blog, Ryan Schlegel wrote an insightful post pushing back against some of the breathless celebration that had surrounded the promotion of “hacker philanthropy,” the term that Sean Parker coined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed to describe the giving of his tech mogul peers. Philanthropic “hackers,” according to … Continue reading
Philanthropy and the quest for Civic Competence
The Chronicle of Philanthropy has just published an editorial I wrote on the responses to the Zuckerberg-Chan announcement and on what they might suggest about the public’s engagement with big philanthropy in the years to come. I was tempted to include in it some additional reflections on an earlier episode from American philanthropic history in … Continue reading
Curating Philanthropic History
Yesterday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History unveiled a long-term Philanthropy Initiative, which includes a new display, “Giving in America,” and a collections effort that “represents Americans’ gifts of time, talent, expertise and money.” They also held their first annual philanthropy symposium, “The Power of Giving: Philanthropy’s Impact on American Life” featuring eminences such as Bill … Continue reading
Donor Advised Funds from an Historian’s Perspective
Editors’ Note: This Friday, in Washington, DC, Boston College Law School’s Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good will be hosting a conference, “The Rise of Donor-Advised Funds: Should Congress Respond.” Among the scholars and policy-makers convening to discuss DAFs is Lila Corwin Berman, Associate Professor of History at Temple University, who will be presenting on … Continue reading
Upcoming Philamplify Debate on Reform Strategies in Education
Next Tuesday, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy will host their first Philamplify debate on “Reform Strategies in Education.” Philamplify is the novel evaluative tool that NCRP designed, using some of the principles of crowd-sourcing, in which the NCRP performs a deep investigation into a single foundation, but also opens up the process to the … Continue reading
Reimagining Education: Philanthropy and Public Policy
Editors’ Note: Robin Rogers argues that philanthropy has undergone great change since the turn of this century, and particularly in the education sector. In her analysis of this “new” philanthropy, she engages with Johann Neem’s and Jeffrey Snyder’s recent contributions to the site’s philanthropy & education forum. Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Job’s widow, just gave fifty million … Continue reading
Obergefell (2015): A Time for Reflection on the Role of Philanthropy in a Democracy
This past Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize similar marriages licensed and performed out-of-state. Of course, this decision will be celebrated by marriage equality activists and supporters, like myself, and … Continue reading
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