Editors’ Note: Peter Kurie discusses the parallels between two American nonprofits that control major for-profit corporations: the OpenAI Foundation, on paper now the wealthiest charitable organization in the U.S., and the Hershey Trust, the subject of his 2018 book, In Chocolate We Trust. (This post has been revised to reflect greater clarity on the organizational … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Michele Fugiel Gartner offers an outline of the history of foundation staff role development, adapted from an article, co-written with Tobias Jung and Alina Baluch, published in The Foundation Review (2023). In today’s polarized political landscape, philanthropy is under increasing scrutiny, from calls for greater transparency to more profound challenges about legitimacy and … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Sam Gill provides an outline of a new theory of the general purpose foundation, adapted from a recently published article in The Foundation Review, “Why Foundations? The Theory and Strategy of the General-Purpose Foundation.” Much of the important theorizing about general-purpose foundations over the history of this strange animal in the American institutional … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: John Thelin and Richard Trollinger, two scholars of philanthropy and higher education, put the recent higher education “donor revolt” in historical perspective. Recent campus conflicts at elite American universities, The New York Times declared in a recent article, signal a “new politics of power” in which “wealthy donors expect money to buy a … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Emma Saunders-Hastings introduces her new article in American Political Science Review on Frederick Douglass and his political theory of ‘dirty money.’ In 1844, the newly-formed Free Church of Scotland sent a fundraising mission to the United States. It raised about £3,000, largely from southern Presbyterian donors. Abolitionists in the United States and abroad … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Today (June 7, 2023), HistPhil co-editor Maribel Morey has updated this list of readings on US philanthropy that she originally published three years ago in June 2020 and last updated in April 2021. In June 2020, I first uploaded onto HistPhil a list of reading resources on US philanthropy, in response to Black … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Michael Lipsky tells the story of a small Ford Foundation grant, made by Norm Collins in 1986, that led to the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and paved the way for Ford’s Honoring Contributions in the Governance of American Indian Nations awards program. This post … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: HistPhil takes a brief break from our forum on the Tax Reform Act of 1969 for a post by Thomas Adam complicating the historical association between the growth of democracy and the surging of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville’s dictum that Americans formed associations for addressing social problems while the French and English … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Gara LaMarche reflects on lessons learned from leadership positions at two of the nation’s largest foundations, Open Society Foundations and the recently sunset Atlantic Philanthropies. I’ve been helping foundations and rich individuals redistribute their wealth to non-profits and social movements for nearly twenty-five years, and almost all of that time there has been … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Cynthia Gibson, one of the leading experts on participatory philanthropy, explains why funders who question whether a participatory approach is consistent with philanthropic practice might want to consult the sector’s past. The material in this post is adapted from a number of sources, including Cynthia Gibson, Participatory Grantmaking: Has Its Time Come? (New York: … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Michael Seltzer reviews Edgar Villanueva‘s new book, Decolonizing Wealth. In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, Frantz Fanon noted what he considered to be the necessary conditions for the overthrow of colonialism: “To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Sarah Fields spotlights the need for more scholarly attention directed to the history of athletes’ philanthropy. Athletes are a complicated group. Sporting figures have long been celebrities, but they have not always been wealthy either as a class or as individuals. And yet they have long been involved in various ways with philanthropy and … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Sylvia Brown chronicles her experience grappling with the relationship between the legacy of the Brown Family and her own commitment to philanthropy. In 1989 my father sold his most valuable possession, a Colonial-era bookcase-on-desk, to pay for the restoration of our family home in Providence, Rhode Island. The desk fetched $12.1 million at … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: This post, by Caroline Reeves, is adapted from a paper presented at the “Empires of Charity” conference, held at the University of Warwick in March 2017 and is part of Reeves’ larger project on the history of Chinese charitable giving. The Last Bastion of Cultural Imperialism In 2009, I was invited to celebrate the … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Paul Schervish writes on the dangers of researchers equating generosity with formal charitable giving. Just peruse studies and media commentary on charitable giving and you will see how often one financial group, region, gender, or race is called more “generous” than another on the basis of how much formal charitable giving that group carries … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: With today’s philanthropies in mind, Michael E. Hartmann explains the relevance of a recently-published Science Advances article on past knowledge and future breakthroughs in science and technology. What’s new? It’s a common question for us all. You’ve heard it. You’ve asked it. It’s often a useful way of jumpstarting conversation. It was also commonly asked of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: The following is adapted from the introduction to a paper just published by the Atlantic Philanthropies, written by HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis, on the history of “Giving While Living,” examined through the story of Chuck Feeney and the Atlantic Philanthropies. The paper is itself an excerpt from a larger monograph that analyzes the issue of … Continue reading
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