Congratulations to my friends at the BizWorld Foundation for ringing the closing bell at the NYSE today. Pictured below is a student of the entrepreneurship curriculum doing the honors and my friend executive director Catherine Hutton to her right. Founder Tim Draper is behind her.
I don’t need any more material objects except for more books.
So, for Christmas or my birthday, please consider giving to charities I care about on my behalf using my whatgoesaround.org GiveList.
I encourage everyone to set up such a gift so we end this nonsense of giving gifts people don’t want/need/use and instead become "everyday philanthropists."
Are there charities that should be on my GiveList that aren’t? Leave a comment and let me know.
The NYT has a nice section on Giving, including one piece which gets at something I’ve been thinking about for awhile – a lot of charity nowadays isn’t going to the poor. I don’t think families/individuals are being philanthropic of they simply give money to their alma matter. The best colleges and universities still serve the privileged by giving money back to the college you went to, you are perpetuating an instituation which leaves the poor behind. I’ve written in the past about how a lot of aid seems to flow to non-critical causes, since hunger in Africa isn’t exactly close to home.
Ben Stein riffed on this a month ago when he wondered why he still gives money to Yale Law School, when $500 in a $13 B fund has a much less impact than $500 to about a million other charities. After a lot of mail, he changed his POV a week later saying "it’s OK for emotional ties to override reason"; in other words, he likes his Yale, so it doesn’t matter whether giving money there still makes sense.
Link: What Is Charity? – New York Times.
At Harvard University’s current rate of growth, its endowment will be larger than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest foundation, in three years. And while Harvard increased its spending last year on financial aid for undergraduates to $80 million a year, that figure represents less than .5 percent of its $22 billion endowment, and only about 2 percent of the approximately $4 billion it earned last year on its investments.
"For the past 15 to 20 years, educational institutions have been funded primarily by tuition and fees, not donations," Professor Colombo said. "We’re conditioned to think of them as charities, but they aren’t."
Last week’s New Yorker had a good profile (not online) of the Gates Foundation – and the man himself. It was a helpful reminder that the Gates Foundation deploys more money toward certain public health initiatives than entire governments or world organizations do…all without any political or economic restrictions. In many respects what the Gates Foundation says is more important than what the World Health Organization does.
There’s something really appealing about Gates’ work here, and it has nothing to do with the money. It’s about applying the same obsessive nature that made him successful in business and applying it to philanthropy. So often, you see rich people throw around their money to check the "doing good" box. Rare do you see the intellectual brainpower devoted to the cause. Gates could so easily get away with simply being the world’s #1 philanthropist in a pure monetary sense.
Imagine if everyone on Forbes’ Top 20 richest list all applied the same amount of intellectual vigor that Gates does to their philanthropy. Imagine the impact.
The PledgeBank is an awesome site that gives people the confidence of numbers.
The idea’s simple. Make a pledge, any pledge, conditional on a number of other people joining in.
Pledges can be symmetrical (everyone does the same thing)…
"I will march on the White House in protest at X, if 1,000 people will join me."
"I will paint my car bright yellow, if 200 people in my city will pledge the same."
…or a-symmetrical (you offer more than you ask from others.)
"I will take $100,000 worth of sleeping bags to Pakistani earthquake victims if 5 people will join me to help distribute them…"
"I will host free pizza at 10pm on my street, if a minimum of 30 people pledge to show up."
The reason this is brilliant is that so many people are reluctant to get involved in social change issues because they feel like their one voice won’t do jack. This overcomes that.
(Hat tip: TEDblog)