Thoughts on Philanthropy from The Giving Review’s “Conversations” in Second Half of 2024
An end-of-year collection of interesting and insightful thinking about grantmaking and giving…
philanthropy
BEST OF 2024
Politicized, Progressive Big Philanthropy
Steve Miller’s December 12 RealClearInvestigations article, “How Tax-Exempt Nonprofits Skirt U.S. Law to Turn Out the Democrat Base in Elections,” is both jarring and informative and helps frame many important…
BEST OF 2024
Megaphone Philanthropy
The line between charity and politics can be extraordinarily blurry. This is problematic, as politics is inherently quarrelsome and divisive, and these are words that very few would use to…
Updated List of Various Ideas to Reform Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector
During the past several years, The Giving Review has tried to conscientiously track contemplated or proposed ideas to reform philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. Again acknowledging its partiality and anticipating…
Red Sky at Morning for Tax-Exempts
The strong election night for President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance ushers in an administration with an unprecedented interest in substantively reforming the tax-exempt sector. These reforms…
The Problem with Giving Tuesday
Remember when Silicon Valley hacked the cold-press juice market? In 2013, Doug Evans—a self-proclaimed Steve Jobs-like savant—laid plans to bring his $700, Wi-Fi-enabled, fruit and vegetable squeezer, Juicero Press, to…
Philanthropy’s Corruption of Politics, and Vice Versa
From his perspective as a University of Oxford political philosopher, Theodore M. Lechterman has introduced a richly substantive critique of philanthropy’s anti-democratic nature to the rising number of such critiques…
Participatory Philanthropy in Grantmaking Examines Shift Away from Top-Down Power of Elite Foundations
Participatory Grantmaking in Philanthropy: How Democratizing Decision-Making Shifts Power to Communities, forthcoming in December from Georgetown University Press, features several case studies of and perspectives on what its proponents call…
About Elon Musk
After reading Benjamin Soskis’ interesting and thoughtful assessment earlier this week in The Chronicle of Philanthropy of Elon Musk’s role in the 2024 U.S. election, I began to thumb through a copy of Nixon…
Recent Books, Mostly By Liberals Or Progressives, Presciently Critiquing Progressive Philanthropy’s Effects
“By the Trump years, the Democratic party blob was collectively better coordinated, more politically focused, and much butter funded than ever before. Law, technology, and political polarization all came together…