The new philanthropy - thoughts on a conference
Create More Givers – Global Conference on “Enhancing the Role of Philanthropy in Challenging Times” was a conference held on the 22 and 23 July, at Hotel Nikko in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The Conference’s claim to being Global came from the range of speakers – even though the majority were from Malaysia, there were others from Indonesia, Australia, India, and one speaker from Trust Africa, Senegal.The participants however were mostly Malaysian: mostly Malaysian academics and NGOs – the latter from ‘charities’ rather than development NGOs, and several activist NGOs, mainly because I suspect Josie Fernandez, the Managing Director of Philanthropy Asia, comes from an activist background. A distinction that I remember we made a couple of decades ago when Professor Hiran Dias initiated the NGDO (Non-governmental development organizations) Management Consortium in AIT.
There were I understood later, some representatives of Malaysian corporate giants in the audience, particularly of their trusts or foundations. But these people were not easy to identify since they were largely silent participants who made no presentations nor any interventions. We didn’t have the T Ananda Krishnan’s etc. only their foundations were represented. Among the speakers there was the CEO of Myer Foundation, Ms Christine Edwards, who talked about ‘philanthrocapitalism’, there was a representative from TATA, the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation in India, Petronas and YTL. The networking time was limited to coffee breaks and lunch – the conference was in plenary session all along, so no time to get to know people in smaller groups.
I didn’t do too well during the coffee breaks and lunch – given that I had a really bad cough (which post-KL left me bronchial for a week!) I was for the most part embarrassed to engage in a conversation that might end up with my spluttering and coughing over people whose daily newspapers recorded some new case of 1HN1 flu! I did manage to meet with a gentleman from Petronas, discover that Don Mohanlal, President and CEO of the the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation was a Sri Lankan, and have some interesting exchanges with Dr Bhekinkosi Moyo, a Zimbabwean, living in South Africa and working in Senegal, for Trust Africa.
Philanthropy Asia, the organizers, comprise primarily a group of academics, who are exploring issues of Philanthropy.The conceptual discussions at the conference were more interesting than the presentations on the practical manifestations of philanthropy – the latter were nothing more than stories of big corporations or rich people ‘doing good’ or small local initiatives that in the development sector we would have termed ‘community projects’. The conference suffered from the lack of a coherent framework for discussion. It would have been really good if the ideas generated in each session could have been synthesized.
Facing the challenges and recent changes to philanthropy
The Conference started off really upbeat, with an interesting presentation on Turning Crisis into Victory: Challenges for the non-profit sector by the chief guest, a Dr Erna Witoelar, Chair Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium http://www.asiapacificphilanthropy.org/ and also the UN Ambassador for the MDGsin Asia Pacific.It was followed by a video presentation by Mr Peter de Courcy Hero from the Centre for Social Innovation, Graduate Business School, Stanford University, on Beyond 2009:Emerging Trends in Philanthropy in an Era of Economic Dislocation.
[By the way, Erna Witoelar also launched a book, which came embedded in an elaborate ice sculpture which was hacked a way for the book to emerge!!!!]
The inaugural sessions were followed by a session on Philanthrocapitalism and Social Entrepreneurship where Christine Edwards, CEO the Myer Foundation, Australia made a presentation on the New Generation of Philanthropists or Philanthrocapitalists:their role in social change and sustainability, and Dr Budi Faisal made a presentation of a Case Study on Eco Paesentran, in Bandung Indonesia, a social entrepreneurship venture.
Even though Erna Witoelar began with the fact that all the crises are related (and she was referring not just to the financial, fuel and food crises but also the crisis of growing inequality, of conflict etc) – there was little going back to that thought during the rest of the session or even in many of the sessions after. A few others and I did bring up the idea of the need for a paradigm shift – and the need for capitalism to rethink the business of capitalism and this was referred to occasionally, but the conference really did not grapple with the issue.
Emerging Philanthropy
One of the characteristics of the emerging philanthropy is that the very wealthy are no longer ‘inheriting’ their wealth, but are making money for the first time – so guilt is no longer the basis for philanthropy (assuming of course that it ever was). Next there is the blurring distinction of profit/non-profit – with corporations looking for the triple bottom line (people, planet and profit) and a concern that when push comes to shove, it is profit that will prevail. The new philanthropy tends to see innovation as a virtue in itself; and also views grants as business – so social profits from these grants need to be visible and results must be ‘now’. This means that longer term structural changes /social movements don’t quite fit into the focus of the new philanthropy. The “merging” of large philanthropists (e.g. Gates and Buffet) requires large implementers who have the capacity to manage and move large sums of money; as a result, much lf the new philanthropy is channeled through organizations in the global north who can deliver the social outcomes that these big philanthropists require.
Of course philanthropy is also taking place at different levels. There is an increase in diaspora giving (e.g. Indians in Silicon Valley) though how much of this is philanthropy and how much of it is just remittances we do not know. Information technology is also putting givers and receivers directly in contact.
There was some discussion about increasing government oversight over philanthropy and also about the emergence ‘hybrid’ organizations – social corporations, social entrepreneurship. Question of where values come in and whether NGOs’ commitment to social change will in some sense be taken over/diluted by these social entrepreneurship ventures. A random point I picked up from Erna Witoelar’s speech was that the MDG Goal 7 (i.e. the one on environment) has no measurable indicator (need to check that out)
Philanthrocapitalism
Christine Edwards paper says that the definitions of philanthrocapitalism have three things present in them
- Substantial sums of money being applied for public value
- Giving done by people who are alive and want to be involved in their giving
- Targeted, focused, striving for, and having expectations of results that are measurable.
They want to see enduring change that has broad impact that addresses big issues of our time and they want to be part of the solution.
[It’s interesting also to look at how Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, authors of Philanthrocapitalism – How the rich can save the world and why we should let them approaches what is philanthrocapitalism. They see philanthrocapitalism as a way in which capitalism itself tends to be philanthropic, working for the good of mankind. See http://www.philanthrocapitalism.net/?Synopsis]
Edwards has some interesting concerns about philanthrocapitalism. One that it must not try to go it alone, that it should foster linkages between governments, academia, community and business. A second is that the expectations of results in the short term could lead it away from investments that have high risk but no real guarantee of return – becoming ‘risk averse’ rather than ‘risk welcoming’ which is what philanthropy has been in the past. And the third, is a caution about the assumption that the skills of capital enterprise can be overlaid on investments in the social and community sector.
Sometime during the conference, she also threw in the term ‘philanthrocrats’ – I guess those professionals, like herself, who work in philanthrocapitalist enterprises!!!!
Islamic Giving
There were a few presentations that discussed issues of Islamic Giving.Some of them were focused on micro level projects such as using Islamic Education centres (the pesantrans in Indonesia) as centres for developing communities, but the most interesting conceptual discussion was presented by Mr Zaim Saidi, the Director, Public Interest Research Advocacy, Indonesia.
Mr Saidi argued that the emerging philanthropists, like the ones that went before them (e.g. JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie etc) are all monopolists since a donation worth of billions of dollars by a single person or corporation can only be made by piling up huge profit through capitalistic ventures, and that can only be made by exploiting other people or by blocking access to a real free market. He argued also that from the Islamic point of view, the capitalist system is based on usury – since the majority ownership system which is prevalent in the capitalist ventures ensures that capital and power are concentrated in the hands of a few – the very people who are also called ‘philanthropists’.
Mr Saidi described the Islamic political order as based on movement and distribution of wealth , and that to move and distribute wealth what is needed are market and trade as well as sadaqa (voluntary giving); zakat (obligatory giving) and waqf (gifts to mosques and madrasas).
I am not sure that I got my head around the whole idea – but his was the closest call to a ‘paradigm shift’.
There were very few other fresh insights, with the exception perhapsof a paper on CSR and State-Capital Linkages: Neoliberalism, Institutional Capture and Environmental Degradation by Associate Professor Edmund Terence Gomez of the Universiti Malaya. As the title of the paper suggests, Professor Gomez’s argument was that where the power structures were concentrated in state, in IFIs and in business, self-regulation, or state regulation was not possible and CSR would do little to alter the behaviour of MNCs to the indigenous people (his particular focus) or the environment. This made him wary of public-private partnerships. Hoped that the discussion would yield also some information about how non-Western MNCs (e.g. Petronas) would behave, say in Sudan – but these were not questions that were asked, nor were there room for that kind of debate/discussion.
Dr Mohamed Reevany Bustami, Chair, CSR and Philanthropy Transdisciplinary Action Group, Universiti Sains Malaysia made a very colourful presentation that highlighted some of the contradictions of MNC CSR and their actual business (e.g. British American Tobacco winning a CSR award for instance, a situation that I think also happened here in Colombo with Ceylon Tobacco).
The last sessions were particularly disappointing also because even though there were very informative presentations from Petronas and TATA in a session entitled Nation Building and Philanthropy, the presentations ended up being not much more than a description of their Philanthropic programmes.
I am afraid I lost the session on environment. Don Mohanlal and the Associate Professor Nik Meriam, Research Head, Programme on Sustainability and Environment were interesting but not as challenging as I had expected them to be, and embarrassingly I cannot recall much of what was said. Hopefully their presentations will go up on the Philanthropy Asia website, because there were no handouts. The presentation from YTL (YTL Corporation Berhad is one of Malaysia's leading integrated infrastructure conglomerates) neatly skirted the fact that the corporation was engaged in highly polluting activities (e.g. coal power) and the other presentation was about a very interesting micro project in Bali.
My final thoughts
Maybe if I was less under the weather, I might have got more out of this conference. As it was I came away with the thought that the focus on philanthropy was no different to the World Bank’s focus on safety nets (see my June post) – an excuse to continue business as usual, while providing hand outs to those who might disbenefit from the system. This despite the rhetoric on sustainability, empowerment etc (we’ve heard that before).There also seems to a great deal of happening with people studying philanthropy, CSR etc. The idea of exploring Islamic Philanthropy more is an appealing prospect.
As for a search for a new paradigm – I am afraid I didn’t find it in KL!
[P.S.Had nothing to do with the demonstrations that took place in KL last week!]
The Conference’s claim to being Global came from the range of speakers – even though the majority were from Malaysia, there were others from Indonesia, Australia, India, and one speaker from Trust Africa, Senegal.The participants however were mostly Malaysian: mostly Malaysian academics and NGOs – the latter from ‘charities’ rather than development NGOs, and several activist NGOs, mainly because I suspect Josie Fernandez, the Managing Director of Philanthropy Asia, comes from an activist background. A distinction that I remember we made a couple of decades ago when Professor Hiran Dias initiated the NGDO (Non-governmental development organizations) Management Consortium in AIT.
There were I understood later, some representatives of Malaysian corporate giants in the audience, particularly of their trusts or foundations. But these people were not easy to identify since they were largely silent participants who made no presentations nor any interventions. We didn’t have the T Ananda Krishnan’s etc. only their foundations were represented. Among the speakers there was the CEO of Myer Foundation, Ms Christine Edwards, who talked about ‘philanthrocapitalism’, there was a representative from TATA, the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation in India, Petronas and YTL. The networking time was limited to coffee breaks and lunch – the conference was in plenary session all along, so no time to get to know people in smaller groups.
I didn’t do too well during the coffee breaks and lunch – given that I had a really bad cough (which post-KL left me bronchial for a week!) I was for the most part embarrassed to engage in a conversation that might end up with my spluttering and coughing over people whose daily newspapers recorded some new case of 1HN1 flu! I did manage to meet with a gentleman from Petronas, discover that Don Mohanlal, President and CEO of the the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation was a Sri Lankan, and have some interesting exchanges with Dr Bhekinkosi Moyo, a Zimbabwean, living in South Africa and working in Senegal, for Trust Africa.
Philanthropy Asia, the organizers, comprise primarily a group of academics, who are exploring issues of Philanthropy.The conceptual discussions at the conference were more interesting than the presentations on the practical manifestations of philanthropy – the latter were nothing more than stories of big corporations or rich people ‘doing good’ or small local initiatives that in the development sector we would have termed ‘community projects’. The conference suffered from the lack of a coherent framework for discussion. It would have been really good if the ideas generated in each session could have been synthesized.
Facing the challenges and recent changes to philanthropy
The Conference started off really upbeat, with an interesting presentation on Turning Crisis into Victory: Challenges for the non-profit sector by the chief guest, a Dr Erna Witoelar, Chair Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium http://www.asiapacificphilanthropy.org/ and also the UN Ambassador for the MDGsin Asia Pacific.It was followed by a video presentation by Mr Peter de Courcy Hero from the Centre for Social Innovation, Graduate Business School, Stanford University, on Beyond 2009:Emerging Trends in Philanthropy in an Era of Economic Dislocation.
[By the way, Erna Witoelar also launched a book, which came embedded in an elaborate ice sculpture which was hacked a way for the book to emerge!!!!]
The inaugural sessions were followed by a session on Philanthrocapitalism and Social Entrepreneurship where Christine Edwards, CEO the Myer Foundation, Australia made a presentation on the New Generation of Philanthropists or Philanthrocapitalists:their role in social change and sustainability, and Dr Budi Faisal made a presentation of a Case Study on Eco Paesentran, in Bandung Indonesia, a social entrepreneurship venture.
Even though Erna Witoelar began with the fact that all the crises are related (and she was referring not just to the financial, fuel and food crises but also the crisis of growing inequality, of conflict etc) – there was little going back to that thought during the rest of the session or even in many of the sessions after. A few others and I did bring up the idea of the need for a paradigm shift – and the need for capitalism to rethink the business of capitalism and this was referred to occasionally, but the conference really did not grapple with the issue.
Emerging Philanthropy
One of the characteristics of the emerging philanthropy is that the very wealthy are no longer ‘inheriting’ their wealth, but are making money for the first time – so guilt is no longer the basis for philanthropy (assuming of course that it ever was). Next there is the blurring distinction of profit/non-profit – with corporations looking for the triple bottom line (people, planet and profit) and a concern that when push comes to shove, it is profit that will prevail. The new philanthropy tends to see innovation as a virtue in itself; and also views grants as business – so social profits from these grants need to be visible and results must be ‘now’. This means that longer term structural changes /social movements don’t quite fit into the focus of the new philanthropy. The “merging” of large philanthropists (e.g. Gates and Buffet) requires large implementers who have the capacity to manage and move large sums of money; as a result, much lf the new philanthropy is channeled through organizations in the global north who can deliver the social outcomes that these big philanthropists require.
Of course philanthropy is also taking place at different levels. There is an increase in diaspora giving (e.g. Indians in Silicon Valley) though how much of this is philanthropy and how much of it is just remittances we do not know. Information technology is also putting givers and receivers directly in contact.
There was some discussion about increasing government oversight over philanthropy and also about the emergence ‘hybrid’ organizations – social corporations, social entrepreneurship. Question of where values come in and whether NGOs’ commitment to social change will in some sense be taken over/diluted by these social entrepreneurship ventures. A random point I picked up from Erna Witoelar’s speech was that the MDG Goal 7 (i.e. the one on environment) has no measurable indicator (need to check that out)
Philanthrocapitalism
Christine Edwards paper says that the definitions of philanthrocapitalism have three things present in them
- Substantial sums of money being applied for public value
- Giving done by people who are alive and want to be involved in their giving
- Targeted, focused, striving for, and having expectations of results that are measurable.
They want to see enduring change that has broad impact that addresses big issues of our time and they want to be part of the solution.
[It’s interesting also to look at how Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, authors of Philanthrocapitalism – How the rich can save the world and why we should let them approaches what is philanthrocapitalism. They see philanthrocapitalism as a way in which capitalism itself tends to be philanthropic, working for the good of mankind. See http://www.philanthrocapitalism.net/?Synopsis]
Edwards has some interesting concerns about philanthrocapitalism. One that it must not try to go it alone, that it should foster linkages between governments, academia, community and business. A second is that the expectations of results in the short term could lead it away from investments that have high risk but no real guarantee of return – becoming ‘risk averse’ rather than ‘risk welcoming’ which is what philanthropy has been in the past. And the third, is a caution about the assumption that the skills of capital enterprise can be overlaid on investments in the social and community sector.
Sometime during the conference, she also threw in the term ‘philanthrocrats’ – I guess those professionals, like herself, who work in philanthrocapitalist enterprises!!!!
Islamic Giving
There were a few presentations that discussed issues of Islamic Giving.Some of them were focused on micro level projects such as using Islamic Education centres (the pesantrans in Indonesia) as centres for developing communities, but the most interesting conceptual discussion was presented by Mr Zaim Saidi, the Director, Public Interest Research Advocacy, Indonesia.
Mr Saidi argued that the emerging philanthropists, like the ones that went before them (e.g. JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie etc) are all monopolists since a donation worth of billions of dollars by a single person or corporation can only be made by piling up huge profit through capitalistic ventures, and that can only be made by exploiting other people or by blocking access to a real free market. He argued also that from the Islamic point of view, the capitalist system is based on usury – since the majority ownership system which is prevalent in the capitalist ventures ensures that capital and power are concentrated in the hands of a few – the very people who are also called ‘philanthropists’.
Mr Saidi described the Islamic political order as based on movement and distribution of wealth , and that to move and distribute wealth what is needed are market and trade as well as sadaqa (voluntary giving); zakat (obligatory giving) and waqf (gifts to mosques and madrasas).
I am not sure that I got my head around the whole idea – but his was the closest call to a ‘paradigm shift’.
There were very few other fresh insights, with the exception perhapsof a paper on CSR and State-Capital Linkages: Neoliberalism, Institutional Capture and Environmental Degradation by Associate Professor Edmund Terence Gomez of the Universiti Malaya. As the title of the paper suggests, Professor Gomez’s argument was that where the power structures were concentrated in state, in IFIs and in business, self-regulation, or state regulation was not possible and CSR would do little to alter the behaviour of MNCs to the indigenous people (his particular focus) or the environment. This made him wary of public-private partnerships. Hoped that the discussion would yield also some information about how non-Western MNCs (e.g. Petronas) would behave, say in Sudan – but these were not questions that were asked, nor were there room for that kind of debate/discussion.
Dr Mohamed Reevany Bustami, Chair, CSR and Philanthropy Transdisciplinary Action Group, Universiti Sains Malaysia made a very colourful presentation that highlighted some of the contradictions of MNC CSR and their actual business (e.g. British American Tobacco winning a CSR award for instance, a situation that I think also happened here in Colombo with Ceylon Tobacco).
The last sessions were particularly disappointing also because even though there were very informative presentations from Petronas and TATA in a session entitled Nation Building and Philanthropy, the presentations ended up being not much more than a description of their Philanthropic programmes.
I am afraid I lost the session on environment. Don Mohanlal and the Associate Professor Nik Meriam, Research Head, Programme on Sustainability and Environment were interesting but not as challenging as I had expected them to be, and embarrassingly I cannot recall much of what was said. Hopefully their presentations will go up on the Philanthropy Asia website, because there were no handouts. The presentation from YTL (YTL Corporation Berhad is one of Malaysia's leading integrated infrastructure conglomerates) neatly skirted the fact that the corporation was engaged in highly polluting activities (e.g. coal power) and the other presentation was about a very interesting micro project in Bali.
My final thoughts
Maybe if I was less under the weather, I might have got more out of this conference. As it was I came away with the thought that the focus on philanthropy was no different to the World Bank’s focus on safety nets (see my June post) – an excuse to continue business as usual, while providing hand outs to those who might disbenefit from the system. This despite the rhetoric on sustainability, empowerment etc (we’ve heard that before).There also seems to a great deal of happening with people studying philanthropy, CSR etc. The idea of exploring Islamic Philanthropy more is an appealing prospect.
As for a search for a new paradigm – I am afraid I didn’t find it in KL!
[P.S.Had nothing to do with the demonstrations that took place in KL last week!]
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Pri, You have really captured the gist of the conference in your insightful writing.
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