Future of "New Donors" Not So New?

Given the unapologetically enthusiastic slant that PhilanthroMedia offers on what is widely known as "new donors", it's only fair that we offer an alternative view from White Courtesy Telephone:

Maureen Robinson, the mother character in the 1960s TV series, Lost in Space, is the perfect metaphor for the future of philanthropy. Her silvery space suit and other-worldly hairdo represent philanthropy’s progressive aspirations. She’s the imagined future of a philanthropy transformed by cosmic sums of money, by networked donors and metrics-wielding CEOs...

In philanthropy, as in science fiction, we tend to imagine a future in which everything changes—except us. We’ll bring to the year 2173 our small ambitions, our competitiveness and unwillingness to collaborate, our downstream attempts to solve upstream problems. ..

Foundations periodically commission consultants to picture philanthropy’s future. Perhaps it’s too much to expect these consultants to tell the truth about how eerily familiar that future is likely to be.

Despite my cheerleading, there's something about this post that really resonates. I, no doubt, invest great energy in the future of philanthropy as I want it to be. But I also believe that all the forces of a society conspire to maintain the status quo. You?

Future of "New Donors" Not So New?

Susan Herr