Freakanomics Author on Wealthy Donors
If you delighted in the uncommon insights of Freakonomics, you will love what the New York Times "Freakanomics" blog has to say about wealthy donors he has been invited to counsel. In a recent post entitled, The Price of Advice: Chronicles of a Young Philanthropist, Part III, Sudhir Venkatesh writes:
...the donors had very rigid ideas concerning the capacity of poor people to change their behavior. When they met poor families (in Chicago and New York), they expected that their money would have magical powers. I exaggerate only slightly.
They believed that poverty was largely a result of resource deficiencies and organizational inefficiencies: if the poor had more money and their service providers could simply manage their giving more efficiently, change would happen. None placed much emphasis on feelings of self worth, the long-term nature of behavioral change or, most important, that staying above water is itself an accomplishment for a poor household. Everyone modeled their expectations after their family business or other corporate workplaces where they saw the “bottom line” motivate people to meet certain standards of achievement.
After a year of direct exposure to and dialogue with people living in poverty...
The three individuals continue to operate family foundations, but they all reacted differently to the intense exposure to daily poverty. The one consistent outcome is that each remains true to the philosophy of entrepreneurially-oriented investing: i.e., the use of incentives, emphasis on individual responsibility, pursuit of investment-oriented gains on charitable giving, etc.
I might point to one other result of this process: the donors came away with a much better sense of their own assumptions/stereotypes. They had to think as poor people do, even as they tried to change poor people’s thinking.
I am currently working on a new video web series called "Inside the Giving Side" that shines a light on the inner working of all-too-insulated foundations. Reading this post reminds me that what is needed, even more, is honest dialogue between donors and the targets of their charity. Few of us like to be reminded of what we don't know and while wealthy donors have resources aplenty, they are likely to know little or nothing of real poverty and what it takes to lift communities out of it.
Posted at 1:31 AM, Jul 11, 2008 in Permalink | Comments (2)