What's Changing? - Charity

 

Please see below selected recent charity-related change.

 

See also: 

• What's New? - Charity
• What's Changing? - Activism
• What's Changing? - Generosity
• Open Charities

 

April 2024

• Business owners can establish a corporate foundation to sit alongside their businesses to support social causes that fit with their company ethos. These should have exclusively charitable purposes for the benefit of the public, and the trustees of the charity must act in the best interests of the foundation, not the commercial company. Forming such a foundation is a way for a business to express its social values. Businesses can also provide “in-kind support” to their corporate foundation by offering up office space, seconding staff, or providing business expertise. 

 

December 2023

• The charitable impulse is a universal one. The Indonesian concept of the joint bearing of burdens - gotong royong - may be why Indonesia tops the CAF’s World Giving Index, but the world’s most generous givers on a range of measures include both the foremost superpower, the US, and countries with comparatively meagre resources, such as Liberia and Kenya. How people interpret and act upon that universal impulse, though, varies from country to country.

 

March 2023

• A 2022 Bank of America study found that younger generations are more optimistic about their ability to achieve philanthropic goals - 87% believe their giving will be more effective than earlier generations. When making charitable giving decisions, 76% of people, including 88% of women, prefer to establish their own philanthropic identity.

 

December 2022

• Further reading:
  • Philanthropists should get on and give - Financial Times
  • What is the future of effective altruism? - Quartz

 

January 2022

• Quartz noted that the idea that some charitable contributions can create a larger impact than others is a relatively new one. In 2009 two philosophers at Oxford started Giving What We Can, one of the first organisations dedicated to researching the most effective use of charitable dollars. They coined the term, “effective altruism” to describe their work. In 2014, GiveWell, one of the first effective altruism nonprofits, developed a new framework for evaluating the best charities. In the framework, GiveWell proposed a new idea: In order to create the largest impact, donors should focus on “neglected” causes and social problems.

 

September 2021

• The relationship between private wealth, philanthropy and society is complex and personal. The way individuals are approaching philanthropy has evolved in recent years, with philanthropists taking the very best of the corporate world and adding discipline to social causes. For many, the act of only giving money to deserving causes, while still at the heart of the philanthropic endeavour, is no longer enough. KPMG’s Family Office & Private Client team conducted in-depth interviews with philanthropists across the globe to uncover how they support various causes, the approaches they adopt, as well as the successes and lessons they have learned along their journey.

 

July 2019

• Amid growing inequality and scepticism about the motives of billionaires, a new philanthropy is taking shape. Evidence-based and results-driven, donors are rethinking where and how they give. Quartz studied the “lives saved per dollar” approach of large and small foundations, and examined how philanthropy is being disrupted. 

 

December 2018

• An article in Nature warned that philanthropists are "flying blind" because little is known about how to donate money well. Some grants to academic scientists create so much administration that researchers are better off without them. And some funders’ decisions seem to be no better than if awardees were chosen at random, with the funded work achieving no more than the rejected. The recipients of funds are increasingly scrutinised, but the effectiveness of donors is not. Funders are rarely punished for underperforming and usually don’t even know when they are: if the work that they fund helps one child but could have helped ten, that ‘opportunity cost’ is felt by the would-be beneficiaries, not by the funder. 
• Giving selectively to a few charities is better than a fragmented approach. Trying to take on too many needs and problems of other people can lead to “compassion fatigue”, warned Quartz.

 

October 2018

• Third-sector and voluntary organisations appear slow to adapt, warned Raconteur. The Charity Digital Skills Report 2017 found barely a quarter had aligned their digital and organisational skills; half had no digital strategy at all. The 2016 Charitable Giving Report by Blackbaud Institute also revealed that, while total UK giving rose 2.8 per cent, merely 7.2 per cent came via online contributions, up just 2.2 per cent.

 

September 2018

• Charity is about benefiting society, adding value to our lives and communities – making us proud and the world a better place, argued the RSA, while noting that the role of many individual charities is becoming more complex, as charities provide essential public services and fulfil their purposes in innovative ways. But research shows that the public no longer gives charities as institutions the benefit of the doubt. The crisis in confidence suffered by other institutions that have fallen prey to wrongdoing and questionable behaviour has left its mark on the charitable sector. People now trust charities less than the average person on the street.
• The Charities Aid Foundation, a British NGO, ranked China 138th out of 139 countries on the willingness of citizens to offer time or money to good causes. The Chinese give only 5% as much as Americans to charity, even though there are far more of them. Why? For The Economist, the problem lies with the Communist Party, which tightly controls NGOs and limits their campaigning because it worries about the role they have played in upheavals in other authoritarian countries.
• Systems change has been attracting the attention of a range of progressive charities, funders and practitioners who are interested in dealing with the root causes of social problems.

 

August 2018

• The FT addressed the challenge of charity fatigue, claiming that whether they are running a marathon, doing a 50-mile cycle ride or climbing a mountain, some colleagues seem to be on an endless fundraising circuit.

 

July 2018

• High impact giving opportunities can be supported by in-depth charity research. For example, GiveWell is a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities through in-depth analysis. Thousands of hours of research have gone into finding its top-rated charities - it claims that they are evidence-backed, thoroughly vetted, and underfunded.

 

June 2018

• When it comes to businesses choosing charities to support, it is hard not to be overwhelmed by choice. With so many organisations operating, many corporate donors opt for sponsoring the major charities, but this may be a mistake, according to The Corporate Action special report, published in The Times, which explored how partnering with smaller, more niche charities can provide compelling stories and drive long-term, visible change. 
• In a world of compassion competititon, imagine an "iTunes" for choosing which charities to support, A respected academic blog has already imagined such a service, which it claims could allow potential supporters to access clear, objective, compelling, multimedia content about any cause or charity that interests them, free from marketing hype, but backed by solid data about the charity's results and impact.
• Charitable options could also include giving away a % of one's income. However, some reflection on where any money given actually goes is always valuable.  See, for example, Rod Liddle's piece on Bob Geldof's reaction to claims that much of the money raised through Live Aid never reached its intended recipients.
• On the non-financial level, a growing number of anonymous groups bring food to the homeless, and generally give their time and another new approach to charity being tried is to link families with more directly to families with much less.
• A ranking of the most charitable countries, The World Giving Index is based on three factors - giving money to an organisation, volunteering for an organisation, and helping a stranger.
• More and more people are thinking about how to build an economy in which the important things are paid for in self-sustaining ways rather than as charities to be funded out of the goodness of our hearts. To do this they are consciously trying to work on something that matters to them more than money.