"Giving Back" is Not the Answer

Let's focus less on "giving back" and more on not taking first.

I don't like the notion of "giving back."

I don't like it because it doesn't factor in the cost of taking first. Injustice and inequity moves through the business and social paradigms of our world, not as a secondary result or externality, but as the product of how we build companies and communities. Metaphorically, pirates should not be called philanthropists, simply because they had a change of heart about who matters and when...and the money to show it. Particularly not when they maintain the systems of power, access, and legislative or regulatory cover that gave them the space to plunder under cover in the first place. Real estate magnates and small realtors alike pillage poor communities and people of color of their homes and cultures. The icing on the cake is that they may later name schools in plundered communities after themselves. Capitalists who send trillions (with a "t") of dollars through private networks to fund strategies and companies remain silent about 98.7% of the nearly $96,100,000,000,000 in global assets under management only going to white men who may later call reforms to the system an act that makes them the victims of identity politics, rather than a restructuring of an unjust model. The very people who clamor to support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in their companies take the wages from their employers home and willfully continue to racially and economically segregate American cities...only to then "give back" two Saturdays a month in communities they vote to keep economically disenfranchised.

How can one give back something from the profits one took where others were denied opportunity, equity, and/or resources, and call it a good deed? Yet we have institutionalized this through philanthropy. It is a tradition that the children of the pillaged (like myself) are now calling to be reimagined and replaced. Philanthropy (not simply charity) requires an amassing of financial resources that are often developed in socially agnostic, indifferent manners that produce such a societal harm that they require the need for the now increasing levels of wealth inequality and poverty to be addressed. This circuitous form of enterprise absolution maintains itself only because the "Winners Take All," as Anand Giridharadas noted so aptly in his recent book. Increasingly, the vanity and pride of the private market individual (the for-profit folks) is cutting away the power of government, public schools, hospitals, and public services to put more onus (and limelight) on the individual who "saves" the poor. Though the equity movement is garnering increased attention in the bedazzled rooms of panels and galas, the conversation about the way they make their money creating the need for their own philanthropy has yet to truly ground itself in reality.

The fundamental challenge of philanthropy is that the development of philanthropic resources may often produce the very need for more philanthropy. Organizations and companies committed to organizing people to "give back" are not getting at the true possibility of committing to collective human struggle: identifying where we are hurting people, and no longer doing so. No marginalized community is your "project." No group of persons living on the streets of wealthy cities or languishing in underfunded public schools named after wealthy business persons need philanthropy...they need justice and a reorganized financial model for the distribution of opportunity. True impact lies at the intersection of resource redistribution and reorganization (e.g. personal and institutional influence, money, physical space, and identity credibility), public policy (to change, through incentive and consequence, the enterprise models that lead to the accumulation required to produce scaled philanthropy rather than sustainable economies where gains are democratically shared), and truth telling. Far too many people evidence their bias towards expediency rather than carefully constructing business and charitable models that uplift humanity, rather than constrain it through harm reductionist strategies that hopefully produce enough money to give a little back. Expediency is often the alter upon which we sacrifice justice. Little phrases like "this isn't our core business/service/ function...we just don't have time to think about this differently" mark the beginning of the need for Dr. King to march, Rosa Parks to sit, the indigenous to protest against being stripped of their natural water supplies, football players to kneel before an anthem, and women to file formal complaints with the EEOC.

In my 10+ years in the field of philanthropy, I've sat at many tables. I've managed multi-million dollar charitable portfolios, taught philanthropy, led million dollar fundraising campaigns, and more. Let me be clear: the board room of far too many family and corporate foundations has little to do with being the smartest person on issues of social impact. It has to do with privileged access, marketing, and feeling good about oneself. Most philanthropists are not issue area experts in their field of charitable focus, yet they insist on directing the vision and at times, the plan. "We" assume that money equals brilliance (rather than opportunity meeting readied presence), but to conflate that the banker who oversaw the housing piracy of a community can also restore the person experiencing homelessness is a stretch at best. The failure of most philanthropy is that it does not acknowledge that power moves through narrative, and narrative allows for the segregation of influence (and the returns to influence: credibility and resources). Once philanthropy is utilized in a way that prevents the need for further philanthropy, and distributes returns before the grant instead of as the grant, it will phase itself out and usher in a charitable enterprise definition that supports the reality that marginalized people can grow out of their marginalization more quickly through the development of sustainable concurrent (do "good" while doing well), not sequential (do "good" after doing well) models of economic distribution, rather than because of another person's benevolence, position, and privilege.

In a conversation I recently had with a well-intentioned man who sought my partnership in joining his efforts to create a form of economic transaction that was more humane, we came to understand that we have different definitions of profit. He felt profit was the value of your goods or services after you paid for the expenses to produce them, subtracted from the value received from selling them. I simply disagreed. Profit is the return you receive from sustainable engagement (not just any type of engagement) in economic transaction. The vast majority of companies do not cover the societal costs that come from their business models. That economic system is corrupted when transactions are rooted in economic racial disenfranchisement, marketing to remove credibility or grow stigma towards people who hold marginalized identities, laws that are legal yet immoral, and opportunities to compete that only exist because others are unfairly (or violently) kept out of the economic race (see: American for every year of the colonial, agricultural, industrial, and information ages where women, people of color, indigenous persons, etc. could not compete with white men in the marketplace).

In order for philanthropy to evolve, we must look at the very definitions of business, profit, community, and value. As a person who grew up as the recipient of philanthropy, in an American ghetto made for my family and people to die in, I am making a simple statement about the value of something that is seen as "good," while repeatedly proven to be insufficient: giving back has no merit where the gift is simply the excess shaved from the bottom of a pirate's plunder.