PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY

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kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Bill and Melinda Gates’s Pillow Talk

WHAT do Bill and Melinda Gates argue about?

Not whose turn it is to wash the dishes or take out the garbage, it seems, but headier stuff. The prospects for eradicating polio. The utility of empowering women. The best ways to save lives.

Oh, and maybe how much to acknowledge to a prying columnist that they sometimes do argue.

It has been 15 years since Bill and Melinda Gates created what is now the largest foundation in the world. This milestone seemed the right moment to ask them what they have learned from giving away $34 billion, what mistakes they have made, and what they disagree about.

But first, just a reminder of how historic this foundation has been. It has played a central role in a campaign to transform health and nutrition for the world’s poor.
In all of history, humans have eradicated only one disease affecting them, smallpox. Bill and Melinda Gates foresee eradicating four more in the next 15 years: polio and Guinea worm disease and, for the other two, perhaps elephantiasis and blinding trachoma. They say, quite plausibly, that we’ll be poised to eradicate malaria soon afterward and to make enormous progress against AIDS, too.

By my conservative back-of-envelope calculations, the world has saved more than 33 million children’s lives since the foundation was established (although obviously the foundation doesn’t get all the credit). And Bill and Melinda Gates foresee the world saving 61 million children’s lives over the next 15 years with the right investments, as child death rates drop more quickly than they ever have in the history of the world.

That’s the amazing news. In contrast, they acknowledge, the foundation’s investments in education here in the United States haven’t paid off as well.

“There’s no dramatic change,” Bill acknowledged. “It’s not like under-5 mortality, where you see this dramatic improvement.”

But both Bill and Melinda insist that they aren’t dispirited by the lack of transformational progress in education. “We’re still very committed,” Bill says.

One giant leap: Bill and Melinda say the foundation is now going to further expand beyond K-12 to also invest nationwide in early childhood programs. I’m thrilled, for I’m a believer that helping children aged 0 to 5 (when the brain is developing rapidly) is crucial for the most at-risk children.

So what mistakes did they make in their philanthropy? They say they started out too tech-focused. Now some of the measures they promote are distinctly low-tech — like breast-feeding, which could save the lives of more than 800,000 children worldwide each year.

Likewise, they say, they didn’t appreciate how hard it was to translate scientific breakthroughs into actual progress in remote villages. The challenges of delivering real impact, in environments where nothing works as anticipated, were far greater than expected.

That challenge is what led them to focus on gender and empowering women, which they initially had neglected but came to see as crucial to getting things done. The foundation has invested in areas like contraceptives, women’s self-help groups and battling sex trafficking.

There’s sometimes a debate about who saved the most lives worldwide. Edward Jenner, of the smallpox vaccine? Fritz Haber, who laid the basis for modern fertilizers (and also explosives)? Norman Borlaug of the green revolution? James Grant, who directed child survival campaigns? Bill and Melinda Gates could be contenders if their health and nutrition investments pay off in coming decades.

But when I asked about their legacy, Bill didn’t much want to talk about it.

“Legacy?” he asked. “We don’t optimize for that.”

So, finally, what do Bill and Melinda disagree on?

Ah, here the conversation gets a little awkward. Bill clams up; Melinda is only a bit more forthcoming.

“On the foundation, there’s always a lot of pillow talk,” Melinda said. “We do push hard on each other.”

Examples?

There is a hushed marital discussion.

I gather from hints that follow that Melinda has been more enthusiastic about gender issues and family planning, while Bill worried that metrics in the area are squishy. Conversely, Bill is fervent about science research and polio, while Melinda pushes him to consider how well those investments will translate into real-life gains.

It also seems that on trips, Bill thought Melinda focused too much on field visits, while Melinda thought Bill spent too much time with officials. But they seem experienced at listening to each other, adjusting, and working things out. “We trust each other,” Melinda says. Kind of like any good couple, I guess — just with higher stakes.

They also teach each other, Melinda says. In the case of gender, they’ve followed her lead in investing in contraception but also they developed new metrics to satisfy Bill.

So among their lessons learned from 15 years of philanthropy, one applies to any couple, even nonbillionaires:

Listen to your spouse!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opini ... ef=opinion
kmaherali
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Generation empowered: UBC social entrepreneurs lighting up rural Tanzania

When Naeem Mawji, M.Eng 2015, and founder of Jamii Power, talks about bringing sustainable, profitable electricity to rural Tanzania, you hear the words not of a dreamer, but those of a problem solver.


His message has resonated with audiences at last year’s UBC President’s Installation Panel Discussion, “Generation Empowered,” and five years ago at TEDxTerryTalks 2010.

“We are not doing this because we are doing something good. We are doing this because we think we can. It’s a massive challenge. We want to be the ones to resolve it, and we believe we are the ones who can resolve it.”

Mawji grew up the son of a civil engineer in Tanzania. He and his younger brother, Aleem (co-founder of Jamii and now a UBC mechanical engineering student), spent their school breaks in rural villages with their father, Anil, a builder of schools, community centre and dams.

“Unlike people from cities, we spent a lot of our childhood in the villages. We speak Swahili and could absorb the culture. That’s how we were exposed to the challenges these communities face.

“And, coming from a family of entrepreneurs, we saw opportunities in these areas, and saw ways to open up possibilities,” says Mawji.

Mawji was also inspired by his Ismaili faith, and particularly the words of the Aga Khan, who urges the fortunate to touch the less fortunate “with the spark which ignites the spirit of individual enterprise and determination.” While an undergrad in chemical engineering at UBC, Mawji started an electrification project in the village of Masurura, near his home town of Musoma. The project, called “Kuwasha” (“to ignite” in Swahili), was a collaboration between the Masurura village, the Musoma District Council, and the UBC Centre for International Health.

“I grew up during power rationing, and have seen how people in rural areas use kerosene to illuminate their homes and some of the dangers associated with that,” says Mawji. “So Aleem and I started Kuwasha to address the lack of electricity and lighting in small Tanzanian villages.”

Mawji and his brother wanted to prompt interactivity in the village by using solar power to illuminate the village’s community gathering places. The project helped “open up time,” in Mawji’s words, so that villagers could interact outside the working day.

While a success, the project illustrated the limitations of small electrification projects. Private solar generators only replace one source of illumination (kerosene) with another. Moreover, they are difficult and expensive to maintain. Worst, because they are DC-power systems, useful appliances cannot be hooked to them without more investment.

“We needed a new approach that would give them the same sort of system any urban person would have,” says Mawji. “We wanted them to just be able to plug in to have broadly useable electricity.”

The Mawji brothers came up with Jamii Power, a concept built around a central 33kWp solar plant sufficient to supply 230V AC power to 150–200 village homes. The power plant is modular and can be installed in just two weeks.

“We build the grid the week before the container [containing the power plant and solar panels] shows up, using locally sourced wires, poles, etc.,” says Mawji. “Once the container arrives, we set up the plant, and then use the container as housing for the plant.”

The Jamii Power model addresses all the challenges raised in Mawji’s Kuwasha project.

“First, we supply AC power, so they can use appliances. Second, we make the necessary investments in the plant, depending on demand. And third, our team handles maintenance, which we can do far more cheaply than an individual could.”

But the success of the first Jamii Power project raised scaling issues, which kept the idea from being a sustainable business. So Mawji turned to UBC and Sauder for help.

“The issues were not technical so much as they were social,” says Mawji. “For example, the community does not have access to banks or credit, so collecting revenue is a nightmare once you expand from a few units to a whole village or many villages.”

Load management was also an issue. Solar power can only be generated in daytime and can only be stored in batteries. There is no way to import power from another village with a surplus.

“To solve the capacity problem, I wanted to look at other sources of electricity. So I joined the UBC Engineering’s Clean Energy program to learn more about technologies, such as bio-mass and micro-hydro power, I could incorporate into the project.

“And I wanted to use the entrepreneurship track to learn more about the business side. That’s where Sauder came in,” says Mawji.

In September 2013, Mawji joined UBC’s Lean LaunchPad accelerator program: an intense eight weeks where the ideas of budding entrepreneurs are ruthlessly picked apart from every angle.

“[Instructor] Paul Cubbon and [entrepreneur] Blair Simonite helped us narrow down to the four key ‘pains’ so we could explain it to people who are unfamiliar with Africa and rural electricity.

“The semester after that, I got into the Technology Entrepreneurship course taught by Cubbon and [Professor] Thomas Hellman. And that is where we took the idea further, getting into the details of what the Jamii business model would look like,” says Mawji.

Armed with his education from UBC, Mawji, 28, now works full-time at Jamii Power in Tanzania, using the firm to also complete his masters project. Brother Aleem, who is 21, divides his time between his UBC engineering co-op work for Teck Highland Valley Copper in Logan Lake, and working at a distance on the Jamii project.

Cubbon continues to follow Mawji and Jamii Power with interest: “Naeem is a UBC entrepreneur that put his company front and centre to help solve a major global societal problem. Sauder and e@UBC continue to stay in contact with Naeem and Jamii to support him where possible.

”Naeem is still developing Jamii Power’s business model, but he is determined to bring sustainable electrification to the villages in a way that all parties, not least Jamii Power, profit and develop. He sees it as an obligation.”

Mawji reflects: “I believe people shouldn’t do things because they feel good about it. They should do it because they can. Because once you have the ability, you have the responsibility. If you don’t, you have denied yourself and the world. Simple as that.”

This article originally appeared on the Spring 2015 issue of Viewpoints magazine.

http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/News/2015/Generation_empowered
kmaherali
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Creator of 5-hour Energy Wants to Power the World's Homes—With Bikes

The mystery man behind the popular caffeine shot plans to roll out 10,000 stationary bikes next year in India.


The man who created the 5-hour Energy drink says he has more money than he needs—about $4 billion more. So he’s giving it away, spending his fortune on a quest to fix the world's biggest problems, including energy.

Manoj Bhargava has built a stationary bike to power the millions of homes worldwide that have little or zero electricity. Early next year in India, he plans to distribute 10,000 of his Free Electric battery-equipped bikes, which he says will keep lights and basic appliances going for an entire day with one hour of pedaling.

Bhargava, who dropped out of Princeton University after a year because he was bored and then lived in ashrams for 12 years in his native India, doesn’t stop at bikes. He’s working on ways to make saltwater drinkable, enhance circulation in the body, and secure limitless amounts of clean geothermal energy—via a graphene cord.

“If you have wealth, it’s a duty to help those who don’t,” says Michigan resident Bhargava, 62, in a documentary released Monday, Billions in Change, about his Stage 2 Innovations lab. “Make a difference in people’s lives,” he says, “Don’t just talk about it.”

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Could his bike really work? Will people want it or even have room for it in their homes? It holds “huge potential and opportunity for rural households,” says Ajaita Shah, CEO of Frontier Markets, a company selling solar lamps and lighting kits in India. (Read about her work.) She says she’d like to test the bike with her rural customers.


“It’s so simple that we think we can make it for $100 … A bicycle repairman anywhere can fix it,” Bhargava says in an interview. Pedaling turns a turbine generator that creates electricity, stored in a battery. The first 50 bikes will be tested in 15 or 20 small villages in the northern state of Uttarakhand before a major rollout in the first quarter of next year. He says they’ll be made in India but doesn’t give details.











WATCH: See the trailer for the film Billions in Change.


Who Is He?


Bhargava’s a bit of a mystery man. He grew up in an affluent home with servants in India, but his family struggled financially after coming to the United States when he was 14. He worked odd jobs and got academic scholarships. “It was worth a year,” he says of studying math at Princeton. After a spiritual quest in India, he built companies, including Living Essentials, maker of the popular two-ounce caffeine shot that’s sold at checkout counters.







Though generally low-profile, he’s not without controversy. He’s sued to fend off copycats of his blockbuster product and countered challenges from state attorneys general for alleged deceptive marketing. The Center for Public Integrity dubbed him the “political kingmaker nobody knows,” saying he’s donated millions to mostly GOP political candidates via limited liability companies.


Also unknown: exactly how much money he has. The documentary says his net worth is $4 billion, but Forbes does not list him among America’s richest 400 people, which includes those with at least $1.7 billion. Bhargava has said it’s difficult to put a specific valuation on his private companies, but he’s signed the Giving Pledge, a Bill Gates-led challenge for the rich to donate their fortunes to charitable causes.


He says he didn’t want to “ruin” his son by giving him money. “I told him when he was 10, 'You’re not getting anything.' His attitude: 'Great. I want to do it on my own,'” Bhargava says about his now adult son.


Instead Bhargava has funded hospitals in India and his cutting-edge Stage2 lab in Farmington Hills, Michigan, begun in 2011 with former Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda. “It’s the most well-funded playhouse for engineers you can possibly have,” lab engineer Kevin Moran says in the documentary.




This is going to affect a few billion people.



Manoj Bhargava






Big Problems, Simple Fixes


Bhargava’s team has come up with innovative ideas in health, water, and energy. It’s pursuing Renew, a medical device that functions as an auxiliary heart by squeezing blood from the legs into the body’s core.


To address drought, it’s building the Rain Maker to convert 1,000 gallons an hour of any kind of water into drinkable water. Bhargava says potable water could be piped from offshore barges with this machine, now being tested at a desalination research facility in New Mexico.


He has an even grander idea—one aimed at nixing the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gases when burned. Whatever people think of climate change, he says in the documentary, “pollution is a problem.” His answer: tap the heat from deep beneath the Earth.


While geothermal energy is already widely used in some countries, including Indonesia and Iceland, Bhargava takes a novel approach. Rather than using steam—mixed with chemicals—to bring the heat to the surface, he would instead pull it up with a graphene cord. He notes graphene, stronger than steel, is an incredible conductor of heat.


“You don’t need to burn anything…Once you bring [heat] up, you don’t change any of the infrastructure,” he says, explaining that utilities could simply distribute it instead of coal, oil, or natural gas.







“That’s going to be, in my mind, the final answer,” he says, estimating this type of geothermal could replace 85 percent of today’s fossil fuels. He says maps show half of the world has plentiful underground heat, and since graphene cables could run horizontally, they could route it to the other half as well.


“I think someone’s going to kill me,” he says with a laugh, noting how such an idea could upset geopolitics. He’s working with a graphene research center in Singapore to develop a cable and plans to have pictures available later this year.




It’s not giving back. It’s what else am I going to do?



Manoj Bhargava






The Bike Ridden Round the World?


Bhargava gets most animated when talking about his graphene cable, but he sees the most immediate potential in Free Electric. He says it could provide electricity for the developing world and offer post-storm backup power in wealthier countries.
kmaherali
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Silicon Valley’s New Philanthropy

SAN FRANCISCO — THE enduring credo of Silicon Valley is that innovation, not money, is its guiding purpose and that world-changing technology is its true measure of worth.

Wealth is treated as a pleasant byproduct, a bit like weight loss after rugged adventure travel.

The tech world is home to some of the planet’s wealthiest entrepreneurs and most dynamic philanthropists, 21st-century heirs to Carnegie and Rockefeller who say they can apply the same ingenuity and zeal that made them rich to making the rest of the world less poor. San Francisco also has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the nation, with the wealth distortion most concentrated among the very people who are driving the economy as a whole.

A similar paradox seeps into philanthropy. Tech entrepreneurs believe their charitable giving is bolder, bigger and more data-driven than anywhere else — and in many ways it is. But despite their flair for disruption, these philanthropists are no more interested in radical change than their more conservative predecessors. They don’t lobby for the redistribution of wealth; instead, they see poverty and inequality as an engineering problem, and the solution is their own brain power, not a tithe.

More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opini ... d=45305309
kmaherali
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The fabulously wealthy who won’t be leaving a fortune to their kids

The celebs who are sharing their wealth

More and more rich people are only leaving their offspring a fraction of their fortune, for a variety of different reasons. We take a look at 20 famous names whose kids won’t be inheriting their wealth.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/financep ... md#image=1
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Why Giving Back Isn’t Enough

DURING this season of giving, I will join millions of Americans in volunteering to feed the homeless, contributing to clothing drives and donating to poverty-fighting charities. Yet I worry that through these acts of kindness, I absolve myself of asking deeper questions about injustice and inequality. We Americans are a remarkably bighearted people, but I believe the purpose of our philanthropy must not only be generosity, but justice.

The origins of formal philanthropy date from at least 1889, when the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie composed his “Gospel of Wealth.” He drafted this intellectual charter at the peak of the Gilded Age, when inequality had reached extreme levels. Carnegie argued, as many still do, that inequality on this scale is an unavoidable condition of the free-market system — and that it was even desirable, if the promise of wealth incentivized hard work. Philanthropy, he believed, would ease the pressure of rising social anxiety that followed from inequality — ameliorating the afflictions of the market without altering the market system itself.

During the 20th century, an entire field of institutional philanthropy emerged and flourished in the pattern of Carnegie’s mold. Iconic American families — Gates, Knight, MacArthur, Mellon, Rockefeller — endowed and expanded foundations that built schools and libraries, developed new vaccines, revolutionized agriculture and advanced human freedom. My own organization, the Ford Foundation, has given billions to support everything from public television in the United States to microlending in Bangladesh.

Our work has been indisputably for the good: Millions of people around the world have access to new tools and resources with which to improve their lives. A few months ago, the World Bank estimated that, for the first time in history, fewer than one in 10 human beings lives in extreme poverty. This is progress.

And yet, for all the advances made in the last century, society’s challenges may have outpaced philanthropy’s resources. Today, the cumulative wealth of the most generous donors seems a pittance compared with the world’s trillions of dollars’ worth of need. Generosity, blooming as it may be from legacies of both Carnegie’s age and the newly enriched, is no longer enough.

The world may need a reimagined charter of philanthropy — a “Gospel of Wealth” for the 21st century — that serves not just American philanthropists, but the vast array of new donors emerging around the world.

This new gospel might begin where the previous one fell short: addressing the underlying causes that perpetuate human suffering. In other words, philanthropy can no longer grapple simply with what is happening in the world, but also with how and why.

Feeding the hungry is among our society’s most fundamental obligations, but we should also question why our neighbors are without nutritious food to eat. Housing the homeless is an imperative, but we should also question why our housing markets are so distorted. As a nation, we need more investment in education, but not without questioning educational disparities based on race, class and geography.

Our self-awareness — our humility — shouldn’t be limited to examining the problems. It should include the structures of solutions, like giving itself. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said not long before his assassination, “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” It is, after all, an offspring of the free market; it is enabled by returns on capital.

And yet, too often, we have declined to question our own circumstances: a system that produces vast differences in privilege, and then tasks the most privileged with improving the system.

Whatever our intentions, the truth is that we can inadvertently widen inequality in the course of making money, even though we claim to support equality and justice when giving it away. And while our end-of-year giving might support worthy organizations, we must also ask if these financial donations contribute to larger social change.

In other words, “giving back” is necessary, but not sufficient. We should seek to bring about lasting, systemic change, even if that change might adversely affect us. We must bend each act of generosity toward justice.

We, as foundations and individuals, should fund people, their ideas and organizations that are capable of addressing deep-rooted injustice. We should ensure that the voices of those most affected by injustice — women, racial minorities, the poor, religious and ethnic minorities and L.G.B.T. individuals — help decide where and what philanthropy puts money behind, not in simply receiving whatever philanthropy decides to give them.

We can wield data and technology, see through a diversity of viewpoints, and draw upon a century of philanthropy’s success and failure to identify and address the barriers holding people back.

This modern giving charter should look different in different settings. At the Ford Foundation, our efforts will focus on inequality: not just wealth disparities, but injustices in politics, culture and society that compound inequality and limit opportunity. We will ask questions like, are we hearing — and heeding — those who understand the problems best? What can we do to leverage our privilege to disrupt the drivers of inequality?

Others in philanthropy will take different, but no less effective, approaches. Many already are answering King’s call, working intensely toward a world that renders philanthropy unnecessary. Ultimately, we each must do our part to ensure that giving not only makes us feel better, but also makes our society more just.

Darren Walker is the president of the Ford Foundation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/opini ... 87722&_r=0
kmaherali
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Bill Gates’s Clean-Energy Moon Shot

It’s hard to think of a tougher challenge than accelerating humanity’s transition to nonpolluting energy sources and limiting global warming, especially in a world with abundant fossil fuels and fast-growing energy needs.

But that’s the assignment that Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and world’s richest person, has set out to tackle with a new multibillion-dollar fund that will invest in research on potentially breakthrough clean-energy technologies. He expects to double his clean-energy investments to $2 billion over the next five years.

Mr. Gates sat down recently with me to discuss the undertaking in his first extended interview since he announced the effort in December at the Paris climate conference. He called himself an “impatient optimist” but acknowledged that transitions in the field of energy were implicitly harder and slower than in sectors like information technology and medicine, where he has experience.

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/opini ... d=71987722

Complete interview:
Innovation

Bill Gates, the ‘Impatient Optimist,’ Lays Out his Clean-Energy Innovation Agenda
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/ ... d=71987722

Bill Gates Explains How to Make Climate Progress in a World Eating Meat and Guzzling Gas

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/ ... ef=opinion
kmaherali
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The celebrities who give away their millions

Slide show:

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/careersa ... ut#image=1

Deep pockets and a big heart


These A-listers aren’t just known for their work in the bright lights, but also their philanthropy. We reveal who’s among the most generous in the showbiz world.
kmaherali
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Zuckerberg, Chan pledge $3B to end disease

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a goal that's even more ambitious than connecting the entire world to the internet: He and his wife want to help eradicate all disease by the end of this century.

Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are committing $3 billion over the next 10 years to accelerate basic scientific research, including the creation of research tools — from software to hardware to yet-undiscovered techniques — they hope will ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs, the way the microscope and DNA sequencing have in generations past.

The goal, which they are unlikely to live to see accomplished, is to "cure, prevent or manage all disease" in the next 80 or so years. They acknowledge that this might sound a crazy, but point to how far medicine and science have come in the last century — with vaccines, statins for heart disease, chemotherapy, and so on — following millennia with little progress.

More....
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/zuc ... li=AAggNb9

******
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Pledge $3 Billion to Fighting Disease

SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, last year said they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charitable causes. Now they are putting a large chunk of that money to work.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the limited liability company into which Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan put their Facebook shares, on Wednesday said it would invest at least $3 billion over the next decade toward preventing, curing or managing all diseases by the end of the century.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/techn ... 87722&_r=0
kmaherali
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Philanthropy 360º: Aleem Walji, CEO, Aga Khan Foundation USA

Published on Oct 4, 2016

Philanthropy 360º is a series of interviews with leaders in the world of strategic giving. Produced by the Global Philanthropy Forum, Philanthropy 360º seeks to inspire and inform. Each video includes a unique perspective on effective philanthropy and strategic giving.

To join the conversation, follow @GPForg on Twitter or visit philanthropyforum.org.

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JygSKvCNG64
kmaherali
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Surat diamond merchant gifts 400 flats, 1,260 cars to his employees as Diwali gifts

Nav Gujarat Samay | Updated: Oct 28, 2016, 12.47 AM IST

Savji Dholakia, Surat-based diamond merchant..

SURAT: Savji Dholakia, a Surat-based billionaire diamond merchant who famously made his son do odd jobs to learn the value of money, has gifted 400 flats and 1,260 cars as Diwali bonuses to his employees. .
.
Hare Krishna Exports, Dholakia's diamond firm, has spent Rs 51 crores on Diwali bonuses this year, its golden jubilee. As many as 1,716 employees were named as the company's best performers. .

The bonuses, which were announced at an informal meeting of employees on Tuesday, have been an annual ritual at Hare Krishna Exports since 2011.

Last year, Dholakia's company gifted 491 cars and 200 flats to its employees. The year before that, it spent Rs. 50 crore on performance incentives, Dholakia said.

Dholakia, who hails from Dudhala village in Amreli district, established and grew his diamond business using a loan from his uncle. His considerable wealth wasn't earned overnight, and he has sought to impart that wisdom to his son Dravya, whom he sent to Kochi with three sets of clothing and Rs 7,000 emergency money, so that the young man could learn what's it's like to stand on his own feet.

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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city ... 092846.cms
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For Melinda Gates, Birth Control Is Women’s Way Out of Poverty

Credit Jemal Countess/Getty Images
Melinda Gates has made providing poor women in developing countries access to contraception a mission. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which she leads with her husband, has donated more than $1 billion for family planning efforts and will spend about $180 million more this year.

Since 2012, she has helped lead an international campaign to get birth control to 120 million more women by 2020. Four years later, a report explains why achieving that goal is proving tougher than expected. This is a condensed and edited version of our conversation about family planning.

Why is this the cause of your life?

If you allow a woman — if you counsel her so it’s truly voluntary — to have a contraceptive tool and she can space those births, it unlocks the cycle of poverty for her. In the early days, I’d be out traveling for the foundation, I’d be there to talk to women about vaccines, I’m going be frank, for their children, and what they would say to me is: ‘O.K., I have questions for you. What about that contraceptive, how come I can’t get it anymore?’ To me, it’s one of the greatest injustices.

One of the statistics in the report that most struck me was that contraception prevented tens of millions of unsafe abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies. You’re Roman Catholic. Is that part of the moral imperative for you?

Yeah. I mean this is obviously something I’ve had to wrestle with very deeply. The Catholic Church doesn’t even believe in these forms of modern contraceptives. I’m in the developing world minimum three times a year now, and I’m out in slums, in townships, in the rural area, and when you see a needless death of a woman or a child because she literally just didn’t have a very inexpensive tool that we not only believe in, we use in the United States — more than 93 percent of married Catholic women report using contraceptives — the moral imperative is that we give these women what we believe in and actually use.

More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/healt ... dline&te=1
kmaherali
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Bill Gates says the world is not prepared to cope with a deadly flu epidemic

Bill Gates has warned that the world's emergency response systems are not yet strong enough to cope with a deadly flu epidemic - one he is crossing his fingers will not arise in the next 10 years.

The Microsoft co-founder said the Ebola and Zika virus crises showed that global health infrastructure had room for improvement, the BBC reported.

The philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation counts tackling disease, including pneumonia, malaria and polio, among its objectives.

Mr. Gates told Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer for England, on the Today program:

“When we've seen Ebola or even now Zika, we realize we still haven't done enough.

“Our ability to create new drugs and vaccines quickly where we have an emerging disease, our emergency response system where we get people in and try and stop these epidemics - we don't have a strong enough system.”

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http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/bil ... ailsignout
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Bill Gates is teaming up with world leaders to stop the next deadly pandemic

In partnership with several world leaders, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has launched a coalition to prevent pandemics through the development of new vaccines.


The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 18.

Governments from Germany, Japan, and Norway have pooled funds along with the Gates Foundation to raise a total of $490 million so far. The target is $1 billion, which CEPI says will help finance the first five years of research and development.

"Ebola and Zika showed that the world is tragically unprepared to detect local outbreaks and respond quickly enough to prevent them from becoming global pandemics," Bill Gates said in a statement. "Without investments in research and development, we will remain unequipped when we face the next threat."

Between 2014 and the end of 2016, when Ebola and Zika outbreaks hit their peak, cases rose into the hundreds of thousands. Roughly half of all Ebola cases in West Africa — or some 286,000 diagnoses, according to the CDC — led to death. They were concentrated primarily in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

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http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/bil ... ailsignout
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What Facebook Owes to Journalism




Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto about community, released last week on Facebook, wisely analyzed the state of journalism: He decried sensationalism, and declared that “a strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community.” Giving people a voice, he said, “is not enough without having people dedicated to uncovering new information and analyzing it.” He even noted that “reading local news is directly correlated with local civic engagement.”

Unfortunately, his memo ignored two major points — the role that Facebook and other technology platforms are playing in inadvertently damaging local news media, and the one way they could actually save journalism: with a massive philanthropic commitment.

Local news is weak in large part because the business models have collapsed. The main reason: As advertising spending shifted from print, TV and radio to the internet, the money didn’t mostly go to digital news organizations. Increasingly, it goes to Facebook and Google.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opin ... dline&te=1
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40 billionaires giving away fortunes to save the world

Slide show:

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstori ... ailsignout
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Giving Away Your Billion

Recently I’ve been reading the Giving Pledge letters. These are the letters that rich people write when they join Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge campaign. They take the pledge, promising to give away most of their wealth during their lifetime, and then they write letters describing their giving philosophy.

“I suppose I arrived at my charitable commitment largely through guilt,” writes George B. Kaiser, an oil and finance guy from Oklahoma, who is purported to be worth about $8 billion. “I recognized early on that my good fortune was not due to superior personal character or initiative so much as it was to dumb luck. I was blessed to be born in an advanced society with caring parents. So, I had the advantage of both genetics … and upbringing.”

Kaiser decided he was “morally bound to help those left behind by the accident of birth.” But he understood the complexities: “Though almost all of us grew up believing in the concept of equal opportunity, most of us simultaneously carried the unspoken and inconsistent ‘dirty little secret’ that genetics drove much of accomplishment so that equality was not achievable.”

His reading of modern brain research, however, led to the conclusion that genetic endowments can be modified by education, if you can get to kids early. Kaiser has directed much of his giving to early childhood education.

Most of the letter writers started poor or middle class. They don’t believe in family dynasties and sometimes argue that they would ruin their kids’ lives if they left them a mountain of money. Schools and universities are the most common recipients of their generosity, followed by medical research and Jewish cultural institutions. A ridiculously disproportionate percentage of the Giving Pledge philanthropists are Jewish.

Older letter writers have often found very specific niches for their giving — fighting childhood obesity in Georgia. Younger givers, especially the tech billionaires, are vague and less thoughtful.

A few letters burn with special fervor. These people generally try to solve a problem that touched them directly. Dan Gilbert, who founded Quicken Loans, had a son born with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that affects the brain. Gordon Gund went fully blind in 1970. Over the ensuing 43 years, he and his wife helped raise more than $600 million for blindness research.

The letters set off my own fantasies. What would I do if I had a billion bucks to use for good? I’d start with the premise that the most important task before us is to reweave the social fabric. People in disorganized neighborhoods need to grow up enmeshed in the loving relationships that will help them rise. The elites need to be reintegrated with their own countrymen.

Only loving relationships transform lives, and such relationships can be formed only in small groups. Thus, I’d use my imaginary billion to seed 25-person collectives around the country.

A collective would be a group of people who met once a week to share and discuss life. Members of these chosen families would go on retreats and celebrate life events together. There would be “clearness committees” for members facing key decisions.

The collectives would be set up for people at three life stages. First, poor kids between 16 and 22. They’d meet in the homes of adult hosts and help one another navigate the transition from high school to college.

Second, young adults across classes between 23 and 26. This is a vastly under-institutionalized time of life when many people suffer a Telos Crisis. They don’t know why they are here and what they are called to do. The idea would be to bring people across social lines together with hosts and mentors, so that they could find a purpose and a path.

Third, successful people between 36 and 40. We need a better establishment in this country. These collectives would identify the rising stars in local and national life, and would help build intimate bonds across parties and groups, creating a baseline of sympathy and understanding these people could carry as they rose to power.

The collectives would hit the four pressure points required for personal transformation:

Heart: By nurturing deep friendships, they would give people the secure emotional connections they need to make daring explorations.

Hands: Members would get in the habit of performing small tasks of service and self-control for one another, thus engraving the habits of citizenship and good character.

Head: Each collective would have a curriculum, a set of biographical and reflective readings, to help members come up with their own life philosophies, to help them master the intellectual virtues required for public debate.

Soul: In a busy world, members would discuss fundamental issues of life’s purpose, so that they might possess the spiritual true north that orients a life.


The insular elites already have collectives like this in the form of Skull and Bones and such organizations. My billion would support collectives across society, supporting the homes and retreats where these communities would happen, offering small slush funds they could use for members in crisis.

Now all I need is a hedge fund to get started.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/opin ... &te=1&_r=0
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No, You Can’t Feel Sorry for Everyone

The idea of empathy for all ignores the limits of human psychology.


The world seems to be getting more empathetic. Americans donate to charity at record rates. People feel the pain of suffering in geographically distant countries brought to our attention by advances in communications and transportation. Violence, seen on historical timescales, is decreasing.

The great modern humanitarian project of expanding the scope of our empathy to include the entire human race seems to be working. Our in-group (those we choose to include in our inner circle and to spend our energies on) is growing, and our out-group (everybody else) shrinking. But there’s a wrinkle in this perfect picture: Our instinctive tendency to categorize the world into “us” and “them” is difficult to overcome. It is in our nature to favor helping in-group members like friends, family, or fellow citizens, and to neglect or even punish out-group members. Even as some moral circles expand, others remain stubbornly fixed, or even contract: Just think of Democrats and Republicans, Sunnis and Shiites, Duke and North Carolina basketball fans.

The endpoint of the liberal humanitarian project, which is universal empathy, would mean no boundary between in-group and out-group. In aiming for this goal, we must fight our instincts. That is possible, to a degree. Research confirms that people can strengthen their moral muscles and blur the divide between in-group and out-group. Practicing meditation, for example, can increase empathy, improving people’s ability to decode emotions from people’s facial expressions1 and making them more likely to offer a chair2 to someone with crutches. Simply increasing people’s beliefs in the malleability of empathy increases the empathy they express toward ideologically and racially dissimilar others.3 And when all else fails, people respond to financial gain. My co-authors and I have shown that introducing monetary incentives for accurate perspective-taking increased Democrats’ and Republicans’ ability to understand each other and to believe that political resolutions were possible.4

But these exercises can take us only so far. In fact, there is a terrible irony in the assumption that we can ever transcend our parochial tendencies entirely. Social scientists have found that in-group love and out-group hate originate from the same neurobiological basis, are mutually reinforcing, and co-evolved—because loyalty to the in-group provided a survival advantage by helping our ancestors to combat a threatening out-group. That means that, in principle, if we eliminate out-group hate completely, we may also undermine in-group love. Empathy is a zero-sum game.

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http://nautil.us//issue/51/limits/no-yo ... 8-60760513
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Inside Billionaire Bill Gates’ trip to Tanzania

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – Bill Gates announced a $15 million investment to help digitise Tanzania’s health information systems and improve health data in the country. Gates congratulated members of the government of Tanzania on leading a drive to incorporate digital health and data into their policy framework.


Photo: Zuma Press/RealTime Images

Philanthropist Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, visited Tanzania earlier this month, to learn more about the country’s development priorities. The foundation believes that the effective use of data is a fundamental building block in creating robust health systems. Bill met with the foundation’s key partners in Tanzania, including government officials (among others, the Tanzanian President John Magufuli), health care workers and development executives, to understand how the country is increasing the use of data in its health sector.

A key focus of this visit was to see, first-hand, the progress Tanzania has made towards achieving the health sector’s data vision, including how innovative practices are delivering on this strategy. During the visit, Bill launched a new partnership with the Government of Tanzania which complements the Better Immunization Data Initiative by accelerating the use of existing data and developing strong data policy frameworks.

Bill also meet with public and private sector stakeholders to discuss opportunities to expand the reach of digital payments. About half of Tanzania’s population have adopted mobile money technology. These meetings helped identify opportunities for expanding and deepening the use of digital payments in the country.

During the visit, Bill toured a fertiliser factory to understand local initiatives aimed at improving the supply and distribution of fertilizer to smallholder farmers. Better access to quality fertiliser and other inputs will help farmers boost staple crop and livestock productivity. This in turn will enable farmers to both feed their families and generate higher incomes. Boosting agricultural production can ensure that healthy, nutritious food is available to all. The foundation is working with a number of partners in Tanzania and elsewhere, including GAIN, UNICEF and Johns Hopkins University, to tackle issues around undernutrition in the country.

The foundation works with partners in more than 45 African countries to reduce poverty and improve health. Some of the major areas of investment include agriculture, child health and nutrition, family planning and financial services for the poor. Between 2001 and 2016, the foundation invested more than $9 billion in Africa. The foundation plans to invest an additional $5 billion by 2021.

https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/east-af ... -216274365
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Giving Away Billions as Fast as They Can

Step aside, Rockefeller. Move over, Carnegie. Out of the way, Ford.

For the better part of a century, a few Gilded Age names dominated the ranks of big philanthropy.

No longer.

In a matter of years, a new crop of ultra-wealthy Americans has eclipsed the old guard of philanthropic titans. With names like Soros, Gates, Bloomberg, Mercer, Koch and Zuckerberg, these new megadonors are upending long-established norms in the staid world of big philanthropy.

They have accumulated vast fortunes early in their lives. They are spending it faster and writing bigger checks. And they are increasingly willing to take on hot-button social and political issues — on the right and left — that thrust them into the center of contentious debates.

Plenty of billionaires are still buying sports teams, building yachts and donating to museums and hospitals. But many new philanthropists appear less interested in naming a business school after themselves than in changing the world.

“They have a problem-solving mentality rather than a stewardship mentality,” said David Callahan, founder of the website Inside Philanthropy and author of “The Givers,” a book about today’s major donors. “They are not saving their money for a rainy day. They want to have impact now.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/busi ... gates.html
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The Mind Meld of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker

The entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist and the best-selling author discuss their surprising bond, the challenge to improve the human condition and the quest to create the perfect toilet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/busi ... d=45305309

Excerpt:

PG Bill, did your success at creating Microsoft make you more optimistic about tackling big issues at the foundation?

BG Absolutely. Take the foundation’s toilet project. We want to reinvent the toilet so it doesn’t need water piped in or out — just a chemical process, so that even Indian cities that will never spend $1 billion can have a toilet as good as a Western one. This is a 10-year quest. If I didn’t have the success I had at Microsoft, I would never have the bullheadedness to embark on this project.

PG Your mathematical skills probably make the foundation run differently than most?

BG You also have to understand science and history, and how to pick the right people to be able to back the right projects. Having optimism about science and feeling in command of scientists, that’s like what I did at Microsoft. And, yes, I embrace more risk. Most philanthropists don’t take huge, 10-to-15-years-type risks.
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10 tough questions we get asked | Bill & Melinda Gates

Our 2018 Annual Letter
February 13, 2018
By Bill Gates and Melinda Gates
We are outspoken about our optimism. These days, though, optimism seems to be in short supply.

The headlines are filled with awful news. Every day brings a different story of political division, violence, or natural disaster.

Image
Despite the headlines, we see a world that’s getting better.

Compare today to the way things were a decade or a century ago. The world is healthier and safer than ever. The number of children who die every year has been cut in half since 1990 and keeps going down. The number of mothers who die has also dropped dramatically. So has extreme poverty—declining by nearly half in just 20 years. More children are attending school. The list goes on and on.

But being an optimist isn’t about knowing that life used to be worse. It’s about knowing how life can get better. And that’s what really fuels our optimism. Although we see a lot of disease and poverty in our work—and many other big problems that need to be solved—we also see the best of humanity. We spend our time learning from scientists who are inventing cutting-edge tools to cure disease. We talk to dedicated government leaders who are being creative about prioritizing the health and well-being of people around the world. And we meet brave and brilliant individuals all over the world who are imagining new ways to transform their communities.

That’s our response when people ask, “How can you be so optimistic?” It’s a question we’ve been getting more and more, and we think the answer says a lot about how we view the world.

This is our 10th Annual Letter, and we’re marking the occasion by answering 10 tough questions that people ask us. We will answer them as forthrightly as we can, and we hope that when you’re finished reading, you’ll be just as optimistic as we are.

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https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter
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Pioneering a People-Centered Approach to Corporate Philanthropy

How making the improvement of human lives around the globe a top priority can be a means to succeeding as a business.


In 1943, long before corporate social responsibility (CSR) became a catchphrase, Johnson & Johnson Chairman Robert Wood Johnson wrote the company’s now-famous “Our Credo,” which states that the company must be “responsible to the communities in which we live and work and to the world community as well.” While language like this is commonplace in corporate America today, when Johnson wrote those words, it was considered extraordinary for a company to put people before profit, and to claim that an obligation to help better society was embedded in its mission.

The very first line of that message states that meeting the needs of doctors and nurses is Johnson & Johnson’s first responsibility. In line with that goal, our employee secondment programs—which allow employees to work directly with our non-government organization (NGO) partners for up to six months—support the company’s larger focus on the global health workforce, especially health workers in developing countries who provide essential care for millions of people. We believe one of the best ways to advance global health is to ensure that health workers have the skills and resources they need to improve and save lives.

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https://ssir.org/articles/entry/pioneer ... ilanthropy#
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Philanthropy Bets Big on Sustainable Development Goals

An international roster of donors has dispersed billions of dollars since 2000 to address social issues targeted by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Their efforts highlight four ways that big bets can achieve big social change.

The United Nations made headlines around the world in September 2015 when it adopted an ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that aim to end extreme poverty, protect the planet, and ensure health and prosperity for all by 2030. Delivering on these goals won’t come cheap. The UN estimates that it will require an additional $2.5 trillion in funding each year above what is currently being spent by government, business, and philanthropy.

Government and business have the deepest pockets and, no doubt, will shoulder the largest financial burden. But they cannot do the job alone. Philanthropy also has a critical role to play. It brings not just much-needed money, but often a willingness to support big thinking, innovation, risk-taking, and collaboration.

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https://ssir.org/articles/entry/philant ... ment_goals
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Sponsor Women’s Empowerment: Eco-Soap Bank’s #GivingTuesday Match

On Tuesday, November 27th, starting at 8AM EST (5AM PST), donations toward this fundraiser will be matched for a limited time for #GivingTuesday!

Eco-Soap Bank provides reliable jobs at very good wages to women in developing countries who would otherwise struggle to support themselves and their families. These women often have few opportunities to gain marketable skills. They or their spouses may be disabled or HIV-positive, or they may be single parents with several children.

Alongside steady, gainful employment, Eco-Soap Bank also offers these women tutoring, English lessons, and other skills training. The ultimate goal is to help reintegrate them into their local economy by helping them find opportunities for upward mobility—breaking one of the world’s most pervasive glass ceilings—and to continue opening our doors to other women in need.

We’ll use the funds from this fundraiser to sponsor the women working in all of our 16 branches across the 10 countries we work in. Your sponsorship empowers women around the world to earn livelihoods providing lifesaving soap to children and families in need.

Individual donations of up to $20,000 will be matched by Facebook and Paypal starting Tuesday, November 27th at 8AM EST (5AM PST). But hurry—last year’s matching funds ran out in minutes! If you plan to give to support our soapmakers, please be at the ready to make your contribution right after 8AM!

For more information about Eco-Soap Bank, #GivingTuesday, or this fundraiser, please visit our Facebook page, send us a message, or get in touch at contact@ecosoapbank.org.

On behalf of the children and families we serve—thank you!

https://www.facebook.com/donate/2202214 ... 697930903/
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A Call to Modernize American Philanthropy

The giving practices of rich magnates and foundations still suggest a colonial mind-set, the author of a new book argues, as he offers ideas for change.


When America’s philanthropic and social sector were developed early in the 20th century, the design resembled elements of colonial social architecture: bureaucracy, competition, specialization and consolidation of power and resources, Edgar Villanueva writes in his new book, “Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance.”

Mr. Villanueva, who has held leadership positions in philanthropy, and is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, argues that philanthropy in the United States continues to transmit a “colonizing virus” by remaining “top-down, closed-door and expert-driven.”

“Writing this book, I started from a place of pain,” Mr. Villanueva said. “I was angry. But there’s plenty of books that criticize. What would I do differently? I felt like I had to push through to a place where I’m offering a different way of thinking.”

I sat down with Mr. Villanueva recently to discuss his book — a compassionate call for change and healing. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview and more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/opin ... dline&te=1
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As Mobile and Digital Fundraisers Expand, Charity Walks Keep Striding Forward

To borrow from Mark Twain, “Reports of the death of the fundraising walk are exaggerated.”

Each year — especially when reporters are assigned to do their year-end stories on charitable giving — we’re greeted with headlines about how charity walks are a thing of the past.

While it’s true that some of the nation’s largest fundraising walk campaigns have seen revenue declines in recent years, a look beneath the surface shows that fundraising walks are far from dead.

In fact, a number of organizations in both the United States and Canada are seeing significant gains in their fundraising walk revenues.

Longstanding programs like the Alzheimer’s Association’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s, Pancreatic Cancer Action Network’s Purple Stride, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Light The Night Walk, and Aga Khan Foundation’s World Partnership Walk are thriving.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhesse ... 6ece84406e
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Melinda Gates on tech innovation, global health and her own privilege.

You would perhaps be demonstrating an excess of sympathy to feel sorry for ultrawealthy philanthropists. But it’s fair to say that many members of that cohort have found themselves in a challenging moment, faced as they are with increasing anti-elitism and skepticism about just how much altruism, as opposed to ideological self-interest, motivates their work. “There are absolutely different points of view about philanthropy,” says Melinda Gates, who, along with her husband Bill, heads the charitable foundation that bears their name, aimed at increasing global health and reducing poverty. Its endowment, at $50.7 billion, is the largest in the world. “But we’re lucky to live in a democracy, where we can all envision what we want things to look like.” In that regard, Gates’s focus, both here and abroad, is on broadening women’s rights, a subject she explores in her new book, “The Moment of Lift.” “I have rage,” she said, about the injustices she has seen. “It’s up to me to metabolize that and use it to fuel my work.”

Interview....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... 3053090416
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Bringing Hope to Pakistan’s Street Children

"There are those...who enter the world in such poverty that they are deprived of both the means and the motivation to improve their lot. Unless these unfortunates can be touched with the spark which ignites the spirit of individual enterprise and determination, they will only sink back into renewed apathy, degradation and despair. It is for us, who are more fortunate, to provide that spark.” -Mawlana Hazar Imam, at the Inauguration of the Aga Khan Baug, Versova, India, January 17, 1983


Providing this spark of hope is Memphis, Tennessee-based Nasreen Aman’s calling in life. In her case, the spark lights the future of street children living in Northern Pakistan.

A few years ago, Nasreen watched with despair, Pakistan’s Hidden Shame, a BBC documentary about young boys living on the streets in towns and cities across Pakistan. In addition to being homeless, these children are vulnerable, exploited, and hopeless. Heartbroken, she could not sit by and just sympathize; she mobilized to help the very children she was seeing on the television.

Born of this impetus was Spark of Hope, a Tennessee Public Benefit Corporation, that raises funds from various communities in the state to educate vagrant children in Pakistan.

Spark of Hope partners on the ground in Pakistan with two direct services providers: Ran’aa Child Welfare Foundation, which operates a community center with academically and socially nourishing programming for impoverished children to position them to become productive members of society; and Zamung Kor, a state-run initiative to house and educate through eighth grade children who have lost their parents and are destitute. The children enriched are as young as four years old, and the curricular offerings are innovative, including digital proficiency and foreign languages.

With Zamung Kor, Spark of Hope has formalized a Memorandum of Understanding, under which it will tailor its educational offerings to the emotional and physical needs of young children who have only lived in open spaces, may experience claustrophobia easily and may be prone to anger as a defense. Together, the partner organizations will provide state of the art athletic and vocational training, because although not every child will excel in the classroom, each still deserves the chance to a constructive life. Further, Spark of Hope will create continued educational trajectories for these children, once they age out of the Zamung Kor offerings.

The success stories from Nasreen’s work are palpable. They include narratives of children going from scrounging in a dump for saleable materials and earning a pittance, to attending school in crisp uniforms with joy and enthusiasm; and of a mathematically inclined child selling donuts on the street to teaching math to his peers and growing up to pursue engineering professionally.

While Spark of Hope’s financial support today is anchored in the generosity of the South Asian community in Memphis, Tennessee, Nasreen hopes to expand this collaboration to include in-kind offerings from the University of Memphis, in the form of curricular aid and innovation. She also envisions an opportunity for collaboration with the local Aga Khan Youth & Sports Board in Pakistan, in the form of internships for students, as well as cross collaboration with American students looking for opportunities to serve overseas.

Nasreen believes that “education will ignite a spark in these children’s lives to help them move away from desperation and poverty, towards a hopeful tomorrow, with sustainable opportunities for a better future.”

She has certainly put her words to action, bringing hope to these children.

Additional information about Nasreen’s organization can be found at http://Mysparkofhope.org.

Photos at:

https://the.ismaili/usa/bringing-hope-p ... rce=Direct
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Notre-Dame Donation Backlash Raises Debate: What’s Worthy of Philanthropy?

As flames engulfed Notre-Dame, people from around the world opened their wallets and began making donations. Within two days, nearly $1 billion was raised to help pay for the restoration of the 856-year-old cathedral in Paris.

The charitable response was a reflection of Notre-Dame’s stature as a cherished monument of French cultural heritage. Some benefactors pledged more than $100 million each, including François-Henri Pinault, whose wealth comes from luxury brands like Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, and Bernard Arnault, the richest person in Europe and chief executive of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH.

But the outpouring met with resistance as critics wondered why tragedies like the incineration of the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro in September did not receive the same degree of support. And it rekindled class resentment in a city already racked by the so-called Yellow Vest movement, a populist response to economic inequality in France that tapped into a rising global movement against the concentration of wealth.

Some criticism was aimed at donors for not paying their fair share in taxes and thus depriving the French government of the revenue to repair Notre-Dame itself. Others denounced the reputational boost bestowed on philanthropists at a time of national tragedy. And some attacked the premise of giving so much to a damaged cathedral when that money could better benefit social service organizations that could provide food, shelter or a better education to needy citizens.

But philanthropic experts and advisers said they were not shocked by what seemed like an ungrateful response.

“It’s not surprising,” said Nicolas Berggruen, a billionaire philanthropist who founded the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, which aims to reshape political and social institutions to develop long-term solutions to society’s challenges. “In the age of anxiety, people will look to accuse lots of different groups for all of the evil or some of the evil. Rich people for sure fall into this. Philanthropists are an extension of that.”

Others took a less philosophical approach, saying that for society to be most effective, philanthropists need to work with government and the private sector, not alone or in opposition to them.

More....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/your ... _th_190427
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