Philanthropy

Philanthropy is a worldwide phenomenon in that cultures almost everywhere exhibit traditional practices that can be described as philanthropic in nature. But philanthropy has also become a transnational or even global force, as mostly Western philanthropists and their philanthropic foundations (sometimes also referred to as philanthropies) have directed some of their largesse to other parts of the world. Over time, this has ranged from the early 20th-century work of the Rockefeller philanthropies in China, for example, and the important role that the Ford Foundation played internationally from the mid-20th century on, to the support of 21st-century super-philanthropies such as the ones created by Bill Gates for global health and development (through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), George Soros for democratic development and human rights (through the Open Society Institute), and Ted Turner for a range of global issues (through the United Nations Foundation).

Deriving from the Greek word meaning “love of humankind,” the term philanthropy at the most general level describes private acts of benevolence toward other people or actions for the benefit of the common good. The term philanthropy is frequently used loosely to describe a wide range of such activities, and sometimes its meaning overlaps with related [Page 1324]terms such as charity and voluntarism. In common parlance, charity generally refers more to almsgiving and other acts primarily directed at helping the poor. Although this is also part and parcel of philanthropy, the latter also includes support for the purposes of public benefit that are not primarily serving the poor. Proving funding for research or high culture, for example, would thus be philanthropic but not necessarily charitable. Another distinction between the two terms emerged at the dawn of the U.S. grant-making foundation in the early 20th century: Whereas prior foundations had mostly concentrated on ameliorating social ills (a charitable focus), the earliest of the modern foundations—the Russell Sage Foundation in 1909, the Carnegie Corporation in 1911, and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913—adopted a philanthropic approach by directing their efforts at examining the roots of these social ills in hopes of finding structural solutions that might lead to the social problem's eradication and thus eliminate the need for continuing amelioration.

Another use of the term philanthropy is to refer to all forms of private financial support for public benefit purposes by individuals or private institutions, such as foundations and corporations. Distinctive here is that such private gifts and grants are not based on a direct quid pro quo between donor and donee (which differentiates philanthropy from fees for services and other commercial income of nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]) and that philanthropy is voluntarily given rather than coerced (as is the case with taxes). With the voluntary nature of the philanthropic gift, the term also intersects with voluntarism—the willingness to become active for the common good. Voluntarism typically refers to volunteering, the provision of free, uncompensated labor on behalf of public benefit purposes, which in turn is considered an integral part of civil society development and social capital generation. Efforts by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project to quantify voluntarism by attaching a monetary value to the volunteered time across a broad section of countries have shown that the value of volunteered labor often outdistances the value of financial gifts.

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