by Robert Hyfler, Ph.D
The chart below suggests five steps in the development of the Jewish philanthropist and the maturation of philanthropic foundations and grant making/funding entities. Attention to this ladder of development can lead to strategies to move along a path of communal engagement and can be a useful tool in assessing the current mindset of funders and potential funders. Note that the “virtue” in each step is often retained as the individual or philanthropic entity progresses to the next step.
- Emotive Philanthropy: The individual gives to feel good or to express solidarity, reacting to the situation, the problem or the symptom begging for a solution. The act of giving is closure. “Legacy” gifts often fall under this category.
- Impact Philanthropy: The individual or philanthropic entity insists on accountability in their giving, looking for results and measurements of success.
- Strategic Philanthropy: The individual or philanthropic entity has a strategic focus in philanthropy; a clear understanding of what they are about and not about in their charitable behavior. They often adopt issues or challenges for long term focus and begin to move in their goals and aspirations from impact and deliverables to “solutions”.
- Collaborative Philanthropy: The individual or philanthropic entity recognizes the value and utility in leveraging their funds with those of others; values the synergy and creativity of the collaborative process.
- Systemic (owner) Philanthropy: The individual or philanthropic entity understands that the survival, health and growth of the institutional Jewish world is the platform on which philanthropic activities thrive and in which true solutions to challenges are found; were that system, its agencies and organizational structures, not to exist they would have to invent it. They develop an “ownership” interest in the survival of communal, institutional and agency Jewish life with all that entails.
Bob Hyfler is a Jewish philanthropic consultant and can be reached at Bobhyfler@comcast.net.
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Bob, always good to read of your contributions to the field. I do want to raise a question about the progression: I am concerned with the unstated and implicit value judgment in #5 – what you call systemic philanthropy. It implies that supporting the current infrastructure is a higher value and more mature philanthropy than funding change and impact. But what if the current infrastructure is stagnant or unresponsive to a changed world? To assume that funders who choose to fund in different ways or with different priorities are not yet fully actualized understates the sophistication which many funders do bring to their decisions – even when they choose, consciously, to fund outside the current infrastructure.
Of course you are correct that there is a need for infrastructure to respond to many – though not all – needs of a community. But sometimes reinvention is a higher value than sustaining. Sadly we have seen too many examples of non profit organizations which have outlived their useful lives or are stuck in unproductive ways of doing things. It seems to me that the highest value in philanthropy is to fund that which will create a viable set of effective responses in the face of ever changing realities. Sometimes that leads to an imperative to support the existing infrastructure; sometimes it most assuredly does not.
Thanks Richard for getting as always to the meat of things and I have two brief responses:
1. Concern with that which is collaborative, structural and institutional does not negate the irrefutable truth that organizations need to change, evolve and maintain an openess to retooling and innovation – defining the baby and the bath water is the challenge – and some have been better at it than others and…
2. As I prefaced my chart as applicable to the “Jewish” world of philanthropy I would only say that our world is anchored in a belief in “peoplehood”, connectedness (areyvut) and community — values and ends that go well beyond programatic impact and problem solving. If this is not an argument for a (revitalized) existing infrastructure, it is (as you acknowlege) a case for the necessity of an infrastucture.