How a tide of tech money is transforming charity | The Economist, Feb 9th 2023
ioi_ab's bookmarks 2023-02-13
Summary:
"...To the newer generation of philanthropists, raised in a business culture that prizes getting to market and scaling quickly over cautious planning, all this appears unbearably stodgy. Nickhil Jakatdar is a serial entrepreneur from India who now lives in California, and who gives away between $300,000 and $500,000 each year. In 2021 he approached the Gates Foundation seeking funding for a not-for-profit medical firm. The foundation’s generosity was impressive, Mr Jakatdar says. But he found the paper-pushing so off-putting that he did not apply. “The Gates Foundation taught me what I don’t want to be,” he says.
Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, became a role model for the new approach when she dished out over $14bn in a little over three years, starting in 2019. Ms Scott did not dispense with analytics entirely. Instead, she front-loaded them. She appointed consulting firms to crunch the numbers and pick worthy recipients, which included Habitat for Humanity International, whose volunteers have built homes in Haiti and Bangladesh, and the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, which is based in Cape Town. The gifts were mostly given without conditions, with the charities trusted to make the best use of the money. Ms Scott has called her approach “seeding by ceding”.
Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, runs his charitable efforts on similar lines. In 2020 Mr Dorsey pledged to give away $1bn of shares to his philanthropic venture #StartSmall. He takes grant applications from anyone via a short online form. Every donation is made public. (#StartSmall’s list of donations includes climate-resilience projects in the Caribbean and humanitarian aid in Ukraine.)..."