Thinkin' About Tomorrow
It's dangerous to get into the predictions business, but here at the Clinton Global Initiative I can't help thinking about future university courses in philanthropy, and what they'll be teaching about the way it all changed in the first decade of the 21st century. For all the hype about the new millennium, the dawning of 2000 has faded in memory with little more than a sigh of relief that Y2K wasn't a worldwide disaster. In reality, though, we've witnessed major transformations in what we think of as philanthropy as this decade has unfolded. And when they get into the business of writing textbooks on the topic, I would imagine the Clinton Global Initiative will require several chapters, if not volumes.
It's not only the gathering of world leaders from government, commerce and NGOs. And yes, a lot of it is the requirement that participants step up with - and live up to - major commitments to tackle global problems. But even more, in ways that we may not be able to measure yet, things we thought we knew are changing before our eyes.
Here you have, in one press conference, Barry Segal, CEO of Bradco roofing company supporting Majora Carter's South Bronx urban forestry program to the tune of $100,000 sharing the stage with not only President Clinton, but Virgin Group mogul Richard Branson. In this morning's announcement, Branson drew gasps with his commitment of an estimated $3 billion by pledging to invest 100% of profits from Virgin's airline and train businesses over the next 10 years in initiatives to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and address global warming.
So the ground continues to shift. Is the re-investment of a company's profits in other business ventures, which may be designed for a good purpose, necessarily philanthropic? At the same time, are traditional NGOs that fail to achieve measurable impact actually doing good or creating new problems?
These and other questions float about in the corridors of CGI, as surely as the recognizable figures such as Desmond Tutu, Hamid Karzai and Bill Gates. And definitely, some answers are emerging. When Gates is asked in a forum what specific sources of global inequity can be addressed through philanthropy, he zeroes in on health, education, agricultural productivity and good governance, and it's clear he believes that sufficient power is being harnessed to address them, and make "fantastic things happen." There are potent numbers being registered: 114 total commitments to date, adding up to $5.7 billion, more than double last year's total. But the question remains: what is the "this" here? Is it philanthropy, or something new? Has Bill Clinton created a parallel structure to government or the UN, sidestepping stifling protocols?
Is the sheer mass of the initiatives being developed through CGI eventually going to tip the balance among NGO's, governments and commerce that may exist today? Who will decide priorities when massive philanthropic interventions (or quasi-philanthropic enterprises) collide? And who will evaluate the results, measuring the impact of these initiatives going forward?
Clinton himself pointed out the need to be disciplined "recognizing what can be dealt with by the state, or by partnerships between the state and NGOs, so that we don't make the same mistakes in seeking short- and long-term solutions." When traditional barriers among nations, disciplines and sectors become less clear, who will ultimately get to judge the worthiness of interventions with far-reaching implications to change the world? Who knows what structure will eventually play that role, a Supreme Court of Philanthropy perhaps? As Dr. Susan Raymond says in her current onPhilanthropy article on Google.org's iconoclastic foundation model, the old definitions just don't fit any more.
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