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FOCUS ON...The shadow side of philanthropy

‘The moon has a shadow side but since we always see only the bright side we could only guess what the other side was like and we had to go on a journey to outer space to really see it. As for philanthropy, we do see its shadow side almost as often as the bright one, but we don’t often talk about it.’ So writes guest editor Nilda Bullain. The December 2006 edition of Alliance focuses on this neglected ‘shadow side’ of philanthropy.

‘The purpose of exploring the shadow of philanthropy is to help us do better philanthropy,’ writes guest editor Michael Lerner. Gender, caste and racism are some of the issues examined in this issue of Alliance, along with the waste of resources and the failure to redistribute. How do you survive spiritually as a funder? How do you keep fresh ideas flowing in foundations? How do you overcome the corrosive effects of power on relations with grantees? These are some of the questions we attempt to answer. Also in this special feature is a plea for intuition and trust in face of the current mania for metrics and a discussion of some issues raised by donor site visits.

Also in this issue of Alliance: Sylvia Borren of Oxfam Novib argues that if funders want to be intelligent, they must also be more humble, while Carolyn Reynolds Mandell examines the prospects for World Bank engagement with civil society under Paul Wolfowitz’s leadership.

CONTENTS

• Editorial 2
• Letters 3
• News from around the world 7
• What's new at … 15
• Conference reports 19
• Spotlight on business in the UK 22
• Opinion - Bruce Sievers 23
• Opinion - Michael Brophy 24
• Books 55

ARTICLES

Big on opinions and tight on core funding? FREE ARTICLE
If funders want to be intelligent, they must also be more humble, says Sylvia Borren 25

Foundations for social change
Jenny Hyatt and Tamás Scsaurszki look at why BCIF UK decided to close and what it has left behind 27

Willing to learn?
Carolyn Reynolds Mandell examines the prospects for World Bank engagement with civil society under Paul Wolfowitz’s leadership 29

Light and shadow in organized philanthropy FREE ARTICLE
Michael Lerner believes we need to explore the shadow of philanthropy in order to help us do better philanthropy 31

Interview
Ingrid Srinath of CRY India 35

Foundations and gender: are European women facing a glass ceiling?
Alliance finds the statistics on gender balance in foundations tell in favour of the US 39

Indigenous peoples and philanthropy: colonialism by other means?
Rebecca Adamson looks at how funders seek to impose alien notions on indigenous peoples 40

The power of the chequebook
The power of money distorts funder-grantee relations and the only remedy is talking, says David Gold 42

Where do the new ideas come from?
How do you stop foundation staff becoming set in their grantmaking ways? 44

Intuition, trust and a great river of money
Ideally, philanthropy needs no applications, no metrics, just a river of money flowing from philanthropists to where it’s needed, argues Chet Tchozewski 47

Learning visit or invasion?
A group of people talked after a site visit to a women’s self-help group in India – about the value of the visit, expectations on both sides, intrusiveness, voyeurism, and cultural hiccups 48

What have we learned?
Nilda Bullain considers what we’ve learned about philanthropy’s shadow side and some issues that other contributors didn’t cover 52

From Alliance, Vol 11, No 4, December 2006

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