You can tell a lot about a place by visiting its airport.

My trip to Norway last November was my first assignment abroad since I joined Alliance three months earlier. I was headed to Kristiansand on the southern tip of the country to cover the annual Nordic Foundation Conference. This year the conference would be held in Nordic, a language I did not speak beyond ‘Hey’, and as such would spend my time conducting video interviews (in English) and trying to learn as much as I could about philanthropy from my fellow conference goers during the tea breaks.

This was my first time in Norway, and although I shouldn’t have been surprised to see pine trees covered in snow, I was nonetheless delighted that from my airplane window seat Oslo looked exactly as I hoped it would. I had three hours in the airport before my connection south and decided to spend it learning about the country while pondering some of the bigger questions about philanthropy that had been nagging me since I first started covering the sector.

Rarely in any of the discourse behind philanthropy have I heard an argument that those who have amassed great wealth have a social responsibility to give back to their communities.