Posted by The Happy Tutor 
Safe Places
Will attend next week a "summit of philanthropic advisors" convened by The Philanthropic Initiative and funded by the Packard Foundation. The question is how to encourage client advisors (attorneys, financial planners, CPAs, trust officers, planned giving officers, and philanthropic specialists) to promote, encourage or support philanthropy among their clients. While the issues are posed by the conveners as "what is missing" in the way of materials, programs, education, etc., these seem to me to be tactical concerns, of limited interest, and limited impact. The larger issues revolve around business models, professional codes of conduct, and how to make charitable planning a going concern. More important yet is the style and decorum within which we are doomed and damned to discuss money with monied people, as if butter would not melt in their maw or ours.
Strategic Issues - Charitable Planning as Going Concern
- Is it the client advisor's job to promote philanthropy? (As opposed to helping the client to achieve whatever goals he or she might have?)
- In what ways can the advisor make money from supporting the client's philanthropic intent? (Fees, products sales, assets under management?)
- In what respects are advisors and community foundations natural allies, or natural competitors (for assets under management)?
- When the client has a philanthropic interest, what disciplines should be represented on the client's planning team? (Tax, legal, financial, philanthropic, family counseling, moral and political?)
- Is the philanthropic consultant an advocate of philanthropy? Of specific causes?
- If philanthropy ultimately means dollars leaving financial tools (including charitable remainder trusts, foundations, charitable lead trusts, donor advised funds, gift annuities, endowments) and going to work in the community, are asset gatherers (trust companies, financial advisors, money managers, community foundations) working at cordial cross purposes with the advocates of causes?
- What business models support "philanthropic work"? What processes support these business models? How can we align our models and our processes to help the client, form cohesive planning teams, and advance the mission of our own org, and get everyone compensated?
- Dollars go to work in the community within a "Taxonomy of Nonprofits." Whose job is it to master that taxonomy and research best and most strategic opportunities? When should this process begin? At the beginning of setting client goals, or at the end as money trickles out of a foundation in grants?
- Who finds the client for charitable planning? For charitable planning per se, or for overall planning with a charitable twist? Or, not a client per se but a donor/constituent to whom an "ask" is made?
- What is the primary roadblock among advisors to doing more with philanthropy? Lack of knowledge? Lack of skill? Lack of vision? Lack of personal philanthropic commitment? Conflict with disciplinary standards of practice? Lack of appropriate clientele? Lack of back office technical support? Lack of training? Misalignment of compensation with philanthropic projects (too time consuming with limited payoff)?
- What success models are available for professionals? Who is making a lot of money and doing a lot of good? What is their business plan? Their best practices?
Decorum: In the Social Context of No Context
I want to say that philanthropy, whether you give time, money, love, blood, your talent or your life, is a virtue, (or makes a claim to be one) and is a moral as well as a civic art. In what context, in what style, in what decorum or genre, do we as advisors, or citizens raise with the wealthy, or with corporate foundations, or with the gifted, the question of moral responsibility, and the need to give back? What bibliography, what range of experiences, is relevant to this discussion? What should be included and what must be excluded? And how are these principles of exclusion maintained? By whom? And why? And how might we open doors and windows? Or should we not?
Should the philanthropic advisor, steeped in tax law read Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Diogenes, the gospels, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Blake, Swift, Dickens, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Frost, that the scales might fall from his eyes? Of course the list could be expanded, shelf after shelf, but on what floor? With the philosophy books? Literature? Theology? Sociology? Politics? Or should philanthropy be filed under tax, legal, and finance? Or should we put it under motivational literature? Or Self-Help?
Who should be invited to these Summits, and other philanthropic retreats, when the issue is private money for private conceptions of the public good? Should representatives be present from those who might conceivably be helped by philanthropy? (Or hurt by what passes for philanthropy and might better be called, "soft money," gamesmanship, and empire building?) Should activists, organizers, and representative of non-wealthy communities be present? As stakeholders? Who speaks for them in these hushed rooms, where the waiters in red monkey jackets come and go, with diffident blind eyes, serving the wealthy and their advisors, as they discuss the way money moves? And the best way to get their piece of the pecan pie?
What are the cognate disciplines of philanthropy? Public relations? Political strategy? Lobbying? Business strategic planning? Religious observances, including confession, penance, restitution, and reform? Government policy on tax and expenditure? Or, volunteering, sitting with the dying, activism?
In what style or genre must we or might we discuss the obligations, if any, of wealth and talent? Do we model our discussion after Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, or after "Ubi Roi" by Alfred Jarry with The Lackeys of Phynance, or after Bakhtin on Carnival in Rabelais? Or we do we model our prose after the mild and mannered style of those who have risen above the fray, and who look down unmoved on those fighting it out on the killing floor? Who is entitled to the balanced prose of the judge? The no lose prose of the moderator? The epistolary style of Horace, the consummate insider in the court of Caesar and Maencenas?
My Role, or Act
At the philanthropy function, convened by my friends and colleagues, I will go as "Dick Minim", wearing my bowtie, purchased for the occasion. I know the drill and have promised that I will not bring a bomb, a copy of the Bible, or Proudon's "What is Property?" Dressed in my Brooks Brothers best, my manners will be impeccable, my style moderate, conversational, and professional. Sartor Resartus, The Tailor Retailored. I am inside the redoubt, over the moat, through the drawbridge, past the drooling dwarf, and the mastiff on the iron chain. I am even on the agenda. Why would I speak for those who are excluded when the result will be that I am excluded too? A gaffe. A scene. Sir, if you would please sit down. Why would I, a responsible businessman, come in Motley, and play the Fool?
If we are going to change the world, we might have to start by changing our standards of what is good manners, good taste, what is high and what is low, what is noble and what is base. Until we discuss the movement of wealth upward, around and around, and then downward, until we discuss money in society as citizens, including a range of stakeholders, in a style or styles open enough so that all stakeholders can be heard, we are not doing philanthropy, caritas, agape, tzedakah, social responsibility, or magnanimity, we are not making for a better world, we are serving --- May God Bless us all! -- ourselves. And the pertinent topic, per Strategic Issues above is how to make our own waterwheel turn faster in the torrent of wealth damned up in these narrow channels. Not that it is all bad, for without the dam we would have no power and light. And perhaps if with that light and power, we can turn charitable planning into a going concern, some good might be done, for ourselves, society, and the client.
Wealth Bondage
The above is the speech I will not give, for I do want to be invited back, and to take such a tone would be rude, "over the top." Instead I will suggest we need some kind of new brochure. But, in the spirit of reciprocity, I have emailed an invitation to the conveners, in the hopes that they will drop by WB for a little after hours conversation. It is hard for them too, I am sure, keeping a straight face at these events.
Now, can anyone help me with this bowtie? Or, maybe I should wear my TX String Bolo, with the Sterling Silver Longhorn? How about my Black Leather Chaps, with chrome studded codpiece? The boots and spurs! Admittedly, The Rope, Bullwhip, and WB Branding Iron might be too much, but let's bring them just in case.
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