Must Have Philanthropy / ESG Books for 2023
From the growing crisis in charitable giving to the need to invest in advocacy and bring about systemic change
I hope everyone is off to a great start to the year. My second batch of recommended reads for 2023 focuses on philanthropy, corporate ESG efforts and unlocking funds at scale for charities dealing with some of the biggest issues confronting humanity.
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Bono’s Surrender
In his latest book, Bono includes a reflection on his experience in co-founding the ONE Campaign and advocating on international development and global health issues. Besides being grateful to the shout out for Global Citizen alongside many other fantastic organizations, Bono issues a strong call for funders to step up and invest in the power of social movements to help “transform life for millions of people.” This is a compelling excerpt:
Bono’s argument strikes a chord with an article I wrote late last year to coincide with Giving Tuesday in the US. You can revisit the piece here and here are some key points:
Given the short attention span of today’s political elites, charities – and those focused on movement building and advocacy specifically – fill a critical void in ensuring the policymaking process is responsive to the needs of poorer nations and marginalized communities…
An advocacy organization is concerned first and foremost with influencing policymakers and shaping policy in the interests of the world’s marginalized and most vulnerable. Advocacy organizations recognize that solutions to the world’s problems – like climate change and extreme poverty – are systemic and therefore require systemic solutions that can not be solved without proper investment.
Impeded by this out of date view of what is and is not considered a legitimate and acceptable charitable activity, campaigners and advocates are left struggling to gain the attention of the world’s most powerful institutions to get meaningful policies implemented that could positively impact millions of people. And who are they up against as they compete for policymakers’ time and attention? Highly paid corporate and partisan lobbyists representing big brands with seemingly unlimited budgets, able to pour in resources over the long term to shape agendas in their self-interest.
Bono and ONE are both examples of the power advocacy can have in changing policies, which in turn help provide millions of people with life saving vaccines. Ultimately, to bring about the systemic change the world is in desperate need of we need more funders to back advocacy movements.
The Davos Man: How Billionaires Devoured The World, by Peter S. Goodman
In this relatively quick read, Goodman dissects not only Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, but the shortcomings of current approaches to philanthropy more broadly. Personally, alongside his forensic analysis of vaccine nationalism during the pandemic, I found Goodman’s account of financial injustice and predatory lending to emerging and developing countries very well done. If you read one chapter in this book make sure it's the detailed insight into how Argentina’s bondholders, mostly in London and New York, conducted their negotiations with the country’s political leadership in an alleged attempt to make an example out of the country “to deter other governments from seeking relief.”
Unfortunately, this is a story that continues to play out as we’ve seen this year in Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Senegal and Kenya and other high debt saturated countries. So far corporate lenders have appeared unwilling to participate in debt relief measures, demanding “poor countries make good on their debts” even in the face of a multitude of crises - from the pandemic through to the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on global energy prices - that have decimated their revenues. And the result, as Goodman points out, is that countries “skimp [investments] on schools and health care so they can continue making debt repayments to Davos man.” This is despite the fact that if they were granted some measure of debt relief in the form of loan forgiveness “they could invest in infrastructure, education, health care, and other spurs to development that would allow them to earn money needed to meet their obligations.” I highly recommend this recently published overview of Ghana’s debt crisis to see how this debt crisis has only gotten worse over the course of the last year.
Fortunately, leaders like Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados are taking it on themselves to challenge the underlying causes of such debt traps. 2023 will be a deciding moment to see if this translates into broader systemic reform. One interesting reform that Mottley is pushing as a new norm, and which I wrote about earlier this year, are disaster clauses in bonds. Such clauses would enable the borrowing country to suspend debt repayments in the event of an economically decimating crisis like a hurricane or pandemic. These short term relief clauses would also arguably decrease the odds of a government defaulting on its debt and in turn increase the likelihood that they will be repaid.
The Generosity Crisis: The Case for Radical Connection to Solve Humanity’s Greatest Challenges, by Brian Crimmins, Nathan Chappell, & Michael Ashley, and Solving The Giving Pledge Bottleneck, by Sean Davis
I have put these books together because they deal with two sides of the same coin in many respects when it comes to the crisis confronting modern day philanthropy.
When I was first asked to provide a testimonial for The Generosity Crisis, I had no idea the extent to which philanthropic giving had already been declining in the US. While the Ukrainian war has seen a slight bump in giving this year, overall the trend is on a downward trajectory. The present economic downturn will likely force philanthropists to tighten the purse strings even further, at a time when their funds are needed more than ever. The Generosity Crisis begins by inviting the reader to imagine a world without charity and goes on to predict the end of philanthropy as we know it if current trends continue. Crimmins, Chappell and Ashley ultimately offer a number of actions that can be taken at an individual and policy level to collapse in generosity. Yet, arguably it’s biggest impact will hopefully be to draw attention to the crisis in the first place and help mobilize an army of advocates to reverse this trend.
Davis’ book unpacks the so-called “Giving Pledge bottleneck. The giving pledge was Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s initiative to get the world’s billionaires to agree to give away their wealth within ten years of their passing. According to Davis, only about 200 of 2800 billionaires have signed the pledge and of these only a tiny fraction have either met or are on track to meet their pledges. Indeed, Davis notes that 10 of the original signers have since deceased and yet not even 50% of their estates have still not been given away in philanthropy. Davos’ own solution involves applying a private equity lens to address this bottleneck and believes the private sector could absorb 95% of philanthropic funds at scale to address the biggest challenges of our generation (although here I think he could have touched on the value proposition represented by investments into advocacy movements).
Timely. Compelling. Relevant. Both books make for essential reading for those in the non-profit, philanthropic and CSR fields. For my part, I’ve written previously about how the way we've been doing charity has long been in need of an overhaul. Now more than ever we need philanthropic capital to be bold, to move at speed and rise to the challenges we face. One way philanthropists can leverage their giving and have a huge multiplier effect is by investing in movement building, policy entrepreneurship & advocacy. Addressing global challenges like climate change and poverty requires systemic solutions at the end of the day, which is what advocacy is all about. Investing in such movements represent a huge opportunity for foundations and philanthropists to have an outsized impact on society, both locally and globally.
Fortunately, leaders in philanthropy like Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation and Mark Malloch Brown of Open Society Foundation are setting precedents for what investments in advocacy and systems change can look like. I am looking forward to checking out Darren’s new book when it comes out this year and it’ll be definitely one to look out for:
