Among the thousands of students graduating from San Diego State this weekend is one of California’s youngest and most unlikely philanthropists.

I first profiled Fabiola Moreno Ruelas, now 21, three summers ago, after meeting her in Gonzales, her small hometown in the Salinas Valley. Her story was simple—but unforgettable.

Fabiola had very few resources growing up. Her father had been deported, her family was evicted from housing, and she and her mother relied on food stamps to eat and on donations from neighbors and church for clothes and schoolbooks. She did well in school, but she needed both scholarships for tuition and additional money—from Gonzales community members—to cover her living expenses in order to go to college.

As a teen, Fabiola was seriously injured in a car accident—fracturing her skull, wrist, and back. But that accident would improve her fortunes. At age 18, during her freshman year, she received a settlement of $29,000.

Then she made a remarkable choice. Rather than spend the money on herself or her family, she chose to give back to Gonzales, the community that had helped her, and other poor kids. She used the money to start her own scholarship fund, the Ruelas Fulfillment Foundation, managed by the Rotary Club. She created an application—a 2.9 GPA and 80 hours of community service were required for eligibility—and launched with the offer of four $500 grants, to help Gonzales kids with college living expenses.

Not long after I met Fabiola in summer 2019, she headed back to San Diego for her sophomore year. Dropout rates are high for first-generation college students from less-advantaged families. She confessed to me that she found university difficult during her freshman year, and that she had contemplated leaving school.

In the end, her instinct for giving would help see her through.

It wasn’t easy, and it was sometimes scary. In her sophomore fall, the academic demands grew, and, even with scholarships, she juggled two and three jobs to afford to stay in school.

Then, early in 2020, she suffered two personal blows. In January, she got the unexpected and unsettling news that her father, back in Mexico, had died. A few weeks later, in February, her stepfather got hit by a big rig while riding a bicycle and suffered near-fatal head injuries.

As Fabiola was processing those hardships, COVID hit. She was a student resident advisor in a dorm—so when campus shut down, she at once lost her place to live and one of her jobs. She went home, only to confront more death and grief. COVID fatality rates were especially high in the Salinas Valley in spring and summer 2020. She felt unhealthy and isolated.

“At that point, I really did feel like I lost everything,” Fabiola tells me. “I was grieving my father and then my stepfather … I was grieving my [student] residents.”

She says she found purpose, and comfort, in giving away money. She funded three more students through her scholarship fund. And during the George Floyd-inspired protests in summer 2020, she decided to give $1,000 from the fund to the NAACP chapter at San Diego State.

She stayed enrolled in school, which was conducted virtually, and soon found online work, mentoring and tutoring other first-generation, low-income students through their first years in college. She also got a boost from emergency federal payments to college students, though she was outraged that some other students—those without legal immigration status—weren’t eligible for the federal money. So, in January 2021, she made two more grants from her college fund to undocumented students, both at San Diego State. When she was down, one of her grantees—an engineering student—gave her a pep talk, she recalls.

She was always busy, between work (one of her jobs was in the university donor relations office) and studying political science. But she still found time to get more involved in student organizations and government—including as vice president of systemwide affairs for the California State Student Association, and, at San Diego State, as student diversity commissioner for Associated Students and as vice president of the student advisory board of the Educational Opportunity Program.

Graduating, she says, feels more like a beginning than an end. She’s not just the first college graduate in her family. She managed, just barely, to graduate without taking on debt. That will make it easier for her to do what she really wants: give away money to others.

All told, Fabiola has now given scholarships to 12 students from Gonzales High School, along with the NAACP and San Diego State students’ grants. She is raising money for more scholarships, with a particular emphasis on undocumented students, and helping students meet their basic needs.

She may even make a wider impact, too, since the governor put her on his vision council for reimagining post-secondary education. And while she isn’t sure what exactly will be next, she can raise money, and has unusual first-hand experience in increasing access to higher education.

Perhaps she could become the chancellor of the Cal State system, she muses.

After all, the job is open.

The post California’s Most Unlikely Philanthropist Is Starting a New Chapter appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Although we’ve forgotten his name, Klopsch and the Christian Herald fostered a popular movement of faith-based philanthropy that rivaled the achievements of competing humanitarian agencies like the American Red Cross and provided a sharp contrast to another trend in American giving at the time: the rise of scientific philanthropy, championed by Andrew Carnegie. During its heyday, the Christian Herald engaged ordinary citizens from across the U.S. in efforts to assuage all kinds of adversity: from homelessness among New York City’s unemployed to poverty among formerly enslaved people in the American South; from disease and destitution among survivors of massacres in Armenia to hardships following natural disasters in India, China, Scandinavia, Macedonia, Japan, Italy, and Mexico. By the time Klopsch died in 1910, Christian Herald subscribers had donated over $3.3 million (equivalent to approximately $89 million in 2019) to domestic and international causes. No other relief organization in this period came close to matching its fund-raising record or ability to arouse popular concern for suffering.

Key to Klopsch’s success in making the Christian Herald “a medium of American bounty to the needy throughout the world” was his insistence that philanthropy was not the province of the privileged elite but a popular practice in which all citizens ought to participate. In a humanitarian crisis, each dollar made a difference—even a nickel could buy a loaf of bread. Every person who could spare a penny should share with sufferers in distress.

By democratizing philanthropy, the Christian Herald’s campaigns made charity a distinguishing mark of American character, Klopsch contended, and helped unify an increasingly diverse population. The common enterprise of serving others, he argued, let people overcome political disagreements, social prejudices, economic antagonisms, regional animosities, cultural conflicts, and religious discord—all of which were on the rise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as Americans argued over immigration, race, income inequality and labor unrest, imperialism, women’s rights, evolution, and the Bible. Whatever their differences in these arenas, Klopsch insisted, surely American citizens could unite around the commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The Christian Herald was particularly well-positioned to build solidarity, Klopsch asserted, because the newspaper avoided controversial subjects, attracted subscribers from all across the U.S., and appealed to adherents of many different denominations. Although the overwhelming majority of readers were white Protestants, the editors took pains to include stories about African American churches and charities, to report on the plights of Native Americans and Asian immigrants, to highlight the work of Jewish philanthropists, and to build bridges with Catholics. At a time when many Protestant leaders supported racial segregation, expressed anti-Semitism, and accused the Pope of conspiring to take over the United States, the Christian Herald’s ecumenism was noteworthy.

Klopsch’s sympathy for the downtrodden “whatever their color, race, or religion” stemmed from his own experiences. As a young man, he was forced to quit school to help support his struggling immigrant family. When run-ins with the law landed him in jail, he came face-to-face with men of many different backgrounds for whom crime had seemed the only means of providing food for their wives and children. These encounters prompted Klopsch to empathize with those whose misfortunes contributed to their distress, dissipation, or even delinquency.

“There is no depth of human misery and degradation so low that it cannot be reached by the love of Christ,” he concluded. Everyone deserved a second chance.

After his release from prison, Klopsch strove to put these convictions into practice. While working to establish himself in the newspaper industry, he began teaching Sunday School at Talmage’s church. He soon formed a friendship with the popular minister, and the two devised a plan to acquire the Christian Herald and accomplish “many good works” by publicizing humanitarian crises and urging readers to help the poor. Klopsch landed at “the front in almost every national and international enterprise of benevolent or humane character,” his biographer wrote; his energetic outreach and innovative methods “gave the man and his journal the highest imaginable prestige, and put the Christian Herald upon a pinnacle of popularity as an organ of wide-spread humanitarianism.”

Yet even as Klopsch persuaded many that being American meant serving those in need, not everyone agreed with his ideas. Klopsch faced criticism from those who believed that charity perpetuated poverty. Many of his contemporaries insisted that indigence was the product of indolence, intemperance, or iniquity. Wealth came to the worthy who worked hard, stewarded resources wisely, and lived virtuously. Although mishaps might sometimes cause unmerited hardship, most often the destitute were responsible for their distress. According to this logic, providing disaster assistance was permissible (as long as the damage could not have been avoided through better preparation), but aiding the poor ought to be prohibited. Helping those who refused to help themselves encouraged a “vicious and willful pauperism” that would only “increase in proportion to the relief provided.”

One of the most prominent advocates of this position was industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie. In a series of essays published just prior to Klopsch’s purchase of the Christian Herald, Carnegie chastised practitioners of “so called charity” who gave assistance to “the slothful, the drunkard, the unworthy.” Aiding such reprobates, he argued, interfered with “the survival of the fittest” and posed a “serious obstacle to the improvement of our race.” Rather than risk abetting “irreclaimably destitute, shiftless, and worthless” beggars through “the practice of indiscriminate giving,” philanthropists should distinguish between the deserving and the derelict—or, even better, avoid almsgiving altogether and instead invest in institutions that would place “within reach ladders upon which the aspiring can rise”: public parks, free libraries, universities, music halls, art galleries, bathhouses, and churches.

Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” inspired the growth of scientific philanthropy, an influential movement that developed systematic processes for segregating the meritorious from the miscreants. Charitable organizations that adopted this approach required the needy to apply for aid. Investigators interviewed candidates, asking about their work habits, health, spending patterns, housekeeping, children’s education, and even religious practices. Sometimes “Friendly Visitors” would call on supplicants in their homes to confirm that the information they provided was accurate and their needs were genuine. Petitioners judged worthy might receive monetary assistance. Those found wanting were offered training in self-reliance, or deemed intractable and cut off from any support.

As scientific philanthropy gained authority, the Christian Herald’s work came under increasing attack. When the Quito sailed for India, critics questioned sending aid to people who might be responsible for their own plight. The famine, some suggested, was the product of “improvident” choices made by “backward” peasants who failed to adopt modern irrigation techniques or “sow their seed at the proper season.” The Christian Herald’s sponsorship of domestic charities also troubled detractors. The newspaper’s support for New York City’s Bowery Mission—an organization that provided food and shelter for the hungry and homeless—drew especially virulent condemnation from “professional philanthropists” who charged that breadlines, soup kitchens, and “indiscriminate doles” attracted “tramps, panhandlers, and vagrants” who refused honest work in favor of free handouts.

Klopsch refuted these allegations. Although he and his colleagues at the Christian Herald acknowledged that modernizing agricultural methods might mitigate food shortages in India and elsewhere, they insisted that providing emergency relief to famine sufferers was a moral and spiritual duty. And while they conceded that scientific methods could improve efficiency in philanthropy, they repudiated the claim that charity encouraged delinquency. Klopsch knew from personal experience how difficult it was to get by in a volatile economy with few social safety nets. “What ‘pauperizes the people,’” he proclaimed, “is not the helping hand they occasionally get at a pinch from their sympathetic brothers and sisters, but low sweatshop wages, exorbitant rents, high prices for food … wholesale enforced idleness, privation and sickness. For how much or how little of this the poor themselves are responsible any fair-minded person can judge.”

Rather than blaming the needy for their penury or condemning the Christian Herald for trying to help, Klopsch argued, proponents of scientific philanthropy ought to recognize that the “real root of the problem” of poverty lay in structural inequalities. If anyone was to be held accountable for suffering, it was greedy industrialists who amassed colossal fortunes by extracting resources from colonized peoples, paying employees a pittance, and inflating prices. Instead of building colleges, libraries, and other institutions designed to “uplift the masses,” Klopsch and his associates suggested, millionaires like Carnegie should expand employment opportunities, offer higher salaries, and support legislation to ensure fair labor and living conditions.

Throughout his tenure at the Christian Herald, Klopsch endorsed social reforms, legal regulations, and religious enterprises designed to redress the adverse effects of laissez-faire capitalism. In his later years, he promoted the platform of “Christian Socialism” put forward by the Rev. Charles Sheldon, who coined the slogan “What Would Jesus Do?” This ambitious program called for substituting cooperation for competition in commercial enterprises and instituting “common ownership of … common needs” such as transportation facilities, heating and electric utilities, water and food sources, and health care in order to create “a new and different order of social life” based on “the teaching of the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.”

None of these proposals came to fruition during Klopsch’s lifetime—and after his death, the establishment of large philanthropic foundations, the professionalization of social work, the expansion of the welfare state, and the federalization of foreign aid diminished the Christian Herald’s stature as a premier humanitarian aid agency.

The newspaper ceased publication in the 1990s, but the issues it raised persist. Today’s debates about poverty assistance, immigration, and global inequality reveal that Americans remain divided over who deserves help and the best ways to create a just society. Still, Klopsch’s legacy lives on among the millions who believe that alleviating affliction is the moral obligation of every individual and carry forward Klopsch’s conviction that the gospel of grace trumps the gospel of wealth.

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This spring—as federal prosecutors announced a major college admissions scandal that had ensnared wealthy movie stars and prominent Californians, who paid millions in bribes to get their kids into elite universities—a poor kid from a poor California town faced her own dilemma about money and universities: How could she use her own meager bank account to help others go to college?

Fabiola Moreno Ruelas, an 18-year-old from the Salinas Valley town of Gonzales, was about to become California’s most unlikely philanthropist. She had not had a glittering, Carnegie-style (or even Kardashian-style) upbringing. In fact, she had suffered much of the worst of California, from the deportation of her father, to a serious auto accident, to the eviction of her family from their home.

But when Fabiola received $29,000 on her 18th birthday—a windfall that was itself a product of a moment of misfortune—she knew she didn’t want to spend it on herself. Yes, $29,000 was far less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars that rich parents had paid to admissions counselors and college coaches in bribes to guarantee college for their own kids. But it was enough, she thought, to make a difference in the lives of her friends and neighbors in Gonzales.

On the one hand, this is a simple story about a small, new scholarship program. On the other, it is an urgent and timely fable about the real meaning of poverty, the true nature of generosity and community, and the abundance of spirit that can spin bad luck into good.

As such, it also might be considered a 21st-century updating of another child of the Salinas Valley, John Steinbeck, who advised in The Grapes of Wrath: “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.”

Fabiola was born in Salinas and moved to Gonzales, 20 minutes south along the 101 Freeway, when she was two. Her father, who was undocumented, was deported when she was still a small child, but she and her older siblings stayed on in Gonzales. In selection of a hometown, at least, she would prove to be very lucky.

Gonzales is home to 10,000 people, more than one-third of them children. Many of their parents work long hours in local processing plants or in the surrounding fields of green vegetables. Gonzales is neither rich (median household income is $53,000) nor well-educated, with just 10 percent of adults holding college degrees.

But over many years, Gonzales has developed a local culture that is extraordinarily supportive of children. A dense web of programs is available for kids during the summer and after school, involving sports, service, or jobs. And Gonzales celebrates its children’s achievements forcefully. On a recent visit, the city had posted banners all around town featuring recent Gonzales High School graduates and the colleges they are attending this fall.

Fabiola and her family always struggled, but they found that people in Gonzales were reliably there to help—to find cheap or donated clothes (via a local church), or to get them signed up for food stamps or welfare. Fabiola started kindergarten at the young age of four—her mother needed a place to send her—and her teachers bought her first set of school supplies and uniforms. In middle school, she was able to do sports because they were free, and she helped other members of the community to fundraise for youth programs.

But in high school, her life got even tougher. Freshman year, she was in a very serious car accident while riding with five friends to celebrate a birthday. She fractured her skull, wrist, and back, but at least she and everyone else survived.

After her sophomore year, her family was evicted from their apartment. They had nowhere else to go, and though her mother and new stepfather were working, every paycheck would go to pay the lawyers’ fees to contend with a lawsuit from the landlord who had evicted them, she says. With a new baby brother, the family moved around from place to place, depending on the generosity of neighbors. They collected plastic bottles from the side of the freeway, redeeming them to get money for food. They didn’t have money to pay their water bill, so Fabiola filled up jars at a local elementary school.

It was the indignity of fetching water that became a turning point for Fabiola. As she stood at the school faucet, she realized she did not want to live like this. She had been an indifferent student, but education, she realized, was the only thing that was free in her life, so she decided to seize its opportunities for all they were worth. Her brother-in-law gave her his old computer. She got straight A’s her junior year. She even took a sociology class at Hartnell College up in Salinas, because the class and the books were free. She went to the Gonzales Starbucks—not to buy anything, but to use the free Internet so she could do her homework.

Joining the Gonzales Youth Council—which operates like a young person’s city council, even writing local ordinances—didn’t cost her any money, so she did that, too. Senior year, she applied to become a youth commissioner of the council, to represent the body at the school board and city council. Soon all of Gonzales’ opportunities came at her, including a paid fellowship with the city government.

No one in her family had completed college; one older sister had dropped out of Hartnell. But Fabiola’s mentors at City Hall encouraged her. And the school superintendent even took her along on a trip to San Diego, where she discovered she liked San Diego State. She applied, and was admitted, with $13,000 in scholarship money. But she would need to pay $5,000 out of her own pocket just to survive, and she didn’t have it. Where would she get the money?

Gonzales, once again, would supply the answer. The town has a tradition of local citizens starting small scholarship funds. A local firefighter, who died in 1996, endowed a scholarship for students who have a 3.0 GPA and are interested in the emergency field. A family of teachers set up another scholarship. And then there’s Maury Treleven, who works with the city and set up the Treleven Family “Service is Learned” Scholarship, which gives money, no strings attached, to college-bound Gonzales kids.

Fabiola won a $5,000 Treleven scholarship and headed off to San Diego State last fall, when she was still just 17 years old.

When she turned 18 during the year, she suddenly came into a bit of money. As part of the settlement from that freshman year car accident, she was entitled to $29,000 when she became an adult.

Fabiola mulled over what to do with the windfall. She talked with her family about the possibility of starting a business or buying a house for her mother. But as she and her family thought more about it, they wanted to make sure the money didn’t disappear quickly. And Fabiola felt strongly that she needed to give something back to a community that had supported her through so many difficult years. She decided to start with the sort of scholarship program she knew well, because she herself had benefited from it.

In December, she helped set the program up, naming it the Ruelas Fulfillment Scholarship, in honor of her mother. She worked with her high school counselor to create an application for high school seniors seeking extra money they would need to be able to afford to live during college. A 2.9 GPA and 80 hours of community service are required for eligibility. The Rotary Club agreed to manage her scholarship fund, so that the money would grow and last longer.

Thirty applications came in, and it was in March, with the news dominated by the college admissions scandal, that Fabiola awarded her first scholarships—$500 each to four students. She says she selected applicants who showed great resilience. One of the recipients is a student she ran against in the youth commissioner elections. She plans to make similar awards the next two years, and then see if she might be able to raise money to do even more.

“I was a little selfless in thinking about this money, but everyone in Gonzales was very selfless in helping me growing up,” she says. “Our community put us first.”

I met Fabiola in Salinas, where she was staying with an older sister for the summer. She exuded appreciation—for her life, for family, and for California.

When I asked her what she made of the college admissions scandal, she expressed some puzzlement. Didn’t those rich parents know that everyone would have been better off if they’d devoted their own financial windfalls to college scholarships for all the kids who can’t afford it?

In that answer lies a parable about two Californias—one rich and old and pessimistic about their own children’s abilities to rise, and the other poor but young and optimistic and determined to lift everyone up.

Which California would you rather live in?

The post The Fabulous Fable of Fabiola’s Scholarship Fund appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For some, a bureaucratic state was the answer. As was argued first by the Socialist Party of America in the early 20th century, the state could equalize wealth inequalities. Later, with the Depression, a great number of Americans came to believe that such a state could mitigate the social problems of the country’s volatile economic order.

A differing view came most prominently from steel-tycoon-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. At the turn of the century, Carnegie argued that industrialists such as himself, not state bureaucrats, were best suited for playing the intertwined roles of wealth redistributor and addressor of societal problems caused by industrialization. If the state provided for citizens’ basic needs, Carnegie feared workers would be disincentivized from improving their work ethic and striving. And he imagined that those who made the wealth would know best how to allocate it on behalf of the public. In an 1889 essay titled “The Gospel of Wealth,” Carnegie argued that philanthropy, rather than the state, was best suited to tame the problems originating from modern industrial life.

This national debate came to a head in the late 1920s and early 1930s, under President Herbert Hoover.

Within months of Hoover’s entering White House, the stock market crash of 1929 introduced Americans to what would become one of the most dire economic traumas in U.S. history. But at first, Hoover did not appreciate the magnitude of the economic crisis that would define his presidency. He focused instead on the country’s general social problems, including its modern economic life and the migration of many people from rural communities to urban settings. In addressing such problems, Hoover was rather sympathetic to Andrew Carnegie’s preference for mobilizing philanthropy.

Hoover invited Rockefeller Foundation President Max Mason to meet with him in Washington, D.C. The Rockefeller Foundation had recently taken over the funding of the social sciences from its auxiliary organization, the Laura Spelman Memorial Foundation. President Hoover wanted to see if the Foundation would be willing to fund a project larger in size and scope than anyone had conceived of previously.

Mason, in his diary of October 2, 1929, wrote that Hoover had told him that he had appointed a committee of five individuals from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Russell Sage Foundation, the University of Chicago, and the University of North Carolina to report on a possible study of trends and problems in the social field. “He expected this committee to determine what problems could be successfully attacked and to propose means of attacking them.” As Hoover explained to Mason, the SSRC could organize and manage the holistic survey of national trends and the Foundation could fund it.

Another president might have asked the U.S. Congress to fund such a nationwide investigation, rather than approaching a private foundation such as the Rockefeller Foundation. But, throughout his presidency, Herbert Hoover would remain hesitant to call upon the state to address social ills. Hoover “stewed in anxieties about the dole and endlessly lashed the Congress and the country with lectures about preserving the nation’s moral fiber, not to mention the integrity of the federal budget, by avoiding direct federal payments for unemployment relief,” the historian David M. Kenney would write in Freedom from Fear.

The project that Hoover proposed was eventually released in 1933 as Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends. This two-volume manuscript would become the first comprehensive, policy-oriented study of a national problem utilizing U.S. social researchers across the country. The research committee for Recent Social Trends met for three years and surveyed social changes throughout the country. Sociologist Howard Odum, the assistant director of research on the project, would later write: “[a]t no time in the history of the United States…had there been attempted a comprehensive, well integrated, and coordinated campaign in which the social sciences jointly attacked the emerging social problems of the nation.”

In response to Hoover’s insistence on limiting the role of the state in taming modern economic life, the American public subsequently elected his antidote, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had endorsed pensions and government-sponsored unemployment insurance, would lead the expansion of the federal government in an effort to curb the national trauma of the Great Depression. His long tenure, from 1933 until his death in 1945, pushed the debate about how to redistribute wealth and recalibrate inequities decidedly in favor of a strong bureaucratic state.

Arriving in theaters a year after President Roosevelt’s death, It’s a Wonderful Life did not echo the national sentiment at the time in favor of a strong state. But neither did it embrace Carnegie’s proposed social role for philanthropy. Rather, the movie provided a third option for taming the volatile and problematic nature of modern economic life: a charitable private sector.

It’s a Wonderful Life tells the life story of George Bailey, an uncelebrated local hero who begrudgingly assumes responsibility for his father’s building and loan company in a small town.

Following in his father’s footsteps (though betraying higher business acumen than his dad), George Bailey builds the building and loan into an institution capable of helping working-class community members build and buy their own decent homes and to provide for their own families. In practice, Bailey brings empathy to his market relationships as a banker; and in doing so, he sacrifices profits and individual opportunity in order to serve his community. In effect, the movie’s narrative arc underscores how Bailey plays a central role in making his town stronger, happier, and more stable economically.

It’s a Wonderful Life thus proposes that market relationships can take on the compassionate perspectives of their participants—and thus tame the negative consequences of modern economic life.

In 1946, this was a rather avant-garde proposition. At the time of its release, after all, many Americans imagined that a robust state, and to a lesser degree charitable giving, could be the key players capable of controlling the negative consequences of modern industrial life. Today, Americans still consider these to be the two main avenues for addressing modern economic inequities. And yet, Americans also have come to embrace a third option proposed by It’s a Wonderful Life. We see this option in Americans’ comfort with (and advocacy of) various forms of more empathetic market relationships from fair trade and impact investing to microlending and benefit corporations.

This is to say that a visible number of Americans today are trying to address the negative consequences of modern economic life by redefining their market relationships to be a bit more humane, empathetic, and driven less singularly by profit. And yet, compared to Bailey and his community in It’s a Wonderful Life, Americans are less certain that charitable relationships in the market will substantively transform economic life in the United States. Because unlike the fictional characters in this 1946 movie, Americans are rooted in actual American life.

And in actuality, Americans remain torn as to whether the market needs to be tamed, and if it does, what exactly could tame it. The answer might be Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Hoover’s vision for private giving. Or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s strong bureaucratic state. Or perhaps—as It’s a Wonderful Life and a growing number of contemporary Americans are suggesting—a more charitable private sector.

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Enjoying the benefits of whiteness, they arrived just in time for the physical expansion of the United States across the continent, referred to by patriotic orators as “Manifest Destiny.” Americans who moved west desired consumer goods to make life comfortable. Jews, as peddlers or settled merchants, followed these farmers, miners, loggers, and other pioneers, selling them clothing, shoes, household goods, and other personal and domestic items.

Many Jewish Americans thrived; Rosenwald’s success was monumental. As the genius behind the expansion of Sears, he became the 57th-wealthiest person in U.S. history, according to one recent estimate. Still, he identified with his fellows, consistently remarking how, as a Jew, he owed so much to America, which had played such an important part in making his luck possible.

Rosenwald gave away his riches as a new American, grateful to his country, but also as a Jew: The inheritor of a tradition that emphasized individuals’ responsibilities to their communities. Despite his own vast wealth, Rosenwald believed that an America without great gaps between rich and poor, and without sharp divides based on religion and race, would be a better place to live—safer for Jews, and for others. His charitable works reflected his conviction.

Rosenwald did not like the words “philanthropy” or “charity”—his approach to giving was informed, instead, by the world of consumer commerce. As a businessman, he believed he had a responsibility to provide goods to people who wanted them, and that consumption was a unifying force. A nation that consumes together, he would say, could find ways to stay and live together. Rosenwald’s idea of the civic good held that no one should be so poor, so disinherited, and so alienated as not to be able to afford or want cutlery, dishes, wallpapers, new dresses, and beyond.

The Pee Dee Rosenwald School, in Marion County, South Carolina, c. 1935. Photo courtesy of South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

Of course, a constantly expanding population of American consumers—spanning otherwise profound divides of class, geography, and race—had helped make his fortune. Rosenwald, known to his friends as JR, grew up comfortably, but only that. His father, a German-Jewish immigrant, started out in America selling small goods house to house, a pack on his back, but eventually became the owner of a modestly successful men’s clothing store in Springfield, Illinois. JR, who was born in 1862 and grew up behind the cash register of his father’s store, aspired as a young man to make his mark in the world of business. He was struggling as a manufacturer and salesman of men’s summer suits when he got an opportunity to invest in Sears, Roebuck—a relatively new, but already successful, mail order operation specializing in the sale of watches. Buying in seemed like a good idea, but JR did not have the cash. He turned to relatives to loan him the money.

It was a fortuitous move. Rosenwald, who had a keen read on consumers, went on to oversee a colossal transformation at Sears, turning it into one of the nation’s largest retailers and becoming a very rich man in the process. He figured out how to sell to all Americans—rural, urban, and suburban; poor and well-off; immigrant and native-born—delivering a dazzling array of stuff they wanted (or learned to want through Sears’s wish book, the fabulously popular catalog). A shopper could buy almost anything from Sears, except for firearms and patent medicine: clothing, kitchen equipment, sheets and towels, blankets, mirrors, tools, musical instruments, even a house to live in with all its furnishings. These and so many other goods would come right to the customer’s doorstep, no matter where they lived.

Even before Rosenwald made his fortune, he had a vision of someday giving it away. As a young man, he dreamed of earning $15,000 a year—and, he said, he knew what he would do with the money. His family could live nicely on one-third, and he would plow another third back into the business. He thought he would give away the last third. When the time came, Rosenwald did so, with a vigor and zest that came to define his public life. He gave famously to causes that helped African Americans, but also to Jewish projects, in America and abroad. He worked to expand medical care and improve medical education, public health and hospitals. His gifts enhanced the city of Chicago. He created the Museum of Science and Industry and the University of Chicago. He made possible Jane Addams’ operation at Hull House and Grace and Edith Abbott’s Immigrant Protective League, organizations that worked directly with the city’s poorest residents.

Rosenwald had a philosophy of giving. He never made donations to endowments because he fervently believed each generation had to tackle the needs of its own age, and that those who gave should not saddle future institutions with mandates conceived in the past. He refused to allow his name to be affixed to buildings or walls, and did not want it formally and permanently attached to projects that would persist beyond his lifetime. When in 1917 he organized his foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, he set it up to expire 25 years after his death and charged it with spending down the principal. Let his children, he argued, who would be wealthy indeed, create and support the organizations and institutions that they wanted to advance—not the ones he might have foisted on them.

Rosenwald did not shy away from publicly proclaiming his gifts and their scale. Ever the civic activist, he believed that announcing how much he planned to give might inspire others—particularly others with means—to act likewise. He may have been the first giver in American history to implement the match. Rosenwald would announce, with bravado, that he planned to give whatever amount to whichever undertaking, but only if others collectively raised an equal amount. He operated on the logic that supporting the public made a giver a better person—and thus, by insisting on the match, he was helping his fellow citizens.

One famous gift demonstrates how Rosenwald put his principles to work: his massive project of building elementary schools for African American children in Southern states. He embarked on the effort in 1917; by the time of his death in 1932, he had funded almost 6,000 schools. They came to be known as Rosenwald Schools, though he had never wished that to be the case. He had wanted the institutions to be known by the names of the communities they served.

Other aspects of the school project more closely reflected his dictates. There was a match: Rosenwald would build only if states provided funds as well, and included the new schools for black children in the public system, supervising them just as they did the white schools. Rosenwald’s offer functioned as a way to entice the white Southern power structure to take responsibility for the education of black children, which he saw as a step towards equalizing resources. Similarly, Rosenwald asked African American residents to help by providing sweat equity, literally by building the schools. They could help by providing lumber from their sawmills or bricks from their kilns. They could provide housing for the teachers who would come to staff the schools.

Rosenwald repeated this pattern time and time again, to the ultimate benefit of millions across the nation. The catalog of his good works, all fueled by a belief in the power of consumption, augments his portrait as a grateful American of immigrant parentage who believed that wealth brought obligations; that being a good American involved making the country a better place; and that he, a very lucky individual, had a responsibility to empower and inspire others.

The post The Jewish Immigrant Philanthropist Who Didn’t Like the Word “Charity” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Charity singles are the songs specially recorded by musical artists to benefit charitable causes. Perhaps the best known are 1984’s Band Aid, which sang “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” about Ethiopian hunger, and 1985’s “We Are The World,” recorded on behalf of Africa. Critics have never warmed to the genre, but I surprised myself by growing attached to a number of them. Not only do they tend to have the hookiest of choruses, but there is also something particularly pleasurable about music that makes no effort whatsoever to be cool. In a cynical, highly marketed, autotuned, and media-managed music world, singers prepared to just turn up and belt out a chorus seem endearing. They have an appealing lack of glossiness, and even an artificial show of sincerity is more attractive than posed irony.

But there is one thing that is clear when you listen to charity singles. Most are bad. Very bad. Being bad was evidence that a single was thrown together to confront an emergency, with the participating artists typically lowering their usual standards. Bad was kind of the point; the rough production values demonstrated that no money was spent, much less wasted. In fact, the ones that were any good musically were usually unsuccessful.

There had been musical fundraisers before the 1980s. Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Leadbelly did a benefit show for California’s Dust Bowl refugees in 1940. Elvis did a 1961 benefit concert in Hawaii for the U.S.S. Arizona Pearl Harbor memorial and George Harrison did a 1971 concert for Bangladesh. But it was in the ‘80s that the charity single came into its own. Benefit songs sold philanthropy and Victorian values, raising funds for traditional causes such as Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, but in a style that appealed to youth-oriented broadcasting and made use of videos, which were then new.

Charity singles are never just about the money, though. They have an old-fashioned moral message and an idealistic take on the need for social change straight out of Dickens. These songs are statements—about who we think we are as a society, how we want to be seen, and which people in need we think we can “help.” “We Are the World”, we are reminded. “Do Something Now” for Christian Aid. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for the Bradford Football Disaster. The songs themselves created a utopian sense of community, however artificial, between donors and an imagined community of worthy recipients.

There was a recipe for building the perfect 80s charity single. Take an eclectic group of musicians who shouldn’t really get along. Include individual voices that have standout lines (good options are Boy George, Bruce Springsteen, and Sting). One participant must look as if they are taking their part too seriously, and one person must look as if they are not taking their part seriously enough. And there should be a video in which microphones, leads, lyric sheets, and producers are visible, as well as a collective chorus shot including people who did not necessarily perform on the record.

Your group of singers should include someone old, someone new, someone with genuine credibility, someone surprising, and a puppet. The puppets from the British satire Spitting Image appeared in the videos for charity singles, including Genesis’ 1986 song raising awareness of Middle East policy, “Land of Confusion.” (The puppets also made their own spoof charity single in 1990).

The Muppets have had a good run in charity singles too, from the ‘80s to the present day. More recently their theme tune was re-recorded to raise money for a New Zealand cancer charity, and Kermit the Frog performed a duet of “Rainbow Connection” with Ed Sheeran for Red Nose Day, a song that the Muppets and their fans have used to raise charity funds and awareness since the 1980s.

To go with the self-consciously eclectic stars, ‘80s charity single videos were produced in a deliberately slipshod way to emphasize the time and labour donated by musicians, producers, and technicians. The urgent nature of production was made clear in wilfully unprofessional-looking videos, thrown together in a hurry. Viewers got to see the nuts and bolts of the recording process, often with a motley skeleton crew portrayed mucking around together. In fact, the more uncomfortable the style pairings and the less likely the performers to work together normally, the clearer their own charitable donation was. The eclecticism of performers also made it easier to market a charity single broadly.

Whether it’s the performers singing together, the consumers buying the records, or the imagined recipients, everyone was part of the same community, headed up by the Muppets and Boy George. We weren’t just buying a single, we were buying a moral community. At a time when there was no such thing as society and greed was good, charity singles reminded us that there was another way, not perfect of course, but a statement of intent.

The problem with this recipe was that it became too familiar; once the format was instantly recognizable, charity singles lost their sense of spontaneity, their heart—and their charity.

Since that ‘80s heyday, and up to the most recent wave of recordings, the most significant charity single releases have been corporate events for corporate-style charities attached to telethons like Red Nose Day, Children in Need, or Band Aid reboots. These events are not the spontaneous thrown-together responses to crisis, but professionally organized and carefully planned and executed. Recent charity singles have been linked to reality TV show brands like The X Factor and BBC Music, rather than being built from particular pop tribes. The X Factor finalists used to produce a charity single and music video before the final winner of the show was anointed. Making it through the live rounds to perform on the video was a badge of honour in itself. For The X Factor contestants, the charity single was a bridge into a professional music career. There is no awareness to be raised. There is no community to be built. There is a television event to be marketed.

Recently, the charity single has made a comeback as artists step away from the corporate event model to create moments of intensely shared feeling. Once again, some charity singles seem to be about community and finding common ground amidst the shock waves of terrorism, mass violence, and climate change. Portishead, for example, has dedicated its haunting new ABBA cover “SOS” to the memory of Jo Cox, Labour MP, who was shot dead in the run up to the Brexit referendum. Adele and Christina Aguilera both used recent performances to express their reactions to the shooting in Orlando, Florida that killed 49 people at Pulse nightclub.

Indeed, Orlando may be a turning point for the charity single. The multiple charity singles for the Pulse shooting victims have not only been good, but also sung by the right people.

After Orlando, a vigil was held in London’s ‘gay village’ on Old Compton Street in Soho, which was the scene of a violent hate crime in 1999 when 39 people were injured by a politically motivated nail bombing. The London Gay Men’s Chorus performed at the Orlando vigil, singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the live performance captured a feeling of shared vulnerability and collective resilience. Their recording of a charity single marks the arrival of a transatlantic LGBTQ community. It will raise funds for both the Pulse Victims Fund and a British-based charity fighting hate crime.

The most striking example of what a charity single can do now is the recording of Bruce Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now” by 60 Broadway stars to raise money for the LGBT Centre of Central Florida. “Broadway for Orlando” contains touches of the Band Aid template. It was recorded in one sitting and the recording studio is the focus of the video. We see shots of the mixing desk. And while some of the singing leaves a bit to be desired, this is not a re-enactment of the ‘80s cliché. Whoopie Goldberg and Sarah Jessica Parker might not compete vocally, but they understand the point of a good cameo. This record is an authentic outpouring by a community with deep-rooted connections to the recipients of funds raised.

This is the charity single at its best. The Orlando charity singers are singing for themselves, and singing resilience into their communities. United in a choir of voices, the Orlando singles find a way to give voice to victims of the unspeakable.

The post We Are the World. We Are the Charity Single. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I assumed he was preparing food for the family to eat later in the day. Instead, he told me the sandwiches were going to nearby apartments of elder adults who had very limited access to food. He said this would likely be their meal for the day.

I asked if I could visit the seniors he was helping, maybe bring a casserole or some flowers to cheer up their day. And so the following Monday morning, my friend Marie and I brought little tuna casseroles and cupcakes, and joined the clergyman on visits to three apartments within three miles of my house.

Each stop went from bad to worse. The first apartment, a block from the Rose Parade route, was home to a lovely woman whose hands were crippled by arthritis and whose back was curled over. She could only push buttons on her microwave and use pop-top cans. The second apartment wasn’t much better. The third apartment stank of stagnant air and animal feces. A very thin woman with extremely swollen ankles the size of baseball bats and large eyeglasses sat on a bare daybed mattress with no sheets or blankets. Her closet door was open, and only one dress was hanging in it. She offered us water–apologizing for having nothing else to share–and said that the glasses were in the cupboard. We found just one glass and nothing else but cans of cat food. Her fridge was empty.

We chatted about the weather and the TV show she’d been watching, but my head was spinning, and I couldn’t focus. It felt like hours had passed, but it was only minutes. I’d walked by this building a hundred times, coffee and cell phone in hand–often on my way to or from a meal.

As I stood with my hand on the door, I felt I had to make a decision right then and there. Do I do nothing and let this be someone else’s problem, and feel pain and intense guilt when this woman dies from neglect? Or do I get involved?

An hour later I dashed into Trader Joe’s in South Pasadena and shared my shock at what I’d just seen and experienced. A wonderful man named Joe–not the Trader Joe–told me to come back on Wednesday. He would help me get some easy-to-open items that the people I’d just visited could eat.

Joe was as good as his word. He helped fold down the seats of my Prius and loaded dolly after dolly of fruits and boxed vegetables. He explained that this food was excess, and the store donated it to make room for newer shipments. (I would learn later that other grocery stores–but not all–do this and more) There was so much food that I could only make left turns; I couldn’t see out the other window.

I soon learned more about the 49 million Americans–one in six of us–who are unsure of where their next meal will come from. I also learned that grocery stores and many food-derived businesses discard their excess unexpired food daily instead of donating it: Up to 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. is wasted. My big question was: Where did this discarded food go, and how could we get it to struggling people like those I had met in my neighborhood?

For the next two and a half years, I made weekly pick-ups at Trader Joe’s and delivered food to organizations in the Pasadena area, including the AIDS Service Center, the Union Station Homeless Services, and Holy Family Church’s Giving Bank. Meanwhile, I learned everything I could about food waste.

In spring 2010, I attended a convention in San Diego on organics recycling and sustainability to gain an overview of the waste industry. I wanted to be able to have a respectable conversation if a food supplier chose to not donate edible food. For three days, I was a human sponge, absorbing information about sustainability, composting, and renewable energy. The waste industry didn’t particularly care about feeding people, but I gained an enormous amount of respect for its passion and commitment to efficiency and reducing waste. The people I spoke with cared as much about preserving the same pristine organic food I was interested in, just for different reasons.

When I got home I reached out to local agencies in need of food: homeless shelters, churches, food banks from Long Beach to the Westside, senior centers, children’s homes. I asked them how often they needed donations, and whether they required food to be prepared and pre-packaged or if it could be kitchen-made. Then I approached the health department about food safety regulations. Through these meetings I realized that it wasn’t as simple as taking food that one place didn’t need and delivering it to where it was needed. Donating food, I discovered, had a unique set of rules that were outdated and hadn’t been adapted for today’s state-of-the-art methods of heating and cooling food.

I realized the process could be made much more user-friendly so that more cities and companies would want to participate.

In 2012 I founded Urban Harvester, a Los Angeles-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Our focus is getting untapped food resources to the nearest shelter, soup kitchen, and pantry. We designed a scalable model that includes education and outreach to bring communities and businesses together.

We don’t have a fleet of trucks or a facility; our goal is simply to connect the dots. We are like a dating service bringing together food and the agencies that need it. Today we are partnering with 211 LA County—a countywide network that includes 49,000 city, county, public assistant, and nonprofit programs–to try to connect to more agencies for our food work. 211 LA County is part of a larger national network of programs that serve 93 percent of the country. Today, this connection work is done personally and locally, but we have built a database and are using technology to build up a system to connect food and agencies that need food at any hour and across the world.

All types of food suppliers are now involved–not just grocery stores but restaurants, food trucks, Starbucks, the South Pasadena Unified School District, a music festival, a temple, a farmers market, and many wonderful food retailers that prefer to donate food quietly. Just a few weeks ago, we proposed and won unanimous passage from the South Pasadena city council of our first resolution: Businesses, instead of disposing of edible extra food that is professionally prepared, are encouraged to connect the food to local agencies. Our goal is to keep taking big steps, albeit one at a time, to help people with their basic needs.

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“It’s very New York for L.A.,” Bojarsky tells me, explaining why she likes the restaurant. “It’s a glorious thing to be in an artistic space that’s sort of open and cool and imaginative.”

I want to talk to Bojarsky about why the people of L.A. don’t give back to Los Angeles—and about what they do care about. She’s made a career working out both sides of this knot. Right now, she runs a salon series, the Foreign Policy Roundtable, which brings entertainment higher-ups together around world issues; she’s an editorial consultant for Los Angeles magazine and their CityThink platform on the future of L.A.; and she advises broadcasting entrepreneur Norman J. Pattiz on his work with the Academy of Music at Hamilton High School—he funded a new auditorium—and the University of California, where he is a regent.

For Bojarsky, being part of the city’s civic culture is a no-brainer. At 8, she was handing out buttons for Robert F. Kennedy outside Nate ’n’ Al’s in Beverly Hills. She otherwise missed the activism of the 1960s, but Bojarsky tells me that she and her friends “were raised to believe in tikkun olam”—the Hebrew phrase that means “repair the world.” She and a friend, as kids, dreamed of being nonprofit lawyers in Carmel—and living in a one-bedroom rat-infested hovel there.

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Is putting pretty faces in front of a camera to raise money a plausible solution to Haiti’s problems? This was the question with which moderator Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti opened the conversation.

Jordan Wagner, the CEO of Generosity Water, a nonprofit that drills wells in Haiti and around the developing world with the support of celebrities like Katy Perry, was quick to point out that his organization doesn’t work only with celebrities but with all sorts of people—children and professors, celebrities and community leaders among them. Wagner said that he is working to show people the power of small acts of kindness and teamwork, but he noted that many charities are not honest about where donations are going. That, he said, is why 100 percent of the public contributions to Generosity Water go to building wells, and the organization reports back to contributors with photographs, video, and financial documents.

Turning to Claudine Michel, a black studies scholar at UC Santa Barbara who was born and raised in Haiti, Wilentz asked what the problem is with celebrity charity and foreign aid in general. The story ought to start with Haitians, said Michel, but most Hollywood types who go to the country don’t start with locals from the bottom up. “They have an idea: it goes from top down to bottom,” she said. And as well-intentioned as they might be, the 11,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have come into Haiti with their own projects don’t understand the culture. Michel feels that the aid is coming at too high a cost. “We might be getting wells and other material things, but we’re losing our soul,” she said. “There’s no doubt about it: Haiti’s occupied.”

Marc Pollick, president and founder of The Giving Back Fund, which manages foundations for a number of celebrities, including two in Haiti, argued against dismissing the contributions of celebrities. “Celebrity is a very powerful lever,” he said. “I think Hollywood’s real focus and attraction to Haiti really started with something I call CNN Philanthropy. CNN now brings you every disaster in the world into your living room, then gives you a platform to help with that disaster.” He pointed to a post-earthquake telethon hosted by Wyclef Jean, who was joined by many celebrities. People don’t donate to telethons like these because they care about Haiti, he said—but because they love the celebrity who’s asking for donations.

Wilentz suggested that the danger of NGOs and celebrities is that the nation becomes reliant on outsiders—and that its people don’t become the deciders of their own fate.

Wagner said that the goal of his water projects is to empower the communities being served—not to change anyone’s values. In order to ensure a project’s long-term success, Generosity Water forms a committee of local leaders to mobilize the community and take ownership of the well. “I’ve seen tangible change being made,” he said, and it is the result of collaboration and partnership.

Michel interjected to ask Wagner what his plans were to empower Haitians to build wells themselves—without an external presence.

Wagner said that a clean-water charity empowers people by keeping them healthy. Clean water keeps people out of the hospital with water-borne illness, and keeps children who would be traveling long distances to find water in school instead. “To tell me that it’s not empowering to someone, it’s simply not true,” he said.

Michel said that the problem runs deeper, however, and it has to do with colonialism, racism, imperialism, power, and access. “The Haitians are not given the opportunity to step forward and learn and be able to actually run those projects,” she said. “What’s left for the Haitians? It’s a situation of dependency—things are not put in place so that things can be sustainable.”

But, asked Wilentz, what if a celebrity advocated for an organization run by Haitians—would that be helpful?

The money can come from the outside, said Michel, but the projects should come from the inside. Haitians need to have ownership of the projects in their community—an ownership that’s lost when outsiders come in for two or three years to build schools and then leave.

The money that helps has also been a source of corruption in Haiti, said Wilentz. She recalled, immediately after the earthquake, seeing people in BMWs picking up people on the streets—the rich helping the poor in a way that’s rare for Haiti. A few weeks later, though, those BMWs were being rented to aid workers for $1,000 a week.

So what can be done to ensure that celebrities help Haiti and that aid efforts reach the people they’re intended for? Bring in scholars who know the country well, said Michel, and talk to people on the ground. And if you have a celebrity fundraiser, call in more people than just Wyclef Jean.

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Zunz, author of the new book Philanthropy in America: A History, said that other countries (and even early America) historically had a variety of philanthropic traditions, but each tradition tended to specify the target and beneficiary of any giving. Such specificity was important legally; heirs could challenge the wills of their loved ones if gifts were too broad.

But beginning in the late 19th century, wealthy American entrepreneurs, with the help of social reformers and skillful lawyers and legislators, gained more control over how their money would be spent, especially after death. The result was a nearly boundless American philanthropy.

“I think what has made American philanthropy historically distinctive is that it has been very broadly defined, so broadly defined that it has penetrated all aspects of society,” said Zunz. American’s late 19th-century philanthropists, he added, “advanced an open-ended agenda of works in which participants could redefine goals as circumstances change; they promoted nothing less than the good of mankind.”

Zunz’s talk focused on people and laws that shaped American philanthropy. Particularly important was the fight over the will of 19th-century New York Governor Samuel Tilden, who intended much of his estate to go to the establishment of what became the New York Public Library. His heirs successfully challenged the will in court, but Tilden’s law partner stalled them until the New York legislature passed a groundbreaking 1893 law that gave trustees of an estate broad power to defend the aims of the donor (and took power away from courts that had favored the challenges of heirs). The library opened in 1895.

The New York legislation was part of a shift in the law across the U.S. that coincided with the rise of so-called “mass philanthropy” to support social causes. “Americans have perfected the technique of mass fundraising,” said Zunz, specifically the use of mail and broad appeals to raise big money in small amounts.

The combination of an ambitious, unshackled philanthropy among the super-rich and a strong ethic of donating among the masses has made American philanthropy an unparalleled force. Annual philanthropy is not as big as the federal budget, Zunz noted, but it is about the size of the Pentagon budget.

There has been one big exception to this American rule of wide-open philanthropy: political advocacy.

Zunz, disapprovingly, charted the American history of trying to keep philanthropy separate from political actions to challenge existing law. “Challenging the law is otherwise legal and is reasonable and is even necessary in a world full of bad laws,” Zunz argued. “But somehow challenging the law is not supposed to be done with philanthropic work.” Zunz compared this separation of the political and the philanthropic to the “separate but equal” doctrine that was used to defend segregation. Both doctrines developed and grew amid similar times–and both served as roadblocks to necessary social change.

The theory behind this separation has been that the state should not subsidize political behavior and advocacy through tax exemptions for charitable giving. Zunz argued that this separation is artificial–and inconsistent. The law permits tax-exempt giving for policy-making but not for advocacy–a line so hard to draw that it may be meaningless.

“It is remarkable how much effort philanthropists have invested in the 20th century in the nearly impossible task of keeping philanthropy separate from politics,” he said.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book: Skylight, Amazon, Powell’s.
Read expert opinions on whether philanthropy is too powerful here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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