Results tagged “givewell” from Uncivil Society

Last week I had the pleasure of talking to Ian Wilhelm, a reporter who has been writing about the GiveWell controversy for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.  His story for the print edition hit the web early this morning. 

Ian does a great job providing an overview of what happened & a range of different perspectives.  Tomorrow I'll post a podcast with highlights from our conversation.  In the article itself, Michelle Moon--MetaFilter's Miko, the first to spot the GW sockpuppetry--hits the nail square on the head by highlighting the importance of the culture clash between commercial marketing and charitable transparency. 

Click the link below to read a few excerpts.  I'll chat more about my own quoted comment when I post the podcast.      

Now I'm actually glad that my early morning post evaporated.  I wrote about how Givewell stands on a precipice where many charities have stood before.  It could fall into nothingness, like the PTL Club; linger as a tragic phantom of being and nonbeing, like Jimmy Swaggart Ministries; or luck out with a huge boost in support and meaningful accountability reform, like what seems to be happening with Oral Roberts University.

Over at Non-Profit Tech Blog, though, Allan Benamer has provided a more analytical meditation on GiveWell's future, with a chart and hard stats and no Heidegger or televangelists!  If you aren't a reader of NPTB or a habitue of socialmarkets.org, you should be--Allan and Jeff are cool cats doing interesting work.

Joker (1), originally uploaded by trexfiles23.

In the aftermath of l'affaire Givewell, Gifthub and MetaTalk have been engaged in a lively chat re online interaction and philanthropy.

This morning Phil posted a provocative on how satire and parable keep the wayward self in check. This discussion reminds me of Marshall McLuhan's observations on roles and humor in the contemporary media economy.

As McLuhan noted, jobs and goals have morphed into roles, as we now assume an array of diverse identities adapted to various media environments. The roles of artist and clown are similar in they each stand perpendicular to the environments in which they're immersed. Humor in particular plays a valuable role in exposing hidden assumptions and providing a forum for otherwise unaccepted thoughts. It's public relations not in the sense of craven advertising but providing a medium for multiple roles to relate--outsiders can express grievance without penalty and insiders can learn what they're doing wrong.

The picture above contains one of McLuhan's favorite aphorisms in this regard, taken from the Marshall McLuhan Distant Early Warning card deck. The full set is available for viewing here.

This afternoon I went to the Guggenheim Museum for the final day of its Richard Prince "Spiritual America" retrospective.  Prince is perhaps most famous for his explorations of appropriated imagery, such as Marlboro cowboys, biker mag girlfriends and nurses on the cover of pulps.

The one that really grabbed me, though, was the picture on the left.  The caption on the bottom:  "Leading his own life now?  Are you kidding?  That's not his own life."

Surely it's not possible to be super-effective and yet lose one's sense of self . . .

See, now that's civil society.

The following comment from the new MeFi Givewell comment thread is part of a growing trend. Recommendation for those who don't take the backlash seriously: read Robert Reich's Supercapitalism, especially, IIRC, the chapter entitled "Politics Diverted." If social enterprise is going to remain a viable organizing principle, it must address the concerns of those who feel that entrepreneurial values are inconsistent with true charity.

For those wondering why the emotion arose in [the initial GiveWell discussion], fourcheesemac nailed it, I think, as being about a microcosm of recent trends in the world. So you don't have to wait for that thread to load, here is the start of his/her comment:

After reading nonprofiteer's smart post above, this occurred to me. Maybe some of the visceral anger here is scapegoating, in a sense, but man is the anger deserved.

We have had years, now, of being told that rational and efficient market-based forces would radicalize the hitherto flabby and emotional ways we have thought about social justice and morality. Across all sectors, not just philanthropy. There have been many prior Holdens, waving stopwatches and sliderules and books of rational choice theory and quantitative methodology at us and telling us that being "good" and being "competitive" are the same thing. The left -- and "liberalism" -- has been repeatedly humiliated by this rhetoric, not least in the last 7 or so years of a CEO president who also seems to have managed to surround himself with fellow incompetents who, behind their moralizing discourse, were busy fucking everything up while robbing everyone blind and lining their own pockets.

Fresh from the GiveWell blog, news that the Board has removed Holden Karnofsky from his ED position and given him a new title as Program Officer. A new MetaFilter discussion has begun.

If the past is any guide, the reaction will be layered. Perhaps most visible, especially within the charitable community: affirmations of the board's action, with sporadic objections that the apparent demotion was too severe, a la the first comment in the post linked above.

A number of those who objected to Karnofsky's behavior will offset accusations of irrational hostility through gracious conciliatory gestures.

A number of people will lose interest now that there's no official action left to influence.

Then we see responses such as this:

Ah, the familiar smell of CYA PR hackery! The GiveWell board "believes that the acts of misrepresentation that were committed are indefensible and are in direct conflict with the goals of the organization and we condemn them in the strongest possible terms", but they don't fire Karnofsky.

So much for trust and transparency.

Even among those who don't put it so starkly--or are silent--the damage has been done.

INSOMNIA UPDATE:

My own personal reaction?

As I've said from the outset, my primary concern was not with Karnofsky's sockpuppetry but with the unfortunate tendency to characterize the folks who found the problem as the problem. Had the red herring of anonymity never raised; had constructive commenters not been lumped in with the inevitable trolls; had the Board publicly thanked Miko or MetaFilter for bringing this issue to light--that would have been exceptional.

As for what the Board did in regard to Karnofsky, again, they had a chance to take action that was truly revolutionary. While I'm glad the Board at least did something, the result was on the whole unremarkable. GiveWell started out proclaiming disruptive change; now it is just another organization that has chosen to weather bad publicity by affirming the status quo, albeit with one of its leaders brandishing a different managerial title. That may keep Givewell going, but that doesn't make it interesting.

However, this isn't to say the experience left me wholly nonplussed. I won't go into all the positives--it's about 4:30 a.m. here in NYC and while the Chrysler Building is a marvel late at night I want to try to get a little shut-eye--but I'd be remiss if I failed to note the evolving interactions among the MeFi community, Phil Cubeta, Maureen Doyle and folks at other philanthropy sites that took an interest in thinking through what all this meant. Sure, there were rough patches, cross words and unfortunate misunderstandings, but that comes with being human, which last I checked was a condition that afflicts us all. What really stood out in such moments as when the MeFi crew flocked to GiftHub, 2173 & GiveandTake or Phil & Maureen joined MeFi is the power of empathy to create meaningful connections where none may have seemed likely before.

And seeing that in action just might have made this whole mess worthwhile.

At last week's New Year's Eve concert in New York, Chris Rock made the following observation about social norms:

White people aren’t allowed to mock black people; rich people aren’t allowed to mock poor people; skinny people aren’t allowed to mock fat people; and so on. The more stuff you have, the less stuff you’re allowed to say.

After watching nonprofit leaders respond to the GiveWell controversy, I want to propose an addendum: charity people aren't allowed to criticize whistleblowers.

Why am I mentioning it today? Because the issue that the article addresses has not gone away. If anything, it's reaching critical mass right now. The culture clash inherent in the social enterprise movement has been surfacing throughout the discussion of the Givewell controversy on MeFi, and in his latest comment Phil Cubeta at Gifthub hits it dead on:

The question is whether what we are seeing here is pushback against the Marketization of Philanthropy, or the Emergence of the MBA Elite as Masters of all Three Sectors.

Definitely, no question. And as Phil notes, it's an issue that "needs careful research and documentation." My next article--which I think given the circumstances I'll post serially here--develops the themes of the one posted here in more depth, but folks interested in the question may find this 2002 piece a useful introductory analysis. Information design, the medieval corporation, Renaissance art and Barney the Dinosaur--it's all here, and more. A few excerpts:

The effects of nonprofit reform increasingly resemble the programmed illusory dreamspace of The Matrix: a green hue colors the world created by a hidden code. In the movie this offputting glow reflects the hue of a digital screen; for nonprofits, it is the color of money.

The core design flaw within modern nonprofit legal theory is its constricted perspective: the assumption that we must cut to an essence behind the fictional mask. It is a methodology that excels at further breaking down nonprofit form into its separate parts, but it has lost sight of how these individual elements compose a greater whole.

The more we encourage the rules of segmentation to dominate the scene, the faster the distinctiveness of nonprofit style will degrade. Advising nonprofits is a task that requires an intuitive grasp of history, culture, and the rhetoric of form--in short, a comprehensive view of nonprofit law as a humanistic discipline.

Yes, there are two paths you can go by

But in the long run

There's still time to change the road you're on.

--Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven

These lyrics sprang to mind immediately upon reading the latest blog post by Lucy Bernholz, Givewell director and proprietress of Philanthropy 2173. In her meditation on the ongoing Givewell controversy, Bernholz asks readers for advice on what the GW board should do in response. Several of the initial responses argue for dissolution, which, as I've suggested elsewhere, is what I believe to be the most appropriate action--not just as punishment or out of recognition of the loss of trust, but as a public example of the courage to shut a venture down when it has passed its peak.

Besides the suggestions for the future, there is also a comment on internet anonymity that raises a telling point about social networks and power dynamics:

Not everyone has a Harvard degree, a few hundred thou in the bank, and a powerful, well-connected charitable board - lawyers, accountants, captains of industry - to back them up. Folks like us - Leona's "little people" - are well aware that even just a little negative attention from folks like you - a phone call to our employer, maybe, or some other way of using social capital that you know about but we don't - could crush the little hopes and dreams of our miserable little lives with great speed and finality.

We think GiveWell and the issues it raises are important, and we are flattered and pleased that you have chosen to listen to us. But your class of people terrifies us because we know you have all the wealth, all the connections, all the power; and at the end of the day, if we know anything at all, we know that what you say, goes.

The signal-to-noise ration on the Gifthub Givewell thread has vacillated, but there's some constructive conversation going on now. One commenter's suggestion that I wasn't being constructive when suggesting that Givewell dissolve rankled a little, 'cuz that's the spirit in which that was offered. Not only is market need an issue to consider in any startup--for-profit or non--but dissolution and merger are hot issues of discussion among nonprofit lawyers, consultants and managers. Someone even recently suggested to me that the Wilson Center--my day job--offer specialized training in this subject, and I'd hate to think it's one of those things we only let ourselves consider in the abstract.

Aaaaaaaaaanyway, back to the Gifthub discussion. Master of ceremonies Phil Cubeta made an interesting observation while I was out that I want to archive here, as it gives an inside look at a world many folks will never see. As I've said elsewhere I may not be into the personae and I don't always agree with what he says (then again, I often disagree with myself from day to day), but it's stuff like this that shows you why so many in the biz look to him for counsel. He's responding to Michelle Moon:

Michelle wrote,

"It interests me that exposure to the 'insider world' of nonprofits would be unusual for you as a donor adviser." Yes, good catch. You see, in the world of finance philanthropy is mostly about estate and finanancial planning around tax, and only secondarily, if at all, around passion, meaning, identity, or social result. To many advisors a foundation is "charity." That is, if the money ends up in a private foundation that is charity because it is deductible going in. Add to that, the advisor may manage the money. Money that leaves the foundation as a grant en route to a nonprofit is, in effect, a leak in the bucket managed by advisors. So, there has been comparatively little work in the forprofit advisory world on the evaluation of nonprofits, or on making good grants. There are certainly players in that niche, like Rockefeller Advisors and The Philanthropic Initiative, but Holden is responding in part of a "hole in the market." Before the recent events, he had been writing me back and forth about business models to support the kind of work he was doing. I told him that many have tried and few have flourished. The standard model is fee for service paid by donor, but that has proven hard going for most who have tried it. Holden was pioneering another model, and clearly, it was in its infancy when this all came to a head last week.

What keeps me blogging is in part having a chance to connect across the silos to good people doing good work in adjacent areas, so begin to built a kind of mental map of the field. An ecosystem, in effect, with many elements. So, yes, I am in learning mode in many areas and am grateful for the stuff you have posted online at Mefi and here.

The Givewell discussion has been continuing on MeFi and Gifthub, which is where I've been posting more thoughts. There was a point last night, when I read these two comments, when my visceral disgust grew so strong that I almost checked out, but I'm glad that I did not. The MeFi folks in particular are raising a number of useful points.

A couple I want to highlight here.

First, this tasty comment by fourcheesemac:

There is a generational shift here, and it seems *way* over-invested in the internet as the be all and end all of social change. Amusingly, none of them ever really deal with the issue of community at all, except their own communities. What every social scientist who works with poor people knows (I be one) is that strong communities help themselves, and that the first challenge of any social improvement plan is to re-inspire a sense of community in a depressed or defeated or terrorized social group. None of these kids seems to even consider this bigger picture issue.

It's an observation you could actually extrapolate to charity more generally. Time and again we rush toward the latest shiny things that promise to Change The World and attract donors, and time and again our well-meaning but naive programs muck up as many things as they cure. But hey, they doesn't matter, because when things get all fuxored we blame the stupid yokels and move on. I've been in this gig long enough that I've seen this multiple times in multiple forms, and I'm tired. Hence the name of this blog, a reaction against the numbing recitation of the "civil society" mantra as a panacea for the world's ills.

The solution, methinks (and have long thought) lies in the direction pointed by 4cm: we need to understand all systems from the inside out if we are going to have any chance of making a positive difference. And that includes the system of do-gooding, which at present is merely lurching from fad to fruitless fad.

The other comment is from Miko, who has over the course of this week been an invaluable resource of helpful insight. It's a reaction to a Givewell blog post criticizing foundations for distributing only about 6.6% of the assets annually:

This last comment is noteworthy because it also critiques large private foundations for giving away about 5% of assets a year, betraying an ignorance of endowment management. The conservative figure for endowment investment is that endowment can be expected to generally throw off 5% a year, which forms the budget used for grantmaking purposes. Minimum spending is set at 5% because that is what can reasonably be expeceted for income. If there is additional revenue, that board decides to either reinvest in endowment or dedicate it to that year's programming. It is not because charities are reluctant to give away money or enjoy "sitting on" the funds, as Holden suggests. It's the way a foundation endowment is supposed to work. All on open, public record.

That Miko had to explain this points to a serious weakness in how many in the social enterprise movement see financial sustainability. For many charities--and this has been true for decades--financial sustainability derives from an array of income resources, including donations, endowment assets, and direct business activity. Yet the past few years have seen a steady devaluation of the first two resources, as if the only valid mode of financial sustainability is income derived from selling goods and services. From this perspective maintaining an endowment appears to be a symptom of greed and fear, the archaic residue of obsolete tradition now being swept away.

Um, no. What it is is shrewd long-term management of a diverse asset pool.

Which is what makes Givewell's rhetoric so puzzling. It claims to embody the values of Wall Street, but you'd think folks from Wall Street would be familiar with the practices of institutional investors. What Givewell's standard--spend down that endowment, spend it DOWN--actually reflects is the attitude of 1960s' Congress critters who were trying to eradicate private foundations by forcing them spend down all of their assets over twenty years.

And that leads to an issue I don't have time to address now but have been chatting about a bit in my public talks. A teaser: could this so-called reform movement actually reflect a shift in public policy away from private charity?

Stay tuned . . .

I thought that I'd spend tonight summing up what I said about social enterprise over the past few days, but instead I've spent my time back home absorbed in the unfolding Givewell controversy. The situation in a nutshell: after a high-profile publicity blitzkrieg touting Givewell as a revolution in charitable transparency and accountability, its founder was caught using false identities--i.e., sock puppets--to promote Givewell and to criticize other groups, including its main competitors. Ground zero for the scandal: this thread on MetaFilter.

The founder, Holden Karnofsky, has already admitted that what he did was wrong, and if all this story involved was a guy copping to sock puppetry I probably would have stopped reading the myriad blog posts and comments hours ago. What has made this incident particularly compelling for me has been the response of professionals in the charity community. I'll probably come back to this story later for a big-picture look, but for now, a few quick lessons:

• Doing good ain't hula hoops. To be blunt, Givewell director Lucy Bernholz' evident lack of familiarity with MetaFilter, the reputational dynamics of its online community and the ethics of sock puppetry and astroturfing make all the 2.0 lingo on Philanthropy 2173 seem little more than superficial trendhopping. Defending her tech savvy by saying that she uses Facebook does not help. The danger here goes way beyond technology: so-called nonprofit experts have a dismal track record of, to quote Bernholz's slogan, "remixing" their advice to fit the latest fads. Russia is an authoritarian country today in large part due to well-meaning but ignorant promoters of civil society; do we really want to base the future of philanthropy on a knack for Scrabulous?

• Don't attack the character of whistleblowers before you've checked out their claims. The same goes for the transparent technique of admit-the-confirmed-mistake-but--raise-oh-so-noble-questions-about-the-whistleblower. Not only is this likely to make you & your organization look even worse, as strategies they're ethically dubious at best--these responses are just a short jump away from the behavior seen in, say, Enron, the Catholic Church pedophilia cover-up and retaliation against reports of sexual harassment at Madison Square Garden. One of the persistent themes in scholarship on organizational dysfunction is the hidden danger of collective identity. The innate tendency to favor our own against others is not inherently benign; the same social glue that fosters loyalty can lead to violence and other forms of moral nihilism.

• Never forget that charities sell trust. Transparently trying to bribe online accusers with a "donation"--don't do this. An imprecise answer to a specific question won't silence your critics, nor will lame excuses. The occasional mistake is to be expected, even encouraged--after all, you can't break new ground without taking a risk. However, a sustained documentable pattern of lies and attacks followed by partial disclosure and defensive responses? If the folks at Givewell were trying to provide a case study of inflammatory and ineffective damage control, they succeeded. No matter how many times management may tout their ongoing commitment to corporate governance, they're toast.
  
  
• Which leads to the next point: karma's a bitch. While I agree in principle with the sacred virtue of forgiveness, Givewell is in a somewhat different position from your average sinner. Holden flew out of the gate loudly proclaiming his ethical superiority and judging other charities for not living up to his standards. His getting busted for fraud is a secular analog to discovering that Ted Haggard had gay sex or Jim Bakker covered up an affair. The issue isn't just a mistake--it's hypocrisy. If we're going to look to the Bible as our moral guide, perhaps a more relevant passage might be Matthew 7:3--"Why do you focus on the splinter in your brother's eye but ignore the log in your own?"
  
  
• In short, it all comes down to a lesson that we haven't seemed to learn from the earliest days of Greek drama: beware of hubris. Oedipus Rex was not about sex; it's a story about how pride can blind us to becoming what we despise. And as Plato observed in The Defense of Socrates, to confuse knowledge of one thing with a knowledge of everything is a systemic problem with specialized expertise. Still here we are, twenty-five-hundred years later, glibly proclaiming that a bit of experience with PR, tech or hedge funds makes one a master of the charitable universe. The only thing different about Givewell's hubris 2.0 is that instead taking a lifetime, Oedipus fell in a day.