The September opening of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), occurring concurrently with Climate Week and other global development events, has become a crucial time for meetings and events focused on philanthropy. With events organized by the Ford Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, and international philanthropy affinity groups like WINGS, UNGA week offers a unique opportunity to discuss the possibilities and challenges facing global philanthropy.
Two members of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy community spent the week in New York: Richard Marker, faculty co-director of CHIP’s High Impact Philanthropy Academy and Louie Zúñiga, a former nonprofit leadership practicum student at CHIP. Each offered insights for donors that emerged from their conversations, summarized here:
The importance of intermediaries and convening organizations:
For most donors, intermediary organizations provide the most effective way to give across national boundaries, as most foundations or individual donors frequently do not have the “bench strength” to do due diligence at the international level. At the same time, intermediaries should be vetted to ensure that they work with a place-based implementer on the ground.
Philanthropy is context-specific:
For instance, in the U.S., funders have increasingly embraced unrestricted gifts and trust-based philanthropy. As Richard notes, however, trust-based philanthropy is a term “that everyone throws around, and it is not [universally] understood. The United States has a particular set of references as to what it is a corrective for.” When funders apply the term to other places without accounting for the local lens on philanthropy, the idea of “trust-based” becomes a distorted and not very helpful formulation. Funders should consider that their understanding of a trend or issue may not translate across contexts.
Shifts in conventional understandings:
Until recently, philanthropic funding has been allocated in the global North and then sent to the global South, where the funds are used. As Louie highlighted, the landscape is undergoing significant change: “Groups are now emerging that are trying to give agency to funding collectives in the global South.” Organizations are “getting funding from the north to use and make their own grantmaking decisions.” This shift parallels the recent localization policy put into action by USAID, which aims to increasingly channel funds to locally led initiatives instead of prioritizing the expertise of those based in the United States and Europe.