IF YOU HAD A $1 MILLION TO GIVE AWAY, WHERE SHOULD IT GO?
Trying to choose your cause is not particularly well served by hunting for that supremely special, really deserving organization. In truth, there are thousands of them.
Or, put the other way round, no totally perfect group exists.
The most honorable, effective, dedicated, and ethical organizations also make some mistakes and suffer glitches. How could they not? Like every human endeavor, nonprofits are prone to the exigencies of time and circumstance—and, no doubt, also to some incompetence and bad actors. In addition, charities take on the world’s toughest, longest-running problems and, as you well know, such challenges throw up stubborn obstacles that will not be cleared either this year or the next.
Solving social ills, supporting a talented arts group, or sponsoring a promising student takes work and commitment. To further complicate matters, nonprofits are proliferating so fast that many groups now have overlapping missions and focus on similar issues. For example, consider the universe of funding directed at finding a cure for breast cancer or AIDS. An online search for “AIDS charities” turns up some 36,000 results. It’s hard to know where to begin.
As a result, for the majority of would-be donors, figuring out where to engage and whether they can or will have an impact is, at best, confusing and, at worst, downright discouraging.
Katherina Rosqueta refers to this predicament as “the million-dollar question.” In other words, if you had $1 million to give away and wanted to make the biggest possible difference, where should you put it?
As executive director of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania, a research group founded in 2006 by a few alumni of the university’s Wharton School, Rosqueta and a staff of six are looking into “smarter philanthropy.” That is, the practices and methods of philanthropy that will work best. The center has targeted education in the United States to study, because Rosqueta and many advisors believe that’s an arena where strategic philanthropy can do the most long-term good.
Inarguably, investing in education has proved to yield enduring dividends for individuals, communities, future generations, and society at large. So since launch, the center’s staff and associates have been surveying schools, programs, and charities around the country to come up with objective measures and facts about what effectively improves outcomes for disadvantaged kids—what truly creates positive results?
On the face of it, then, the center’s innovative work would seem a keen resource to tap when kicking off the quest for that million-dollar donation. With its rigorous, well-funded, well-focused mission, you’d think its executive director would be eager to tell us exactly where to make our contribution to education in order to get the most bang for our buck. But she isn’t.
Sure, says Rosqueta, they can point to some high-level things that work and some other things that don’t. The Center can offer advice about addressing education’s deep challenges, including the role of competition, the need for better teachers, the pros and cons of school vouchers, and so on.
But in the end, says Rosqueta, categorically, “There is no silver bullet. The one place to spend a million dollars doesn’t exist. These are difficult problems and if you really want to have an impact you have to learn and keep learning relentlessly.” In lesser ways, the dilemma holds with $1,000 or $100, too