SPEAKER_00 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropism podcast with Roger Davis. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we put philanthropy in context, or at least try to, with me, your host, Rodri Davis. And this is our second episode, and I'm delighted to say it's our first ever interview episode as well. And we've got a great guest, Lucy Bernholtz, who many of you will be uh already aware of, um, to talk about her new book, uh, How We Give Now a Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us. Um, and as you'll hear during the course of the conversation on the podcast, I've actually spoken to Lucy before on uh previous podcasts when I worked for CAF and hosted the Giving Thought Podcast. But it was great to have her back on to talk about her new book. Um, for those of you who don't know who Lucy is, she's a senior research scholar at Stanford University's Centre on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Uh, and she's also director of their digital civil society lab. Um she's a well-known writer and commentator on issues around philanthropy and technology. Um, and she's produced you know a whole range of articles and books, including the annual blueprint that she brings out every year, looking at kind of tech trends and predictions about what might be going on in philanthropy over the coming year. Um, she also edited collections, including Philanthropy and Democratic Societies, which is a great book that I quite often cite. Um, and she also writes extensively on philanthropy, technology, and policy on her award-winning blog, Philanthropy2173.com, who I'm that I'm sure many of you have read before. Um so yeah, as I say, it was great to have a chance to chat to Lucy on the podcast about her new book. Um we had a great wide-ranging conversation. So we talked about the sort of central thesis of the new book, which looks at mass giving and essentially the kind of renewed focus on mass giving, particularly in a US context, and the idea that actually the the range of options for us when it comes to doing good, what Lucy calls the giving space, is kind of expanding, or at least uh we're becoming more aware of the proliferation of different options that are aware of us. So we we talked about that and some of the ways in which that space might be expanding. We talked about uh an argument that she makes that actually a lot of what's pitched as democratization of giving in recent years has actually been commoditization and why that is and what genuine democratization of giving might look like. Um we talked about the role of technology and our increasing reliance on platforms when it comes to giving and what that might mean and some of the risks around platform dependency. Um, linked to that, one of the uh interesting uh arguments in Lucy's book is around the new possibilities opened up by our ability to donate or to give data. Um, and we talked about what that might mean and what some of the sort of opportunities and challenges around that were. Um, we talked quite a bit about mutual aid, um, which is something that has obviously become uh more prevalent or at least we're more aware of during the pandemic, um, but something that Lucy was kind of already tracking in the work that she was doing for the book, and we talked about why mutual aid had become that much more um uh prominent in public consciousness, what it was that appealed about it, how mutual aid um r interacts with and relates to more traditional notions of charity and philanthropy, uh, and whether actually a focus on things like mutual aid might result in less philanthropic giving and whether that's something that we should be concerned of or whether it's something that we should just accept. Um we also talked about what some of the policy implications might be around some of the phenomena that Lucy's tracking in the book and kind of what the role of governments is when it comes to promoting philanthropy or everyday giving. Um and we also talked about the um the relationship between elite or kind of institutional philanthropy and every everyday giving and what what role there might be, if anything, for sort of big money donors or foundations in supporting the growth of cultures of mass giving. Um so without further ado, let's go into the conversation. Um I hope you enjoy it. I certainly did. Um I'll be back at the end for a little bit of housekeeping and uh sort of general maintenance. Um so without further ado, here's Lucy. Okay, great. So I'm here with Lucy Bernholtz. Hi, Lucy.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Hi, Rodri.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Uh great to have you on this new podcast. I know we've uh previously spoken on another incarnation of a podcast uh that I hosted and thoroughly enjoyed that. So I'm very much looking forward to this one. Uh and for those of you listening who don't know, uh Lucy is the director of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford Centre on Philanthropian Civil Society, and most importantly, for the purposes of this conversation, uh the author of a new book called How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us, um, which is an absolutely fascinating book. I'll put details in the show notes for people who want to get hold of a copy, and I thoroughly recommend reading it. Um, but maybe the the best place to start, Lucy, is just for you to say a little bit in your own words about kind of what brought the book about and what the kind of central message of it is.

SPEAKER_02 5:41

Sure. Um, and thanks uh for having me again. So the book was really uh born from my uh concern that in the US in particular, when we talk about philanthropy, we talk about only the very wealthy. And uh there's a couple of reasons that concerns me. One, they're representative only of themselves, not representative of the whole uh whole of us. Two, I know from um my professional world and my just life as a person that people give in lots of different ways, and there's lots of different factors that shape the decisions they're making. And I wanted to understand those better, particularly for people who are not um, you know, in the US context, particularly wealthy, um, or not wouldn't consider themselves wealthy at all. Um, and I described that as being people with a single job that's paying their bills and uh access to healthcare, which in the US is neither of those two things can be taken for granted anymore. So that's who I mean by the rest of us. But really, I just wanted to understand how people were making these decisions, what decisions they were weighing off against each other, and and what they understood themselves to be doing when they were giving of their time their money or uh increasingly their digital data.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Yeah, absolutely. And it it does feel um like an oddly underserved topic, as you say, because the focus so often is on institutional or elite philanthropy and the stories of the kind of individuals in there. Um one thing that interested me in reading the book is to what extent would did you were you trying to focus on uncovering the ways in which people give that are already there and have been there for quite a long time? And to what extent are you trying to give a sense of how those ways are changing at the moment?

SPEAKER_02 7:35

Yeah, you know, so much hype about technology changing everything. And I was like, really? Like, what is it actually changing? So um I do look at things like crowdfunding and um uh direct cash giving through apps like PayPal or Venmo. Um and uh but I wanted to go into this really with the assumption that you know technology per se is just technology per se. What was it actually? Was it changing the the uh the not more than just the experience of giving, but was it changing how people thought about what they were doing? Um and how much of a role was it really playing if you ask people themselves, as opposed to um, you know, just read press releases from tech firms who will tell you that, you know, they've changed everything under the sun and all for the better. Um so I I felt like there just wasn't a real understanding of um what was new that mattered and what was just you know new because we're now networked and connected at all times. Um and what I found was um people use technology in a lot of different ways. They're not necessarily um uh you know thinking that they're doing something much different than if they were actually delivering a check or handing direct um dollar bills to someone. It's really not the technology itself is not that meaningful. Um, and I think that's important because there's also been uh incredible investments in ways to make giving um money using digital technologies easier and um faster, but there has not been a parallel uptick in giving. So um, you know, I think we still don't really understand um what role digital technologies play. The one thing that's truly new in the book is our ability to give our digital data.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to come onto that in some some detail in a moment. Um I think it's it's really interesting what you say there, because one of the questions that's always struck me about the impact of technology on how people give is uh is whether the the affordances of technology would are genuinely overcoming limitations of some of the ways that we've tried to give or associate in the past. So I think, you know, for instance, with the current interest in things like mutual aid or kind of grassroots social movements and organizing, you know, when you look look at the history, it feels as though there were reasons that they always slightly hit a buffer in terms of scale or speed. Do you think technology has actually changed any of those dimensions and is allowing people, if not necessarily to do new things, to do them bigger and faster than before?

SPEAKER_02 10:29

Well, I also think, yeah, I mean, mutual aid is a really interesting topic. So um the research for the book, I should say, was done and completed it by 2019. Um, the writing continued into 2020. If you look at the what the book uh discovers about mutual aid, as it were, was that as early as 2019 and 2018 when we were doing the research, if you look at the behaviors that people told us they consider to be acts of giving, because we let the people we talked to define the terms. We didn't want to hit them over the head with the uh philanthropy industry's own definitions. We actually really wanted to see how they were doing what they were doing to make the world a better place. Anyway, if you look at the list of behaviors that people consider giving, they point to mutual aid and reciprocity. They point to acts of caring and kindness, they show that people take action locally and value very highly being part of uh their various communities. Um, what the technology allowed throughout 2020 and 2021 as mutual aid sort of got a started to get a lot of media attention, was in some ways the technology makes it more visible, as it does with so much giving, because there's now these either online spreadsheets or people organizing through Slack or using shared documents to uh figure out who has what and who needs what and things like that. But those aren't the impetus for mutual aid, those are um really just you know tools of everyday living nowadays. And I think because mutual aid at its heart, um, first of all, is a very long-standing set of practices for communities that are mostly marginalized and minoritized by mainstream, um, the mainstream economy. Um, I wanted to distinguish between kind of uh uh emergency mutual support, if you will, and longstanding acts of mutual aid that are fundamentally um pre-figurative attempts at creating alternative economies. I think they're two different things. And I didn't want to do disservice to the latter by focusing too much on the former. So, yeah, they they uh they they get a lot of attention, they make it easier to see these mutual aid networks, which in a pre-digital or cash-based economy are actually quite deliberately often trying to stay out of the limelight. Um, but they don't fundamentally, I don't think, change the um the human values and desires that go into creating and um acting within networks of reciprocal support that are at the root of mutual aid. Uh so again, the technology, it it's not a straightforward line to better, bigger, or you know, more worthy. It's often just a way that they become more visible to reporters and um they can they can be bigger networks, um, but the real question is are they lasting? Do they people stay part of them?

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Yeah, no, I I think that's a really good point. I guess it one of the things that makes me wonder is is that increased visibility and awareness of mutual aid networks, even if they've always been there in one form or another. Definitely within the nonprofit world, it feels as though people are sort of asking the question well, how can we get involved either by you know adopting some of the same uh tools and techniques or messaging or supporting mutual aid networks? Do you think we should have any sort of cause for concern there? Because it does strike me there's a you know really large risk of kind of co-optation or kind of taking the language of mutual aid and and sort of ignoring the fact that it actually comes from this separate tradition, and then we just kind of try and turn it into something that serves the need of the current nonprofit sector.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And in fact, we're seeing this already. So um, you know, a mutual aid network is a group of people who view each other on an equal, on equal footing, and they're all trying to um take care of their common interests in interest of taking care of themselves. So there's very much a it's built on a reciprocal dynamic, it's built on an awareness that we are because you I am because you are, um, because we need each other. And then in fact, um in any over any period of time, those those of us in our network will be both um givers and and receivers. And that is horizontal, it's based on reciprocity, it's based on internal accountability, um, and then it's based on any number of resources, it's not only money. Not-for-profits in the United States in particular are a very important part of the whole ecosystem of care and and um uh uh social change, but they are by design hierarchical organizations with an accountability structure that's focused externally, not internally. They are very much based on a we do the work, you, the donor, give us the resources, or you, the beneficiaries, benefit from what we do. There is no built-in sense of um uh equity, there's no built-in sense of reciprocity, it's a transactional um structure in a hierarchical, externally facing um corporate mode. So they're very different things. And what we've been seeing over the last several months, the what's been reported on over the last several months here in the US is that as mutual aid networks um got established early on in 2020, um, people found great support and and great community and great help in being part of them. Some of them have continued on into the late 2021, and they're thinking, well, maybe we should institutionalize ourselves in some way. There are options when they look around sort of the menu of recognized associational uh organizational formats in the US is to become a 501c3 nonprofit. And that that is a you know, square peg and a round hole. They don't fit. So that's a problem. Problem number two is as you were talking about, it's much more like the role of institutional philanthropy and social movements writ large. Social movements, mutual aid, again, are about we're all in this together. Um, we need each other, we operate on equal footing and we are um working to make some change um both within the way we treat each other and towards some outward cause. And uh if nonprofits come along and don't change how they structure themselves and how they operate within that context, they will do harm to that um that community, that set of community bonds and way of acting and treating one another and making decisions that is so core to mutual aid.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think um it that it's something that sort of struck me about mutual aid. I I wondered whether part of the enthusiasm for it more broadly, sort of outside of the people who and communities who who have traditionally been involved, is that it's tapping into a wider desire for participation. And actually, a lot of traditional nonprofits, to me, it seems have fallen into a mode of being very transactional in the way that they they talk to the people that support them. And as you say, it's kind of we will do the work, you give us the money. And that's not necessarily what people want anymore. So they're sort of looking for alternatives. Um and it it brought me on to thinking about something I thought was really interesting in the book, which is the point you make about the a lot of the talk about democratization in in the space for giving, the giving space that you describe, all these kind of different options that that present themselves to us is actually not a proper democratization, it's commoditization. So we're sort of increasingly coming up with new products for people to give. And I think what I wondered was um what sort of struck me a lot of that seems to be the quest to make giving ever easier and easier and sort of more frictionless. And is that actually undermining the very sort of notion of participation? We're actually kind of making people feel less of a sense of participation because the ways in which we're offering to give barely even register. And and you know, is is that something that we should sort of go in the other direction again?

SPEAKER_02 19:29

That is my hypothesis. I mean, let me be clear. I didn't answer that question in the book, but I hope I raised it because um just looking at large trends, the amount of time and energy that's gone into creating new products for giving, um, everything from um, I don't know, text to give to crowdfunding platforms to donor-advised funds, right? They all use the term democratization. Democratization requires some consideration of power, and there's no consideration of power in any of these things. They are simply um, first of all, they're only almost exclusively focused on money, which is only one thing that we give. Secondly, they're all sold or provided, or whatever word makes you feel good, um, by a third-party intermediary, most of whom uh crowdfunding, um, cash apps, uh, donor advice funds are provided uh by um mostly by commercial enterprises, or in the case of donor advised funds, a charitable spin-off of a commercial enterprise. Um, they're they're just they're they're products. They're not um tools of power or of shifting power. And I think that's hugely important. In fact, I just had a great conversation um with a dozen, a couple dozen people at a uh conversation about the book, and I asked them, just imagine if we had been talking about all of this for the last 20 plus years as the commodification of giving and not the democratization of giving, would anything actually be different from the the universe of these tools, these products? Or would the only thing that would be different would be you wouldn't feel so good about it? And that to me, whenever anyone said, Oh, yeah, it's saying I could look at the same menu of things, which in the book I call the giving scape and I try to lay out for people as as literally as product choices. You see the same menu of product choices, but if you call it the commodification of giving, it just doesn't feel so good. Call it the democratization of giving, and boy, I'll get right behind it. Sounds great. And you know, in some ways, there's no clearer sign that what you're looking at is a marketing slogan than when that's the case. Yeah. You call it B instead of A, you sound

SPEAKER_00 22:00

feel good about it if you call it a instead of b it it's not so um you know warm and fuzzy so there's that the other thing i i'm just and this is again it's just speculation i don't i don't have any data to back this up but i do worry about how quick we are to use democratization of x right is the marketing slogan de jour we've democratized philanthropy we're democratizing investing we're democratizing i don't know car buying we're just not democratizing democracy in this country at the same time that this word this very important word and concept has become really the marketing slogan de jour the actual thing our democracy is in in is being attacked and dismantled so that's something to worry about yeah absolutely absolutely it's all very well democratizing or claiming to democratize the others if you sort of forget the the overarching uh point of the the main democracy that affects everybody um i I wondered actually as you speak there it brought me to thinking about something I've wondered about before which is you made the point that the a lot of this um the the uh the commodification of giving has taken place because of third parties are coming and are often kind of commercial operators. And I wondered whether we're actually on the verge of that problem getting even worse because at the moment it seems as though the balance is still commercial operators who have come into the nonprofit space because they support a market opportunity, but they're they're kind of focused on at least you know that specific marketplace. But actually the more that we start talking about people giving via general purpose platforms, sort of payment platforms or social media, who have just kind of tagged on the ability to give because it's one more thing they can offer users to keep them within the platform. I wonder if it'll get even worse in some cases because you know it's a company that's not even really particularly interested in being in the giving space. They just happen to be doing it amongst a vast array of other things they're doing as a way of keeping users and capturing data. I mean do you think do you think that's something we should sort of be wary of and keep an eye on oh boy yeah how long do you got Rudre?

SPEAKER_02 24:08

I mean absolutely so a couple of things there um there's so many problems with this one I do uh back to something you asked earlier I I actually think the the constant um effort to make giving money easier um winds up obscuring it in such a way that I do think we need research and to really understand if if it's making people less motivated than more motivated. So and the little research that we have about either um what's generally called cause marketing, and most of which has been done related to climate related activities does show that when people sort of take some small feel-good action in the cause in the in the process of buying something else, they often go home and and make a you know a decision that directly counters what they've done. So there's kind of the you know embed the giving inside of some transaction like buy these shoes instead of those shoes and you'll help save the polar bears or something I'm obviously mixing up real life examples. But then they go home and they crank up the heat or they crank up the air conditioning or something right there's not a lot of research on this but what we do have that I and I covered in the book shows that this making giving so easy it disappears may not be serving us in the long run. Secondly for the platforms that you're uh referring to um we have to really understand the data economy in an entangled way with the economy of money. And what I mean by that is yes I do think that some of the platforms social media platforms payment processing platforms are offering opportunities to give money A, because it um keeps you if your social media platform and your business model is you know time for advertisers then yes it keeps you on the platform longer. But what we really have to understand there is they're also then able to access this incredibly fine grained data about your what might be some of your most intimate dare I say personal preferences like who you actually align your values with you know whether that's a politician or a cause or a set of people or a community right think about how uh what it says about you if someone had super granular data on whose um what nonprofits or political campaigns or um local associations of communities or religions or traditions you spend a lot of time on. That's very valuable information about you that gets packaged and sold as um profiling data the same way what your favorite kind of ice cream does, right? So certain ice cream manufacturers care what kind of ice cream you like I can name endless numbers of political campaigns, politicians, political parties, um uh magazine and booksellers and um you know and nonprofits and charities that really want to actually know well what causes do you support? And that is very valuable information. So it's not even just that embedding giving into social media actions um makes it even more transactional than it was before or makes the and makes the transaction so minimal that you don't even stop to think about it. It's that the data that generated by that transaction is so enormously powerful to so many other things that we're worried about right now. And then finally on this I think the other thing we've done that is not serving us now or into the future is that in the US we've had for since the late 1940s a pretty robust way of tracking individual giving of money in a way that informs researchers and public policymakers. We do this through you know surveys and and tax form analysis and all kinds of things. And those data sources are generally available to the public. What we've done by moving so much financial giving to these proprietary platforms and here it could be a large social media company or a large crowdfunding platform or a payment processor on your phone is we've privatized the data sources. So we now have to believe companies when they say hey we moved $100 million in in charitable giving last year but we're not going to show you the data so just trust us. You know some of these companies I don't trust to tell me anything because they've never told the truth once. So why we would believe that is really concerning and you know it it leaves it opens up these kind of enormous um black holes in the constellation of data we have about what people are actually doing in order to make the the world a better place. And I think what how we give now shows is we do a lot of different things and more and more of them are happening in in data black holes um or I should say proprietary data black holes. So we don't actually know what we're doing anymore.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

Yeah and it's a really good point and it's you know I mean anybody who's been you know worked in the philanthropy world on the nonprofit sector and and sort of dug into research and data will know that that that even before all those the existence of those black holes there were many, many gaps in in our knowledge about about the sector. So it's a real cause for for concern. I guess I just wanted to wind back to to the middle point you were making about the the fact that you know from the platform's point of view the point view of these commercial providers when we're giving actually to them the more valuable thing really is what they're learning about you know our values and our behaviour. And it seems in in a way we're unconsciously making a second level of gift there in addition to to the the one that we're making actually sort of directly financially and one that seems to me quite problematic. But but it it made me think you know you talk quite a bit in the book about the idea of giving data as a sort of new form of giving and that seems to me quite a negative potential sort of interpretation of what that means. But do you think there's a sort of positive model of what it means to give data and maybe you could sort of say a bit about what that might look like.

SPEAKER_02 31:06

Sure. Well let me try to clearly distinguish the two which I tried to do in the book. The first one the example of where you're on a social media platform and you're responding to some requests to give money or you're you know were moved by something in the news and you decide to go look at it further on um social media platform or crowdfunding platform all of that your act of giving in those in that situation to my mind is whatever you decide to do uh financially if that's what you're being asked for. The data about that gift is not being given by you it's being taken from you. It's being extracted from you as part of the normal process of using those um internet social media tools. This it's that process of extraction is on at all times. There's never a time at which you can use those platforms and not be having your data taken. So uh and in the book I try to actually um I have a chart where I ask people to follow the money and then follow the data right they're not going to the same places in most in most instances like that and nor are they both acts of um voluntary choice of a contribution that you are fully aware you're making and you know a little bit about what you're doing right one is the in that case the money is that the data is not it's just being taken from you. So what would it take is it possible to have an experience of your of moving your data um in a way that mimics something like moving your money right and we're familiar as people um and certainly people in the nonprofit and philodrabox sector are familiar with the fact that if you want somebody to give you money, you have to ask them and you normally have to have a conversation or a little bit of something some exchange about what you're going to do with it. And you can't just go up to somebody and you know pull out their wallet and take out five dollars and walk away with it. That's not a contribution of but if you think about the data relationships we have in the online giving platforms they're just they are just they're asking you for the $5 in cash but they're taking the data without asking you. So what would it look like if it were something different? Well we have lots of things to look at now to to to begin to answer that question because this is happening all around us. So I use a couple of different examples in the book trying to show a range of different data types that people are giving. One thing people are giving is photographs from their cell phones. So a cell phone photograph is a digital data artifact it's made up of pixels um and uh you could share it with someone else you can you know have it on your phone you can give it to other people we do this all the time um but you can also give a photograph of a living thing a bird a bug a tree a plant um to a website and an organization called iNaturalist and something interesting begins to happen you first of all it it doesn't ever just get taken from you you can only they can iNaturalist only gets these photographs if you choose to send it to them and when you choose to send it to them a couple of things start to happen one most people send photographs to iNaturalist or another example is eBird because they want to know what the bird they're looking at is and they've just taken a picture of it. So they upload this photograph to the website and within seconds they will get an answer to what the likely identification of that bird or bug or tree is depending on what the photo is for a very long time until very recently from both iNaturalists and eBird, those answers were actually coming from human beings who were other volunteers, other people who were interested in birds, bugs and plants who were working off a massive database who would look at your picture compare it to the pictures in the database and say ah it's probably a you know mockingbird or whatever it is. And the database itself is the true resource of the nonprofit because that data set of these contributed photographs is the biggest data set of biodiversity photographs ever built by humans. And it's built by tens of millions of us who've been contributing these photographs and it's then used by scientists to understand what's happening from a human level perspective happening to plant and animal and bird diversity because of global warming. So that database is used by scientists all the time it's led to some big breakthroughs it's led to lots of published papers but it's supported and created and maintained by this distributed network of tens of millions of people, each of whom the more involved they want to get with this process, the more they are asked are you sure you want to do that? Do you want to do this? Are you sure you want to do this? Here's what happens if you do this and so what you start to experience actually is what a kind of and I'm here making air quotes honest conversation with a third party intermediary about the use of your data what it actually can look like. Whether or not you want to contribute more whether or not you know whatever you actually are having this clear cut exchange about the data that is your photograph which shows a couple of things one although you'd never know it from using most of the internet and app devices we use an honest conversation is possible it's not not possible although 21 page nine point font terms of services to which you just glaze over and click I agree would make you think it's not possible. No it's possible there's just not the will for commercial enterprises to actually tell you what they're doing with your data. You can also get out of it at any point you can stop you can take your photos back you know you can you can sort of withdraw. So it's much more akin to the kinds of relationship you might have if you were a financial donor to a nonprofit to have this kind of data donation to in this case the nonprofit that is iNaturalist or the nonprofit that is eBird behind eBird. Another example that's not in the book because it's happening right now as we speak and I think this is really worth watching because it's it it would if you look at this effort from which is being led by consumer reports in the US which trying to build a data set that would allow the consumer protection organization to understand actual delivered speed of broadband actual price of broadband charge and places where broadband is not available. The only way those of us who don't work for the two cable big cable companies in the US can possibly understand that is to build an external database that mimics the data that the companies have. It's the only way to do it until the rate unless regulation changes. And so that's what Consumer Reports is doing. They're leading what I think of as a data donation drive to get people to send them redacted copies of their cable bill from which they are building a big not you know not the size of the real ones but a big enough and representative enough database to say ha in these places in these zip codes the companies are not delivering the speed they say they're delivering or they're charging more actually than they say there I are. And the only way we can do this is to empower civil society advocates with this with the same kind of data that the companies have. And so we're going to see more and more of this not only examples like consumer reports um which is you know sort of getting out in front now with this data donation drive but there's all kinds of other civil society advocacy happening around us that's built really around these kind of mirror databases. And so developing the rules for how to do this like under what circumstances should I take this chance of sharing my data with X organization is such an enormously exciting opportunity for civil society to design the rules of because we actually are the ones who live the rules of asking people for donations of other things also. We know what people want we know what they're concerned about. We can engage with them and have them lead us toward what what would make them feel safe what would make it feel um equitable what would be absolutely forbidden and no don't ever ask for that I'm never going to give it to you right we should be leading the creation of both the organizational models the institutional rules and the regulations for this and in a way we are because most of the examples I can find are being led by civil society organizations but it's such an opportunity for us to actually say wait a minute we see this is possible we know people can be terribly harmed by the existing data economy. We understand that black women communities of color indigenous people with disabilities queer people all the communities that get harassed and marginalized and minoritized and violently hurt should actually be the ones leading our imagination in whether or not we want to do this. We here I'm talking about society but the the people among us who have been traditionally sort of you know sent out to get hurt first let's actually lead let them lead let's follow their their thinking on what when and if if and when this is a good idea and if so what rules and practices and norms we want to build around it so that we can really make this something that serves humanity doesn't you know that there aren't unintended consequences most of which are usually entirely predictable. And I I feel like this is such a moment for philanthropy and civil society to use their imagination and and walk the talk of um starting from a position of equity and public safety. And I really hope that it will um take off after the book.

SPEAKER_00 42:24

Yeah no I mean I definitely echo that and I I think it's a it's really fascinating and it it kind of goes to something that I've thought outside of philanthropy is one of the the big challenges facing you know society over the the coming years, which is as you say we seem to have made in a lot of ways this kind of Faustian pact where we're willing to to give away or just allow to be taken all of this data. And in exchange we're given products and personalization and tailored recommendations. And overall we're either just sort of unaware of it or ignore it because we quite like having those things but the people who get the benefit are very much not the same as the people who are most likely to get hurt. And I think your point that if civil society and kind of philanthropy funding that civil society can model a different way of doing this and a better way of doing this, that could be you know hugely important for how we kind of move into the future. I'm aware that we're sort of coming up on the hour and I don't want to end up taking up too much of your time. There's a couple of other things I really wanted to to touch on. One of them is another totally different section in the book that I thought was fascinating all about um political giving um and and what I wanted to to kind of tease out a bit was you sort of it strikes me that in the context of things like online digital social movements and you know the in the increased awareness of kind of grassroots organizing and actually within politics itself a sort of renewed appreciation of that the line between what we would have traditionally called philanthropic giving and giving to political causes seems much more blurry or like it doesn't really necessarily make sense anymore. But then I noticed in the book you actually make the point That uh we do need to maintain that distinction because there's a sort of fundamental difference in terms of uh what we expect in terms of transparency between uh giving to political causes and uh which should be transparent and giving to charitable causes where we should have the right to remain anonymous. So I just wanted to, you know, if you could say a bit about kind of whether you think that is a distinction we need to maintain and whether it needs to be a slightly different one from the way it is currently.

SPEAKER_02 44:27

Yes, I do think it is a distinction we need to maintain, and I think it's been obliterated in the United States um quite deliberately. This isn't, you know, we often use um uh the passive voice here, but there are um vested interests that have worked very hard to um dismantle this line between um what's political and what's charitable. And most of the reason for doing that at the institutional level has been to take advantage of the fact that there's just such a long-held tradition, again, in the US context, of anonymous charitable giving. Whereas people who are putting in unprecedented amounts of money with an intention of shifting a political agenda want nothing more than to be able to do that without leaving any fingerprints on it. So what a wonderful system to use, what a wonderful opportunity for those people to be able to use kind of the charitable not-for-profit sector as a money laundering arm to what ultimately become political gifts. So that's that's what has been happening. I mean, this has been, this is actually goes back to why I founded the Digital Civil Society Lab with Rob Reesch 10 years ago was this concern that um the more that line between charitable act between charitable anonymity, I won't even say activities, charitable anonymity and political transparency gets erased, the more the not-for-profit charitable side of organizational life in the US really does become a money laundering arm for political pass-throughs. Um, lots of that going on. But for the again, staying away from the very wealthy and just looking at, you know, somebody with a job and uh health insurance who wants to make the world a better place, we learned a lot in these interviews. One of which was the tax code, which is sort of you know the holy grail of policy conversations among the philanthropy industry, means almost nothing to the people we were talking to. And it never even came up in conversation unless we brought it up. It's not the guardrail by which uh this population, these populations, I should say, are making their decisions. Um, they're trying to make the world a better place. So they want access and they make access and they find access to use their financial resources and their time, um, and probably their digital data, although I only looked at it really in this one section, but you know, every way they can, because they're trying to live a better life. So they're using it in their consumer choices, they're thinking about it in their investment choices if they have any, or where they um what bank they choose to work with, or um, and certainly in the way they move money and time, but they're not making these distinctions based on tax law. They're making these choices based on um a mix more of who's asking and when and what their own sense of the best source of change will be. So we don't actually have, I don't think, an accurate picture in the US of what factors people uh rely on when they choose to make uh financial contributions, say, to either a political candidate or a campaign issue or to a organization that does advocacy on a particular issue and they make uh or making a choice to a say direct service charitable organization. But we know that uh we know because they told us that they are making choices between those two things because, unlike the very wealthy, their financial resources are not unlimited. You know, every time anyone like me um chooses to spend a dollar on X, it's a dollar not spent on Y. That's that's just reality. And we don't really understand this. We don't understand the psychology of it, we don't understand all the factors people are factoring in here. And because I was focused on how, not why, it's not, you know, the book asks the question but doesn't answer it. Um, so I think we're we're woefully uninformed on what we're actually doing when it comes to giving to political work. And here, you know, whether that's giving money or taking to the streets um or to a nonprofit advocacy organization or even a direct service advocacy organization. And unless we can understand the dynamics between these spaces as they're lived by the people making these decisions and not as they're viewed from the regulatory code, I think we're kind of flying, you know, around with blindfolds on. I don't think we really know what's going on in in just even in philanthropy, let alone in society writ large.

SPEAKER_00 49:51

Yeah, absolutely. I think that yeah, that question of of how these things interrelate, as you say, when there does have to be some element of a zero-sum game because you only have finite resources, is is fascinating and kind of it strikes me as probably a very complicated mixture of conscious decisions, unconscious ones, lots of lots of different factors about you know how and where they're being asked and presented with opportunities. But as you say, it'll be you know definitely an area where knowing more would be hugely valuable. Um I'm aware that we're we're definitely coming to the end of the reasonable amount of time I can take from you, Lisa. So I just wanted to ask one final question, actually, because um something that sort of struck me. I I know you said you know the book is kind of very deliberately about giving at in the kind of everyday sense by ordinary people uh like you or I. Um, but but it it does feel to me, I mean, and again, this is I don't really have data on this, it's more of a sort of gut feeling. There seems to be a growing trend among elite donors, or at least some elite donors, to uh to focus on or to talk about everyday giving or to kind of put some of their efforts and activities towards growing everyday giving in a in a broader sense. And I wondered, you know, there's a sort of more cynical part of me that thinks that might be not unrelated to an awareness of the kind of critiques of the anti-democratic nature of elite philanthropy, and it's sort of seen as a as a way of um of kind of uh answering some of those critiques. Um but taken on face value, maybe they just genuinely sort of believe that a wider, you know, more healthy culture of giving would be good. Do you do you get a sense that kind of elite donors are also waking up to this same phenomenon that you're talking about in the book? And do you think we should be pleased about that or concerned?

SPEAKER_02 51:28

Um it's a great question. I I know um, yeah, so I think what the book shows, what I think quite clearly, what the book shows is that people are giving all the time. We actually are doing a vast array of giving behaviors that we, you know, the kinds of people in the book, again, people with with a single job and access to healthcare, which again, not the whole US population by any stretch of the imagination, but um we're giving all the time. So if if if the elite philanthropists you're talking about, the big foundations or whoever it is, actually had the conversations I had uh with you know hundreds of people over several years and all kinds of interviews, not one of them said they weren't giving. In fact, they had a list of 12 different ways they were giving. Here's how we're giving. What's small on their list is on their list, but it's not the only thing on their list, is a financial donation to a charitable nonprofit. So they're doing that. It's on their, it's it's in their mix. It may not be the thing they do most of. It may be that they do less of it than they used to, and it would be good to understand why. Um, it may be that they, and I think this is what we heard from almost everyone we spoke to, it's one of about 15 things they do. Um and I think the problem is the the big foundations in particular, the only thing they do is financial transactions to nonprofits. So if you equate that with giving, and you're have concerns about it going up or down or who's doing it or whatnot, if you if your goal is to just make more of that happen, then you're completely out of sync with all the people in the book, because all the people in the book are givers, they're doing all this stuff, and that may not be their priority thing. So, a smarter way to go about this, if you ask me, and what I hope the book sort of leaves readers seeing is that all these ways of giving are ways of participating, they're ways we live our lives engaged with others, trying to make the world a better place. And financial transactions to tax-exempt nonprofit organizations is one piece of that, but it's not the whole, you know, the whole thing. And so efforts to drive more of just that one behavior, I look askance at because I don't think it's a problem that we're not doing that. I think it's that we're only counting that. I would be much more interested in efforts that were about recognizing, privileging, um, building a public support system that enabled more of this full spectrum of ways that people care for the people around them, people far from them, and the you know, the challenges that we as humanity have created for ourselves and for the planet. We are taking all kinds of action. That is just one. And it happens to be the one that we've built a whole philanthropy industry around. Doesn't mean to me that that's the only one that matters, the only one we should privilege, the only one we should count. I think we need to change what we count. And I think um the foundation philanthropy industry, you know, should do a better job of recognizing that it is a set of products in a very complicated marketplace to use this horrible language of commerce and financialization, but everybody's familiar with it, um, that they're not always the best choice for a lot of people. And maybe better understanding the other choices we're making would be a better way to go around it. Um, I I just I think otherwise it's a very myopic, um heavily industrialized, if you will, um purely financialized sense of how we give. And we give in a lot of different ways, and that's only one of them.

SPEAKER_00 55:35

Yeah, and absolutely. I definitely that feels like there's a very strong sense of, you know, the if uh if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and you know, the the nonprofit will sort of fall into seeing everything through the lens of financial transactions. Um, and I think broadening those definitions, I absolutely agree. Um, I just wanted to ask before I let you go. I mean, obviously, probably the main thing that you want uh to leave people with is that the book's out and they should go and read it um and enjoy it. Um, but do you have anything else sort of coming up, events linked with the book that you want to flag up or let people know about?

SPEAKER_02 56:05

Oh, yeah, thanks. There's um some great events coming up, one with the Associated Press and the Conversation. I'm really excited about. I'll be doing um an event for Seattle Arts and Lectures. All of this is tracked on the uh website off of uh for the book that's on um the Digital Civil Society Lab's website. And um, yeah, lots of conversations. And I'm also doing uh a number of um you know book chats with groups and organizations and and boards of directors and whatever. So um I'm also open for other invitations. So happy to talk with anybody about the book. And yes, I'd love people to read it and let me know what they think.

SPEAKER_00 56:44

Great. Well, I'll put links in the show notes to web places where people can find all of that information. And certainly I would you know encourage everybody to go away and read the book because it's um really fascinating. And I hope this conversation has kind of given a sense of that. Um, it just remains to say thanks ever so much, Lucy, for coming on the podcast uh again. Uh um uh it's great, you know, that you're able to give up the time and I really appreciate it. Um and yeah, wish you all the best with uh with uh getting the book out there.

SPEAKER_02 57:07

Thank you so much. Thanks for everything.

SPEAKER_03 57:13

At Meeting of Industrial Leaders in Washington, here's Julius Rosenwald. Most people are of the opinion that because a man has made a fortune, that his opinions on any subject are valuable. Don't be fooled by believing because a man is rich and he is necessarily smart. There is ample proof to the contrary.

SPEAKER_00 57:45

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Lucy for coming on the podcast. Um, absolutely great to have a chance to chat to her. Um I I put links in the show notes to lots of the things that we discussed in terms of where you can find more information about Lucy's work and her book and kind of the events that she's got coming up. Um if you're interested more broadly in issues around kind of philanthropy and civil society, um, do check out some of the blogs that I've started putting up on my medium page at Forliteracy. Um follow me on Twitter at Rodery underscore h underscore Davis or at for literacy. Um also there is now a Twitter feed for this podcast, which is uh Phil underscore isms underscore pod. Um if you've got ideas for things we could talk about on the podcast or people I could interview in future, uh drop me an email at philanthropismspodcast at gmail.com. Um you can find all this information on the website for the podcast, which is philanthropisms.com. Um other than that, just like, subscribe, you know, keep telling all your friends about it, people that you think might like the show. Um give us a nice review on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts, because that all helps. And other than that, I'll see you next time. Bye.