SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis, and on this episode it's just me, no guests this time.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

But as we come towards the end of the year, should be going out just before New Year and leading us into 2022, I want to take a little opportunity just to look ahead to what some of the key trends and themes might be in the world of philanthropy and civil society of the kind that I'm interested in next year. I hesitate to call this a predictions podcast because I think even though I do quite a lot of work where people ask me to sort of guess what might be coming ahead in terms of philanthropy and civil society, I'm very wary of pitching that as predictions, because I think making predictions has always been a bit of a mugs game, and I think over the last two years, if anything, it's taught us that it is entirely a mugs game to make hard and fast predictions. So instead, these are just sort of some observations about the key trends that we're already seeing, some of the things perhaps happening at the edges, and some ideas about what to watch out for over the coming year. Before we get into all that, I should just say, you know, looking back over the last year, it's been a relatively sort of momentous year, certainly on a personal level. Uh I left uh my job at CAF after 11 years, which is a big move for me, and obviously gone on to do a bunch of different things, including this new podcast. Um so I just wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you to anybody who has started listening to this podcast. Thanks to anybody who used to listen to the old podcast I did at CAF, the Giving Thought Podcast, and has uh shifted over to listening to this one. I hope you've been enjoying it so far. Um, certainly, you know, if you find the things that we've already talked about, or the sorts of things I'm talking about today interesting, there'll be loads more episodes coming up next year, including some great interview episodes that I've already got lined up with some really great guests. So do keep uh an ear out for those. Okay, so without further ado, let's get into some uh predictions, particularly because I actually recorded uh a version of this podcast already, it's a little peek behind the curtain here yesterday. Uh, and then in the process of editing, uh I had the uh the actual nightmare scenario where I inadvertently, when it asked me to close, uh, do you want to save this file? I inadvertently clicked no and thereby lost the entire episode. So I'm now re-recording it. Hopefully that means that this will be a leaner, meaner version of uh of the same thing, and thankfully it wasn't an interview that I'd done with a guest, which obviously would have been uh much more of a problem. But anyway, so in terms of thinking about what to look out for next year, I'm gonna sort of start off maybe with some things that are very much at a macro level in terms of big socio, economic, and political trends that are relevant to the sector, and then kind of zoom down to philanthropy and civil society itself, and then have a think about maybe some tech trends, because obviously that's a big element of the work that I do is kind of thinking about the impact of emerging technology on philanthropy and civil society. So I guess the the obvious thing to start off with is the pandemic. Unfortunately, we are still very much in that pandemic. As I record this, we are seeing the crest of the wave of the new Omicron variant hitting here in the UK, and we are told that it's very likely that we're going to see new lockdown uh restrictions being imposed after Christmas, uh if not before. So I think you know the sense that um that we're anywhere near the end of this pandemic uh is probably gone by the wayside. I think probably the other thing is that the sense that we might have had back at the beginning of this pandemic that there would be a meaningful end in the way that we might have understood it is also something that maybe we've had to let go of. I think it it's becoming apparent that it will be more of a slow process of normalization where we won't be able to get rid of COVID in any real sense, but as a greater proportion of the population becomes vaccinated across the world, then we will be able to sort of cope with it and there might be occasional uh outbreaks that we then have to deal with. Obviously, given the highly unequal distribution of vaccines around the world and vaccination rates, that leads to all sorts of questions about uh ensuring that people around the world and in the global south in particular are able to get access to vaccines in the same way that people in the global north are. Um, and that's obviously a big problem that needs to be solved. Um, taking us some sort of distance away from our core topic of philanthropy and civil society, but obviously relevant in that civil society organizations, you know, will need to play a part in ensuring that equitable distribution of vaccines, and it's also a key area of focus for many philanthropic funders and institutions at the moment. Um I guess, you know, I'm not going to go into much more about the pandemic because I feel spectacularly unqualified to offer any kind of prognostications. And to be honest, even the people who do know far more about epidemiology and public health and and uh pandemics than I do still don't seem to be able to guess what's going to come next. And in many ways that's because we're still in the midst of of what's going on, and it's almost impossible often from within the eye of the storm to know what the likely end point is because it's a kind of highly complex, chaotic system. I guess that that is the prediction that I'm going to offer is uncertainty, I think. Any sense that we might have had more certainty over 2022, we probably need to sort of wind back a little bit. And I think uh in terms of what it means for civil society and for charities, it's really a sense that if we thought we could get back to business as usual, then we'd all be going back to the office and doing sort of fundraising events in person and meetings in person, all this kind of thing. Yes, hopefully more of that will be possible in 2022, but I think also we need to have all of our contingency plans in place and be aware that there's still going to be significant disruption. Um, I guess the other prediction or trend that this leads to longer term is that question that's been much discussed already in in many different forums, about what impact the pandemic will have longer term on our view of the nature of work and how we do it. There's been a lot of discussion about obviously the enforced necessity of people working from home or working virtually, and lots of organizations and companies uh thereby kind of shifting the way that they do things, yes, over the short term, but also many of them taking the decision now that over the long term they're not going to return to the the same sort of status quo um that there was before, and they're going to shift either fully remotely or to some sort of form of hybrid working. I think this is the case in the charity sector, as in many others. I've seen organizations move fully remotely already during the course of the pandemic. I've seen others definitely shift to more sort of hybrid working, and I think this raises all sorts of questions and brings all sorts of interesting possibilities. I think on the positive side there's the potential that it has for overcoming some of the geographic boundaries to employment within the charity world and perhap perhaps resulting in a sort of overall rebalancing of the sector. I'm thinking here particularly in the UK, but I guess it's true in all contexts really, that if it's no longer necessary to be in one particular place to work for an organization because it's fully remote, or if the amount of time that you have to spend in an office is uh significantly reduced so that you can do that on a kind of part-time basis, you can live that much further away from where your work is based if it is indeed physically based anywhere. And this opens up possibilities for people being much more widely geographically distributed and having teams that are much more widely geographically distributed, and it opens up the pool of talent available for people working in civil society, and that's potentially quite exciting. You know, you can you can draw on that much wider pool of people who might want to work for your organization and thereby get kind of you know really high-quality people working and draw on a pool of sort of highly motivated and you know talented potential employees. So I think that's that's a really interesting positive one. I think in terms of negatives, there are interesting questions about what impact this potential change in the nature of work will have on existing problems around division and polarization within society. Because I think there is one point of view that says actually the very process of having to commute to work and going to an office and working, spending shared time with people who might have, you know, different viewpoints to you and different life experiences and come from different backgrounds, but you're sort of having to work with them because oh you haven't just spend time with them because you're in a work environment means that you are there is at least some sort of mixing across different um social groups and social boundaries. And actually, if people are just staying at home and not doing any of that stuff anymore and only interacting with a selected group of people and spending more time kind of interacting uh over the internet and sort of via social media, all of those problems around l you know existing within filter bubbles or echo chambers might get that much worse and it won't be counterbalanced by sort of enforced mixing with others. Yeah, or the flip side of that is other people would argue actually, if people are spending more time at home and and working from there, maybe that means that they will start to put more emphasis on their geographical location as the place that they do that mixing, and so there might be more focus on people getting engaged in their locality or with their local community. And I guess we saw some of that during the pandemic with more focus on sort of neighbourliness and people getting to know their local area, and it'll be interesting to see whether there's any of that sort of positive benefit longer term. I think that another thing that I will just throw in there that I think's interesting is that the more that people are working from home or working in hybrid ways, it feels as though one of the potential dangers, in a way, is that the lines between work and life get that much more blurred. Um, I mean, I it's certainly something I struggle with. Like I'm I'm an absolute terror for you know working uh in the evenings and you know odd times and sort of letting that bleed into my home life. Uh and it's particularly because I like the work that I do and that's a nice problem to have. But lots of people I think are finding that challenge at the moment. So I think on the one hand, there is a question about managing those divisions and you know what that means for people's well-being and mental health. But I think again, on the flip side, potentially there there is a positive story here about if the lines between work and life do get that much more blurred, will it mean that people are more willing to bring their personal values into a work setting or that it becomes more uh kind of acceptable to do that? And I think there is some evidence, you know, you've seen people more willing to talk about their home lives and things like their mental health and that kind of thing in the context of a work environment. And as they do that, will that mean that people um see it as more important that their the work they're doing reflects their values as a person and their their sort of beliefs and that there's some sort of sense of purpose to it? And if so, does that mean there's more of an opportunity for for civil society organizations either to engage people to work for them or to engage people working for you know companies or public sector organizations who also want to kind of have some sense of value and and will do that through partnership with civil society? I I don't know, but I think you know it's a really interesting question. And then finally, uh, in terms of thinking about the direct impact of the pandemic, I guess there are two other things that I think are really important. One is the human toll that this is taking. I think you know we're all very well aware of that. Many of us have struggled with personal loss or you know, with impacts on mental health, um, the strains of having to homeschool children, background levels of anxiety being much higher than normal, and that kind of thing. And I think at the level of civil society or the sort of all the organisations within it, the the real worry, I guess, is that there's just going to be a huge degree of burnout and a kind of loss of good people who are able to continue to work and to have the sort of energy to do what is needed to kind of pursue the causes that are at the heart of civil society. Um and I think you know this is something I've seen. I've seen lots of people leaving jobs in the sector, either because they've been made redundant or because they've decided to move on, or in some cases decided just to stop working for a bit and kind of reassess what they want to do with their lives. And some of those people, you know, will return and continue working in civil society, um, others may not. They'll go off to do other things. And you know, if they're replaced by other people, um, then that's that's sort of fine at an aggregate level, but if they're not, there's a real sort of concern that that we're seeing a kind of you know brain drain out of the civil society sector. And I think you know that should be a cause for concern. Um the other thing uh linked to that, I guess, is it's taking a toll on individuals, but also there's a toll at the level of organisations and the sector as a whole, which is you know, in organizations we are seeing close, um, so we're seeing you know closures of individual charities. We're also I think a particular area that concerns me is around infrastructure. Um, so I think you know, I as I record this only a couple of days ago, I saw the news that the Small Charities Coalition here in the UK was having to close its doors uh next year because it's um found the financial situation as a result of the pandemic so challenging. And I've seen lots of other infrastructure organizations similarly struggling. And this is uh I think a particular challenge because the pandemic, I think, has highlighted on the one hand the enormous need for infrastructure and the fact that when a crisis hits, you become hugely reliant on that infrastructure as a safety net and as a distribution mechanism and all these other things, uh, and as a way of kind of communicating information. It's it's hugely apparent that you can't build that infrastructure from scratch at the point where a crisis hits. So you need to invest in the infrastructure, you know, when you're not in crisis time, so that when those crises crises do hit, um, that infrastructure is there for you to rely on. And unfortunately, at the moment, that doesn't seem to be the case. I don't think there is the additional investment in infrastructure that's required. And the danger is if we lose more and more of that infrastructure because of the pandemic continuing and the funding environment being so difficult, it will be very difficult to replace, or kind of the additional cost required to replace what has been lost will mean that it's that much more difficult to get the infrastructure we require. So um, I think there is a real sort of need for funders and philanthropists to think about the part that they can play in maintaining uh and renewing some of the infrastructure um that is already out there, and what new infrastructure we might need for the future. In terms of some other challenges, I think sort of things that are already going on at the same time as the pandemic, you know, there's a few big ones here. I mean, the obvious one is the climate crisis, which, you know, is is still happening, hasn't gone away because of the pandemic. Um focus has somewhat been taken off it. Certainly in the early days of the pandemic, I think we were getting to a point where suddenly it felt as though like there was quite a lot of uh attention being given to the climate crisis. And despite the fact that we had the COP26 um uh summit last year, it still feels as though this is uh slightly a sideshow at the moment. And that's that's a big problem because obviously I think we're aware now that we're feeling the effects of of climate change in many places around the world, and it's no longer just a sort of long-term theoretical problem, it's an immediate short-term problem for many people and communities around the world, and the impacts of that are being felt, as with many things, unequally, and it's hitting many of the sort of poorest parts of the world hardest and earliest. And it feels in some ways as though, you know, we're aware of the challenges of the climate, but we're almost in the middle of a kind of slow-moving disaster. I often I often think what it would be like to be in the middle of one of those montage scenes in a Roland Emmerich film, you know, like the day after tomorrow or whatever, and you kind of you sit there watching these films and you think, why is nobody doing anything when they're seeing all of these different news reports about all these weather events going on? And in a way, it feels like we're almost sitting in that at the moment. I mean, it's the this this the pace at which, you know, the the accelerating and very worrying reports of the impact of climate are coming in is there, but maybe we are we're just kind of not conditioned to be able to respond to things that happen at that scale or at that sort of pace. So I guess you know, the impact of this for civil society and philanthropy for my money is that we need to make sure there is a uh a very clear and continuing focus on climate across all areas of of civil society. And it's not just about climate being one cause amongst many for me. I don't I think it's it's moved beyond that. I think it's one of those things that is not a cause area that an individual funder or an organization can say, oh well, you know, we don't focus on that because we're not a climate funder or an environmental funder. It's a kind of cross-cutting concern uh or like a lens that needs to be applied to all of the activities of all organizations. So I think every charity, every funder, every philanthropist needs to be asking themselves, how are all of the different activities that I am undertaking, um, how are they reflecting, you know, having a positive impact when it comes to the climate? And that's across everything from investments to operations to employment practices and and so on and their grant making. So I think it's it's definitely one of those things that's so cross-cutting at this point and so urgent that that that's the way we need to be thinking about it. Um, I think arguably there are other issues that we should view in the same way, and maybe you know, there's more dissent around this, but I think uh something like the the focus on racial justice, um I think is a question about whether actually, again, that is not something that should be seen as a cause area, but as a cross-cutting concern that all organizations need to take into account again across all of their different operations and ask themselves questions about how you know what they're doing um in terms of their hiring practices, their investments, you know, their leadership and all these things reflect a desire to address issues of racial injustice. I I my question with that one in a way is there was a big upsurge of of interest and sort of enthusiasm, if that's the right word, for this, obviously, in the wake of all of the spated Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd and other similar stories in the US. Whether that the momentum built up by that will continue, and whether the sort of enthusiastic words of companies and funders and others about how important racial justice is will actually uh translate into action still remains to be seen. I think 2022 is a year in which uh it there will be quite, you know, the proof will be in the pudding actually for organisations whether they meaningfully follow through on what was said about the importance of issues of racial justice or whether actually it's sort of seen as, oh, we've done that now and we'll move on to something else. Bringing us towards uh sort of specific philanthropy and civil society issues, um I just want to touch on a couple of things about the political climate within which philanthropy and civil society operates at the moment. I think there's a kind of few things to watch out for there. Um, at a global level, I think one that's very clear is that a sort of broad climate of hostility towards civil society, particularly in terms of its advocacy role and the role it plays in speaking truth to power, will continue. I think this phenomenon of the closing space for civil society where governments try to restrict the ability of organizations to engage in in that work of challenging uh and challenging government and challenging policy by putting limits on things like the freedoms of association, freedom of speech, uh right to assembly, all these sorts of things will will continue, and I think we've seen more and more examples of that. I think we'll also see more examples of measures specifically targeted at philanthropy um as a means of funding civil society. So I think we've seen a number of instances over the last couple of years of governments introducing restrictions on so-called foreign funding, so this is philanthropic money coming from overseas institutions or donors, um, which is then sort of demonised through legislation and and uh given uh the the appearance of illegitimacy as if it's kind of i interfering um in in the uh the sort of democratic process of that society. And and there is some element of truth in this. There are obviously concerns about the ability of philanthropy to skew um skew the democratic process when large amounts of money are involved going into countries where you know they they can have a significant impact on public discourse or on public policy, but on the flip side there that may well be used by authoritarian governments or governments of an authoritarian bent as an excuse to kind of clump down on civil society more broadly. I think there's also around politics a kind of interesting question at the moment about the relationship between philanthropy and democracy, um, which is a you know a thorny one anyway. I think there's a question about whether philanthropy is a threat to democracy in some sense because it represents a means for those with large amounts of wealth or assets uh to exert an undue influence on the public sphere, or whether, on the flip side, philanthropy understood in a broader sense as you know giving. By people at all sorts of different levels, including the giving of time and effort as well as money, is actually a vital part of renewing and maintaining civic engagement and the health of democracy. I think the tension between those two things is very keenly felt, particularly at a time when democracy itself in many places is not looking extraordinarily healthy. I think actually the the argument that that ac the involvement of philanthropy in democracy uh is problematic has merit and needs consideration. But on the I think the the assumption that what we're talking about as a counterfactual is a sort of perfect democratic system that is optimally working and that if we got the philanthropy out of it everything would be fine doesn't make sense. I think we also need to pay attention to the problems that ph that uh democracy itself is having, you know, in the US, in the UK and in other countries, and think about the role that philanthropy can play in potentially strengthening that democracy. So I think you know, we saw in the US in the run-up to the last presidential election lots of focus on the kind of renewed political movement building and involvement of small-scale donors in the political process and this kind of thing. Um, and I think you know that's something that we will probably see in lots of other places. And I guess the thing for me is it it starts to raise questions about whether some of those divisions that we draw between philanthropy and politics start to look a little bit anachronistic or whether we need we do still need to draw firm distinctions, but decide where those distinctions lie. Um I guess the final thing here, as well, in a sort of specific UK context, um, is to say, you know, we've got our own version of that closing space for civil society problem that um that I talked about at the beginning of this segment. Um the ongoing challenges around the political narrative around campaigning by charities and civil society organizations is somewhat problematic. I think over the last few years we have seen legislation introduced that has sort of brought that narrative into law, uh introduced things like clauses in grant contracts given out by government that restrict the ability of organizations to engage in advocacy work, lots of negative messaging from uh government. And this also filtered down into the regulatory environment where the charity commission over the last few years, under the the now previous leadership, um was often going out and and giving speeches where it questioned whether charities were inappropriately getting involved in the political sphere. And this was tied into narratives around the sort of culture war and the idea that there are lots of issues these days that have become political because people uh sort of have very divided views on them and that charities should somehow take this into account and that they had to kind of um ensure that they were sitting on both sides of every issue, um which always seemed nonsensical to me. And I think it's just worth saying, you know, I I think we will see more of that over the over the coming year. It seemed for a brief moment as though things might get better, because there was the appointment of a new uh chair of the charity commission who seemed to be much less minded to to go along with some of these cultural war narratives, but unfortunately that's all collapsed in a fairly calamitous way because it turned out that he was the subject of uh relatively serious allegations about his personal conduct as a chair of of one of the charities that he was involved with, uh, and this hadn't been taken into account in the due diligence that the charity commission did. Uh, and so he has in the last few days resigned before taking up post, which is an absolute mess, uh, and they may well have to rerun that in entire process. So we'll see how that goes. And and you know, who that person eventually ends up being will probably have quite a determinate impact on the whole narrative around charities and political campaigning in the coming year and and for sort of a few years down the line as well. Okay, in the next section, um I'm just going to come on to talk more specifically about some issues around uh charitable giving and philanthropy, so stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_03 26:14

At the meeting of industrial leaders in Washington, here's Julius Rosenwald. Most people are of the opinion. That the one of the man has made a fortune. That his opinions on any subject are valuable. Don't be fooled. I believe it. He is necessarily smart. There is ample proof to the contrary.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

Okay, so uh I just want to come on now to think about um charitable giving and philanthropy and some of the kind of key trends in that. And going back to the first episode of this podcast, which you can listen to, um I draw the distinction there between charitable giving and philanthropy um advisedly, and really what I'm trying to do is just sort of distinguish between what I might call mass market or everyday giving and philanthropy in the sense of giving at a higher level or kind of institutionalized giving. And obviously, you know, I will acknowledge there's a whole debate to be had about terminology and whether actually we need to change the definition of the word philanthropy to encompass uh a broader range of different forms of giving. Um, but in this particular case, I'm just sort of drawing the distinction because I think there's a couple of different trends that are relevant to the two, some of which are about that very distinction that I've described there. I guess that one that to start off is around the question of whether we're seeing a decline in charitable giving overall, both in the UK and in the US, and in other countries like Canada and Australia. Over the last few years, there have been bits of research um suggesting that there's a kind of long-term decline in giving behavior, particularly in sort of participation in giving. In the UK, and I think to some extent in the US as well, this decline in participation has been slightly masked by um uh the fact that the overall levels of giving haven't declined. But what we're seeing, obviously, to explain that phenomenon is that we're increasingly reliant, or the nonprofit sector is reliant, on a smaller number of donors giving larger amounts. Um, and that is you know potentially a problem for a number of reasons. I mean, one is the practical reason that the more that you're reliant on a smaller number of uh sources of funding, the more that organizations are having to kind of compete for those sources of funding, and the fundraising environment was already quite competitive and has become more difficult as a result of the pandemic. So that's a kind of practical concern. I guess there are other more theoretical concerns about what the concentration of uh of kind of funding in a smaller number of hands means for the kind of overall legitimacy of civil society, where it's not just necessarily the amounts of money going into it that are important, but it's the the broadness of the base from which that money is coming that sort of gives it legitimacy because it's reflective of a large body of people. And so if you have that sort of smaller pool of people, that legitimacy is perhaps somewhat reduced. Um, I think this this brings in all sorts of interesting questions. I mean, one is just what is actually going on, and I think there's more research to be done in all countries to explain that. One area I'm particularly interested in is actually the question, the question of whether whether we're genuinely seeing a decline in giving if people are just sort of giving less, or whether what's actually happening is people are doing the same amount of social good or or sort of um social action or uh in their own sense, but they're doing it in different ways where it's not getting captured in some of the research that focuses on more traditional forms of giving. And this very much goes to the the conversation I had on the podcast with Lucy Bernholtz about her book How We Give Now, where the sort of thesis in in that book in the US context is actually people are doing more giving than ever. It's just that they're doing it in all of these different ways that don't necessarily accord with the ways that people in the non-profit world think of as giving, particularly giving as a form of sort of financial transaction between an individual donor and a kind of formalized non-profit entity. Actually, people are doing all kinds of different things, giving to informal organizations and networks, giving directly to individuals, engaging in kind of giving to political causes, maybe giving uh, you know, through kind of cause-based marketing and ethical consumerism and all these sorts of things. And the question of whether people are doing these things and whether that is kind of taking up, you know, uh more of a share of their overall pot that is available for social good, and that's resulting in them giving less to charity in a traditional sense, is one that I think still hasn't been bottomed out. And and even more important to me than than finding out, you know, whether or not that's what's happening is perhaps the the question of does it matter if people are doing social action or kind of doing good in all of these different ways, and as a result they're giving less money to traditional registered charities or non-profits, does it, you know, should we care about that? Is it is is it actually fine if the pie is just being sliced in a different way and charities aren't getting as much of it anymore, but you know, other types of organizations are? Is that fine if people just sort of is the way in which we do good evolving, or is something in danger of being lost? And to me, that's that's a really interesting question, which is what is potentially the sort of the USP or the unique value of charities and charitable giving in the sense of organizations with a set charitable purpose that you know don't seek to deliver a return to the to people, and the idea of giving money with no expectation of financial return or sort of volunteering a time in a way that is not reimbursed. What is it about that, if anything, that is unique and needs to be preserved? Because I think if we can answer that question, that then makes a sort of positive case for the importance of charities and philanthropy, rather than I think what we too often see, which is a just a sort of assumed case that people need to do those things because they're the only game in town. And I think that's not the case anymore. So I think that assumption uh needs to be dropped, um, and we need to make that stronger positive case. Yet the day is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, we must be for him to administer during life, will pass away on with I think shifting on to sort of think about philanthropy, perhaps the way to kind of bridge these things is I think one of the big trends within philanthropy that's really interesting is that there's an increasing focus within philanthropy and as sort of giving at a higher level and institutional giving, in what that kind of giving can do to support giving at a more modest level. So there's quite a few examples of organizations, foundations, and funders using at least some of their money to support you know the development of a broader based culture of giving and kind of mass market giving or everyday giving. Um, and I think this is really interesting, kind of what's driving that, whether it's a recognition of the inherent value of that giving, whether it's partly a sort of you know acknowledgement that the there are questions about the democratic legitimacy of you know very big money philanthropy and it and the role that it plays in the public sphere and sort of supporting the development of a broader base of giving is part of trying to uh to kind of acknowledge that and to to deal with the problem in some sense. But I think this is, Seth, definitely something to watch. I think tied in with that is uh a few other things. I think there's a really interesting phenomenon on the moment or a trend about the uh the ways in which people are viewing measurement within philanthropy. Um, I think for a long time the direction of travel was very much towards we need more and more measurement and better measurement, and the holy grail is you know our ability to measure um social good across all different types of causes and to report that to people, you know, that will mean that people will give more and they'll have more trust in giving and everything will be fine. And I think actually lots of people have started to push back on that idea and say, well, no, the problem with this is when you impose systems of measurement, they often reflect the views of the donor or the funder, and they're imposed on the organizations receiving the money. And so it's just another way of kind of cementing the power imbalance that is inherent in that fund, you know, grantor, grantee relationship. And I think there's an interesting question there about as we push back potentially on some of that measurement, where do we find the sweet spot where we kind of make sure there's enough measurement that we actually know that what we're doing is having an effect and having a positive effect? Because I think surely we want to do that, and there's a real danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here if we just said, oh, scrap all of the measurement, we don't need any of it at all. But making sure that whatever measurement we do have is appropriate and proportionate. Um and I think that goes to another key trend that we've been seeing through the pandemic, and I think you know we'll continue to see over the coming year, which is that shift from sort of restricted programmatic funding towards more of an unrestricted core cost approach. And this is something a lot of funders did through necessity during the pandemic, because I think they recognized that their grantees or the organizations they were funding found that suddenly, you know, their their needs changed and the environment in which they were working changed very quickly and very significantly, and they therefore needed to spend the money on different things. And so lots of funders and philanthropists thankfully said, absolutely, you know, do you know what? Just remove all of the strings that were attached to that funding we gave you that was you know allocated for a specific program and spend it on whatever you need. And in doing so, lots of them found you know the sky didn't fall in on their heads, and actually it worked out pretty well. And so lots of funders are sort of thinking about, well, could we do this more on a long-term basis and adopt a kind of trust-based approach to funding that's based on our relationships with those organizations with funding? Um, and we've definitely seen this reflected in the approach of somebody like Mackenzie Scott, who's obviously become a sort of very high-profile philanthropist and adopted almost entirely a kind of trust-based approach, albeit with you know some upfront due diligence. Um I think it'd be interesting to see where that debate goes over the coming year. Another big trend or sort of debate within philanthropy that to watch this coming year, I think, is the one over time frames. I think again, you know, this has been accelerated by the pandemic because I think the sense that uh philanthropy is something that happen has to happen slowly over the long term has been challenged by the immediate needs of the pandemic and the fact that lots of funders have found that there's a demand for them to get much larger amounts of money out of the door quickly, and many of them have managed to do that pretty successfully. And again, this has sort of raised the question of, oh, you know, did we just assume that we couldn't do this? Or actually we found that we can, should we try and get more money out quicker? And LinkedIn, that is a question of, well, should we be spending more money out of our endowments as well? You know, actually the kind of the rate at which we're spending those maybe needs to go up rather than what maybe has been the default assumption of kind of protecting that pile of money and just spending out of the investment income. Um, I think that's tied into a sort of very long-standing question about the balance between long-termism or even perpetuity and the immediate needs of the present. Um, there's always been a tension within philanthropy, but we're seeing this reflected in a debate about whether more foundations and foundation type structures need to have time limits associated with them or whether they need to shift to a spend down approach. And other people arguing that, you know, if if that became the norm across the board, the problem is we wouldn't have any, we would lose all of the value of philanthropy and foundation type structures being there as as kind of uh organizations that are able to take a longer term view of issues or to kind of fund into the future. And so I think that's you know, this is an area where there are genuine kind of valid points of view on both sides, so I don't think there's a right or wrong answer, but it's it's an area where there's a lot of debate at the moment. Another area of debate um I think is very keenly felt within philanthropy, and I think will continue to be over the coming years around the need to contextualize philanthropy. So I think the idea that that we can sort of uh look at philanthropy or assess its value in isolation, the acts of giving themselves and what they achieve in the world. Um I think there's a a sense that we that's no longer the case, and that actually philanthropy needs to be understood in that broader context within which it exists. So we need to think about what the tax status of the donor that is giving that money in the first place might be. Have they paid all the tax that they owe? What do their investments look like? And particularly importantly, where has that wealth come from in the first place? So I think the question of scrutinizing the sources of wealth and weighing that up against the legitimacy of efforts to do good through giving money away has become more and more apparent. Um and this whole question of sources of wealth and particularly the angle which is, you know, are there some sources of wealth that are kind of tainted in some sense and therefore, you know, it's uh illegitimate to try and do good through uh philanthropy, or if you do, you know, you need to take some sort of reparative approach, or you know, some of them are so tainted that it's impossible to do enough good uh to repair the damage done in accumulating those fortunes, is a very, very old problem. It's been around for thousands of years, and I could bore you at some length about that, and I'll put links in the show notes actually to uh a long Twitter thread I did about it where I did bore everybody about it at length. But I think it's it's one of those issues that's been around for a long time and is sort of cyclical, you know. We see it come round and round again and again. But the speed at which the cycle is going to me has has has got faster. So, you know, the the frequency with which we see stories about you know donors who are highly problematic or you know, ethically dubious in some sense, having given money or about to give money to an institution or an organization, and this raising all of the sort of ethical questions about whether it's okay for the organization to accept that money and whether it's okay to sort of try and do good with bad money. You know, we've seen examples like the Sacklers over the last few years and an enormous amount of uh focus on them and kind of how we should understand their philanthropy in light of the role that they played in the opioid scandal uh in the US and the development of oxytocin. Um seen other examples like um Jeffrey's uh Jeffrey uh Epstein, the disgraced financier, who gave lots of money to uh MIT Media Lab um and obviously you know turned out to be hugely problematic uh in his own personal life and was linked in with lots of other philanthropists as well, and seemed to play a sort of connecting role uh in in the whole kind of ecosystem of elite philanthropy. And you know, I will confidently predict that we'll see more examples of of stories about tainted donations over over the coming year and into future years ahead. I think what we won't necessarily see is any firm conclusion drawn about that question of whether when faced with a tainted donation, the the acceptable course of action for a charity or or a cultural institution is to say no thank you and to sort of keep their hands clean and to turn down the money, or whether it's better to take the money from where it is doing bad in the world and try and do some good with it. And this is tied into all sorts of issues about what the conditions are that are attached to the donation, whether the donor gets a reputational benefit from it, whether it's attached to sort of naming rights and all this kind of thing. And that's the topic for an entire other podcast that I'm sure I'll do at some point. But you know, it's I don't think we'll find answers to those questions, but we will definitely be debating them more because the you know news stories will come up that will bring them to light once again. I think the the other thing that this kind of maybe highlights is one obvious trend that we'll see over the coming year is continuing criticism of philanthropy. I think the last few years we have seen you know a growing body of critique of philanthropy from various different angles, and that has become more and more mainstream. And I think we've seen that again during the pandemic as well, where the role of philanthropy has been quite prominent in terms of things like the development of vaccines, but also in terms, you know, and on the good side there, I would guess, you know, it's been quite had quite a positive role there, perhaps less of a positive role in terms of the distribution of vaccines, but also at the same time lots of questions about whether philanthropy has sufficiently responded to the challenges of the pandemic and kind of increased levels of spending in response and all these kinds of things. So I think there will be more and more critique and criticism. And broadly I welcome that. You know, I think I think kind of valid critique is something that we should engage with, because I think for me, the important part of making philanthropy better is to understand the critique. Can work out where it makes valid points and uh kind of points to changes that can be made in norms or in the ways in which we do things, and to understand where perhaps the critique goes too far and where you can respond to it and how that can be done. Uh my concern is that what actually happens too often is you get critique on the one side and that skews over into polemic, and then on the other side you get people who are naturally resistant to the critique and that skews over into defensiveness, and there it makes it impossible to have the discussion, the necessary discussion in the middle that is sort of nuanced and where people are engaging across sort of different points of view but doing so with civility, and that's a kind of another trend I think I would highlight, which is I think I feel as though we've seen increased division within the world of philanthropy over the last few years. And I think in some in some cases there there are elements of the sort of wider culture war and the narrative around culture wars and societal division that have come within the world of philanthropy, and you see people discussing or kind of debating these issues around philanthropy, but instead of meaningfully engaging with each other, they just become another battlefield on which you can position yourself as part of one group and position somebody else as part of another group and use philanthropy as a stick with which to to beat uh that other group with. And and that's very frustrating for me as somebody who kind of loves nuance and likes talking about philanthropy because it makes it quite difficult to have nuanced discussions about philanthropy. But I guess, you know, I and many others will keep banging my head against a brick wall. I guess in terms of that that question of sort of discussion and discourse about philanthropy, the one other thing to to just throw in here is I think it's a really interesting time for discourse about philanthropy from philanthropists themselves. And again, I think that's another trend to watch out for over the coming years is what big donors particularly themselves have to say about their giving. You know, there's a long, rich history of big donors like Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller and um Julius Rosamold and others sort of writing essays about their giving and giving their own sort of view on the role of philanthropy and how to do it properly. But what we're seeing now through you know the medium posts of Mackenzie Scott and increasingly the slightly angry tweets of Elon Musk is a much less filtered version of the same thing. So, you know, Scott writes really interestingly about her giving and why she's doing what she's doing, and there's a whole, you know, all of us in the philanthropy world are sort of criminal criminologists really kind of picking through her words and trying to work out uh what they tell us about her approach to philanthropy and about you know elite philanthropy more broadly. Uh, and similarly, I think you know, we'll find ourselves picking over um sort of tweets from Elon Musk that are sent out at three o'clock in the morning that are relevant to his philanthropy over the coming year. And I think it will be you know fascinating to see uh what this tells us about the different approaches within philanthropy and the different sort of models that uh that are out there. Um I think you know it'll be really interesting. I'm not sure it'll always be that edifying, but you know, I definitely I'll pull up a big uh bucket of popcorn and uh and keep watching myself. Okay, so I think that's uh some thoughts on what we need to watch out for in the world of philanthropy and civil society. Um in the final section in a second, I just want to come on and give some thoughts about trends in technology and some key issues to watch out for there in terms of how technology might affect philanthropy and civil society. So stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_02 47:28

Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire, playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy. Genius, genius.

SPEAKER_01 47:59

Okay, so we're back for the final section. Um definitely in danger of running just as long as the other version of this podcast that I recorded, but I'll do my best to go through these uh in a concise fashion. Um yeah, right. Um the first thing I wanted to flag up about the impact of technology is around the the way in which uh technology and the internet particularly has allowed a sort of platformization of giving, particularly. Um so I think this this sort of platformization has happened in lots of other areas. So we've seen it in the commercial sphere with um things like Spotify and YouTube and Uber and and others and Netflix. And essentially what it is, it's the move from a model where you have kind of owner-operator companies that own particular large bodies of assets and and sort of dole them out to customers, to a model where the the come the large thing in the middle is a platform, and what it does is connect people who have some need for a product or service with others who can provide them with that. And you know, the odd thing is the platform itself often doesn't really own that many assets itself, um, although increasingly lots of them are also starting to do that too. But we're seeing this have more and more of an impact in the world of philanthropy and civil society as well. I think at first, you know, it was reflected in the fact that we're seeing kind of platforms specifically set up for social good purposes. Um, so we've got things like uh Kiva for social loans, things like just giving in the UK for kind of fundraising and giving, and lots of you know other platforms that are out there, special purpose uh giving platforms. I think increasingly that's sort of morphing into platforms that might do some of that, but also do other things. So we have all the kind of crowdfunding platforms, things like GoFundMe and others. Um and they're increasingly starting to get quite a large uh body of you know what might have been thought of as traditional giving, but people are doing it sort of more maybe to individuals than to uh organizations. But I think what what we will see more and more of, we're already seeing some of, but I think it will be a real growth trend, is a shift towards people using commercial platforms that have added giving functionality to what they do. So I'm thinking here of sort of payment platforms like Apple Pay or Google Pay, or um kind of uh social media platforms um, you know, uh like Facebook or Instagram or others, adding the ability for people to give to uh charitable causes into what they do simply really as a way of bringing people to the platform and keeping them there, because that's kind of what they want to do. They want to make sure that as many different activities as possible are done from within the platform so that more and more data can be harvested uh about those those transactions and those actions, um, because that is the thing that is of value. Um, and I guess there's a couple of uh interesting things uh in that. I mean, one is that it there's a positive, I guess, in that it might open up the space for more innovation because these platforms are going to have resources and skills to kind of invest in technological innovation, so it might result in in sort of more more innovation in giving. I think there's an interesting question, um, again, going back to the conversation I had with Lucy Bernholtz about whether this this kind of giving through platforms then introduces two levels of gift. So there's the gift that you are giving in monetary terms, but then there's also the data that you are giving in some sense uh in terms of uh the information about you know the causes that you give to and you know the geographies and all this kind of thing. And is that bit understood? You know, are are people when they're giving, are they consciously knowing that they are doing that as well? Um, or is that bit being sort of done um uh with their consent but in a way where it's not as transparent as all that? So actually, you know, are people kind of donating data without knowing it? Um, or are there ways in which we could make it sort of more overt and people could make a conscious choice to give that data? I guess the the less positive thing to me about this platformization of giving is, well, one is I think there's already an issue broadly around our dependency on digital platforms. And the concern here is not necessarily that they're inherently evil, although some of them seem to be doing a good impression of uh looking as though they are, but more that if we're reliant on this small number of digital platforms, we're if we have some sort of naive assumption that these constitute digital public spaces, we're totally getting the wrong end of the stick because they're not. They are platforms run by commercial entities that have their own profit motivations and other drivers. And if we don't understand that, um the danger is we've become reliant on those platforms and don't think through what the dangers are of that reliance. So there have been lots of instances for um, for example, of charities and civil society organizations that have shifted, maybe you say, their fundraising almost entirely to a model that's do um based around Facebook, and then they found that their um Facebook pages and their ability to fundraise through it has suddenly been taken away from them and without knowing why. And so you make yourself dependent on the platform, and you know, you you don't necessarily have any recourse when there are subsequent changes to the terms of service or the platform decides on your behalf that um that you're no longer eligible for for fundraising or doing some other activity. So I think there's a real danger there. I think more broadly, if more giving is going to happen through those platforms, there is a question about how people are presented with the information on where to give. So I think some of that is around the conscious ways in which information is structured. So if you're presented with a list of options in which to give, uh of places where to give, is that just a sort of short list of charities or non-profit organizations? If so, who has picked those organizations? Are they more likely to be sort of well-known uh established brand organizations? Are they more likely to be sort of popular or safe causes? And actually there's a danger that less well-known organizations and unpopular causes or causes that are more contentious will be left out of the picture. You know, are there going to be questions, I guess, as well, as we shift on from having lists of organizations presented to you to having kind of algorithmic recommendations, which I think is the next step. So you'll have you know something like uh kind of Spotify recommendations, but for charitable giving, what are the algorithms that are determining the choices that people are presented with there? Again, I would be relatively concerned that they will result in well-known organizations profiting at the expense of less well-known or kind of um organisations working on more problematic causes, or kind of, you know, particularly if an organization says working on rights-based causes in a part of the world where that's contentious, would a platform like Facebook decide not to have them on there because it didn't want to uh, you know, sour its relations with the government of that particular country? Well, given its track record of doing very similar things, I suspect that would be a valid concern. So I think you know, we need to ask questions about what happens as we shift towards more platform-based giving. Um I think that is something we'll start to, you know, hopefully those conversations will start to become more sophisticated over the coming year. I think another area sort of broadly about technology that we need to pay more attention to is cybersecurity. I think I'm as guilty as anyone else of not paying them as much attention as I could to this area because it just sort of seems a bit boring. But you know, cybersecurity is a huge issue uh across all sorts of sectors. And I think for civil society it's a particular problem because I think civil society organizations have long been seen as a kind of soft underbelly, really, by those who are trying to sort of perpetrate hacks and other kind of cybersecurity attacks. And I think as more and more organizations are being forced to work online, and particularly where they've done that in a way where they've shifted online very quickly, and they haven't necessarily thought that much about the systems that they've put in place or the tools that they're using, people are working from home and all that kind of thing. The the sort of points of possible attack from a cybersecurity point of view, I think, have massively increased. So I think there's a real need for civil society and the charity sector to think about its resilience in the face of some of these cybersecurity threats. I just want to shift now to thinking about a couple of particular technologies that I have done work on and some things to watch out for. So, firstly, around artificial intelligence, one thing to watch out for here, I think, in terms of relatively low-hanging fruit, is whether the availability of sort of AI-powered productivity and accessibility tools will start to have an impact in in philanthropy and civil society. So there are all kinds of tools now that allow you to do various tasks that would traditionally have sort of taken up the time of human beings, and they're designed to do many of those in a sort of automated way. And you know, the positive point of this is that they free up the time of humans to do things that humans are good at, and this ranges from everything, uh everything from kind of organizing your calendar and writing you know simple emails through to producing slide decks and other things, and there's many other tools around various forms of data entry. And this could potentially be you know hugely beneficial for civil society organizations in particular, where many of them operate on relatively uh kind of uh small staff or they have sort of relatively small staffing margins, and any amount of time that they can free up for human beings to focus on, you know, those things that human beings are particularly well suited to. So actually kind of you know, developing human relationships and and maintaining those and building networks and that kind of thing rather than data entry, for instance, is a good thing. So I will be interested to see whether you know organizations start to take advantage of some of this. Another one I think to watch out for is developments within voice controlled interfaces and sort of conversational interfaces. So thinking here of things like Alexa and Siri and Google Home, I mean I touched on this a little bit in terms of the question of platforms because it's related to that again. I think the interesting thing about it is to me, it's not just you know another type of interface that's the same as the visual interfaces we have. It has a kind of fundamentally different information architecture and it presents us with options in fundamentally different ways. Particularly, you know, the the answer to a question asked to um you know a visual search engine like Google, for instance, is a long list of potential pages you can look through. And yes, we know that because of the page ranking algorithm, that's not an objective presentation of information, and that the order in which those are uh presented to you is dependent on all sorts of factors, and that's why there's a whole industry around search engine optimization. But when you ask a question and through a conversational interface, it doesn't run through a list of thousands of different potential options, it provides you with one or two examples uh of that. So, what is determining you know the information that you are presented with? Again, for me the question, the more that we are able to ask information about issues relating to civil society or to be able to give through these conversational interfaces, we need to understand what it is that's determining the information and the choices that we are presented with. Because otherwise, again, I think we are sort of ceding control to large tech companies to create algorithms that determine you know what information people are presented with about options for giving philanthropically without understanding you know at all on what basis those algorithms have been designed. Um, and that could be you know hugely problematic. So I think this is an area where um as it's being developed, uh the non-profit world and civil society really needs to kind of um stay in touch and and you know make sure that these things are being developed in the right way. Another area that I will flag up, because I don't think I've seen anybody really talking about it that much, um, again, I think it's one of those areas that just sounds quite boring, so everybody doesn't everybody stays away from it, but I think is is surprisingly important is the impact of the use of AI and sort of automation within the wider regulatory environment and the financial environment. So there's a whole area of of what's called regtech. Um, so they've got financial technology, which is fintech, and that sounds cool. So people involved on the regulatory side wanted their own tech, which is reg tech. Um, and here you're talking about things like how artificial intelligence is used to automate things like credit risk modelling or scoring. And you know, that does sound boring, but it's really important because this is the sort of thing that determines whether individuals or organizations can get bank accounts or can move money around. And given that civil society organizations often you know already face quite significant challenges in many parts of the world in terms of access to financial services or finding that they've been debanked because they're perceived as being too high risk. I think the fact that we're automating these systems based on our existing understanding of risk and how risk applies to civil society is potentially hugely problematic because you know, whenever you automate a system based on the existing data, as we'll see in a minute, you get all sorts of issues of kind of encoding the existing biases into the system. But worse than that, you probably make those biases worse and you make the system much less transparent. So I I just think we will find more and more examples over the coming years of organizations in civil society that find that they have been denied banking services or had their banking services removed from them, and they will find out that that decision has not been taken by a human being anywhere, it's been taken by an automated system, and there's very little ability to understand why the decision's been taken. It's probably very hard to find recourse to challenge the decision. Probably even the people working in the bank don't know why the decision's been taken, because these things are sort of black boxes that have algorithms within them, and the people you know that use them don't necessarily understand how they work. And so I think there's a real kind of area um of concern around that. Um and that I think that brings us on to you know another thing that I think is really important more broadly, which is around you know that sort of potential negative consequence of artificial intelligence around bias. And as I say, this is something I think we're increasingly aware of, which is if you have systems based on machine learning, particularly, so the idea that you have algorithms that are able to kind of learn in the sense of you set them free on or you set them off operating, trying to kind of optimize for a particular goal using very large data sets and through a process of trial and error and self-um improvement and correction, they get better and better at doing that particular task. But if the data set that you've you've allowed them to learn from contains biases, historical biases, statistical biases for things like race or gender, the algorithm sort of learns those, it internalizes them, it comes to reflect them, and it actually quite often sort of entrenches them and amplifies them. And so you see lots of stories already of things like racial bias when algorithmic systems are used in a criminal justice system, or bias against demographic groups when it's used for determining things like welfare, payments, um, biases against certain communities when it's used for predictive policing and other things. So there's all sorts of different examples happening. And I think this is an area where there's a real role for civil society to play because it needs to highlight the examples of these new challenges of bias and to play a part in kind of speaking up about them, particularly because they are going to affect um mostly the kind of the most marginalized communities in society, and they are often the sort of people and communities that civil society organizations exist to work with and to serve. Um, and I guess the the final thing I'll say about AI is that there's a a challenge, I think, there, around uh civil society playing that role in speaking up on some of these issues, which is I've seen over the last few years with my sort of tangential involvement in issues around tech ethics and AI, that it feels as though there's a sort of hardening of some of the narratives around it. So a few years ago it felt as though um there was engagement, whether it was meaningful or not, between the tech industry and people sort of highlighting the need to uh engage with some of these negative unintended consequences. But I think there was a sense then that actually some of the AI, and it a lot of this was framed in terms of ethics. So the idea was that it was a kind of insider approach and it was about shaping the development of AI uh to be more ethical. But I think some of the there have been some high-profile examples where efforts around AI ethics have have proven to be little more than window dressing, and there were stories like the um this summary firing of Timot Gebru from um uh Google, which caused a huge furrore. And as a result, I think people are questioning whether these tech companies genuinely actually mean it when they say they want to develop these things in a more ethical way. And I get a sense that some of them maybe also the tech companies themselves are kind of doubling down on this and saying, well, actually, you know, fine if if you didn't like our ethical um, you know, projects and programs, maybe we'll just get on and develop this stuff anyway. So it feels as though it's it's kind of polarizing again into more of a an insider and outsider approach. And I think that's sort of problematic because I think the outsider influencing approach is fine, and I think there's a role for civil society in that in sort of challenging the tech companies from the outside. But if there isn't the option of also kind of engaging with them and working with them on a more sort of insider basis. That just limits the range of tools that uh when it comes to to kind of influencing um and you know this stuff's happening so fast and it's so important that we do uh make sure that we kind of mitigate any of these negative unintended consequences that having your hands tied in that way is is not a good thing. Just a couple more things on technology. So one uh is around kind of cryptocurrency and blockchain. Um again it's an area I've done loads of work on over the years. If I'm entirely honest I sort of slightly lost patience with it or got a bit disillusioned. It felt a little bit like some of the discussions around crypto and blockchain and philanthropy had run their course and they weren't really going anywhere particularly but I think there's been a bit of a renewal over the last year or so and I think we'll see more of that into into the coming years. And some of this I think it's a few different things. So I think there is there's the most basic is around sort of crypto philanthropy itself which is just there is money coming out of the crypto world and again you know the the valuations within Bitcoin and Ethereum and others are back up uh to sort of historic levels and as a result there are people who are making very large amounts of money and so there is a potential pool of donors to to give to uh to you know charities and nonprofit organizations and I think there are interesting questions about how you tap into those donors, you know what does that donor pool look like, what are they interested in? Do they have particular characteristics that still need answering? I think there's there's a specific growth area obviously around uh NFTs um so this is something we've seen over the last year or so and these are non-fungible tokens so without going into a huge amount of detail this is where you can create a digital token associated with a digital object that is unique in a in a sort of sense that's that's genuinely quite interesting. Now some people sort of disagree about whether these things really you know do result in the creation of unique digital objects or not but as if you assume that they do what's interesting potentially about NFTs is the problem always with creating digital objects was that you could just duplicate them or replicate them and then distribute them very widely. So it was impossible to maintain any scarcity value. Where an NFT that that is not possible the the digital object a cryptographic object that's associated with whatever it happens to be usually a picture or a JPEG or something or you know piece of music is unique. So as long as you maintain that association that that is a unique digital object that can be transferred but when it's transferred the ownership is transferred it's not simply duplicated and shared. And so as a result this has become a big thing in the art world for instance there's lots of artworks being created as NFTs now and selling for sort of you know millions of pounds. And this is interesting I guess for charities and nonprofits I mean again partly just in terms of fundraising. So I think lots of I've seen quite a few conversations of people sort of saying oh how do we get into NFTs is a way that we could fundraise and there probably is a possibility there. It feels as though quite a lot of the examples of NFTs being sold there is an element of it where some of the money's gone to charity and I don't know but I wonder whether that reflects a certain sort of recognition that the whole thing is a massive bubble and there's a certain amount of kind of embarrassment on the part of the people who are doing it and they're kind of giving to charity almost as in recognition of the fact that they know that these things are uh are kind of hugely overvalued or don't have any inherent value. So maybe there is an opportunity to kind of tap into that. I think maybe there are the other area that I haven't really seen so much around at the moment about whether there's kind of specific charity charity specific NFTs that could be created that are kind of reflect the cause area of an organisation. So you know kind of can a charity or a nonprofit create its own NFTs. I think they're all again sort of questions then about volatility whether it's appropriate for organisations um you know in the nonprofit sphere to get into that there are environmental concerns about the energy usage required to create things like NFTs on the on the blockchain. But I think again this is an area where we will see um quite a lot of discussion over the coming year. The the other area I think uh that's worth keeping a watch on is the the metaverse um so this is the idea of creating a kind of it's well the people who believe in it will tell you it's sort of the next iteration or evolution of the internet where we've created an entirely sort of digitally immersive sphere in which people can kind of interact using avatars um and it kind of provides new opportunities for interaction and communication and all this kind of thing. It's hit the news because um Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have decided to go big on this to the point of changing the name of Facebook to Meta and we're not supposed to call it Meta. You know there was a lot of skepticism when they came out with it particularly because they created these absolutely godawful videos of Mark Zuckerberg having a series of extremely awkward interactions with his made up friends on the metaverse where they all kind of existed as a series of you know crudely drawn slightly childlike cartoon characters doing you know zany work things and it all looked horrifying. But you know it there are other people also kind of interested in the metaverse concept and doing it in different ways and doing it in open source ways. And actually there's a lot of interesting stuff I think about you know the convergence between that metaverse and advancements in virtual reality and augmented reality and also around the creation of some of these digital assets like cryptocurrencies and things like NFTs that we were just talking about. So I think it's worth paying attention to I think you know on the good side um again maybe it raises new opportunities for fundraising and for organizations to do fundraising and awareness raising and I'm sure over the coming years we'll see the first examples of nonprofits having fundraisers in the metaverse so watch out for that. I think as a tool if it becomes uh you know commercially available again it might offer new opportunities for accessibility and communication um you know we've already seen that the availability of video conferencing tools and the use of them and the wide use of them during the pandemic has has sort of removed some of the geographic barriers within civil society. So I know I've been able to take part in many events I wouldn't have been able to take part in had they been in person um and that's you know in many cases been hugely beneficial. And that will probably be even more the case in the you know in the world where we have a metaverse for people to to interact in. I think the the the bad side of that um I think it's many of them I mean one is that um first of all I don't think we should just allow Facebook to develop it by themselves. I think the idea of a version of the metaverse that is sort of monopolistically created by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook or Meta is hugely problematic. Going back to that concern I raised earlier about platform dependency this would be like a sort of you know version of that but on steroids so I think we need to be very concerned about that. I think there are other things though I mean I think there are there are already signs that there are concern you know issues we need to be aware of within the metaverse itself for instance so even in the beta testing for that I was reading the other day they've had a few instances with people kind of digitally groping uh people and sort of you know attempted sexual assaults and this is a problem that has happened in other virtual environments and within gaming environments as well and that is something that would definitely have to uh to be taken into account. I think again there's a question about the the filtering of experience and sort of how people are being presented with the experiences that they're having in that digital environment and who is deciding what information they are being presented with that's uh you know that's we'd really need to think through. I think there are questions about what you know increased or long-term immersion in a digital environment would mean for your relationship with the real world and your sort of you know mental health that we just don't know the answers to at the moment. I mean that obviously assumes a version of the metaverse that is you know the kind of Matrix Ready Player 1 version where it's all about virtual reality. I think it's worth saying actually it won't necessarily all be that there will be some of that but there will also be lots of it that's sort of i interacting with the real world as well through more like augmented reality. But I guess the more fundamental point about it is I think there's a real danger of it of it being yet another form of sort of tech solutionism because I worry that actually it'll the metaverse will end up being presented as the answer to all kinds of different social issues or challenges that we face and it will just be a way of deflecting the necessary attention from things that actually need addressing in the immediate here and now and if that takes some of the resources from the technology world that could be going through philanthropy and kind of applied to some of those more immediate real world issues and they end up getting spent on doing things in the metaverse instead that seems to me like there's a massive opportunity cost associated with it. Okay well I think that brings us to the end of uh my thoughts which is good because we've run long again. If you've been interested in the things I'm talking about um I'll put lots of links in the show notes where you can uh check out some blogs and things that I've written. If you've got ideas for things that we could talk about on the podcast in the coming year or people I could interview the email address you can find on the website for the podcast which is philanthropisms.com. You can find me on Twitter at Rodri underscore h underscore davis or at for literacy uh where I do stuff about kind of history of philanthropy. There's also a Twitter feed for the podcast itself which is uh Phil underscore isms underscore pod other than that just like subscribe tell all your friends about it if you know somebody that you think would find this kind of thing interesting please do tell them get the word out there um and I will see you next time in the new year by the way