By Richard AC Sippli , Institutional Relations Coordinator of the Bem Maior Movement and member of the Movement for a Culture of Giving .
We begin by aligning the concept that donation is an instrument, an instrument that the donor or philanthropist uses to support organizations that work on causes they believe in. Donations are a powerful tool for exercising active and vibrant citizenship.
When we talk about philanthropy, the idea that usually comes to mind is that of an urgent cause, a problem that we need to solve immediately, such as hunger, inadequate education, unemployment, and other issues directly related to basic human rights. Donation, in this context, tends to be an action in response to something that has already occurred, a reaction, in this case, to the lack of food, the precarious state of schools, the neglect of teachers, and so on. This is what many understand as welfare, a very important type of philanthropy focused on short-term needs.
There is also another type of donation that some call strategic philanthropy or medium/long-term philanthropy. In this case, the focus is on supporting organizations that address the root social issues that generate the problems that traditional philanthropy addresses. This type of philanthropy aims to work closely with public authorities, seeking to validate good practices and new social technologies that allow for the improvement of current public policies and thus give scalability to these solutions.
However, there is a third type of philanthropy that I would like to highlight here, one that is still little known by most major Brazilian donors: a kind of meta-philanthropy, a philanthropy whose cause and objective is the development of the philanthropic ecosystem itself. Donations here intentionally aim to create a more favorable regulatory and cultural environment so that social organizations throughout the country can more fully exercise their transformative potential. The Movement for a Culture of Giving looks at this new-old meta-philanthropy, and its guidelines are a powerful guide to understanding how we can participate in this construction.
This article was originally posted on the LinkedIn page of the Movement for a Culture of Giving .
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