By Richard AC Sippli , Institutional Relations Coordinator of the Greater Good Movement and member of the Movement for a Culture of Giving .
We started by aligning the concept that a donation is an instrument, an instrument that the donor or philanthropist uses to support organizations that work on causes in which he/she believes. 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, lack of preparation in education, lack of employment and other issues directly related to basic human rights. Donation, in this context, therefore 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 demands.
There is also another type of donation that some call strategic philanthropy or medium/long-term philanthropy. In this case, the focus is to support organizations that work at the root of the social issues that generate the problems in which traditional philanthropy works. This type of philanthropy aims to work closely with public authorities, seeking to validate good practices and new social technologies that make it possible to improve current public policies and thus provide scalability to these solutions.
However, there is still a third type of philanthropy that I would like to highlight here, one that is still little known by the majority of large Brazilian donors, it is a kind of meta philanthropy, a philanthropy that has as its cause and objective the development of the philanthropic ecosystem itself. . Donations here are intended to create a more favorable regulatory and cultural environment so that social organizations across the country can exercise their transformative potential to a greater extent. The Movement for a Culture of Giving looks together at this new-old philanthropic goal, and its guidelines are a powerful guide to how we can participate in this construction.
This article was originally posted on the Movement for a Culture of Giving LinkedIn .
