Tag Archives: philanthropy

Are Americans generous?

Originally published in Vox on September 17, 2024.
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For 20 years, experts have sounded the alarm on the decline of charitable giving in the US. Then came the pandemic, which led to a wave of new donations and volunteers to nonprofits. For some leaders, this was a sign that perhaps the retreat from philanthropy was reversing course.

But it’s clear now, according to a substantial new report released today by a group of nearly 200 philanthropic leaders, that Covid-19 did not bring about any lasting reversal of declining charitable giving — and many of the trends identified in the 2010s have only since accelerated.

Today, the number of donors to and volunteers with nonprofit organizations continues to decline, even though the total amount of money flowing to the nonprofit sector has gone up. In other words, more money is being given, but by fewer people.

These are some of the key takeaways from the report, authored by a group called the Generosity Commission. Over the past three years, this commission funded more than $2 million in research to better understand the state of giving and volunteering in America.

The report is among the most comprehensive surveys of the field. The last time such a broad assessment of philanthropy was published was in 1975, with the release of the Filer Commission, which fueled lasting reforms in nonprofit governance and tax policy.

This time, the Generosity Commission similarly recruited top researchers to better clarify US philanthropic trends.

It should be said that this project wasn’t led by disinterested parties. The Generosity Commission wants to figure out how to increase giving and volunteering to the more than 1.7 million nonprofit organizations across the United States, 88 percent of which have budgets less than $500,000.

The report’s findings highlight some of the key debates that have been mounting in philanthropy over the last decade: Why does giving and volunteering matter? What constitutes generosity and can it really be measured? Why is nonprofit participation declining?

Its takeaways are relevant for those grappling with how to make a difference, a topic that we’ve been covering at Vox and that I’ve personally been trying to think through. Last month, I published an essay exploring why I changed my mind about volunteering; the piece sparked a lot of discussion about what really “counts” when it comes to service. This new report adds to the broader debate I touch on in my essay about privileging certain types of generosity over others, and forces readers to consider the stakes of a diminished nonprofit sector.

The authors make the compelling argument that there are many social services we’ve come to take for granted that nonprofits will always provide. And leaders with the Generosity Commission suggest it’s too risky to expect the government, the business sector, or even informal acts of generosity to ultimately fill these roles.

They may be right. But other countries have much less robust nonprofit sectors while still providing social services, and so to convince a clearly skeptical US public, charitable groups will need to think harder about how they tell their story. The case for supporting nonprofits can’t simply be that nonprofits have historically assumed these responsibilities in America, or that Alexis de Tocqueville famously admired them and therefore we should stick to nonprofits out of tradition.

We’re facing something of a Rorschach test right now: Recently, the New York Times published a sobering article on the threat posed by declining volunteer paramedics. The Generosity Commission could argue that this situation perfectly encapsulates why it’s critical to motivate more people to step into these formal volunteering roles that have served American communities for decades. Yet others could reasonably say that in a country as wealthy as the US, we shouldn’t depend on volunteer labor to fill these jobs, and indeed, most other nations don’t.

The state of volunteering and giving, according to the Generosity Commission

Many nonprofits are still flush with cash, but not all nonprofits are experiencing a money boon. Some are receiving less money than they used to, and according to the Urban Institute, these are most likely to be small, community-based nonprofits — the type of groups most reliant on volunteers to support their mission and local contributions to balance their budgets.

Even for the organizations with ample funding, their donations increasingly come from a concentrated pool of wealthy donors. According to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project data included in the new report, 43 percent of dollars given to nonprofits in 2020 came from gifts of more than $50,000, up 11 percent from 2019.

In 2020, GivingTuesday reported that there was a 5 percent increase in charitable dollars from the previous year, reaching a record annual $471 billion. But by 2021, there were fewer total donors than there were in 2019. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project further reported that the number of donors dropped by 3.4 percent in 2023, after already having dropped 10 percent in 2022, and 5.7 percent in 2021. Most of these drops have been concentrated among those with lower levels of education, income, and wealth.

There’s similarly been a drop in the number of volunteers, even with the rise of virtual opportunities. AmeriCorps reported that 23 percent of the country formally volunteered in 2021, down from 30 percent in 2019. It’s the steepest drop since the agency started collecting data in 2002.

And this decline is taking a toll on organizations: Nearly half of nonprofit CEOs reported in 2023 that finding enough volunteer help was a major problem for them, up from 29 percent in 2003.

Okay, but why are people donating and volunteering less?

Perhaps it seems intuitive that people who make less money would be less likely to donate or volunteer. But research has shown that, at least historically, it’s the poor who donate more of their incomes to charity. The Generosity Commission suggests that while economic insecurity certainly is part of the story, cultural shifts and changes in habit formation are likely at play, too.

The Great Recession hastened this decline: US households donating to nonprofits fell from 65.4 percent in 2008 to 53 percent in 2016. Yet these downward trends continued even after the economy recovered. By 2018, the proportion of households giving fell below 50 percent, according to the Philanthropy Panel Study, leading some economists to argue that “shocks to income and wealth” cannot fully explain the drops we’ve seen since.

Millennials in particular give less today than previous generations did when they were at the same age and life stage. Some researchers speculate that delays in other traditional markers of adulthood, like marriage and buying a house, may have discouraged charitable behaviors.

Another leading explanation is declining religiosity. Americans who identify as religious are far more likely to donate to charity, but as of 2020, only 47 percent of Americans belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 70 percent in 1999. However, many Americans today identify as spiritual, and there’s some evidence that practicing spiritual activities like yoga and meditation are linked to giving and volunteering.

Other explanations include declining trust in institutions, broader social disconnection, and changing tax incentives. Some experts argue that a focus on courting high-dollar donors has sidelined smaller contributions, fueling a negative cycle in giving.

The report doesn’t give any firm answers, and emphasizes there’s much more to understand, especially when it comes to understanding informal giving.

What the Generosity Commission recommends

The commission makes nine recommendations to address giving and volunteering rates, some clearly heavier lifts than others.

To change the culture, the report recommends enlisting more public figures and leaders to talk about how they benefit from giving and volunteering, and to include young people and employers in the conversation. They also recommend that philanthropies issue marketing and development grants to nonprofits, mutual aid networks and giving circles.

The report recommends further research, particularly on the intersections with faith, social connection, and informal modes of generosity. (Jane Wales, the commission co-chair and vice president of Philanthropy and Society at the Aspen Institute, told me some Gates-funded research on informal giving is currently underway.) The report also says more needs to be done to help smaller, under-resourced nonprofits learn about emerging best practices.

The Generosity Commission makes two policy recommendations — one to sufficiently fund the IRS to regulate the nonprofit sector, and another to create a new non-itemized charitable tax deduction, to incentivize more Americans to give. (The deduction would make it easier for people who don’t typically itemize their taxes—particularly middle and lower-income households—to receive tax savings from charitable giving.) The authors note that we’re coming up on an opportunity for Congress to push these changes, given that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 will expire at the end of 2025.

“If we had some version of that [tax deduction], it would validate giving to [nonprofit charities] as the normative civic act,” Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and an editor of the Generosity Commission report, told me. “That could be a big ask of the [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act]. But it’s also possible that the days of nonprofits’ predominance within the charitable landscape are passing.”

There are bigger questions here

If the glory days of nonprofits are passing, what would come next?

Probably something worse, according to the Generosity Commission. It argues that the nonprofit sector remains the bedrock of American civil society, providing valuable goods and services that the government and the market has not and likely will not ever do.

To its credit, the commission repeatedly stresses appreciation for informal modes of giving and volunteering, like mutual aid networks and crowdfunding platforms. It also admits that its perspective is increasingly at odds with how many people, especially in younger generations, think about volunteering and giving. The researchers find that most Americans identify as generous, aspire to be generous, 74 percent of Americans self-identify as “generous” — and may not buy the claim that declining nonprofit contributions signal declining generosity.

Similarly, younger Americans report that they’d rather give directly to individuals, rather than to intermediary organizations. The evidence is mixed on whether political giving may “crowd out” charitable giving, and further study will be required to clarify whether forms of social engagement like protesting are used as substitutes for volunteering.

Woodrow Rosenbaum, the chief data officer of GivingTuesday, has pushed back on the idea that giving is in decline at all, saying that’s only true if our measurement yardstick is based on monetary gifts to nonprofits. Survey research from GivingTuesday suggests that younger Americans simply “have less rigid demarcations” between various modes of giving — whether that’s to nonprofits, GoFundMes, individuals, or political campaigns.

Still, the Generosity Commission believes those activities are unlikely to ever fully substitute for the daily work of nonprofits. When I asked Wales, the commission co-chair, about this question, she emphasized that the political appetite for building out the welfare state is just lower in the US than in other countries, and she suggested it would be difficult to build the kind of system they have in Europe.

Perhaps one of the most compelling arguments the report makes is that participation matters for healthy democracies. The commission asks us to consider whether declines in formal giving have contributed to mental illness and increasing levels of loneliness. (The authors suggest yes, but, again, conclude more research is needed.) One of its studies found that giving to a charity increases a person’s likelihood of joining one or more community groups by nearly 10 percentage points; volunteering increases it by a rather stunning 24 percentage points. This kind of data lends new weight to the idea that formally giving and volunteering could strengthen civil society — both collectively and individually.

The debate over the definition of generosity notwithstanding, one thing is clear: nonprofits increasingly depend on a limited number of rich benefactors. And ceding a sense of empowerment to improve the world to the ultra-wealthy is what keeps Wales up at night.

“People ask why does participation matter if there’s enough money to go around to nonprofits, why does it matter if it’s concentrated in the hands of just a few people,” she told me. “And from my own perspective, it’s got everything to do with the health of our society. The last thing you want is large portions of American society to feel they lack agency and are not part of the everyday decision-making in their own community.”

Why I changed my mind about volunteering

Originally published in Vox on August 26, 2024.
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Last fall, a reader asked me what they could really do, as one person, to aid people living on the streets. “I often feel helpless to enact change,” they wrote.

I’d been covering homelessness in America and knew that even the sprawling support organizations that have been working on outreach for decades had failed to end the crisis. My mind immediately went to systemic solutions, like voting for candidates who prioritize building more housing, or supporting efforts to loosen zoning codes.

But when I called experts, their answers surprised me. Some of our ideas overlapped, but many of their suggestions were ones I had admittedly not entertained: passing out socks or hand-warmers, donating items like sleeping bags to local shelters, or giving office supplies and bus passes to nonprofits serving unhoused people.

The reporting left me uneasy. Why did I think only about structural change and disregard more immediate help? And why don’t I do more of those day-to-day charitable things, or know many people who do, either?

I did growing up. I have clear memories of bagging meals at food pantries, of cleaning up parks, of Walking for the Cure. I sold lemonade for Darfur and baked brownies for victims of Katrina. In Hebrew school, I learned about giving tzedakah, a form of charity, and our obligation to “repair the world.”

But over time, those childhood activities started to look, well, childish. My coming of age in the 2010s coincided with critiques of individual action that were gaining prominence in media, politics, and academia — overlapping with a growing national focus on inequality and the climate crisis. It was the era of Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, and our whole country grew more fluent in rebukes of billionaires and plutocracy.

Different arguments began to emerge: Volunteering, donating, and modifying one’s personal behavior were, at best, unproductive; at worst, they were harmful distractions from the change we really need. Be wary of those tote-bag shoppers at Whole Foods, championing recycling and reducing one’s carbon footprint. Didn’t they know that BP coined the idea of the “carbon footprint” to shift blame off its own oil production? Didn’t they understand that “lifestyle politics” was not the answer? Volunteering or bake sales didn’t threaten the status quo. They were what people in power wanted you to be doing.

Real social change would come only from mass protest and collective pressure on governments and corporations. It didn’t hurt that such protests against poverty, police brutality, and rising global temperatures were also exciting, and seemed to offer young people better and more visible ways of making a difference.

As a left-leaning college student, I was persuaded by leaders who warned that personal consumer choices would never amount to real social change. I also grew familiar with arguments by activists and intellectuals that nonprofits were too often complacent and even disincentivized to solve real problems, since doing so could threaten their own funding streams. Contributing my time and money to this “nonprofit industrial complex” would be a mistake. Cutting checks wouldn’t change anything other than the balance in my savings account. For real social progress, we’d need systematic policy shifts, comprehensive legislation, and political power.

Since I received the reader’s note about homelessness last fall, I’ve been thinking more about the cost of all this cynicism. Were the arguments against individual action even helpful?

I also started to wonder if these beliefs contributed to the American “friendship recession” and loneliness crisis I kept hearing about. Back in 2000, in his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam highlighted declines in American church attendance, volunteering, civic associations, and team sports; it seems our “social cohesion” had only gotten worse since then. Gen Z and millennials volunteer at lower rates than adults born in earlier generations, even though there is pretty overwhelming research that volunteering and donating makes people happier, and boosts their self-esteem, physical health, and lifespan.

It’s not considered socially acceptable to tout personal benefits derived from charitable acts. It’d be unusual to hear volunteers say they’re going to a soup kitchen to improve their self-esteem. Perhaps this is because those gains suggest that there are more selfish motivations for behaviors we want to think of primarily as selfless. But wealthy philanthropists don’t seem shy about citing their self-interest, and often say their humanitarian work leaves them with deep feelings of pleasure, optimism, and agency.

It struck me as rather sad that those of us who are not billionaires may have convinced ourselves that volunteering or fundraising was mostly a waste of time.

When did I become someone who placed such exhausting value on optimizing my time, anyway? It suddenly felt much more arrogant than altruistic. Convenient, and uncaring.

Perhaps most importantly, had distancing ourselves from charity and service made the world a better place? Has it made my own life better?

A few developments helped sour so many in my left-leaning generation on individual action.

The climate movement over the last 15 years played a leading role, rejecting solutions based on individual responsibility, and emphasizing the limits of forgoing meat or driving hybrid cars. Activists organized worldwide youth climate strikes and pipeline protests, focusing the public’s attention on governments, oil companies, and fossil fuel lobbyists.

In the 2016 presidential primary, where he captured over 70 percent of the Democratic youth vote, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders took aim at “corporate polluters” driving the climate emergency. And perhaps no claim had more cultural influence than the widely shared, though misleading, statistic that just 100 companies were responsible for 70 percent of the world’s emissions.

There was also a largely successful effort to link curbing climate change with anti-capitalism. The 2011 Occupy protests got an even bigger boost following Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in English in 2014. (Vox called it “the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade.”) Naomi Klein’s influential book This Changes Everything, also published in 2014, made the case that capitalism itself was an existential threat, that saving the planet would not be possible without overhauling the economic order.

In many ways, the growing emphasis on collective action felt clarifying, righteous, and long overdue. Student debt activists who emerged from Occupy helped millions of people process their feelings of shame and guilt over falling victim to predatory loans. New and influential left-wing outlets, like Jacobin, helped shape my generation’s consciousness and inspire us to demand more from those in power.

At their best, these collectivist messages inspired hope, agency, and empathy — spelling out a concrete playbook for a more just planet. At their worst, though, they fueled despair, cynicism, and nihilism, promising a better world only if near-impossible political changes were made, and fast. Social and economic conditions were characterized as terribly as possible, to galvanize more people to upend them. Even those who weren’t necessarily looking to foment a revolution contributed to growing negative attitudes around individual action. The Effective Altruist movement, for example, argued that most charities were wasteful and ineffective, save for some rare exceptions.

A recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that young people are far more fearful than hopeful about the future: They worry about the moral direction of the country, don’t think their vote will make a real difference, and don’t volunteer for community service. It’s not that people today are choosing to protest instead of recycling; it’s that in our current environment, many people are doing neither. Despite all the attention on collective action and solidarity, many young adults are isolated and pessimistic about social change.

I set a New Year’s resolution to volunteer. Here I was, a self-motivated journalist with professional research skills; finding charitable work I could donate my time to shouldn’t have been too hard.

But it was more difficult than I expected. I’m not a member of a faith-based organization, neither my workplace nor my union organizes volunteer events, and my initial inquiries to nonprofits through volunteermatch.org went ignored. Lacking something I could easily plug into, I felt the poverty of my institutional connections in a new way. Robert Putnam would be nodding sagely, I thought.

Finally, I stumbled on something called a “giving circle,” where people donate money collectively, mostly to local nonprofits. It resembled a book club but for philanthropy, and I found one focused on women and children in the DC area.

The full group, roughly 250 people, convenes annually to vote on donating their pooled membership funds, though those who want to be more involved can participate in subcommittees that review grant applications to help narrow down the list. Since I report on housing, I decided to join the housing subcommittee and our group of roughly 20 began meeting weekly on Tuesday nights. ​​It was unfamiliar work, but I appreciated it and all the women involved who took the reviews so seriously. I learned about extraordinary groups in the DC area, like Together We Bake, which has trained hundreds of women in food production, and SafeSpotDC, which helps victims of child abuse.

I also started reading books on volunteering, grasping for new ways to make sense of what I was feeling. I read in Arthur Brooks’s book, Who Really Cares, that secular liberals like myself are stingier givers — less likely to donate to charity or volunteer than the general population, and much less likely to donate or volunteer than religious conservatives. The larger decline in organized religion loomed over this research.

“For many Americans, political opinions are a substitute for personal checks,” Brooks writes. He even observed that proponents of income redistribution were less likely to give blood. “If everyone in the population gave at the same rate as government aid advocates, the supply would drop by about 30 percent,” he reported.

I squirmed when I read this. I’d never given blood. I found a study that said among first-time blood donors, the most frequently cited reason for giving was “influence from a friend.” I couldn’t think of anyone encouraging me to donate, but that felt like a weak excuse.

Around the same time, the Red Cross declared an emergency blood shortage; donors had dropped by 40 percent over the last two decades. With Brooks’ book fresh in my mind, I decided to sign up. In early February, I went downtown to a blood donation center; the whole thing was relatively quick, and I felt happy when I left.

I caught a charitable bug. None of this was hard, I realized. I just hadn’t prioritized any of it. I found a local homeless organization that had an Amazon wish list of needed items. I sent them tampons, pads, wipes, underwear, and hand-warmers, and chided myself for not having done such easy things sooner.

The US has long been defined by its culture of volunteerism. When French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s he marveled at the many civic groups, later arguing that such volunteer organizations were integral to American democracy. Our bustling nonprofit sector would become a global symbol of entrepreneurialism and freedom.

It’s become common to say this vibrant civic fabric has since frayed. America is hanging out less. Our “social fitness” in shambles. But over the last year, I’ve found plenty of data that complicates this narrative.

Volunteer rates have not fluctuated very much over the last 75 years. There were declines in the 1980s, then surges following the 9/11 attacks and again during the Trump presidency. Researchers find mixed evidence that social capital is declining, though there’s more consensus that volunteering itself has become more episodic and time-limited than before. Nonprofit donations are down, but crowdfunding contributions keep soaring.

Some scholars say the Bowling Alone thesis was always missing the forest for the trees, that Putnam’s analysis privileged the kinds of activities white people of means were most likely to do.

“You had the largest immigration rights mobilization in 2006 ever, and then the white people were all reading Putnam,” Erica Kohl-Arenas, a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis, told me. “Numbers are not down in terms of people as part of associations, groups, or affiliated networks, but they might be down in terms of those who say, ‘I’m going to go look at the Yellow Pages to do five hours of service a week.’”

In contrast to the Yellow Pages form of service, so-called informal volunteering — meaning unpaid acts of service not coordinated through legal nonprofits — is harder to track, practiced more by communities of color, and almost never included in official counts of philanthropy.

“There’s lots of volunteering that doesn’t involve an organization,” said Mark Snyder, the director of the Center for the Study of the Individual and Society at the University of Minnesota. “When neighbors on a block shoot a message to your group text asking if someone can keep an eye on your kid, or bring over a meal, these things aren’t considered volunteering. But do you get paid for it? Do you get a sense of benefit by helping?”

Paul Schervish, a retired sociologist who directed the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, spent his career urging colleagues to take interpersonal and intra-family caregiving more seriously. He noted that while charitable giving is measured at roughly $500 billion annually in the US, remittances to relatives in poorer countries exceed $100 billion per year.

“None of those payments are included in what we talk about when we talk about philanthropy,” he told me. “Furthermore, Hispanics rank lower on charitable giving than other ethnic groups, but part of that is they are offering their homes up to family and living with extended family members so much more often, and carrying out these remittances. Care for each other, and even within your own family, is something that we don’t pay attention to.”

Schervish argues that a proper understanding of philanthropy has always been more vast than the way Putnam and conventional theorists have sliced and diced it. It should encompass both informal aid for friends and family, and acts of service for people more distant from you. Look no further than the Greek word philia, he says, referring to non-romantic love, that shares the same root as our modern word philanthropy.

“Philia or friendship love, for Aristotle, extends out in concentric circles from the family to the entire species,” Schervish has written. “Friendship love is a relation of mutual nourishment that leads to the virtuous flourishing of both parties.”

Or put differently, rather than debate whether acts of philanthropy are motivated by selfishness or selflessness, or whether it “counts” if it’s service for your aunt versus your neighbor versus a child in Africa, Schervish encourages thinking about donors, volunteers, and all caregivers as people who take action in connection with others, who “view others in need as familial.”

I took the point that the popular view on social cohesion may have oversights. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that people today are feeling more despair, especially younger people.

I know firsthand that many Americans are overwhelmed by negative news stories, which compound in exhausting ways. It’s become far too hard to know what’s true, and all the contradictory information leads some to give up trying to make sense of the world altogether. The proportion of readers who say they avoid news is close to an all-time high.

Volunteering wouldn’t solve these problems, but given what we know about volunteering’s benefits, it seems it could certainly help. One University of Oxford researcher surveyed over 45,000 employees whose companies offered wellness benefits like massage classes, coaching sessions, and mindfulness workshops. The only option that seemed to actually have a positive effect on well-being, the study found, were those jobs that provided workers with opportunities for charity or volunteering.

Volunteers help bag to-go meals at Catherdral Kitchen on August 21, 2013, in Camden, New Jersey. Cathedral Kitchen is a multi-service soup kitchen that has been serving the Camden homeless community since 1976. They serve between 300 and 600 dinners each night, as well as offering biweekly dental services, and periodic medical and legal services as well.Andrew Burton/Getty Images

A friend from my giving circle pointed out that the vast number of activities billed as self-care are pricey beauty treatments, boutique fitness classes, and other ways to “treat” ourselves. They all tend to advance the idea that feeling better, and even simply feeling good, is found in helping oneself rather than each other.

Still, it can be harder for young people today to volunteer, Snyder, from the University of Minnesota, told me. “Young people are scrambling more than cohorts before to make a living, making ends meet through multiple jobs,” he said. “There are fewer discretionary hours available in a day.”

I reached out to the Making Caring Common Project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. In 2014, it found that a large majority of American teenagers value personal achievement and happiness over caring for others, priorities they felt their parents also shared. Richard Weissbourd, who directs the center, told me they’ve re-surveyed youths several times over the last decade and found similar results. Teens consistently rank happiness and personal achievement most highly, and caring for others and concern for the common good at the bottom.

“The irony of course is that by encouraging everyone to prioritize individual success and happiness, people are getting further from the kinds of activities and mental frameworks that drive satisfaction, fulfillment, community, and peace,” Weissbourd said.

While most news stories on mental health tend to focus on youth struggling in middle and high school, Weissbourd said his research has him worrying most about people ages 18 to 25, who he finds doing “twice as badly” as younger teens. “There’s a lot of apocalyptic thinking and not a lot of action there,” he said. “It’s like a deep tiredness, a feeling like people are in deep winter.”

Meanwhile, though the climate crisis drove people like me to be more distrusting of calls for individual action, some climate leaders have been calling for a different approach. More activists now stress that systemic and individual change should be understood as two sides of the same coin, and that individual action can be necessary for building sustainable, transparent political movements.

“A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief,” Jason Mark, the editor of Sierra magazine, wrote in 2019. “This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.”

In his book Giving Done Right, Phil Buchanan, the president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, refers to a longstanding debate over whether it’s useful for donors to spend money on alleviating effects of problems, rather than attacking the problems’ underlying causes. Philanthropy certainly has some great victories in funding “root” solutions, but Buchanan urges against the mentality that only permanently eradicating a problem is worth doing. “You shouldn’t assume that a focus on roots is necessarily superior,” he writes. “Trimming branches is also important.”

In a way, it can feel safe to distrust the value of individual action. Being wary of philanthropy and charitable groups that promise to better the world resonates with the skepticism I’ve been trained to have, professionally and culturally. It also allows me to avoid making sacrifices; there’s no real vulnerability or bets required.

But as time goes on, and as I think about the family I might one day raise, I’m coming to appreciate the value of letting go and taking gambles on hope, as long as they point generally in the moral direction I want to go.

With all these questions swirling in my head, I cold-emailed a local rabbi. She offered to meet and pointed me to a story in Exodus about Jews who agreed to accept the Torah from God before really knowing what was in it. “Naaseh v’nishma,” the Israelites said, which roughly translates to “we’ll do, and then we’ll understand.” The lesson, the rabbi told me, is about diving in with imperfect information, of learning through doing.

Schervish, the retired sociologist, thinks I should worry less about carving time outside of my regular routine to volunteer, and to count acts of service I take for my friends, partner, colleagues, and others just as much as philanthropy organized through 501c(3)s.

“Meeting the true needs of others is how you nourish somebody, but what that nourishment is, and what those true needs are — we’re always going to find people debating about that,” he told me. “And you’re going to have debates within yourself. But it’s always the right question.”

This was his gentle reminder that determining how to live morally requires wrestling that is messy, personal, and evolving. I haven’t figured it all out yet. But I don’t want imperfect information to stop me from diving in, now.

Naaseh v’nishma, I signed up to donate blood again.

A bold new federal experiment in giving renters cash

Originally published at Vox on September 12, 2023.
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A group of researchers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development have been quietly developing an idea that could fundamentally upend the nearly 50-year-old housing voucher program, which helps more than 2 million low-income families afford apartments in the private rental market every year.

The idea is relatively simple: What if, instead of traditional housing vouchers laden with convoluted red tape that landlords notoriously hate, low-income tenants could pay their rent with cash? Would that make it easier for tenants to find housing or move into better neighborhoods? Could that even save the government money by streamlining the aid?

Right now, due to funding constraints, only a quarter of those eligible for housing choice vouchers (formerly known as Section 8 vouchers) ever receive one. But if you are in that lucky 25 percent and are awarded a voucher, you might not be able to use it. The program is so cumbersome that only around 60 percent of beneficiaries can find a landlord willing to rent to them.

This isn’t the first time the federal government has explored questions around cash rental assistance: In the early 1970s, Congress successfully piloted a program to 14,000 families across 12 cities. That research, however, was largely forgotten about in the following decades. It wasn’t until recently, when some HUD employees stumbled upon old reports buried on an agency bookshelf, that policymakers realized the cash rental assistance model might be more valuable for modern times.

They are building on that older research as well as more recent developments: an ongoing related study in Philadelphia, the Covid-19 experiments with new kinds of cash assistance (including not just housing aid but also stimulus checks, child tax credits, and food subsidies), and dozens of encouraging guaranteed income pilots that have cropped up over the last few years. HUD officials now say it’s time to give federal cash aid a closer look.

The leaders behind this effort held their first official meetings last week, pitching philanthropic groups on the idea and asking for their financial backing. While the two virtual sessions were closed to the press, a HUD official told me “30 to 40 interested funders” came to their Tuesday pitch, and “dozens more” to their Thursday one. The team is convening a third meeting with nonprofits and housing researchers on September 19.

Though the HUD appointees who led the meetings — Brian McCabe and Aaron Shroyer — are framing the idea as a modest research project, officials involved are clear-eyed on where such a study could ultimately go. If, for example, a rigorously designed experiment provides new evidence for changing how vouchers are administered, that could have major implications for the $30 billion annual program and all the low-income families it serves. A small pilot could lead to a larger demonstration study, which could, officials say, then lead to pitching Congress on permanent change.

The wheels of federal policy reform move slowly: It might be 10 years until HUD makes any sort of long-term ask of Congress. But the wheels are turning now, in a way they never have before, to make the idea of cash aid a reality.

How the cash rental assistance policy might work

There are a lot of steps to getting housing with a federal voucher. First, a household has to prove eligibility. Then a public housing agency must issue the voucher subsidy to a landlord on the household’s behalf. For the household to benefit, the landlord must accept that voucher, the unit must pass an inspection, and the landlord must sign a contract with the public housing agency.

These are a lot of steps, and one hope is that by cutting out much of this bureaucracy, more people will be able to quickly move into affordable housing.

The proposed HUD study would look like this: Households selected from existing voucher waiting lists across a handful of diverse cities (ranging from smaller and suburban to dense and urban) would be randomly assigned to receive either the traditional housing choice voucher funded by HUD or a monthly payment for an equivalent value funded by philanthropy. The cash would not be unrestricted; it would need to go toward paying rent.

Researchers would then be able to study and compare the two groups over time (HUD says ideally for four years) to assess key housing policy questions, like whether one group had more success landing an apartment and staying in their unit.

A HUD official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said they don’t have an exact number of tenant participants in mind, but stressed they’d want to involve researchers from the very beginning so they could design a study capable of providing strong statistical analysis. An example they put forward was studying five cities, with 200 households per city.

Landlords would likely still know if renters were using philanthropic cash to pay their rent, as it’s common to ask prospective tenants for income verification. But this kind of study could help clarify whether landlords are more biased against renting to low-income people who rely on aid at all, or if landlord resistance stems primarily from the logistical hassle of the traditional voucher program.

“The idea — to the degree possible — is to make the [public housing agency] invisible,” explained the HUD official. “So a landlord knows they’re dealing directly with the tenant, and not the tenant and the PHA.”

Jack Landry, who researches guaranteed income programs for the left-leaning Jain Family Institute, said he’s excited about HUD’s proposed idea because it offers something distinct from the rest of the existing evidence base.

“There are a lot of UBI [universal basic income] pilots out there, but only a fraction of them are being rigorously studied, and a lot of them are funded by American Rescue Plan dollars, making it unclear what happens when the money runs out,” he told Vox. “I’m enthusiastic because I think HUD’s idea has really clear policy implications and a fairly clear route to translating to large-scale policy change.”

Congress won’t let HUD distribute cash directly — but philanthropists could step in

Todd Richardson, a longtime HUD staffer whose team inadvertently discovered old federal reports of the cash rental aid program that ran in the 1970s, proposed in a little-noticed blog post in 2017 that perhaps those research findings could inform an existing voucher program known as Moving to Work.

Moving to Work, which allows public housing agencies to spend federal housing funds more flexibly than is permitted under the traditional voucher program, has been around since 1996 but was expanded by Congress in 2016.

Two years ago, in a meeting attended by local and federal housing officials and this reporter, participants discussed the idea of using Moving to Work to test cash subsidies for renters. Attendees expressed enthusiasm for the idea, though Richardson, who was leading the meeting, warned that it might not “pass muster” with the agency’s legal department.

The reason HUD is now pursuing a partnership with philanthropy is HUD’s lawyers ultimately determined it would violate existing congressional law to distribute federal housing dollars as cash, even under the Moving to Work program. Though some renters accessed federal cash rental assistance during the pandemic, officials say that’s largely because the American Rescue Plan was more vague on how funds could be spent, and thus more flexible.

But if HUD isn’t allowed to distribute its vouchers as cash, foundations could step in, and then HUD could study how that goes.

This public-private idea is being tried already in one city: In Philadelphia, researchers are almost one year into a two-and-a-half-year cash rental assistance experiment studying 300 households selected to receive money on a prepaid debit card every month. HUD officials have been in touch with Philadelphia program leaders, but they envision designing their federal study differently, partly because state and local housing agencies have more flexibility on how they spend public funds.

Sara Jaffee, a University of Pennsylvania researcher involved in evaluating Philadelphia’s cash rental assistance program, told Vox they’re just finishing cleaning up data and should be able to share some initial findings within the next month. She said they’re testing a lot of questions related to housing outcomes, including around housing quality and the experience of leasing with landlords.

According to a HUD official involved, the federal demonstration could conceivably get off the ground in the next six to nine months, depending on how fast governments find charitable partners. They’re hoping they can entice local philanthropies interested in putting money back into their communities — like the Pennyslvania-based foundations that are supporting Philadelphia’s study — as well as national tech and progressive groups that might want to grow the evidence base for universal basic income.

Last week’s meetings marked only the first step to potentially changing how billions of dollars in housing aid to low-income renters are spent. But as far as first steps in federal policymaking go, they were serious ones.

Don’t Trust Jeff Bezos’s Preschool Philanthropy Scheme

Originally published in In These Times on September 19, 2018.
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The CEO of Amazon and the world’s richest man declared this month that he’ll be wading into the waters of philanthropy. In a high-profile announcement, Jeff Bezos described his vision for a “Day One Fund”—a $2 billion investment in organizations that provide homelessness assistance, and a new network of nonprofit preschools in low-income communities. This charitable gift will amount to just 1.2 percent of his net worth.

Bezos joins fellow tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Reed Hastings in championing corporate-style reform of American education. “We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon,” Bezos said of his future preschool chain. “Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer.”

Preschool is a particularly appealing area for those who like conceptualizing problems in terms of market potential. Several years ago, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce affiliate reported that every dollar invested in high-quality early childhood education yields savings “from $2.50 to as much as $17 in the years ahead.” University of Chicago economist and Nobel Prize winner James Heckman published research in 2009 finding high-quality preschool can yield a 7-to-10 percent annual return.

Preschool is also one of the most popular target-areas for champions of “Pay for Success”—a branch of so-called impact investing which took off under the Obama administration. Under Pay for Success, private funders front money for social programs, and the government pays the investors back with interest if certain predetermined goals are met. Chicago launched a Pay for Success preschool program in 2014, funded by Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust and the J.B. and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation. These private groups aim to roughly double their investment over the next 18 years.

It’s not clear at this point how Bezos’s Day One Fund will be structured; whether it will be a traditional family foundation like the Gates Foundation, some sort of limited-liability company like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or perhaps one of the increasingly controversial “donor-advised funds” that other tech titans have embraced. CNBC reports that between thirty to fifty percent of Bezos’s gift could be tax-deductible.

It’s also not clear why exactly he chose this month to announce his plans, but it’s possible that Bezos is trying to improve his image, which has taken a public beating over the past year. This past June, the Seattle City Council rolled back its so-called “Amazon tax” which councilmembers had passed unanimously four weeks earlier. The tax, meant to generate new revenue to address the region’s growing homeless crisis, would have required Amazon to pay about $12 million per year in new taxes. The company helped fund an aggressive, unpopular, and ultimately successful campaign to repeal it.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has also been targeting Bezos, specifically on the gulf between the CEO’s ever-increasing wealth and the low-wages of Amazon’s many thousands of employees, who rely on all sorts of government aid to supplement their income. This month, just days before Bezos made his philanthropic announcement, Sen. Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna introduced new federal legislation to force large companies to help shoulder the cost of social services for low-paid staff. More than anything, though, the bill is understood as a vehicle to spotlight the issue of inequality between rich owners and their workers. It’s unsubtly named the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act, or “Stop BEZOS” for short.

While he’s offered little detail as to how he’d treat the educators in his forthcoming preschool network, Bezos’s other businesses offer some hints. The median compensation of Amazon’s more than 566,000 global employees at the end of 2017 was $28,446. Thousands of Amazon workers in Europe launched a strike this past summer to protest their working conditions, following an exposé of a journalist who had toiled undercover at an Amazon warehouse. Workers in Minnesota also demanded safer Amazon conditions this past summer, alleging dehydration, injuries and exhaustion on the job. A spokesperson for the company dismissed the employees’ complaints, calling theirs a “positive and accommodating” workplace.

The national median income for preschool teachers in 2016 was $28,570. While a growing number of education policy experts have called for increasing salaries as a way to attract and retain better teaching talent, there’s no guarantee that Bezos’s “customer” focused-model will prioritize competitive wages.

And to put Bezos’s gift in perspective, Head Start, the federal government’s high-quality early-childhood education program which serves nearly one million low-income children every year, runs on a strained budget of more than $9 billion annually. Bezos’s Day One Fund, meanwhile, is $2 billion, to be divided amongst both pre-K and homelessness.

Let’s be clear about the scale of the problem. In 2016, just 42 percent of 3-year-olds and 66 percent of 4-year-olds in the United States were enrolled in preschool programs, and these figures were not measurably different from the percentages enrolled in 2000. Demand for early childhood education far exceeds existing capacity in this country, and the cost to change that will require significantly more than what Bezos has so far offered to contribute.

The world’s richest man may sincerely view his new philanthropic project as a way to positively impact the world, but what we know is that Bezos has built up his company and personal fortune by aggressively avoiding taxes for years. In 2017 alone, Amazon paid literally nothing in federal income tax, while reporting $5.6 billion in U.S. profits.

Instead of creating his own new private network, which might run in direct competition with Head Start and other existing state programs, Bezos could help the government expand its proven models: A combination of higher taxes and philanthropy could help early childhood educators cover the cost of school supplies, help program providers extend their school days, construct and refurbish school buildings, supplement teacher salaries, and improve teacher training programs. There are even Montessori-inspired Head Start programs, the progressive pedagogical model Bezos seems most interested in expanding on his own.

Giving more kids access to good schools can be an uncomfortable thing to criticize. But we have to be able to recognize when something even seemingly generous is nowhere near enough. Last year Bezos said he wants his philanthropy to help “people in the here and now.” This month he said he wants to ensure our great-grandchildren have “lives better than ours.” Whether he means it or not, it’s on all of us to push for more.

Education Interviews, 2016

I published six education Q&As this year. I’d recommend all of them 🙂

1. Learning from History: The Prospects for School Desegregation9780226025254
 An interview with historian Ansley Erickson

2. The Economic Consequences of Denying Teachers Tenure
An interview with economist Jesse Rothstein

3. It’s Not the Cost of College — It’s the Price
An interview with sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab

4. How to Stop For-Profit Colleges
An interview with sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom

516yzaplyl-_sx332_bo1204203200_5. Pulling Back the Curtain on Education Philanthropy
An interview with political scientist Megan Tompkins-Stange

6. College, the Skills Gap, and the Student Loan Crisis
An interview with economist Marshall Steinbaum

CeEreKsWoAAnbjJ.jpg           9780226404349

Q&A: Pulling Back the Curtain on Education Philanthropy

Originally published in The American Prospect on September 21, 2016.
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Private foundations give millions of dollars to public education every year, but these powerful institutions typically operate behind a curtain of secrecy. In a new book, Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence, University of Michigan public policy professor Megan Tompkins-Stange sheds new light on the role philanthropy plays in public education, particularly in the arena of charter schools and other market-based reforms. 

Tompkins-Stange spent five years conducting confidential interviews with foundation insiders at the Ford Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Analyzing their diverse, and sometimes competing, approaches to grant-giving, she raises important questions about the influence that philanthropic interests wield in American education and public life. This is an edited transcript of that interview.

Rachel Cohen: You chose to dive into a controversial topic—education reform. What kind of feedback has your book received?

Megan Tompkins-Stange: Honestly I was really scared building up to the book’s release date, especially since I am a junior scholar. For months I was like, what am I doing? Why did I decide to do this? I was terrified. But honestly, most of the response to the book has been really supportive and positive, including from the foundations. I still haven’t heard anything from the Broad Foundation, but I’ve also heard from retired teachers, and people who experienced some of the politics first-hand.

One major critique I’ve received is that I’m not vocal enough about whether philanthropic giving is good or bad. But I did this intentionally—I wanted it to be accepted as an academic and empirical book, as opposed to a piece of advocacy. I’ve taken a more critical stance in the press though, I’m now more comfortable to do so.

Your book talks about the secrecy of foundations. Can you say more?

Foundations are private nonprofit corporations. There’s very little they have to do in order to be accountable to the public. They publish their tax forms, they have their 990s. They’ve established some professional norms over the past 50 years, so many will publish their grants in a database, or put out annual reports. That’s more just good practice, though. Foundations don’t have boards that are democratically accountable, and they are very private by nature of their organizational form. They don’t have to talk to anyone.

Of course, the argument that comes up again and again is, well is that a good thing? That’s a debate that’s gone on for many years. My position is that foundations need to be much more legally accountable. They have enough power in the public realm that they need to be held to some accountability procedures beyond the ones they institute on their own. That could be a formal mechanism, or creating space for people to weigh in on efforts they’re pushing that will impact the public at large. They could have boards with some kind of public member component, or make some investments subject to an external review.

People often lump the Gates and Broad Foundations together, but you explore some differences between these two education reform-friendly foundations.

Eli Broad is the only person to have founded two Fortune 500 companies, and part of his theory of change is about getting the right people into the right positions. So Broad focuses on pipelines: training superintendents, creating leadership positions for individuals to then shape school districts. He very intentionally talks about “venture philanthropy” and having “dramatic results” and creating “transformative breakthroughs.” The Broad Foundation moves unapologetically with urgency; that is their core value.

Gates is a little more skittish about where the public stands on them, they’re more careful. They have legions of lawyers who work to make sure their advocacy doesn’t cross any line. The Gates Foundation also has a sense of urgency, but they’ve always been a bit more cautious. Some people say this may be due to some things Microsoft went through with antitrust—Bill Gates has always just been much more public and attracts more criticism and critique than Eli Broad.

Many supporters of the Common Core insist that the standards originated from the states, not the federal government. Your book recounts the many ways in which they were actually pushed forward by the Gates Foundation, on both the state and the federal level.

Gates was very much about building up the power at the state and local level, and then bringing in the federal government. That was their strategy, and the main way they did that was by getting all the governors on board in ’08 and ’09. Gates made huge grants to The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association designed to build political will.

The grants were basically for instituting standards, educating the public, and research. It was all very above-board, but they really played that convener role to get everyone on the same page. Their strategy was to give money to elites to move the effort efficiently and quickly.

HistPhil, a blog about the history of philanthropy, hosts debates about what’s changed in the modern landscape of philanthropic giving. Your book describes some shifts in education philanthropy over the past few decades. What do you think has changed?

HistPhil is such a valuable website, I really appreciate the role that they’ve taken in advancing the conversation and bringing it back to history. There’s a tendency in political discussions about philanthropy to argue that today is the biggest it’s ever been. The truth is that foundations have been really powerful for more than a century; if you look back at some of the press from the 1920s and 1930s, there are very similar arguments being made about the influence of the Rockefellers.

All that’s old is new again. I think that what’s changed is that people today are more concerned about the size of foundations. It’s the first time in many decades we’ve seen foundations that are in excess of a billion dollars, and the growth of their assets has also grown significantly. The presence of market-based values and the influences of neoliberalism over the past 30 years is a big deal, too. People tend to get hyperbolic because there are wealthy people in tech and business who are more assertive in ways that foundations haven’t been in the past.

Your book suggests “evidenced-based” policies are often far less rigorous, and far more political, than their proponents suggest.

Right, what is evidence? I’m working on a book proposal now with [political scientist] Sarah Reckhow about teacher quality debates. We look at the new industry of advocacy research, and its influence on policy discussions. So many ideological arguments have the veneer of neutrality confirmed by the label “evidenced-based.”

We’re in the midst of a presidential election that actually has a significant focus on philanthropy. Both Clinton and Trump have foundations, and particularly the Clinton Foundation’s influence is regularly in the media. Do you see this having any import for the education philanthropy conversation?

It’s an interesting question because the broad public doesn’t really know what a foundation is, or what it does. Clinton’s foundation doesn’t make that many grants, it’s more like brokering and convening. I teach a class on philanthropy and I start by asking my class “what is the foundation you most admire?” Students will say things like the Salvation Army. Most people really conflate foundations and public charities, and there’s not a real understanding of who gives the money and who does the work on the ground. There’s a real lack of knowledge about what power these different groups have, which also carries implications for our democracy.

The national conversation around inequality has grown far more pronounced. Has this impacted the public’s focus on philanthropy?

That was fascinating for me. Literally I kept having to add things to the book as we were going to press. ESSA passed, Bernie Sanders became a real viable candidate. I think people are starting to realize that philanthropy is inextricably linked to an unequal society. You can’t have philanthropy without having some people who have a lot more than others.

 

 

Oprah Is Not Your Friend: A Q&A With Nicole Aschoff

Originally published in Dissent on August 18, 2015.
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Nicole Aschoff, the Managing Editor at Jacobin magazine, is author of The New Prophets of Capital, a book that examines the modern mythmaking central to twenty-first century capitalism. It’s a short and agitating book that aims to critically examine some of the rhetoric espoused by “new prophets” like Oprah Winfrey, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

Rachel Cohen: Your book makes the point that capitalism has always needed, and will always need stories for people to grasp on to, to “get us out of bed in the morning and remind us where we are going.” Why is this? Does socialism have its own prophets?

Nicole Aschoff: Stories, as a vehicle for norms, ideas, and morals, are important to all societies, and capitalist societies are no exception. In capitalist societies there is a disjuncture between the things we value highly—family, community, fulfillment, education, culture—and the architecture of our economy, which prioritizes profit. Stories about “creative capitalism” and positive thinking told by people like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey matter because they smooth over this disjuncture. They help to convince people that capitalism is the best, or only possible, way to organize society.

Just as there have always been people whose stories bolster capitalism—from Ben Franklin to John Mackey—there have also always been voices that challenge capitalism and the existing hierarchy of power. In the United States we can think about the stories told by people like Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, and Rachel Carson, to name a few. However, if we look at the history of the labor, civil rights, feminist, and environmental movements, the importance of collective actions and voices, rather than a few powerful prophets or hierarchical leadership structures, is striking. Successful social movements are made up of empowered, critical, ordinary people, and I think this is something to strive for.

Cohen: You explore the popularity of Whole Foods and discuss the rise of “lifestyle politics” whereby people conflate consumer choices with politics and citizenship. You acknowledge that for so many individuals, given that social change often feels incredibly elusive, there’s an aspect of empowerment that comes with modifying one’s consumer choices—like buying organic produce or going vegan. What, in your view, is wrong with this idea and what might be a better way to think about consumer action and social change?

Aschoff: It depends on what you want to get out of lifestyle politics. If your goal is to eat healthier, or simplify your life by reducing your possessions, then buying better things—if you have the money—can be quite empowering. But if your goal is to impact bigger processes, like environmental degradation or global poverty, lifestyle politics is not the answer. Companies that produce nice things like organic food or sustainable furniture are like all other companies, and must constantly expand and produce more to generate profits.

This does not mean that making better choices is useless or that we shouldn’t challenge the way things are being produced. It is simply a call for different kinds of projects. The environmental crisis is ultimately a social and political crisis that can only be solved by collective action.

Cohen: One chapter looks at the rise of “philanthrocapitalists” like the Gateses, Waltons, Broads, and Buffetts. In an era of scarce resources and shrinking government budgets, why should we be concerned about the growing influence of philanthropists?

Aschoff: Periods of increasing activity by philanthropic foundations, or these days “philanthrocapitalists,” are historically a symptom of social crisis associated with rising inequality. On the surface this might seem positive. But we can’t expect big foundations to solve inequality, or poverty, or any number of other social ills.

Foundations distract from how wealth creation works, by making it appear that philanthropists are doing people a favor out of the goodness of their hearts. This hides the fact that the wealth they have amassed was not simply the result of their own cunning or ability—it was made possible by all the people who worked for them, not to mention the public infrastructure made possible by taxpayers. By presenting themselves as do-gooders or charitable institutions, foundations erase the last four decades of aggressive lobbying for financial deregulation and tax-cuts and the concerted attacks on working people and unions by businesses and elites.

Unlike taxes, when foundations make philanthropic donations, they are choosing which projects they want to fund. These projects often have some progressive effects—poor children get vaccines when they wouldn’t otherwise. But they also often contain conservative goals—for example, the Gateses favor commoditizing health care rather than supporting universal health care, and many foundations support privatizing public education and reducing the voice of parents and teachers in how schools are run.

Whether we like foundation projects or not makes little difference because people like Bill and Melinda Gates are incredibly powerful and essentially unaccountable. We have no say over how foundation money is used, even when it impacts people’s lives profoundly.

Cohen: You note that challenging these stories about capitalism “require a fundamental rethinking of our current way of life, a prospect that evokes fears of violence and disorder, and a deeper apprehension that in the process of transforming our society, we might lose ourselves and the essence of who we are.” How do we overcome these fears?

Aschoff: Capitalism is a stressful system. People use up most of their energy just keeping their head above water, so telling them to imagine a different kind of society might seem silly or off-putting. But when we look back at U.S. history—at slavery, child labor, the oppression of women, Jim Crow, homophobia—these things didn’t get better by themselves. People fought and died to make them better, and they continue that struggle today. Capitalism is a historical development; there is nothing “natural” or inevitable about it. As renowned author Ursula Le Guin said recently: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.” Reminding ourselves how change has happened in the past is important if we want to think seriously about creating a different kind of society.

Cohen: One chapter of your book explores Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s particular brand of feminism. Your argument, which I’ve also seen made by writers like Sarah Jaffe, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, Sarah Leonard, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, suggests that Sandberg’s approach of encouraging women to “lean in” may help a small slice of elite women access power, but ultimately won’t help women at the bottom of the economic ladder. Why does it have to be an either/or discussion?

Aschoff: Nearly everyone is dependent upon wages to pay for all the things they need to survive, but those wages come directly out of the profits of the businesses they work for. The job of a head of a company—whether male or female—is to maximize profits, and one way they can do this is by paying as little as possible in wages and taxes. This means the goals of women leaders are often at odds with the needs of working-class women. Having women at the top may help in the fight against sexism and smooth the way for other women to step into leadership positions, but the idea that women leaders will implement better conditions for women more broadly has little historical precedent.

Sandberg’s manifesto aligns perfectly with the needs of capital by encouraging women to map their dreams onto the growth trajectories of corporate America. Sure, seeing women in leadership positions can be aspirational, but turning this into the mechanism for achieving feminism hides the structural barriers preventing most women from achieving security and success, while simultaneously burnishing the meritocratic façade of big business. Real feminism—the idea that everyone, regardless of gender, should get decent pay and a voice in their workplace, dignity, respect, quality healthcare and childcare, the right to higher education and housing, and a robust support network for old age, illness, or disability—is incompatible with scaling the corporate jungle gym.

Cohen: When we hear about an anti-union company announcing they will raise their minimum wage, or give more flexible commuting options, or expand their paid maternity leave, how should we be thinking about these employers and business models? In an era where everything can seem bad and getting worse, how should we be thinking about these bouts of “conscious capitalism” in the marketplace?

Aschoff: Capitalism’s overwhelming power often inspires a feeling of helplessness or despair, so it is understandable to feel hopeful when businesses make small decisions that improve people’s lives, like raising wages or improving working conditions. At the end of the day, the goal of any political movement should always be about making people’s lives better. But there is a difference between gains granted by “conscious” companies and gains that are won through struggle.

Take for example the Fight for 15. Winning $15 an hour won’t change the fact these companies exist to make a profit—they can absorb higher wage costs and continue going about their business essentially unchanged—but that certainly doesn’t mean that $15 isn’t worth fighting for. It would represent a huge change for people living in poverty. Victories like the recent one in NY are exciting, and show that not only can workers win when they fight together, but also the potential of their struggles to build solidarity and confidence that can be channeled into a much broader, democratic movement for change.