Thread by @Philliteracy

So, last night I finished the book that I have been clogging up all your twitter feeds with snippets from👇

I'll offer some more thoughts on the book as a whole in due course (spoiler alert: I frickin' loved it), but here's one last thread of great material in the meantime. 1/

Firstly, this absolutely killer skewering of 'philanthro-jargon', which resonates just as much in 2020 as in 1974 IMHO.

"In our world, you have to leverage even to get out of bed in the morning".

Bloody genius. 2/

But it's not just the funders who get ripped: he also points out that grant-seekers are often not exactly blameless in this equation... 3/

Next, before we get into the serious stuff (and apropos of nothing much), I loved this little poem: "A Recipe Derived from the Annual Report of the Ford Foundation" 4/

Now, onto the serious stuff- which in the latter part of the book mostly grapples with the gap between the theoretical justification for foundations, in terms of pluralism/discovery, and the reality that they are generally quite conservative (it's all very Rob Reich-y...) 5/

Here's some interesting stats from the Peterson Commission in 1966-68 on quite how small the percentage of innovative or radical being funded by foundations in the US was: 6/

Here's former UK Liberal Party leader Joe Grimond questioning whether charitable trusts are too much an artefact of existing systems and structures to fund anything genuinely radical: 7/

Here's McGeorge Bundy of the Ford Foundation launching a broadside at well-intentioned but risk-averse "reorganization men" in foundations, who in his view undermine the potential to fund radical projects: 8/

And even when foundations do fund "radical" projects, do they inevitably "domesticate" them and act as a"powerful bribe to conform", as Lord Balogh suggests? 9/

Whitaker's conclusion is really interesting: Having considered all the challenges he favours a pragmatic approach that seeks to reform philanthropy rather than be cynical about it, or to let the best be the enemy of the good: 10/

I've got a lot of sympathy with this kind of combination of pragmatism, ambivalence, critique & optimism re philanthropy (as I'm sure many others do too)

To find it so eloquently expressed in the pages of a book from 50 years ago has been absolutely fascinating to me. 11/

I wasn't aware of Ben Whitaker before, and sadly he died in 2014 so I missed my chance to tell him how much I enjoyed his book.

He certainly sounds like a fascinating character though (and was on the right side of a lot of issues IMHO!):

theguardian.com/politics/2014/… 12/

That rare feeling of talking to a kindred spirit through their writing is one of the best things about books, so I'm delighted to have had it in this case.

I'll be reading it it again & I honestly can't recommend it highly enough to anyone else interested in philanthropy. End/