Research has shown that there is a link between making a donation to charity and feeling joy. Social Conscience is a widely given reason on why people donate to charities.
When questioned, many individuals stated that they felt a moral duty to help others when they can. These personal values and principles were commonly found amongst individuals. Educating your children about donating teaches them about the importance of helping others. Sharing this experience from a young age can be valuable. It shows that they can make a positive impact in the world and that no amount of help is too small.
Encouraging children to be generous can strengthen their attitudes towards helping others. Your actions can encourage those around you to take part and donate to charities too. Family giving strengthens relationships through a shared goal and raises more money collectively. Working with family and friends can increase the positive impact. Donating to charities can help lower your taxable income.
Click here for more information on tax deductions for donations. All of this provided the foundation on which he built the company that made him rich. All of this undermines the argument that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a result of their hard work.
Indeed, some overtly acknowledge the existence of this social contract. T he growth in philanthropy in recent decades has failed to curb the growth in social and economic inequality. The answer lies in the template that was established by the men who transformed modern philanthropy through the sheer scale of their giving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For all their munificence, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and the great industrial philanthropists of that era were notable — even in their own day — for avoiding the whole question of economic justice.
Then, as now, a huge percentage of wealth was in the hands of a tiny few, almost completely untrammelled by tax and regulation. Carnegie, then the richest man in the world, was criticised in his day for distributing his unprecedented largesse because his fortune was built on ruthless tactics such as cutting the wages of his steel-workers.
Carnegie built a network of nearly 3, libraries and other institutions to help the poor elevate their aspirations, but social justice was entirely absent from his agenda. Philanthropy can be compatible with justice. But it requires a conscious effort on behalf of philanthropists to make it so. The default inclines in the opposite direction. H ow can philanthropists break away from this default position?
By nurturing the plurality of voices that are essential to hold both government and the free market to account. Philanthropy can even act as an agent of resistance, the American historian of philanthropy Benjamin Soskis suggested, immediately after the election of Donald Trump.
Philanthropy can recover a genuine sense of altruism only by understanding that it cannot do the job of either government or business. For it belongs not to the political or commercial realm, but to civil society and the world of social institutions that mediate between individuals, the market and the state.
It is true that philanthropy can weaken elected governments, especially in the developing world, by bypassing national systems or declining to nurture them. And it can favour causes that only reflect the interests of the wealthy. But where philanthropists support community organisations, parent-teacher associations, co-operatives, faith groups, environmentalists or human rights activists — or where they give directly to charities that address inequality and specialise in advocacy for disadvantaged groups — they can help empower ordinary people to challenge authoritarian or overweening governments.
In those circumstances, philanthropy can strengthen rather than weaken democracy. But to do this, philanthropists need to be cannier about their analysis and tactics. At present, most philanthropists with concerns about disadvantage tend to focus on alleviating its symptoms rather than addressing its causes.
They fund projects to feed the hungry, create jobs, build housing and improve services. But all that good work can be wiped out by public spending cuts, predatory lending or exploitative low levels of pay. And there is a deeper problem. When it comes to addressing inequality, a well intentioned philanthropist might finance educational bursaries for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, or fund training schemes to equip low-paid workers for better jobs.
That allows a few people to exit bad circumstances, but it leaves countless others stuck in under-performing schools or low-paid insecure work at the bottom of the labour market. Very few concerned philanthropists think of financing research or advocacy to address why so many schools are poor or so many jobs are exploitative.
By contrast, conservative philanthropists have, in the past two decades, operated at a different level. Their agenda has been to change public debate so that it is more accommodating of their neoliberal worldview, which opposes the regulation of finance, improvements in the minimum wage, checks on polluting industries and the establishment of universal healthcare.
Research by Callahan reveals that more liberal-minded philanthropists have never understood the importance of cultivating ideas to influence key public policy debates in the way conservatives have. Most philanthropists see them as too political. Many of the new generation of big givers come out of a highly entrepreneurial business world, and are disinclined to back groups that challenge how capitalism operates.
They are reluctant to back groups lobbying to promote the empowerment of the disadvantaged people whom these same philanthropists declare they intend to assist. They tend not to fund initiatives to change tax and fiscal policies that are tilted in favour of the wealthy, or to strengthen regulatory oversight of the financial industry, or to change corporate culture to favour greater sharing of the fruits of prosperity.
They rarely think of investing in the media, legal and academic networks of key opinion-formers in order to shift social and corporate culture and redress the influence of conservative philanthropy. Rightwing philanthropists have, for more than two decades, understood the need to work for social and political change. Mainstream philanthropists now need to awaken to this reality. Philanthropy need not be incompatible with democracy, but it takes work to ensure that is the case.
This is an edited extract from Philanthropy — from Aristotle to Zuckerberg by Paul Vallely, published by Bloomsbury on 17 September and available at guardianbookshop. This article was amended on 9 September to clarify that other forms of ID apart from a driving licence can be used to vote.
It was further amended on 10 September An earlier version said a quote warning about the growing influence of rich donors had come from the UN general assembly; it has now been correctly attributed to the Global Policy Forum.
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