Almost 15 years in the field have shown me that actual philanthropists—those engaged in acts of love for humanity, like my mother—are much more prevalent in the regular population, and only rarely found inside the field’s formal institutions: the foundations. Honestly, the vast majority of foundations have no right to call what they do philanthropy. The word isn’t egoanthropy, expertanthropy, or ROI-anthropy. But in the field, instead of love of humanity, there is a lot of the opposite: ego, greed, fear, blame, and disrespect.
