The Givers Quotes

“What is clear is that this growing river of money will dramatically expand the size and influence of a new power elite of living donors that already wields enormous clout. One analysis by the scholar Kristin Goss found that nearly half of America’s top two hundred philanthropists—including many Giving Pledge members—have expressed an interest in shaping public policy.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“In his book Born on Third Base, Chuck Collins—the Oscar Meyer heir who gave away his fortune—argues that Congress should establish two types of charitable entities and give them different tax benefits. Donations to groups that “alleviate poverty, reduce inequality, and address urgent social problems” would be fully deductible; donations to other nonprofits would not get the full benefit.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“One group with an eye to fostering authentic equity between those who give and receive is Resource Generation, which organizes rich young people to become leaders in social change philanthropy. A key premise of the group’s work is that donors need to be ever mindful that their giving doesn’t replicate the same unequal power arrangements in society that they’re hoping to curb. It’s easy for that to happen when donors put themselves in the driver’s seat, deciding on their own what solutions will work best or how to enact plans for change. Some 2,200 wealthy heirs have been engaged by Resource Generation since its founding in 1998.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“the IRS makes no distinction between what most of us would think of as charity—say, donating to a food bank—and activities that are more political, like donating to an effort to abolish food stamps.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“Since the 1970s wealthy donors have heavily financed efforts to cut taxes and public spending. The success they’ve had helps explain why government now can’t do as many things, which gives private funders new leverage in shaping society.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“Long before Feeney popularized giving while living, the early-twentieth-century philanthropist Julius Rosenwald preached the same gospel—with a remarkably similar slogan, “Give While You Live.” The founder of Sears, Roebuck, Rosenwald’s name is now largely forgotten precisely because he didn’t emulate contemporaries like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in creating a permanent foundation. Yet Rosenwald may have had as much impact as either philanthropist because of what he did do, which was to sink a lot of his fortune into helping build 5,300 schools for black children throughout the South. It was the kind of huge up-front capital investment that a more cautious foundation, mindful of preserving its endowment, would never have made. But Rosenwald’s cash and boldness had a transformative effect on African-American chances in the Jim Crow South, where his schools educated the likes of John Lewis, who helped lead the civil rights movement long after Rosenwald was gone.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“OSF was also the first major foundation to get behind same-sex marriage. From 2000 to 2005, a pivotal period in the marriage equality fight, OSF invested millions in LGBT rights organizations. This early money, some of which went to back state-level fights, like a 2005 legal challenge in Iowa, was arguably more important than the bigger money that came in from other funders later on. OSF grants also went to frontline activist groups fighting for immigrants and, later, to Black Lives Matter.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“no philanthropist has done more than Soros to soften America’s drug laws. Soros got behind that cause in the mid-1990s, funding a new drug policy think tank and bankrolling the push for medicinal marijuana, widely seen as a bridge to legalization. Today, two decades after Soros began his push—and many tens of millions of dollars later—several states have legalized pot, and more are likely to follow.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“In the early twentieth century, when John D. Rockefeller was petitioning Congress for a charter to create the first foundation, a top nonprofit leader of that time, Edward Devine, argued the charter should only be granted if public officials had some say over the selection of board members. The idea never went anywhere and has rarely been raised since. Foundations answer only to themselves.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“It’s not uncommon for donors to make various demands in return for campus cash. In one case, the foundation of BB&T Bank offered $1 million for business education to Western Carolina University, a public state school in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Among the reported stipulations of the gift was that the university’s College of Business make Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand required reading for students. The school took the money.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“State schools have been among the biggest beneficiaries of Koch largesse—which has occasionally caused controversy. Florida State University was embroiled in a flap after it was alleged in 2011 that a Koch grant had come with stipulations about what faculty could be hired and fired by the school’s economics department. The controversy caused a stir, and made national news. But it didn’t dampen FSU’s willingness to take $800,000 in additional Koch grants in 2016. Far bigger sums are flowing to other schools, like Montana State University, which landed a Koch $5.7 million grant the same year to fund research critical of government regulation.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“Unfortunately, the ranks of financial winners include few graduates of community colleges, and as a result big gifts to such institutions are rare. When LaGuardia Community College in New York City received a $2 million donation from Goldman Sachs in 2015, it doubled the school’s endowment. The gift was unusual enough to make the New York Times. By comparison, Harvard raised an average of $3.1 million a day during 2015.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“Consider the $400 million donation that Nike founder Phil Knight made to Stanford University in early 2016. The money will be used to cover tuition and living expenses for just one hundred grad students a year at Stanford, which has one of the largest endowments in the United States, over $20 billion. The idea is to train the next generation of leaders who will go on to “address society’s most intractable problems, including poverty and climate change.” Of course, though, there are plenty of talented leaders who are already in the trenches working on these problems—and could sure use some help from the likes of Phil Knight. It’s hard to think of Stanford grad students, many of whom already get a tuition-free ride, as a needy bunch.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“the pet health interests of rich people may or may not line up with what society overall should give priority to in seeking medical breakthroughs. As the Times warned: “The philanthropists’ war on disease risks widening that gap, as a number of the campaigns, driven by personal adversity, target illnesses that predominantly afflict white people—like cystic fibrosis, melanoma and ovarian cancer.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“The wealthy also play an ever larger role in deciding who lives and who dies. Or, more specifically, which medical problems get conquered versus which are neglected.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“One foundation-backed effort to provide long-acting birth control to teenagers in Colorado helped lower the birthrate among teenagers across the state by a stunning 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, and sharply cut the number of abortions, too. Despite this success, the Colorado legislature refused to provide ongoing funding for the program—at which point a group of private funders stepped in ensure it would continue, including Ben Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune who lives in Denver.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“The Buffett Foundation remains a top supporter of Planned Parenthood and other groups that back abortion access, as it was when the senior Susie ran it. Yet now it’s writing even bigger checks. One of its largest impacts has been around contraception, where the foundation has played a key role in battling unwanted pregnancies by helping bankroll new birth control options. Its grants have helped revolutionize the use of IUDs, a long-acting form of contraception. A reason that IUDs are so effective is because, once these tiny T-shaped devices are inserted into the uterus, there’s no room for user error. The Buffett Foundation invested heavily both in research to improve IUDs and programs to spread their use. “Quietly, steadily, the Buffett family is funding the biggest shift in birth control in a generation,” according to one media account.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“Warren generally shared his wife’s liberal views, if not her desire to work in a hands-on way to improve society. He strongly rejected the Horatio Alger view of success so popular among conservative-minded business types and instead talked often of how the “ovarian lottery” determined people’s fate. As he’s said: “For literally billions of people, where they are born and who gives them birth, along with their gender and native intellect, largely determine the life they will experience.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“The passing down of big inheritances is also moving the upper class to the left, since heirs tend to be more liberal than their parents in what might be called “Rockefeller syndrome.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“Robert Bruelle, a sociologist who studied funding for work that denied climate change, found that a sizeable chunk of this money—some $78 million between 2003 and 2010—was moved anonymously through DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. The amount of money going through these groups, Bruelle found, increased dramatically after ExxonMobil and Koch Industries pulled back from publicly backing policy work that questioned whether climate change was real. But he couldn’t say whether it was these donors who fueled the surge of DonorsTrust with secret donations, since the group doesn’t have to reveal who’s using its services. Its donor-advised funds are like numbered Swiss bank accounts. “We just have this great big unknown out there about where all the money is coming from,” Bruelle said. Dark money moving through DonorsTrust has also fueled the Project on Fair Representation, the group seeking to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. And DonorsTrust has been the conduit for anonymous funding for groups sounding the alarm about Islamic threats within the United States. Some $18 million went to Clarion, a group that has been described as a leading purveyor of Islamophobia in the United States.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“There’s something heroic about wealthy crusaders who aim to spend down their fortunes to improve society—that is, assuming you like what they’re doing. If you don’t, that sense of urgency can be unnerving. How many liberals, for example, would be thrilled if the Koch brothers announced that they intended to give away their vast fortune as quickly as possible to make “America a better place”?”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“As the 2012 election approached, it emerged that the foundation Einhorn runs with his wife paid for dozens of anonymous billboards around Milwaukee and two Ohio cities, mainly in minority areas, that screamed “Voter Fraud Is a Felony!” with penalties of up to three and a half years in prison and fines of $10,000. The Einhorns put out a statement through a PR firm that the billboards were a “public service” message aimed at Democrats and Republicans alike. “By reminding people of the possible consequences of illegal voting, we hope to help the upcoming election be decided by legally registered voters.” The director of a progressive group in Wisconsin, meanwhile, has this to say: “Perhaps their Chicago public relations firm could answer why the Einhorns only felt it was necessary to target legal voters in minority communities, and why they didn’t feel the need to do this ‘public service’ throughout communities across Wisconsin where a majority of the residents are white.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“When donors hold views we detest, we tend to see them as unfairly tilting policy debates with their money. Yet when we like their causes, we often view them as heroically stepping forward to level the playing field against powerful special interests or backward public majorities.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“By late 2010, forty-five states had adopted the Common Core, before the standards were even fully developed, with full implementation unfolding over subsequent years. This work was backed by a range of other foundations, such as Hewlett and Broad. But the lion’s share of the credit for the initiative’s adoption goes to Gates—a stunning victory for the foundation that, in a way, is hard to get one’s mind around. In effect, Bill and Melinda Gates, two private individuals, have helped determine what tens of millions of American children in public schools will learn every year—and also how they will learn, with changes in the teaching of math and other subjects.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“What came out of this meeting was a heightened awareness of how much common ground the Left and Right share when it comes to criminal justice reform. Libertarians see the overreach of the criminal justice system as yet one more example of government run amok, while progressives hate how these policies devastate communities of color and divert resources away from things like education. In early 2015, a new Left-Right group emerged—the Coalition for Public Safety—the likes of which had rarely been seen in Washington, backed with $5 million in Arnold Foundation funding. The Ford Foundation and Koch Industries also put in money, the first time these polar opposite funders had ever worked on the same side. The coalition sought to advance bipartisan legislation in Congress, as criminal justice increasingly became one of the few areas where lawmakers could work across the aisle.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“A study by the U.S. Department of Justice had found that three-quarters of Ferguson residents were subject to arrest warrants, mostly for failing to pay fines or show up in court. “We are putting people behind bars for their inability to pay fines even when we wouldn’t imagine throwing someone in jail for the underlying violation, which could be something as ordinary as jaywalking or driving with a broken tail light,” said Sam Brooke of the Southern Poverty Law Center, after landing an Arnold Foundation grant to litigate against these practices, in partnership with the ACLU.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“In contrast to the crapshoot of electoral politics, investing in think tanks offers a reliable and proven way to slowly change policy and culture over time—and without the high-profile controversies that can come with partisan giving, which is often a concern to wealthy donors who also run businesses.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“The think tank was invented in the twentieth century to offer objective analysis of complex issues. Now, though, think tanks often operate as the motherships of ideological movements on both the left and the right—weaving together a jumble of values and ideas into a coherent story and actionable policy agenda.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“Wealthy donors have long used philanthropy to wage ideological warfare and contest the highest ground of U.S. politics. What’s different now is that a far greater number of rich people are deploying more money to this end than ever before, and with greater sophistication. These days, if you’re wealthy and determined to shape the broad direction of American life, you pump money into elections through campaigns and super PACs. But you’ll also recognize that bankrolling public policy outfits—at both the national and the state level—can often be a far more powerful lever for swaying debates on big questions like the size of government or the causes of poverty or how much to regulate business. Even better, such spending is tax deductible.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age

“Most media coverage of philanthropy doesn’t make much distinction among charitable gifts—and nor does the IRS for that matter. You get the same tax deduction whether you donate to a genuine charitable cause, say a food bank, or donate to a think tank with an ideological agenda.”
― David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age