Philanthropy as Active Citizenship
Neville Gabriel
A prominent philanthropy platform executive wondered aloud with me whether my commitment to social justice activism could be a hindrance to facilitating the practice of major philanthropists. The worlds of philanthropy and social justice often seem worlds apart. This may be one of the strongest unresolved tensions that strain the emergence of the field of African philanthropy within a global community of practice: how to do philanthropy in a situation where social and economic justice matters greatly.
The philanthropic sphere has come across as the preserve of an elite set of very smart and well-connected people who quietly and comfortably go about doing great things to make life better for others – often behind the scenes and without causing too much trouble. Philanthropy has, until recently, been identified with an elite club of powerful and respectable people who influence the world positively through big money.
Similarly, activists have seemed like extraordinary champions of social, economic, and environmental justice who held the moral high ground far above the rest of us. Although more troublesome, they were modeled as the elite vanguard in rightness of thought and action for human dignity and the integrity of the earth.
Yet, the biggest fault lines of human progress in the world today are exactly about the capture of social and economic power by elites – of whatever sort. Amongst the greatest contradictions in an increasingly democratized world has been the simultaneous increase in the concentration of power in the hands of fewer people. Even if the concentration of power is shifting poles from North to South.
