To the fence-sitters, the equivocators, the Swiss-inclined among you; to those individuals who wonder if the private funding of public good is really such a promising idea; in short, to those who are neutral --or worse: apathetic --about donating to In the Arena or to any worthwhile nonprofit for that matter; to those people this missive is directed.
When did "giving" arrive on your radar screen? When were you first infused with a sense of joy by realizing that the intelligent allocation of your private capital to trained professionals might actually be able to affect significant and meaningful change, change that you yourself had the inclination but perhaps neither the time nor the skill set to pursue?
For many folks this has happened in the recent past, and by recent I mean at about the time that Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono were featured on the cover of Time magazine as "People of the Year" (2005) or when Warren Buffet made public his monumental gift to the Gates Foundation (2006) or for the deeply empathetic among you, when the tsunami wracked Indonesia (2004) or hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast (2005).
No doubt the landscape of philanthropy is evolving and, as a result of the confluence of events (natural disasters) and circumstances (the deplorable state of domestic education or the sub-Saharan spread of HIV) and gifts (on a Buffet-esque order of magnitude and more diminutive, too), philanthropy is enjoying an increasingly broad share of the free rent in people's minds.
But this newly-touted magnanimous instinct is neither new nor wholly magnanimous. It is, in fact, a time-honored and time-tested idea, and one that has helped to push forward this country and to keep us at the forefront of whatever Age it is in which we are immersed: the Industrial, the Modern, the Digital or the Information. At each one of these junctures, private citizens have assumed the mantle of responsibility where public resources have fallen short. This is not a naked critique of our government; rather, it's a championing of the individual's ability to mitigate the more serious problems facing our citizens. It's what makes America America, according to de Tocqueville, or for the results-driven among us, according to the statistics that reveal that our citizens are the most generous in the world (in 2006, the US gave 2.2% of its GDP to the independent sector, as compared to the UK, the second most generous country, which gave .6% of its GDP).
Take for example, the role that private philanthropists played in the founding of this country's first organized (non-religious) athletic leagues. Troubled by the increasingly mischievous and unstructured behavior of the city's young males at the turn of the century, New York's Board of Education began to brainstorm ways to promote character development and to instill in the city's youth an abiding sense of both competition and fair play. Their solution: The Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL), an adult-supervised, after-school athletics program that emphasized participation over individual achievement. Part-assimilation plan for the city's burgeoning immigrant population and part-damage management for the unruly crowds of boys, the PSAL was an idea whose time had come.
There was just one problem: as a private entity, it was ineligible for public funds. According to Steven A. Reiss, in his book "City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports", proponents of the PSAL appealed to the city's financial community for support. And lo and behold, wealthy industrialists Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Solomon Guggenheim, among other benefactors, bankrolled the idea. So it was that in New York City in 1903, a group of private philanthropists launched the first school-based athletic league (versus the club-based programs popular in Europe)and engendered one of this country's initial examples of the ability to leverage the power of sport to effect social change.
Keep in mind that the income tax, otherwise known as the 16th amendment to the US Constitution, wasn't even instituted until 1913, 10 years after Carnegie, Rockefeller and Guggenheim threw their fiscal weight behind the PSAL. So these three men and their peer financiers received no tax break for their contributions; their giving redounded in no way, shape or form to their own bottom lines. Or did it? Might Carnegie have had an interest in building, from the ground up, a generation of workers who would prove both competitive and productive (could have saved him a load of trouble ten years earlier when the Homestead Strike threatened to buckle his steel empire)?
I concede I could be wrong here and I by no means intend to tarnish the generous instincts of any donor. I do think, though, that it's worth highlighting the private agendas behind the public gifts; and further, to sanction those agendas. People give for myriad reasons, and not all of them are purely charitable, nor should they be. People give to make something happen, something they care about. People give to people and to organizations that can make that something happen.
Today, over 100 years after the founding of the PSAL, our country is witnessing the second coming of philanthropy. We've not been mired in "twenty centuries of stony sleep"; in fact, it's been just one century, but a tumultuous one at that. And although the rules have changed and the societal challenges are different, we're still calling upon our private citizens to address public needs. Your instincts need not be Mother-Teresa-pure to give; but your resolve to affect change must be Andrew-Carnegie-steely.
There is a precedent, and a strong and noble one at that, for the deployment of private funds to leverage the power of sport for the public good; and there are precedents for other causes, too. Pick your passion; follow your bliss; jump on the back of this man-made philanthropic beast, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
