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Philanthropic foundations bias heavily towards granting large $ amounts exclusively to organizations (not individuals), meaning there are few existing avenues to fund promising people.

Molly Mielke • Scaling the personal grantmaking sector · Molly Mielke

The rules about giving are currently written in ways that benefit only the wealthy, even as the vast majority of giving comes from everyday people.

Lucy Bernholz • How We Give Now

In the United States, more and more of these services and systems have been underfunded publicly (by taxes), and so philanthropy has stepped in. These are two sides of the American historical coin: we underinvest in our shared public systems while we celebrate individual generosity. This places a burden on voluntary acts and giving that is both too

Lucy Bernholz • How We Give Now

It could be said that a great fund-raiser is a broker for the sacred energy of money, helping people use the money that flows through their lives in the most useful way that is consistent with their aspirations and hopes for humanity.

Lynne Twist • The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (Forerunners: Ideas First)

Catherine Liu

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Cover of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (Forerunners: Ideas First)

I think of philanthropy as a type of idea marketplace for public goods, funded by private capital. Like all idea marketplaces – startups, media, philosophy – it’s inherently pluralistic. We don’t have a single government-funded media channel, for example, but instead get our news, entertainment, and ideas from a multitude of sources.

Nadia Asparouhova • Idea Machines

Idea Machines

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A small minority of foundations are in fact interested in systems change, radical action on poverty and disadvantage, and programmes like the Omidyar Group’s ‘Imaginable Futures’.6 But the big money steers well clear.

Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Effective altruism’s strength lies in its infrastructure, which we can use to better understand how other idea machines work, what their impact will be, and what’s needed to make them more effective.