No one likes to talk for too long about their failures, and when you’re relying on the largesse of others, highlighting their failures can be risky. Those are a couple of the reasons why there’s still too little discourse about how philanthropy is dropping the ball on some paramount challenges facing American society today.
Now to be sure, there has been a great deal of talk about how U.S. grantmakers can improve in procedural terms — giving more general support, paying more attention to grassroots organizers, adopting participatory approaches, and the like. But we tend to hear less about how specific problems are defying philanthropic intervention: issue areas where grantmakers have either tried and failed, or aren’t even bothering to try on a large scale.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of problems that might just fit that description. We’ve emphasized issues that have particular relevance in the United States, but some have a global resonance, as well. As a word of disclaimer, there are certainly funders doing good work on each, and this isn’t meant as a condemnation of any particular grantmaker. These are difficult problems, after all, larger than any one funder or even one sector could hope to untangle. In many cases, there is an underlying failure of the public sector that funders are simply ill-equipped to compensate for.
Rather, it’s a way to think about where philanthropic commitments haven’t been paying off, why that is, and whether that’s likely to change. Running through the list poses a big, open question for the field: As more funders embrace intersectional approaches, advocacy and strategies emphasizing upstream factors like social determinants, do they risk endangering progress on specific problems? And on the flip side, where is a single-issue approach to funding still holding the sector back?
The opioid epidemic
The statistics here are grim. National drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed over the past two decades, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describing a “quadrupling” since 1999. Over 91,000 people died from drug-involved overdoses in 2020, with the vast majority of those deaths stemming from the abuse of opioids. Next to COVID, the opioid epidemic is one of the most lethal public health problems facing the U.S. It’s also one that philanthropy hasn’t been able to get much of a handle on.
Part of the problem is that philanthropy can’t do very much on the supply side of the equation. Even as law enforcement agencies continue their long slog to stem the flow of opioids into the country, new dangers like illicitly manufactured fentanyl (an opioid 100 times more powerful than morphine meant for hospital use) are driving overdose deaths through the roof. Looking back at how the nonprofit sector — and philanthropically inclined pharma moguls like the Sacklers — contributed to this carnage is a necessary exercise. But it’s not sufficient.
There are some national funders on the case, like Bloomberg Philanthropies and Arnold Ventures, both of a semi-new guard of ambitious giving vehicles backed by living donors. The story’s a bit different among older foundations with long histories of work on drug addiction. Over the long term, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has withdrawn from issue-specific funding in this area to spearhead the movement to tackle health’s social determinants. The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, another longtime player in the opioid fight, also wound its funding down several years ago.
Obesity
One sticking point for funders when it comes to addressing U.S. public health crises may be a neo-colonialist mindset: that it’s easier to “solve” health challenges abroad by throwing money at them than it is to do the same with public health challenges closer to home.
Obesity certainly qualifies as such a crisis. Continuing a decades-long trend, the CDC reports that obesity’s prevalence in the U.S. increased nearly 10% over the past 20 years, up to nearly 42% nationwide in 2020. “Severe” obesity went up at an even higher rate — from 4.7% to 9.2%. Meanwhile, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other related conditions remain among the top causes of premature death in the country.
Despite its toll on Americans’ health (not to mention associated medical costs), obesity is a priority for few philanthropic funders (Bloomberg again being one). While some grantmakers do support valuable work to counteract the effects of food deserts in underserved communities, few of those programs challenge the structural problems behind the obesity epidemic — namely, lax governmental regulations and full-on incentives for manufacturers to produce and market high-sugar, high-salt foods in super-sized portions, with the full knowledge that these often addictive products are fueling a public health crisis.
K-12 education
While few funders prioritize the opioid crisis and even fewer take on the problem of obesity directly, the same cannot be said for K-12 education. Improving learning outcomes for children is a favorite cause for a wide swath of grantmakers, from billionaire living donors to storied national foundations and a whole host of local funders.
As we outlined in our deep dive report on K-12 giving, the multitude of donors in this space is certainly having an impact, helping millions of American students in real time. But on the other hand, recent K-12 philanthropy has failed quite spectacularly in its attempts to take on the achievement gap, with a widening gulf between the educational outcomes of well-off children versus their poorer peers.
Despite a vast array of programming and a vigorously embraced but largely stalled-out movement to scale the charter school model, education philanthropy wasn’t able to prevent a fall-off in reading and math scores among U.S. students between 2012 and 2020. Moreover, sizable gaps remain between white students and Black and Latino students. Taking into account the fact that the student-age population in the U.S. is far less white than was the case several decades ago, this country’s continued failure to provide an equitable education to its children is a major factor dragging down nationwide achievement.
Housing and homelessness
Pre-pandemic optimism aside, chronic homelessness remains a visible and seemingly intractable problem in many parts of the country. And chronic housing insecurity affects millions more Americans across a range of geographies and income levels. Philanthropy, meanwhile, often tinkers at the edges of this crisis, providing services to homeless people, for instance, or backing local housing projects.
While those efforts are admirable and do help people in need, what they haven’t done is make a dent in the fundamental problem: a scarcity of housing, publicly subsidized or not. In an effort, again admirable, to avoid demonizing unhoused people, anti-homelessness funders’ longtime “housing first” mantra may have also shortchanged local efforts to address relevant factors like drug addiction and mental health.
This is one of many cases in anti-poverty philanthropy where more funders need to start paying attention to federal policy, including the regulation of financial markets. It was a lack of such regulation that threw the housing industry into disarray in 2008, depressing housing supply ever since and wiping out the wealth of numerous middle-class households and households of color. At the same time, an abundance of long-standing “not in my backyard” regulations at the local level prevents the construction of additional housing, often with racist and classist undertones. An emerging pro-housing movement is challenging that entrenched status quo city by city, and it could do with more philanthropic (and political) support.
Gun violence
Here’s another case of grim statistics. The total death toll from gun violence in the U.S. over the past two years likely approaches 100,000 people. Both murder and suicide rates have climbed over the past decade, with murders in particular rising sharply during the COVID era. A near-constant stream of mass shootings in the news represents only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the carnage gun violence is wreaking across America.
This is another case where a national-level solution to the problem lies beyond philanthropy’s purview. The lobbying power of non-c3 gun rights groups (specifically the NRA) combined with the overrepresentation of sparsely populated rural states in the Senate, has ensured that any gun control bill with teeth won’t make it into law.
Nevertheless, there’s plenty that philanthropic funders can do to address gun violence on the local level and to support research on a topic that has long been intentionally understudied. This is one area where there are philanthropies on the case, but despite some optimistic takes recently, it remains to be seen how effective funders’ current, more holistic approaches to gun violence will be.
Nuclear weapons and arms control
Even as the death toll from small arms adds up in the U.S., the potential worldwide death toll from a nuclear conflict remains one of the most pressing threats human civilization faces. In the post-Cold War era, a more multipolar global power arrangement has multiple rival nations wielding doomsday arsenals. The U.S., China, Russia, India, Pakistan, the U.K., France, the list goes on.
If our luck holds and the world continues to sidestep nuclear catastrophe, the civic sector’s decades-long disinvestment in arms control and nonproliferation won’t mean so much. But if history plays out differently, whoever’s left will be asking: Why didn’t they do more?
As is the case with other problems on this list, part of the difficulty may lie in measuring the impact of peace and security funding. Funding things like research, international institution-building, cross-border dialogue and peace activism doesn’t easily lend itself to clear evaluation. That may be one of the reasons some long-standing grantmakers in the nuclear arms control space have wound down their funding recently. With flashpoints like Ukraine and Taiwan in the news, stoking renewed fears of nuclear conflict, perhaps now is the time for a 21st-century David Rockefeller to emerge. Maybe one of these lavishly wealthy effective altruist types would like to take up that mantle?
Racial inequality — education and residential stratification
The good news when it comes to philanthropy for racial justice is that more people in the sector are talking about it than ever before. While grassroots power-building organizations led by people of color remain underdogs in the philanthropic fundraising game, the period since the summer of 2020 has seen multiple efforts emerge to address that imbalance, including with backing from some of the nation’s top philanthropists.
What’s still uncertain, however, is whether this influx of new resources will translate into a more racially equitable nation over the long term. By most hard metrics, Black and brown people remain behind in the U.S., for instance, in terms of household assets, educational opportunity, and neighborhood prosperity. Some of the other problems on this list — opioid deaths, obesity, homelessness — also disproportionately affect low-income communities of color, as has mortality from COVID-19.
With that in mind, philanthropy may want to consider augmenting support for grassroots power-building and inclusive democracy work (which still need a lot more funding) with renewed attention to problems like urban segregation. Copious research has found direct links between a young person’s zip code and the level of economic opportunity available to them. Reengaging with school desegregation and finding ways to loosen the de facto redlining that keeps neighborhoods separate and unequal in too many U.S. cities seems like a worthy task for the legion of funders who say they’re behind racial equity these days.