If there were a charity that had explored nearly all avenues of charitable giving that should be of interest to any new charity.
Not true, at all. I was president of Point Foundation created by Stewart Brand with money from his Whole Earth Catalog. Point tried every imaginable form of charitable giving and left extensive notes. To my knowledge no one in the charitable world has ever looked at those results.
There is a good reason no one has looked at Point’s experience. Everyone, no exceptions, is certain they know how to ‘do good with money’.
That is the fundamental false premise of charitable giving.
If one started with the opposite proposition they would be better off: ‘there is no way to use money to do good’. Start with that challenge and you will find that charitable giving is a bad idea to start with.
Zuckerberg is starting with the idea that mixing profit businesses with tax exempt projects will be an improvement over existing structures. That is strange nonsense.
Profit businesses always do good because they are ultimately selling to individual consumers who buy because they find benefit. In that sense the Zuckerberg Charity is merely an investment company like any other.
Charity to tax exempt projects is the exact opposite. Money doesn’t fix anything. It can promote corruption, laziness and self deception. But doing good is itself a flawed idea.
We can all think about a few uses of money that was positive. Carnegie's libraries. The Rockefeller sponsored research on rice and wheat that has had bountiful results. Some commissioned pieces of art, music and dance. From that point on, the list gets shorter. Very short.
What we at Point found was that the people who used charitable money effectively were people who were already effective in their work. These people were rare and far between. They could raise money in any case without Point.
When you really do good, you will find ferocious opposition. I didn’t learn this from Point. I learned it from 1978 to 1981 when I built a park for street people in a bad neighborhood in San Francisco. The street people loved it. Freedom from hassle.
But every force in society sought to close the park. Social services wanted people to be clean, sober and get jobs. So did nearly everyone else. The project was so good and made a few vulnerable people very happy… so it had to be stopped.
When you really do good, don’t expect support. Expect opposition.