‘Toward a New Social Contract’ is the theme of this year’s Global Philanthropy Forum, currently taking place in Washington, DC. But the real hand-to-hand fighting on the role that philanthropy plays in the rich’s responsibilities to society is being played out in Britain, where a government initiative to cut the tax subsidy to giving has […]
Whatever happened to the Big Society? Once British Prime Minister David Cameron’s flagship idea, it has been so conspicuous by its absence in recent weeks that Third Sector magazine argued last week that it was time to say ‘bye-bye’ to the idea. Such a judgement by the official organ of the UK charity sector, which yearns […]
When Britain’s leading liberal commentator on social affairs, Polly Toynbee, laid into Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society project last week, she was at pains to say that she has nothing against stronger communities and more volunteering – she was bristling at the fact that the public spending axe has fallen on charities. Since “governments are defined […]
You might have thought that a bold plan backed by a Nobel Prize winning economist to raise over $75 billion to help the developing world would shake Britons from their knee-jerk cynicism about philanthropy. You would be wrong, sadly. Yesterday London’s Dorchester Hotel hosted the Fortune Forum’s launch of a scheme devised by the economist James Mirrlees to […]
Martin Brookes of New Philanthropy Capital has written a provocative editorial in the latest issue of their Giving Insights newsletter, taking to task a recent book by two leading British commentators Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Unjust Rewards. Brookes says that they mock Arpad Busson, founder of hedge-fund charity Absolute Return for Kids (a bit like the Robin […]