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  • How Donors Can Fight Rising Antisemitism on College Campuses

    It’s been one month since Hamas terrorists brutally murdered over 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians – including babies, children, women and the elderly – and the international community was jarred back to the reality of the evil in this world.  

    Subsequently, an antisemitic backlash to the Israel-Hamas war has ensued. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that fights antisemitism, in the weeks following the Hamas attack, there have been nearly four times as many instances of harassment, vandalism and assault directed at Jewish people and communities in comparison with the same period in 2022.  

    On college campuses in particular, there has been an alarming rise in threats against Jewish students. This week, a Cornell University student was arrested following online threats he would “bring an assault rifle to campus” and “shoot up” a dining hall where Jewish students eat. At Stanford University, an instructor was removed from the classroom after trying “to justify the actions of Hamas” and singling out Jewish students. In response to “an extremely disturbing pattern of antisemitic messages,” the Biden administration announced this week it would partner with campus law enforcement to provide federal resources to schools.  


    Universities Slow to Respond Following Hamas Attacks 

    Sadly, in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric terrorism, many people tacitly supported their actions. Yet as anti-Israel rhetoric and actions have intensified among some groups, leaving Jewish students feeling scared and unsafe at American universities, too many higher educational institutions have hypocritically equivocated at the moment they should have stood firm in their opposition to antisemitic hate and violence. Encouragingly, charitable donors are uniquely positioned to hold higher education accountable to its commitments to the safety, dignity and rights of all people.    

    Days after the attacks and amid pressure from donors to respond, universities released statements expressing concern. The responses ran the gamut from clear moral condemnation to near sympathy for the attackers. Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian student groups hijacked the conversation with their shocking statements and protests thereby coopting the universities’ responses.  

    Harvard’s reaction illuminates this point. It took days for the most elite university to release a statement, prompting former Harvard President Larry Summers to say: “The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student group’s statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral toward acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel.” The university released multiple follow-up statements, but failed to strongly condemn a student statement that held Israel responsible for Hamas’ violence, prompting other alumni and donors to chide the university. 

    In comparison, University of Florida President and former U.S. senator Ben Sasse sent a letter to students and alumni explaining why it was unacceptable that his peers at other institutions were taking a neutral approach: “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. [They] have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby or the murdered grandmother,” he wrote.   

    The neutral approach that some colleges have taken – those that even chose to speak out —stands in stark contrast to letters and commitments made after the murder of George Floyd and the social justice protests of 2020. Many of those statements condemned the officer, the criminal justice system and systemic racism inherent in all institutions against Blacks. This leads us to wonder why those who embraced social justice and the equal rights and protections of all people haven’t stepped up now to defend their Jewish counterparts or condemn the slaughter of 1,400 people. What message does this send to Jewish students, faculty, donors and alumni? 

    As Sasse said on another occasion, “You got so many universities around the country [who] speak about every topic under the sun, Halloween costumes and microaggressions. But somehow in a moment of the most grave, grotesque attacks on Jewish people since the Holocaust, they all of a sudden say there’s too much complexity to say anything.” 


    Donors Can Help Combat Antisemitism on Campuses 

    Now, as violence and intimidation against Jewish students are rising, donors and alumni need not sit on the sidelines in dismay. They can use their voices and dollars to move administrations to stand against antisemitism in word and deed.  

    Philanthropic giving to higher education last year totaled $59.5 billion, including $23 billion from individual donations, according to a 2022 survey of U.S. universities by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. People giving $1 million or more made up less than 1% of donors but 57% of total donations.  

    While higher education giving is a rewarding and meaningful use of philanthropic dollars, it can be challenging for both donor intent and grant compliance. Nonetheless, accountability is a critical element of higher education funding. Academic institutions must be held accountable for the misuse of donor funds and that includes indirectly supporting activities that can be destructive to civility, undermine academic freedom or promote violence. 

    Recently, major higher education donors have ended their financial support and relationships with institutions over their response to the attack. For example, venture capitalist David Magerman, hedge fund billionaire Cliff Asness, private-equity billionaire Marc Rowan, former U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman and other high-profile donors cut ties with the University of Pennsylvania in protest of the university’s support for a festival featuring antisemitic speakers and its subsequent conflicting messages on the Hamas attack. Magerman, who is calling on other donors to do the same, noted, “I was just pushed over the edge by the equivocation of the response.” 

    At Harvard, retailer Leslie Wexner announced he was pulling funding from Harvard over its refusal to support Israel. Meanwhile, a group of prominent alumni including Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and investors Seth Klarman and Bill Helman published an open letter criticizing the school’s leadership for creating an increasingly hostile environment for Harvard’s Jewish students and providing steps the university can take to remedy its actions. 

    Perhaps the removal of charitable dollars will nudge universities to action. Academic institutions may say their hands are tied or attempt to hide behind claims they are protecting academic freedom and free speech. However, that rings hollow when we consider the alarming censorship on campus today. Let’s remind them of their sundry diversity, equity and inclusion efforts – from speech codes to removal of faculty — that have been weaponized against opposing viewpoints on campus. There is something deeply wrong when people argue “words are violence” but make excuses for and even celebrate one of the most inhumane acts of violence on a civilian population – including at least 30 Americans – in recent memory.  

    While faculty and students have the right to their viewpoints, the university has a responsibility to ensure everyone’s physical safety and – given their outspoken stance on social justice – to speak out when atrocities like the unprompted murders of innocent Jews occur in the world. And when they forget, donors should remind them.   

  • Will the “Apprenticeship Degree” Come to America? 

    A version of this essay by Reach University President Joe E. Ross first appeared in Inside Higher Ed on July 25, 2023.  

    Philanthropy Roundtable is pleased to share this essay by Joe E. Ross, president of Reach University. Ross and his team have worked to provide an innovative model that creates pathways to opportunity for individuals working within educational communities while simultaneously solving one of the largest problems plaguing our nation’s schools today – teacher talent pipelines. Reach University is providing a low-cost solution to the barrier of credentialing for individuals who are best positioned to meet the educational needs of their local communities through a groundbreaking apprenticeship model.  

    Among high school seniors, a privileged few get to pick between elite, world-renowned colleges like Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, Stanford, Wellesley or Yale.  

    What if they could spend their next few years at investment bank Goldman Sachs instead?  

    Some now can. Dozens of famous employers — including Goldman Sachs and other corporate luminaries like Deloitte, GE, IBM, J.P. Morgan, Nestlé, UBS and Rolls Royce — have begun to offer a four-year paid “apprenticeship” that leads to a debt-free bachelor’s degree.   

    What’s the catch?  

    Well, to apply for the Goldman Sachs gig and others like it, you need to be based in the United Kingdom. Here in the United States, the apprenticeship-to-degree model is only beginning to emerge, particularly for working adults who otherwise lack access to college. If the idea takes off, it could be a long-term solution to the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis and restore lagging faith in American higher education.  

    How does this model work?  

    Imagine a job – a paid job – that turns into a degree. Applicants apply to the employer. The diploma is technically conferred by a collaborating university. But the action happens outside the Ivory Tower. Half of the learning comes from on-the-job work. The rest comes from job-relevant classes typically held outside of working hours. Tuition is largely paid for as part of the learner’s compensation. There are no student loans. 

    Early adopters of a similar approach in the United States include state education agencies and K-12 school districts seeking to address the teacher shortage. The nonprofit Reach University created a debt-free, apprenticeship-based bachelor’s degree specifically for school employees in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado and Louisiana. Launched in fall 2020, the fully job-embedded program has grown from 50 candidates to over 1,500 in less than three years.  

    The federal Pell grant typically covers all but $2,000 of the cost of the job-embedded degree program. Philanthropy or Labor Department apprenticeship funding covers most of the remaining tuition, so each candidate’s out-of-pocket contribution is capped at $900 per year. That’s enough to ensure some skin in the game, while keeping the program affordable without student debt.  

    Dr. Heath Grimes is the superintendent of the rural Russellville City School District in northwest Alabama. The majority of students in Russellville are Hispanic but the district has had a hard time recruiting bilingual staff. Grimes began last year to recruit prospective hires who had graduated from the local community college. He positioned the district as a kind of “transfer institution” where they could use their job to turn their associate degree into a bachelor’s degree.   

    Elizabeth Alonzo, who held an associate degree in business, was among the first to accept this unusual offer. She now serves as an English language aide. Her job is a kind of apprenticeship where what she does at work renders both a paycheck from the district and academic credit from Reach University. Less than a year from now, Alonzo will graduate with the bachelor’s degree she needs to become a teacher. 

    She will be the first fully bilingual elementary school teacher in Russellville.  

    For now, the apprenticeship-to-degree program at Reach exclusively serves school employees – classroom aides, coaches and bus drivers, for example – who aspire to become teachers, and who first need to earn a bachelor’s degree.  

    But could this idea expand in the United States to fields outside of teacher preparation?  

    The answer is yes. Just look at what’s happening in the United Kingdom. More than 100 universities now offer so-called “degree apprenticeships” in fields ranging from management consulting to medicine, and more than 40,000 new students enroll each year. Robert Halfon, the U.K. minister for higher education and skills, likes to say that “degree” and “apprenticeship” are his two favorite words.  

    The ordering of those words — degree before apprenticeship — reflects the complexity of the apprenticeship system in the United Kingdom, where the “degree apprenticeship” is the pinnacle of a multi-level system that also includes the “intermediate apprenticeship” and “advanced apprenticeship.” This nomenclature does not translate on our side of the Atlantic. It makes more sense to refer to the American version as the “apprenticeship degree.”  

    After all, amid skyrocketing student debt, it’s not the apprenticeship that needs to be modified. It’s the degree.  

    That’s why Reach University is bringing together policymakers, philanthropists, employers and entrepreneurial leaders in higher education and workforce development to launch a new nationwide center to advance the apprenticeship degree – not as a postsecondary alternative, but as a postsecondary option – and to make it mainstream in the United States.  

    We believe the emergence of the apprenticeship degree has three notable implications for the future of American higher education:  

    1. For starters, we’re skeptical of narratives that paint the apprenticeship as a mere “alternative” to college. This is a false binary. An apprenticeship that intentionally leads to a degree provides both near-term job skills and long-term upward mobility.  
    1. Second, we imagine the future of college as the future of work: The workplace becomes a campus. Colleagues become classmates. Classes may be online, but learners are not remote. This would be a big change for higher education. To conflate the apprenticeship degree with an online degree or an executive degree would be like mistaking Superman for a bird or plane. 
    1. Finally, when it comes to the nation’s seemingly intractable student loan crisis, we believe the debt-free apprenticeship degree could save the day. But this will only happen if job-embedded higher education goes mainstream, drawing the imagination of learners across all income levels. 

    Enrique Peñalosa, a former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, has been quoted describing this third dynamic in the context of urban policy: “The sign of an advanced society is not where the poor have cars, it’s where even the rich use public transportation.” 

    Similarly, we’ll know the apprenticeship degree is changing the landscape of opportunity in America when rich and poor alike aspire to a job that will lead to a good degree.  

    Not the other way around.   

    To learn more about Reach University, visit www.reach.edu. If you are interested in helping accelerate Reach’s work addressing the teacher shortage or supporting Reach’s Fall 2023 launch of the new National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree (NCAD), please contact NCAD Executive Director Eric Dunker, edunker@reach.edu.   

    For more information about other organizations providing Pathways to Opportunity, reach out to Philanthropy Roundtable Program Director Erica Haines.  

  • Doers to Donors: Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg Helps Transform the Lives of Young Musicians

    In the latest episode of Philanthropy Roundtable’s interview series “Doers to Donors,” Roundtable President and CEO Christie Herrera sat down with entrepreneur, author and philanthropist Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg. Ochoa-Brillembourg is the chairman emeritus and founder of Strategic Investment Group, an independent investment management firm based in Arlington, Virginia. She also is chairman and founder of The Orchestra of the Americas Group, which has helped train talented musicians from around the globe for careers in world-class orchestras.  

    This wide-ranging discussion focused on Ochoa-Brillembourg’s journey as a Venezuelan immigrant to the United States, her work managing an international portfolio of global financial assets and her passion for philanthropy, particularly for the arts. Ochoa-Brillembourg, who detailed Venezuela’s economic collapse, also offered a warning for those in this country to not fall prey to the lures of socialism. 

    Following are some highlights of this interview, which can be viewed in full here:  

    Why Ochoa-Brillembourg Says Managing Assets is a “Noble” Profession  

    Ochoa-Brillembourg, a Harvard University graduate, began her career in the United States managing pension funds at the World Bank. But after a decade as the chief investment officer within the bank’s Pension Investment Division, she decided to strike out on her own.  

    “I actually established a manner of managing pension assets that turned out to be very successful and uniquely successful,” she said. “I developed a business plan. I spent three years marketing that business plan.”  

    That led to the founding of Strategic Investment Group in 1987 and a career she credits with creating financial certainty for those whose assets she managed.  

     “We all have very uncertain futures,” Ochoa-Brillembourg said. “[And] if we have no savings, we have no way to plan our futures.”  

    At Strategic Investment Group, she sought to reduce the uncertainty people feel about their finances by managing their money to produce the highest returns.   

    “Managing people’s assets is probably one of the most noble professions you can have,” she said.  

    “I’ve allowed hospitals to create an incredible cancer ward because of the excess returns we produced.” 


    How The Orchestra of the Americas Group is Changing Lives 

    Beyond the rewards of her career, Ochoa-Brillembourg has found fulfillment through her philanthropic work, most notably her involvement with The Orchestra of the Americas Group (OA Group). 

    The OA Group is a “Grammy-winning symphony orchestra that trains, empowers and presents top-rising talents of the Western Hemisphere and beyond in semi-annual flagship residences around the world.” Recently, it has taken on two additional missions, offering an online music conservatory that bridges the “gap between local and opportunity” and the world’s first MBA in Arts Innovation, co-curated by top universities including Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown and Duke.  

    Ochoa-Brillembourg says the conservatory is attracting some of the top performers in the world as teachers, including renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and giving talented musicians, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, the opportunity to make connections that lead to careers with world-class orchestras.   

    “We have testimonies of all of our graduates that we have changed their lives. I mean, thousands of testimonies that we have changed their lives and why,” she said.  

    One of the most notable success stories is that of Gustavo Dudamel, a Venezuelan conductor currently serving as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and music director of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. 

    “We identified him as an extraordinary young conductor in our first tour of the orchestra in 2002,” she said. “We were the first time that he was taken on an international tour and performed all over Latin America and the United States.”  

    In addition to the impact of the orchestra on its young musicians, Ochoa-Brillembourg says her philanthropic involvement with the OA Group has also changed her life.  

    “It is a transformation,” she said. “It opens up your heart, your mind, your soul, your creativity, your spirit. It gives you a sense of the immense opportunities that life brings.” 

    Read more about Ochoa-Brillembourg and the OA Group in our Philanthropy Magazine article, “Beethoven in the Barrio.”  


    A “Cautionary Tale” for America 

    Ochoa-Brillembourg’s discussion with Herrera also turned to her experience with life in a socialist regime.  

    “Caracas is a very special place. It was a very special place to grow up for various reasons,” Ochoa-Brillembourg said. 

    Now though, she says the ongoing economic and political crisis in Venezuela has led to the collapse of the private sector and a “band of criminals is ruining the country.” The humanitarian emergency began during the presidency of Hugo Chavez and has since worsened, leaving millions of people without access to needs like basic health care and safe water.  

    Ochoa-Brillembourg says it should serve as a warning to Americans to safeguard their democracy. 

    “I have never met a socialist who didn’t want to take other people’s money for themselves,” she said. “What’s happened in Venezuela, they have stolen us blind. And it’s what’s happening in China … and what has happened in Russia. Corruption in a socialist regime is extraordinarily more rampant than in a democracy.” 

    It concerns her that Americans, particularly on college campuses, have “lost” the freedom to “disagree and … to argue and reach some form of agreement or middle point,” things that are integral to a democracy.  

    “But we’ll find our way eventually, I do believe,” she said.  

    Learn more about “Doers to Donors” and watch the full interview featuring Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg here or listen to the podcast on Apple, Google or Spotify. Subscribe to the Roundtable’s YouTube channel to make sure you don’t miss future episodes.  

  • The Giving Review: Forgo Mandates and Work to Change Philanthropy through Excellent Grantmaking

    Editor’s Note: This article was originally published as part of The Giving Review’s symposium “Conservatism and the Future of Tax-Incentivized Big Philanthropy” and reprinted here with permission.

    It is certainly true that, as The Giving Review has noted, private philanthropy in the United States “is increasingly on the defensive.” Whether such a position is justified, however, is a subject of debate. American philanthropy has a long and distinctive heritage, but it is no stranger to controversy. Anyone familiar with John Rockefeller’s struggle to obtain a federal charter for the Rockefeller Foundation (first funded by the donor in 1909 when philanthropy was not yet “tax-incentivized”) knows that his opponents characterized such an institution as an enemy of democracy. The federal charter never materialized, but with a New York State charter in hand, Rockefeller went on to build a legacy of private giving that continues to this day.

    As the number and size of private foundations increased through the 20th and early 21st Centuries, concerns about these vehicles continued, always with the question of whether donor-directed philanthropy was actually focused on the “public good,” a term that defies an unbiased definition. Rules and regulations followed to stem activities that were deemed political, mandate an annual payout, prohibit self-dealing, and require tax filings that included transparency around compensation, grantmaking, and investment management. Yet despite the complex compliance demanded by IRS overseers, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley opened a set of 2004 hearings on the nonprofit sector (charities and foundations alike) by complaining, ”Big money, tax free, and no oversight have created a cesspool in too many cases.”

    Facing its critics, the philanthropic sector has never denied that abuses occur, nor has it opposed reasonable regulations. But the dialogue about philanthropy has changed over the past five years or so, and unlike my colleagues at The Giving Review, I am concerned that a conservative nod to new regulatory mandates based on someone’s opinion of “what Big Philanthropy is doing in, and to, America” will have a disastrous impact on philanthropic freedom, on private giving, and on civil society.

    Three books published in 2018 questioned the legitimacy—even the very premise—of private philanthropy in the United States. In Just Giving, Stanford University professor Rob Reich, who had once viewed even “big” philanthropy as a counterweight to big government and big business, questioned whether tax-advantaged private philanthropy was simply power exercised willfully and without public accountability, a force that might undermine democracy. Winners Take All became the platform through which former McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas questioned the motives and the efficacy of philanthropists who, he alleged, used their giving to avoid confronting how they came by their power and wealth. Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth explored the relationship among racism, an extractive economy, and wealth creation, and called for increased power-sharing and greater equity in philanthropic decision-making.

    With those three books as a backdrop, private philanthropy faced the 2020 challenges of responding to a national health crisis, lockdowns, ensuing economic and educational crises, and a simultaneous racial upheaval. The response was overwhelming from small and large foundations that represented a wide spectrum of philosophical persuasions. Beyond providing additional funding that year, foundations changed their grantmaking operations. They eliminated or streamlined applications and reporting requirements, fast-tracked the approval process, used electronic transfers for quicker payments, redirected project-specific grants to general operating support, and removed challenge or matching requirements. Nonetheless, the doubters and critics of philanthropy continued to demand more. In that tumultuous year, a group calling itself Patriotic Millionaires pushed Congress to double the minimum share of assets foundations would be mandated to distribute. One of their spokespersons, Scott Wallace of the Wallace Global Fund, remarked that “only Congress has the power to force this massive injection of wealthy people’s money into jobs and nonprofit charitable organizations working in vital areas like health care, food banks, poverty alleviation, education, social justice, and economic development and job creation.”

    In response, I suggested that it was hardly “patriotic” to interfere with the decisions of foundation boards—the rightful stewards of their endowments—regarding foundation payout or lifespan, or to mandate that they abandon their values, missions, or donor intent in their grantmaking. Instead, we should allow foundation governance to work and produce a healthy variety of voluntary responses. And foundations did, in fact, differ in their responses to increased need, with some immediately ramping up their giving overall and others sticking with their typical annual payout while refocusing some dollars on health or on economic issues resulting from the lockdowns.

    But there is a more important lesson here. All too frequently, the advocates of what appear to be simple, structural changes to philanthropy are seeking to destroy what Karl Zinsmeister once called “a riotous patchwork” of private giving choices in order to drive all philanthropy to their own notions of the what-should-be-obvious central problems of American society. Conservatives should be wary of what’s behind the curtain and protect

    “the broad range of causes and organizations funded by nongovernmental dollars, the increasing number of ways donors can deliver those dollars, and the many timetables on which those dollars are expended [which] all make for a vibrant civil society that is nimbly responsive, deliberately experimental, and determinedly focused all at the same time.”

    Conservatives should also reject the premise behind many of the “reforms” currently suggested for both private foundations and donor-advised funds (DAFs) that tax incentives designed to grow giving and protect civil-society institutions from unreasonable government control are actually subsidies that transform dollars privately donated into assets that belong to the public and are therefore subject to democratic control. This claim has been successfully rebutted, most notably by Evelyn Brody and John Tyler in their publication, How Public is Private Philanthropy? We should be clear in our acknowledgment that the state has the authority to regulate and supervise all §501(c)(3) entities to ensure that their assets are not used for private benefit. Beyond that, however, tax incentives do not oblige private foundations and other charities to use their assets to serve the same ends as government. “Autonomy has been one of the defining characteristics of American foundations and other charities,” Brody and Tyler concluded. “Such entities are free to support and pursue differing and even contrary programmatic visions, strategies, methods, and structures provided that they do not stray from their mandate to serve charitable purposes.”

    We should also acknowledge that the Internal Revenue Service definition of “charitable purposes” covers a multitude of causes that may not appeal to Americans of one political persuasion or another. I find it quite ironic, for example, that the Hewlett and Ford Foundations and the Omidyar Network are utilizing their charitable resources to replace “the neoliberal paradigm” that liberty and prosperity are best achieved with limited government in a free-market system when their assets originated from the disruptive innovation that flourishes in that very system. Many conservative outlets—including The Giving Review—have also expressed their unhappiness with the grantmaking of the multi-billion-dollar Ford Foundation, and with CEO Darren Walker’s advocacy of moving “from generosity to justice.” As two of its co-editors noted, “Whether Big Philanthropy’s power is in the hands of detached professionals or radical activists, it is very far from what everyday American citizens have in mind when they think of charitable activity.”

    While I understand this concern, the distinction between philanthropy and charity is not new; the search for root causes engaged John Rockefeller throughout his life. Today, foundations of all sizes and philosophical persuasions frequently supplement their support for basic community needs with grants to support research or policy-focused nonprofit organizations. We see this in admittedly conservative grantmakers like the Bradley Foundation, which blends its support of faith-based, human service and arts organizations in Milwaukee with its grants to “advance federalism and limit government at the national, state, and local levels.” And we see it in progressive funders like the Park Foundation, which combines grants “dedicated to advancing a more just, equitable and sustainable society” with support for human service and cultural nonprofits in its home community of Ithaca.

    Finally, any attempt to define “Big Philanthropy” will be fraught with challenges. Sen. J. D. Vance seems to have decided that $100 million is the magic number, suggesting that foundations with more than that amount in assets be required to pay out 20% each year or else lose their tax-exempt status. That is, in essence, a mandatory death sentence for a broad swath of foundations in this country. And even if there were agreement on a significantly higher number, does it make any sense to demand that foundations that, in Vance’s words, constitute “a massive left-wing bias at the heart of our society” flood civil society with even more progressive dollars?

    As I noted in a RealClearPolicy article,

    “It’s essential that those who seek to kneecap philanthropic generosity on ideological and political grounds remember what goes around comes around. Ill-conceived government mandates will not discriminate—nor should they. Additional regulations will not just burden the foundations politicians or bureaucrats dislike, but all foundations governed by the same rules.”

    It’s likely that any new regulations would have a far greater negative impact on small and regional organizations than “big” ones and reduce the amount of charitable dollars available to those in need.

    We should also recognize that that limiting foundation and DAF lifespans and adjusting payout rules will never satisfy the hard-core opponents of philanthropy, those who maintain that wealth itself is the problem and that confiscatory taxes and expanded government spending are the solutions. In the process of attempting to appease them, conservatives will sacrifice both donor intent and donor privacy, essential elements of philanthropic freedom.

    Instead, conservatives should forgo the use of government mandates and work to change philanthropy through the optimism and excellent grantmaking that was so evident in the last quarter of the previous century. We can encourage and assist conservative donors to commit to the long term and build new institutions where none exist or where existing ones have grown bloated and stale; to defend and advance our nation’s constitutional principles; to restore democratic norms, including free speech and religious freedom; to promote limited government and voluntary association; to expand economic opportunity within the free market; to strengthen families and communities; to build character and reinforce the value of personal responsibility; and to stand up for individual rights and the equality of all people.

    That is how we improve lives, grow and strengthen civil society, and demonstrate the power of private giving based on our core values. Our success—and the strength and resilience it will bring to our communities—is how we can meet the challenge of so-called “Big Philanthropy.”