"If you can bring so much happiness to so many people, why don't you do more?" With this question, Muhammed Yunus challenged participants at the Conference on Borderless Giving on June 5 and 6. Taking successful experience to a larger scale was one of underlying threads that ran through many discussions at this second annual event of the Global Philanthropy Forum, co-hosted by World Affairs Council of Northern California and Stanford University's Institute for International Studies.
The conference brought together over 300 participants from more than a dozen countries under the theme: Human Development: Investing in Children, Families and Communities. Participants shared ideas and experiences in plenary presentations, working breakout sessions, and also through "At lunch and dinner" sessions in which philanthropic leaders hosted discussions at individual tables.
In addition to scale, another important concept explored at the conference was the impact a donor and an individual he/she supports can have by working together to make a new idea into reality. In a session on Building Indigenous Institutions, William Fuller of The Asia Foundation stated that as a philanthropist "You bet a lot on leaders; sometimes you bet more on people than institutions." He was speaking of support provided by the Ford Foundation, at which he was a country representative, to Yunus in the late 1970s that proved critical in the creation of the Grameen Bank.
Another key concept was the importance of advocacy. In one of the closing plenaries, Tim Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation, urged philanthropists to not be reluctant to be advocates and drew attention to the conservative movement's advances in advocacy in the last 20 years in the United States. Pointing out that participants at the conference claim interest in social change, he said "Within a democratic society, we all have responsibility; I would argue that those of us who have been entrusted with shepherding scarce philanthropic resources have a special responsibility."
Graça Machel, President of the Foundation for Community Development of Mozambique urged participants to also support the advocacy capacity of other citizens and communities, and especially the capacity of women to speak out, pointing to the example of the thousands of strong women's organizations in Southern Africa that are vocal in their own communities but need to work together to have political impact at a higher level. Philanthropy to support networking among these organizations can bring about profound change, she said.
Kavita Ramdas, President of the Global Fund for Women echoed this comments on the critical role women leaders can play in advocacy, while also warning of the huge work responsibilities women activists can face in combining advocacy efforts with other nonprofit work as well as home life and professional responsibilities. Philanthropists must find ways to support women's groups and engage men in so-called "women's issues" to overcome these challenges.
The Global Philanthropy Forum, which describes itself as "neutral forum for donors to share experiences, strategies and best practices and to consider ways to improve the strategic nature of their giving," provides video from the conference and a range of other information resources on its website at www.philanthropyforum.org.