Will philanthropy be a stopgap or a spark?
We can’t donate our way out of systemic collapse.
Last month, the Gates Foundation pledged $1.6 billion over five years to Gavi, a public-private partnership supplying vaccines to kids in poor countries.
In announcing this increased giving, Gates criticized the US cuts to funding global health work and asked the audience at the Global Health Summit in Brussels to imagine the devastation parents must feel when faced with the preventable loss of a child. Invoking the words of Nelson Mandela, he urged attendees to remember that “There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way it treats its children.”
For Gates, it’s clear that this work is a moral imperative.
The number of kids dying from avoidable deaths around the world will rise for the first time in a decade because of the massive cuts to foreign aid. Programs like Gavi are among the most powerful steps to stop that from happening.
Gates’s framing of public health programs as a moral necessity is right. But here’s the problem: this is the job of government, not philanthropy.
Gates’ generosity, while commendable, is a window into a deeper dysfunction: the reckless retreat of government from its most basic obligations. Philanthropy is stepping in where public institutions should lead—and in doing so, our sector may be enabling a dangerous status quo. We can’t donate our way out of systemic collapse.
Charity can’t replace collective responsibility
Philanthropy excels at innovation—funding pilot programs, social movements, and community-driven solutions. But our sector cannot (and should not) bankroll public health, education, and vital safety nets—the bedrock of a functioning society. That’s the role of our tax dollars, democratically allocated by elected leaders who are, at least in theory, accountable to the people who put them in office.
Yet today, as wealth concentrates and increasing austerity destroys lives, I see too many in our sector deluding ourselves that we can plug, patch, or prop up what government has chosen to abandon.
Yes, philanthropy’s resources are vast, but they’re a drop in the bucket compared to what’s being stripped away.
Let’s look at the math. Last year, philanthropy poured a record near $6 billion into charitable giving. This seems generous until it’s held up against the more than $1.5 trillion sitting idle—or worse, invested in harmful entities—in endowments.
But even if philanthropy were to suddenly come to our collective senses and release all of the capital in our endowments, our combined resources still wouldn’t replace even two of the cuts in the disastrous new tax bill, which will wrest nearly $1 trillion from public health programs including Medicaid, the ACA, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and reduce the vital food assistance program SNAP by an estimated $230 billion.
We literally can’t afford to let the government continue to retreat from its obligations to fund essential public goods and services. It is my view that tax dollars are best used for necessary positive rights to health, environment, safety, and education. These services should be a part of the collective responsibility and accountable to the demos.
So, while I applaud Bill Gates for stepping into the void created by the Secretary of HHS, I am saddened that we continue to rely on public/private actors with relatively limited resources to fill in the gaps of our collective responsibilities.
Fund the fight, not the failure
Philanthropy’s unique power isn’t in mimicking government—it’s in fueling the movements that can force government to act. Instead of subsidizing systemic neglect, a better bet would be to spend our precious resources fueling the organizing that can build the power capable of reversing the disastrous trend in wealth disparity, winning a fair tax system, and building up programs that can unite and heal our communities as opposed to terrorize, punish, and divide.
But, for philanthropy to backfill the retreat of government from its responsibilities, we are wasting the capital necessary to advance community-based power and efficiency.
There’s little doubt that in the coming years, we’ll see more deadly cuts, deeper wealth inequity, and expanding crises… so we’d do well to get clear on our orientation to the crises we face now: Will philanthropy continue to act as a stopgap or a spark?
Will we keep writing checks to clean up policy disasters, or can we fund the movements that prevent them? Will we decide to prop up a rigged system, or help to dismantle it and build something better in its place?
Every choice we make to fund resistance instead of retreat is a step closer to the future our communities deserve.