Philanthropy.  Wikipedia describes the word etymologically means "love of humanity" in the sense of caring, nourishing, developing and enhancing "what it is to be human" on both the benefactors' and beneficiaries' parts.  Webster’s says philanthropy is the practice of giving money and time to help make life better for other people. 

Today, when we talk about philanthropy what comes to mind are large foundations, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation being the largest and most well known.  However, the involvement of these foundations and their philanthropic efforts in public education is often not warmly welcomed by everyone. 

Note the recent NYT article announcing Facebook’s partnership with Summit Public Schools, a network of charter middle and high schools in the Bay Area.  Facebook has been donating engineering time and expertise to help build out Summit’s personalized learning management platform.  However, despite this philanthropic effort, the overall tone of the article is negative, suspicious even.  Questions of motive and intent, student privacy and the ever-lurking profit motive (gasp) abound. 

But is that really fair?  Or better yet, are these fears and concerns, which may have varying levels of applicability or validity depending on the circumstances being presented in a balanced manner?

Lauren Powell Jobs recently announced the XQ competition – a prize backed by $50M of philanthropic capital to redesign America’s high school.  Philanthropy like this can encourage and catalyze risk-taking in ways that government funding simply cannot.  Private philanthropy towards public causes like education can experiment, innovate and take risks and when those risks fail, philanthropists can publicly state that they did fail and what they learned as a result.  Imagine a government entity trying to do that?  The pressure to get re-elected keeps politicians coloring generally within the lines of what is safe and least risky. 

Philanthropic capital is doing for the non-profit sector, what private capital has always done for the for-profit sector – fuel entrepreneurs and the engines of innovation and growth they seek to create. 

I speak from experience.  Matchbook Learning is a 501c3 (a national non-profit) charter management organization focused on school turnarounds.  We have graciously received grant funds in our first four years from philanthropic partners like the NewSchools Venture Fund, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Next Generation Learning Grant via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Praxis and the David Weekley Family Foundation.  This fact alone may cause you to discount what I say on this topic. 

However, not a single one of these funders has ever asked for anything in return but rather in varying ways and times, helped support Matchbook Learning from an idea to a plan to a model to a start-up and eventually a functioning organization.  I can say unequivocally (and none of these folks owes me a single dollar more) that they each have genuinely sought to help Matchbook Learning innovate, risk, fail and try again, as we learned what works and what doesn’t, what to replicate and build on and what to set aside.  We simply would not exist today serving the children and their families we serve in Newark and Detroit – and the many more we hope to serve - without their generous and strategic support. 

There are not many places on the entire planet than can marshal this kind of both financial support for causes in both the breadth and depth that the United States can.  I don’t know Lauren Powell Jobs but I am grateful she’s a philanthropist.  Our country needs them.