"This will become a defining manifesto of our era.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs
“Orchestrating a dynamic chorus of vital voices and vibrant vision, Walker harnesses singular storytelling to catalyze ideas and instigate inspiration for a more just future.” —Ava Duvernay, Emmy-winning producer
“From Generosity to Justice shows why Darren Walker is one of philanthropy’s most forward-thinking and important leaders.” —Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City
"Here’s a challenge: Find a figure in American philanthropy more inspiring, more knowledgeable, or better able to articulate both the vast import and fundamental limitations of this great national tradition than Darren Walker." —Town Country Magazine
“His bold call for business leaders to demonstrate moral courage is just one part of a new model for justice-minded philanthropy, one that offers both the advantaged and disadvantaged tangible ways to disrupt inequality.” —Indra Nooyi, former CEO and Chairperson of PepsiCo
“A clarion call for a new kind of philanthropy to transform our society.” —Joel Fleishman, Professor of Law and Public Policy Studies and Director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at Duke University
“Walker illustrates how philanthropy is about more than giving money away; it’s about giving energy, and providing ‘righteous optimism’ for the sake of justice.” —Agnes Gund, President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art
“A recalibration and reimagination of the philanthropic model crafted by the Carnegie and Rockefeller families over a century ago. This new gospel must be heard all over the world!” —David Rockefeller, Jr.
“From Generosity to Justice is a rare, eye-opening, and exciting read that opens both the heart and mind.” —Shonda Rhimes, producer
“Walker bravely tackles the subject of inequality with one pressing question in mind: What can philanthropy do about it?” —Ken Chenault, former CEO of American Express
"This clear-thinking text insists that powerful shifts in thinking are vital to changing actions and outcomes." —Foreword Reviews
"An insightful analysis of contemporary philanthropy offered by a perceptive, experienced insider." —Kirkus Reviews
From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth
Narrated by Darren Walker
Darren WalkerUnabridged — 5 hours, 27 minutes
From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth
Narrated by Darren Walker
Darren WalkerUnabridged — 5 hours, 27 minutes
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Overview
Today, we find ourselves in a new Gilded Age- defined by levels of inequality that surpass those of Carnegie's time. The widening chasm between the advantaged and the disadvantaged demands our immediate attention.
Now is the time for a new "Gospel of Wealth."
In From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, articulates a bold vision for philanthropy in the twenty-first century. With contributions from an array of thinkers, activists, and leaders including Ai-jen Poo, Laurene Powell Jobs, Kenneth Frazier, Carly Hare, and Elizabeth Alexander, Walker challenges and emboldens readers to consider philanthropy as a tool for achieving economic, social, and political justice.
That task requires humility, moral courage, and an unwavering commitment to democratic values and institutions. It demands that all members of society recognize their own privilege and position, address the root causes of social ills, and seek out and listen to those who live amid and experience injustice.
What began in Carnegie's day as a manual for generosity is now reimagined as a guide that moves us closer to justice- a guide that helps each of us find a way to contribute.
Justice is calling. It's time we answer.
Editorial Reviews
"Walker illustrates how philanthropy is about more than giving money away; it’s about giving energy, and providing ‘righteous optimism’ for the sake of justice.” —Agnes Gund, President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art
"His bold call for business leaders to demonstrate moral courage is just one part of a new model for justice-minded philanthropy, one that offers both the advantaged and disadvantaged tangible ways to disrupt inequality.” —Indra Nooyi, former CEO and Chairperson of PepsiCo
"From Generosity to Justice is a rare, eye-opening, and exciting read that opens both the heart and mind.” —Shonda Rhimes, producer
"From Generosity to Justice shows why Darren Walker is one of philanthropy’s most forward-thinking and important leaders.” —Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City
"This clear-thinking text insists that powerful shifts in thinking are vital to changing actions and outcomes." —Foreword Reviews
"Orchestrating a dynamic chorus of vital voices and vibrant vision, Walker harnesses singular storytelling to catalyze ideas and instigate inspiration for a more just future.” —Ava Duvernay, Emmy-winning producer
"This will become a defining manifesto of our era.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs
"A clarion call for a new kind of philanthropy to transform our society.” —Joel Fleishman, Professor of Law and Public Policy Studies and Director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at Duke University
"Here’s a challenge: Find a figure in American philanthropy more inspiring, more knowledgeable, or better able to articulate both the vast import and fundamental limitations of this great national tradition than Darren Walker." —Town Country Magazine
"A recalibration and reimagination of the philanthropic model crafted by the Carnegie and Rockefeller families over a century ago. This new gospel must be heard all over the world!” —David Rockefeller, Jr.
"Walker bravely tackles the subject of inequality with one pressing question in mind: What can philanthropy do about it?” —Ken Chenault, former CEO of American Express
2023-02-17
Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, argues for a new vision of philanthropy informed by the demands of justice in this nonfiction debut.
The author frets that the current age is marked by “historic disruption,” roiled by such pervasive injustice, inequality, and authoritarianism that we are “staring down existential risk.” Walker contends that a traditional interpretation of charity—one that emphasizes generosity toward the downtrodden—is simply insufficient insofar as it neglects the causes of socio-economic inequality. In short, Walker posits that charity must not be abandoned but rather transformed by a new relation to justice, one that strives to attack “systemic issues, not just their symptoms.” To this end, the author recommends the adoption of a “justice mindset,” which carefully takes stock of one’s various privileges, investigates the biases and ignorance that undermine our philanthropic efforts, and ensures that our own egos don’t get in the way. Moreover, he feels that the effective philanthropist must seek out solutions that are empirically rigorous and resist the temptation of “silver bullets” and grand strategies concocted independent of real experience. Walker’s acumen in professional philanthropy is impressively vast, and he covers the field with great expertise and clarity. Also, he includes edifying interviews with other notable philanthropists like Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Walker’s discussions can be frustratingly vague—he’s more interested in broadly sketching a general approach to charity than providing immediately actionable counsel—the absence of which he acknowledges. Consequently, the book is filled with platitudinous moral exhortations: “Now is the time for courage. This is our moment to show each other—and the world—that we can rise above the flaws and mistakes of our past, that we are better and stronger than hate, fear, and injustice.” Nevertheless, this remains a thoughtful reflection on the limits and possibilities of philanthropy, one that does not reject capitalism but advocates for a “more inclusive form” of it.
An insightful analysis of contemporary philanthropy offered by a perceptive, experienced insider.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940178285008 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Disruption Books |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2023 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 981,831 |
Read an Excerpt
Preface In January 2020, I wrote a New Year’s message reflecting on what I called “the hard work of hope.” I anticipated a difficult year ahead. At that moment, inequality had reached staggering, all-time highs, all around the world. As I described in the New York Times, many well-intentioned friends would deliver soliloquies about dazzling economic growth, at home and abroad. But what I knew, informed by my own life’s journey, was that the social-mobility escalator had ground to a halt, setting in place an inescapable, insidious hopelessness that had begun to asphyxiate democratic values and institutions. With many millions teetering on an economic precipice, the anxiety, resentment, and grievances were gathering—and the forces exploiting this insecurity were sure to respond with increasing mendacity and impunity. I asked rhetorically, then, “What new crisis needs to befall us before we, together, are spurred to collective action?” If we weren’t moved to organize and mobilize for justice after the turbulent first two decades of the twenty-first century—after all that we had endured—would we ever be? Little did I imagine. For several weeks, a novel coronavirus had been spreading across Asia and Europe. The very same day I shared my New Year’s essay, in fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the United States. And then, everything changed. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, it happened slowly, then all at once. The same March week that Americans closed schools and offices—canceling competitions and performances—police officers in Louisville shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her own home. As the virus raged that spring, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, with untold billions of people watching on televisions, tablets, and smartphones around the globe. Many took to the streets, demanding an overdue reckoning with our nation’s history and legacy of racism—not only in America’s criminal-justice and mass-incarceration systems, but, as significantly, in our classrooms and workplaces, throughout our culture and society, the world over. And then, of course, the President of the United States refused to concede a free and fair election. Insurrectionists desecrated the United States Capitol and attempted to overturn the United States Constitution. This was the worst, but hardly the only, effort to disenfranchise on a scale unseen since Jim Crow. To me, the historic disruption underway is something altogether different in kind, not just degree. I commented in a 2022 opinion essay that our nation seems more irreparably divided than ever before in my lifetime, barreling down a parallel path, perhaps, to the one our forebears traveled in the 1850s. Our converging crises of extreme inequality, racial injustice, and autocratic, anti-democratic impunity—multiplied not just by each other, but also by a pandemic that has claimed more than 6.5 million lives (and counting)—pose grave peril to our survival, as does a changing climate that is pushing our life-sustaining ecosystems to the brink of collapse. The droughts and floods, the storms and fires, all are worsening. Further, the distortion of our capitalism, and the inequality it continues to produce, have overloaded this burden onto the backs of the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable. We are staring down existential risk—and as a global and national community, our window to act is closing. If we only do what we’ve always done, the trauma of these last few years will be only the beginning. In this context, philanthropy has, by necessity, initiated a number of bold experiments since the beginning of 2020. For one, we continue our work to treat courageous visionaries on the frontlines of social change with greater respect—as our partners, not our vendors—providing them the resources and flexibility to chart the way forward. For another, we are using more of our assets more fully— beyond our historic pattern of granting only 5 percent of our endowment value, each year, as required by the United States tax code. At the Ford Foundation, this was the guiding principle behind our $1 billion commitment to mission-related investments, which are proving the potential of capital markets to deliver both a financial and social return. And during the depths of 2020, the same philosophy led us to finance a $1 billion social bond, effectively doubling our payout rate and injecting a capital booster to the organizations meeting our cascading crises. Many of our fellow funders are deploying similar strategies to unlock the power of the other 95 percent. With From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth, I hope to recenter attention and action—across the public sector, business, and civil society—on these approaches and others. After all, the ideas within this book, conceived and championed by a new generation of rising leaders, are demonstrating their mettle under fire. Ultimately, I feel more strongly than ever that philanthropy is not one kind of action or entity, but rather a continuum that spans from generosity on one side to justice on the other—and that we must push our work, wherever and however we can, beyond the former to the latter. At the turn of the last century, it was a Chicago muckraker journalist and humorist, Finley Peter Dunne, who coined that most illustrative phrase: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” We must do both, as my friends Elizabeth Alexander and Ken Frazier contend here. As I see it, “comforting the afflicted” is about our charity, our kindness, our magnanimity—about providing relief and recovery. But “afflicting the comfortable” is about our pursuit of justice— how we reimagine and reform. One asks that we “give something back,” but the other insists that we “give something up.” Afflicting the comfortable compels us to recognize the inequalities that make relief both necessary and possible: caste, as Isabel Wilkerson perfectly phrases it; decades of Ayn-Rand, Milton-Friedman, greed-is-good excess; the conscious choices that aggregate into a conscienceless capitalism. Afflicting the comfortable demands that we reckon with the ways in which we, ourselves, benefit from vast disparities in access and agency, voice and value. And afflicting the comfortable obligates us to rectify—to repair—the deep inequalities that deceive us into ignoring how and why we put ourselves first and others second, resetting the cycles of privilege built into our laws, norms, customs, and behaviors. All of this constitutes a new gospel of giving, defined by timeless terms and tenets, as I argue in these pages. It calls on us to improve the systems and structures that shaped us, to engage with the root causes of our most urgent crises, not just the immediate consequences, even when those root causes implicate us. It challenges us to trust the people and communities most proximate to problems to shape the most effective solutions to those problems—to value their lived experience as equal to established expertise. This requires moral leadership and moral courage: that we fix our eyes over the horizon, beyond the next earnings report or the next election, and toward a long-term vision for a more inclusive, equitable society. It also defies us to do something perhaps even harder: to step away from the extremes and from the edge, away from sanctimony and certitude, and to listen and learn with curiosity, and openness, and empathy—with tolerance for one another. In ordinary times, hope is rare. But in these extraordinary times, hope is radical. And so, I share this book with the radical optimism that we can, and must, and shall overcome. Through our triumphs and our defeats—two steps forward, one step back—we will continue our ascent from truth, to reconciliation, to the fullest measure of justice: absolute equality for all people. Darren Walker November 2022
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