Before I launch into this topic, I need to make a full disclosure:
- The author sent me a free (and inscribed) copy of the book upon publication.
- The author picked up the tab last time we had lunch together.
- There's a chart in this book on page 68 that I've been trying to describe (with sweeping arm gestures) to colleagues for over a year. I first saw it at the Boston regional nonprofit technology conference in 2007, during a session led by the author, and it's a big relief to me that I don't have to stretch the concept of fair use in transmitting the information it contains. My colleagues can now go out and buy a copy.
- Let's face it: most nptech professionals are entirely ahistorical, unless they happen to work for a nonprofit such as Colonial Williamsburg. We're interested in this year's model, but even more focused on next year's model. George gives us a context that begins in ancient Greek democracy and goes on the explain the founding of the United States as a philanthropic endeavor. This is actually helpful in allowing us to see philanthropy as more than a social duty to give: it's a shared project, and opportunity for human development, and a project in which "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" are at stake.
- George gets it about how the industrial model of philanthropy grew and expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries, and how the jig is up for that model in the information age. It's not just a matter of an economic shift, but a shift in social relations and philanthropic thinking. With the internet making distributed philanthropy not merely possible but powerfully effective, the idea of setting up a massive foundation with a palatial central office seems a little quaint, when geographically dispersed individuals and groups can form ad hoc networks to perform the same tasks. Those foundations frequently do excellent work, and their endowments ensure that they won't have to change their ways if they'd rather not, but they'll be increasingly irrelevant, as the highly networked adhocracy grows and we come to recognize that individuals and families do far more as donors than the highly visible foundations. You needn't take my word for that; George has done the research and can explain this much more eloquently than I ever could.
- George explains how our rhetoric (and perhaps therefore our thinking) has shifted, as we've moved from the industrial age to the information age in philanthropy. It's no longer about grand patrons giving away their bounty to the deserving poor - it's about all of us wanting to make a difference, working together, and investing in the change we want to see in the world.
- We tend to make use of terms such as "nonprofit" to describe our organizations, thus allowing the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to define not only our sector, but to define the taxonomy by which we understand our missions. In his book, George proposes an alternate taxonomy that he developed in the context of his work with the Catalogue For Philanthropy. He points out the need for terminology not based on postive rather than negative definitions (e.g., "nonprofit" or "nongovernmental"), and a taxonomy that orients us to philanthropy as an integral part of our human mission.
What more can I say? Read his book!
