The problems philanthropy seeks to remedy are big, messy, and complicated. Yet far too often, we try to combat them with simple responses. Faced with child hunger, we focus on giving children food; but we don’t connect that work to creating a national minimum wage, even though the vast majority of food-insecure children in the United States have working parents. We try to fix homelessness without embracing foster-care reform, despite knowing that half of Americans experiencing homelessness spent time in the foster-care system. We create initiatives to alleviate the climate crisis by promoting recycling and beach clean-ups, without building in advocacy for substantive policy changes that stop pollution at its source.
Cathy Choi & Trent Stamp
Read the full article Philanthropy’s Problem with Single-Issue Solutions by Cathy Choi & Trent Stamp, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review
