A compilation of interesting and insightful thinking from the first four of seven recorded discussions so far this year about grantmaking and giving.
Nonprofits and Democrats, managers and professionals
“[N]onprofits play the central role in the fraud scandal” in Minnesota. There are “NGOs all across Minnesota that have been involved in this. …
“But I think there’s something that goes a little bit beyond that, and I think that is the political status of NGOs or nonprofits—I consider those to be equivalent. NGOs tend to be on the left of the political spectrum. The Democratic Party is well-integrated with NGOs. Some people, even in the Democratic Party, are worried about the role that NGOs play and how powerful they are. So I think when Republicans and people on the right think about the problems of this fraud scandal, they don’t just see it as a one-off and unfortunate set of incidents, but they see it as reflective of the power of NGOs in the Democratic Party and over progressive states ….”
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There is a “kind of built-in tension between managers and professionals. I think there is often a lot of antagonism between those two groups.
“Professionals are exercising power through the institutions that they control. That tends to be things like academia, tends to be things like the NGO sector, nonprofits in general, and the cultural sector, cultural industries.” There’s a “lot of professional-class power in those” institutions. “[W]hen people on the right are concerned about the power of the left in American society, they’re really thinking about institutions that the left controls, and those institutions are things like the NGO sector, academia, and the culture industries.”
— Darel E. Paul, from “A conversation with Williams College’s Darel E. Paul (Part 1 of 2),” January 26, 2026, and “A conversation with Williams College’s Darel E. Paul (Part 2 of 2),” January 27, 2026
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Philanthropies and the parties
“Lyndon Johnson was skeptical of the Ford Foundation back in the 1960s,” when Johnson’s advisor “Joe Califano suggested, ‘Why don’t we get a neutral observer like McGeorge Bundy, the head of the Ford Foundation, in here to discuss these matters about urban violence?’ Johnson wrote in the margins of the memo, ‘Ha! Ha!’ So that’s already how they thought about the Ford Foundation back in a Democratic administration in the 1960s.”
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There are “all kinds of great, conservative think tanks that get philanthropic help, including the Reagan Institute where I work, and the Hudson Institute and American Enterprise Institute where I’ve worked previously. That said, at the same time, there are a lot of foundations that are giving money to causes that I don’t agree with, and I think some of them are destructive not only to America, but to the idea of capitalism writ large. I think as conservatives, we should push back against that. But I really don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of the philanthropic system that is really unique to America and something that is an advantage I think America has over other countries.”
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Joseph “Schumpeter talked about this problem of capitalists funding their own destruction, and that was what 75 years ago or 80 years ago. So this is not a new problem, and it is part of the system. I think the question we need to ask is, ‘What’s the alternative, and how can we reform the system without losing these great things that we do get out of philanthropy?’ … I don’t like the naked partisanship of the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, these other foundations—and I think there has to be a fix, but I have not yet identified what [are] the fixes that will not redound more problematically on the conservative side.
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“Right now, we have a Republican administration, and maybe it’s better to do those rules administratively while you have an administration that is perhaps so inclined to do it. This administration uses a meat axe or a cleaver, when sometimes the scalpel would be appropriate—but again, I’d rather have them writing the rules than, let’s say, the Kamala Harris administration writing rules on this particular subject.”
— Tevi Troy, from “A conversation with presidential historian Tevi Troy (Part 1 of 2),” February 3, 2025, and “A conversation with presidential historian Tevi Troy (Part 2 of 2),” February 4, 2025
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Why Democracy Needs the Rich
“A premise of my book is that not everyone has equal influence in democracy, in a representative democracy,” and it’s “impossible to make sure that they have equal influence. The real question is, Do we have a pluralism of views and perspectives?
“The rich do have that pluralism, and they are one of the few groups—because of their independence and resources—that can counter what I call professional influencers, who obviously have a lot more influence, because that’s what they do for a living. They include the media, they include academics, they include entertainers, and they include the bureaucracy. And all of those groups, unlike the rich, lean in one political direction: all to the left, and sometimes very dramatically so ….
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“[I]f you start clamping down on the wealthy, you’re not going to get a better world. Now, maybe you get a better world if you could simply get rid of the liberal wealthy, but that’s really not a plausible world either, right? You just can’t have a structure like that. We can’t give the government the power to make those decisions, because that would be, again, worse than the disease.”
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Asked whether Tocquevillian civil society is the same as today’s tax-incentivized nonprofit sector: “Oh, absolutely not. But another point: there was not a large income tax back then.” The “deduction for philanthropy is saying that’s still something that we’re interested in, we value as a society. So I agree, it’s different, but you’re always struggling with translating one world to the next and you have a much bigger state than Tocqueville saw and much higher levels of taxation. So I think in that sense, it’s still a translation, an avenue, a channeling of some of the same impulses that Tocqueville saw almost 200 years ago.”
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On what some may consider “sensible regulation” of the wealthy’s involvement in partisan politics through the charitable-nonprofit avenue specifically: “I certainly think it’s a good idea to have a separation, insofar as we can.” If philanthropy has “a viewpoint perspective, that’s fine. But if it actually gets involved in actually trying to elect candidates with grassroots organizing, things of that sort, that strikes me as much more like politics. Now, I’m in favor of the rich being able to do that as well, but” we “might not want to have tax benefits for” it. “[T]hat strikes me as a sensible line that government could and should draw, and it may well be a difficult line, and one that is not always honored.”
— John O. McGinnis, from “A conversation with Why Democracy Needs the Rich author John O. McGinnis (Part 1 of 2),”March 11, 2026, and “A conversation Why Democracy Needs the Rich author John O. McGinnis (Part 2 of 2),” March 12, 2026
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Nonprofits’ professionalization, philanthropy and place, and “a new civic future”
We “have to recognize that the specific form of 501(c)(3) nonprofit, that has become hyper-professionalized, hyper-managerial”—which “has actually played a pretty-significant role in crowding ordinary citizens out of the shaping of their shared lives together. Nonprofits are a part of it, but informal groups should be a part of it, neighborhoods should be a part of it, small businesses that are anchors to places should be a part of it. It’s an all-of-the-above. I think where we get into trouble is when we say that you need these qualifications in order to be someone who is renewing your community. I think that is the inherent problem. To the extent that nonprofits have bought into that kind of approach of specialization and professionalization, then, yes, they are part of the problem.
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“All of these tools—professionalization, measurement—are meant to enable distant control by distant people in distant places” and end up treating “particular people in particular places as abstract anyones and abstract anywhere. And philanthropy has been a driver of that.
“As someone who had to fill out many logic models with inputs and outputs and outcomes, I can tell you very clearly that that is not how relationships work, that is not how the messiness of community works, that is not how the messiness of civic life works. I don’t think philanthropy in and of itself is a problem, I think philanthropy in terms of the ‘how’ that it’s operated is the problem.”
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Philanthropy should have “commitment to a place. … You don’t have to pick all the places, you don’t have to have the same places forever, but I think understanding that dropping $100,000 general-operating support—which some people can do that pretty easily—onto an organization for a year or two years and then leaving is actually kind of harmful to communities.”
— Sam Pressler
The primary audience of “An Invitation to a New Civic Future” is “fellow practitioners, to be like, ‘Hey, we see you. We know the work that you’re doing in your community, and if you haven’t started doing that work yet, you should just do it. You don’t have to wait for permission, … for a grant. You don’t have to wait for a program officer to give you their blessing. You don’t have to wait for any of that. You can just do your work, and we are here to support you, and we want to learn from you, and we want you to learn from us, and we’re working towards the thing.’”
Every day, “I get inbound from people who” say, “‘I want to do this thing in my community. Where should I begin?’ There’s a renewed energy around this, because it feels like” the local “places where people live are the places where you can have a sense of agency over a world that feels like there’s a lot of distant forces acting upon you. I think we’re trying to hopefully be like, ‘Hey, we’ve been doing this, we see you. … If you’re just getting started, join us. If you’ve been doing this, you’re a part of something. And let’s go forward together.’”
— Richard Young
From “A conversation with Connective Tissue’s Sam Pressler and CivicLex’s Richard Young (Part 1 of 2),” March 16, 2026, and “A conversation with Connective Tissue’s Sam Pressler and CivicLex’s Richard Young (Part 2 of 2),” March 17, 2026
