From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth

By Darren Walker

Andrew Carnegie wrote his original "Gospel of Wealth" in 1889, during the height of the gilded age, when the country's 4,000 richest families held almost as much wealth as the other 11.6 million American families combined. His essay laid the foundation for modern philanthropy.

Today, we find ourselves in a new gilded age—defined by levels of inequality that far surpass those of Carnegie's time. The widening chasm between haves and have-nots 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, David Rockefeller Jr., and Dr. 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 now becomes 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Disruption Books
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781633310780

Book preview

Front Cover of From Generosity to Justice

Praise for From Generosity to Justice

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

"From Generosity to Justice is a rare, eye-opening, and exciting read that opens both the heart and mind."

—Shonda Rhimes

This will become a defining manifesto of our era.

—Walter Isaacson

Walker bravely tackles the subject of inequality with one pressing question in mind: What can philanthropy do about it?

—Ken Chenault

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 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

A clarion call for a new kind of philanthropy to transform our society.

—Joel Fleishman

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

"From Generosity to Justice shows why Darren Walker is one of philanthropy’s most forward-thinking and important leaders."

—Michael Bloomberg

Half Title of From Generosity to JusticeBook Title of From Generosity to Justice

Published by The Ford Foundation / Disruption Books

New York, NY

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Copyright ©2023 by The Ford Foundation

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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission from the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be directed to [e-mail].

Motto from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Disruption Books at [e-mail].

Cover and text design by Sheila Parr

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

978-1-63331-077-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63331-078-0

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For David, who taught me the meaning of generosity, justice, and love.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction:

A New Gospel of Wealth

1. From Generosity to Justice:

A Continuum of Philanthropy

2. The Privilege of Perspective:

Seeing and Sharing Access and Opportunity

New Paradigms for Legacy Institutions:

A Conversation with Elizabeth Alexander

3. The Awareness of Ignorance:

Learning What We Don’t Know

Joyful Justice:

A Conversation with Laurene Powell Jobs

4. The Ownership of Selflessness:

Giving with Humility

5. The Raising of Roots:

Addressing Causes, Not Consequences

Nurturing Communities:

A Conversation with Carly Hare

6. The Power of Proximity:

Valuing Both Expertise and Experience

Bringing Hidden Labor to Light:

A Conversation with Ai-jen Poo

7. The Courage of Conviction:

Standing Up and Speaking Out

A CEO Speaks for Justice:

A Conversation with Ken Frazier

8. The Democracy of Justice:

Our Liberation Is Bound Together

Conclusion:

The Tenets of a New Gospel

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Notes

Half Title of From Generosity to Justice

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

INTRODUCTION

A New Gospel of Wealth

Never before has the world experienced so much inequality.

Thanks to major advances in technology, new entrepreneurs fundamentally transform the way people live and work. But these titans of industry also accumulate wealth on an astounding scale, while the vast majority remain in poverty.¹

And it’s not just economic inequality run rampant: Around the world, there are grand disparities in how people are treated in culture and in politics, who can access education and economic opportunity, and which groups are free to express themselves and participate in a democracy. Even in the most progressive, democratic countries, institutions and systems continue to marginalize and exclude low-income people, women, the disabled, ethnic and religious minorities, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and others.

I am not describing our current moment, though it may sound like it.

Rather, this was the state of the world in 1889, when the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie published the first essay of what we would later refer to as The Gospel of Wealth. Aptly known as the Gilded Age, this was a time when industrialist tycoons enjoyed lives of unprecedented, unimaginable opulence, while ordinary people endured low wages, dangerous working conditions, and overcrowded, unhealthy living quarters.

Back then, the United States’ 4,000 richest families possessed nearly as much wealth as the other 11.6 million American families combined.² That level of stark inequality is similar to our own most sobering figures. Today, just the top three richest Americans—not even close to the top 4,000—own about as much wealth collectively as all of the bottom half of the United States combined.³ Globally, 130 years after Carnegie’s gospel, Oxfam reports that the 26 richest individuals control as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion—half of the current world population.⁴

There’s a reason many have called ours the New Gilded Age.⁵ Indeed, today the problem of inequality is even greater.

Economic inequality is one major form of this current crisis—and the form we hear most about—but once again it is not the only one. We also see rampant, pervasive inequality in politics and government; in culture and creative expression; in education and upward mobility; and—especially—in the prejudicial way that our institutions and systems treat women, people with disabilities, the LGBTQ community, Indigenous communities, people of color, and poor people. These different inequalities both cause one another and are the effects of one another. They are deeply interdependent and intertwined.

These inequalities are not abstract, either. They are experienced every day, by nearly every one of us. A distorted form of capitalism has produced extreme wealth for owners and daily insecurity for workers. Authoritarian leaders have suppressed rights and fomented division, discord, and dysfunction. Fast-moving technological innovations, full of rich potential, are instead used by both groups—the owners and the rulers—to suppress and supplant.

These inequalities reflect the fact that some people have a fuller experience of basic human rights than others do. As a result, these others have less access to democracy, social and economic mobility, and their own human dignity.

As the president of a social justice foundation with a mission to strengthen democracy, I have one presiding preoccupation: the staggering threat of inequality. Every day, my colleagues and I ask: What can we do to reduce inequality in all of its forms?

Carnegie’s answer to the imbalance of wealth in his times—or perhaps more specifically, the displays of extravagance and indulgence that resulted, and the potential upheaval he feared—was something radical. He wrote that wealthy individuals had a special obligation, while they were still alive, to give benefactions from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage, and thus dignify their own lives.⁶

In a word: philanthropy.

Carnegie’s ideas fundamentally altered the way the world thought about wealth and giving, and his philosophy has served as the underpinning of American philanthropy and, by extension, of giving around the world.

Since then, much of the work of philanthropy has been undeniably beneficial: Millions of people worldwide have been lifted out of poverty, protected from terrible diseases, provided with social and economic opportunity, and given access to