Giving Compass' Take:

• Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow, founded the Emerson Collective LLC and critics think that her philanthropic pursuits are less traditional because she engages with entrepreneurs who want to disrupt their sectors and experiment.

• Should Jobs alter how she conducts social impact work and think more broadly about the communities that are affected by the projects she funds? 

• Read about the different approaches to empowered philanthropy. 

One traditional definition of philanthropy is “the desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good causes.” Laurene Powell Jobs doesn’t think that is good enough. Through her Emerson Collective LLC, she desires, like many of her contemporaries, to transform classic philanthropy by allowing it to operate with the style, culture, and independence that characterize the business from which she derived her wealth. (Powell Jobs is the widow of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple).

In 2004, Powell Jobs chose to form her philanthropic venture as a limited liability corporation rather than as a more traditional foundation, giving her the flexibility and autonomy that she desires.

With a personal fortune estimated to exceed $20 billion, Ms. Powell Jobs desires the flexibility to use her resources widely and with little public accountability. The Emerson Collective’s giving looks very traditional when it supports CollegeTrack, But it looks very untraditional when it buys a majority stake in the Atlantic, creates social advocacy art, or buys a share of Washington DC’s professional sports teams.As an LLC, it can also easily shift to political advocacy when it thinks policy and system change is needed.

Central to this approach is a suspicion that what already exists may be part of the problem rather than the solution that innovation is critical even when it is disruptive.  The Collective’s leadership regularly looks for answers from outside, searching for “‘amazing entrepreneurs…100-percent aligned with our mission’ who can find solutions that might not occur to a nonprofit.”

While a charitable venture experimenting with what’s “new” and “better” can afford to experiment, its principals are not directly affected by the effort nor faced with the personal meaning of failure. Greater accountability for public experimentation seems necessary.

Read the full article about the Emerson Collective by Martin Levine at Nonprofit Quarterly