The situation on the Korean peninsula is increasingly scary. Which funders are paying attention to this crisis? And what can philanthropy realistically do to shape outcomes here?

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One way to begin answering these questions is by looking to the recent past, when private funders played an important role in resolving tensions over Iran’s nuclear crisis starting in the early 2000s. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ploughshares Fund were the two key players in this work, although other funders pitched in, as well. For over a decade, before an international agreement was reached to suspend Iran’s nuclear program in 2015, grantmakers supported so-called Track II engagement with Iran, which brought together former senior officials from both countries, as well as other connected players, for dialogue which kept going even when official talks were stalled or nonexistent.

Investing in this process over an extended period, RBF president Stephen Heintz told me, was the "key philanthropic point of intervention” and a case of "philanthropy supporting something that wouldn't otherwise have happened." Funders also supported policy research and advocacy to make the case for the final negotiated deal. In an op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Ploughshares' executive director, Philip Yun, detailed the ways his organization worked to influence the Iran nuclear issue, acting as both a grantmaker and hands-on policy advocate.

Philip Yun says he’s been trying to engage other donors from the tech sector on the nuclear threat. “The two existential threats [to humanity] are global warming and nuclear weapons,” he says. Plenty of newer donors are paying attention to the former; few to the latter. Yun hopes that this will change, pointing out that some top experts, like William Perry, believe that the risk of a nuclear detonation somewhere in the world has never been higher.

Certainly, the current situation on the Korean peninsula underscores just how dangerous things have become in today’s more volatile nuclear age.

Read the source article at Inside Philanthropy

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