Giving Compass' Take:

• In this story from Medium, author Brent Cooper explores Tomas Bjorkman's venture into metamodern philanthropy, a philosophy which focuses on synthesized, macro-level patterns and solutions.

• Metamodernism and metamodern philanthropy view the global population as a community, but this is far from the international consensus. If donors focus their efforts on inciting a paradigm shift toward globalism, might that enable their global philanthropic efforts to be more effective?

• To learn how funders can support new nonprofit mindsets, click here.

As it stands today, it seems the large majority of philanthropy functions still like a marketing scam, promoting their brand while marginally addressing problems they are helping to create in the first place. The needs of social and environmental justice are neutralized and co-opted in the neoliberal marketplace such that corporate interests control and limit the ability to solve the world’s problems which they are key drivers of. This is related to the concept of greenwashing. It is a disastrous paradox, and the superrich abstractly pay to suppress their denial about it in a system akin to the Catholic Indulgences. One can simply pay off their sins — and are incentivized to keep sinning so long as they can buy back the pretence of a social conscience — and that’s not even including the paltry regulatory fines that are supposed to tame corporate greed.

[Patron of metamodern philanthropy Tomas] Bjorkman’s latest book is built on the solid premise that our world is socially constructed. The better we understand that, the more agency we have to make it better. We already co-create social reality through shared narratives about religion, nationalism, science, the market, and other aspects of our identities. But we can and must do much more to create a new lasting meta-narrative predicated on an even greater common thread of humanity and life itself. It is open-ended and always will be, but we are at a pivotal moment in civilization where our meta-narratives must converge around the notions of human and societal development and the metamodern thought perspective.

Read the full article about metamodern philanthropy by Brent Cooper at Medium