Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Stanford Social Innovation Review post, Grant Oliphant, president of The Heinz Endowments, discusses sharing power in philanthropy by encouraging, empowering, and enabling others.

• Are we being active listeners in our work? What would such a mindset mean for advocacy-related funding?

• Here are more details about a top-down versus bottom-up approach in philanthropy.

In a time when we often feel submerged in daily madness, it can be tempting for philanthropy, steeped as it is in patience and privilege, to believe its high-minded role is to stay above the fray. Certainly, part of philanthropy’s presumed value is its capacity to identify and sustain action on issues beyond the realm of the daily news. Before the last US presidential election, a Center for Effective Philanthropy survey showed that foundation executives were already ranking equity and wealth disparity along with climate change as the most important issues of our time.

But we can never use our devotion to solving society’s defining issues as an excuse to stand apart from its defining moments.

We are in one of those moments now.

We cannot wish away the toxicity that has so insidiously risen to the surface in US policies and rhetoric as a passing moment. The angry roar of tensions that run deep in our culture represents an ancient struggle over power and privilege, gender and race, and discrimination and oppression that has been with us for generations.

Philanthropy has always claimed to stand on one side of that struggle — on the side of freedom versus oppression, and on the side of a genuinely just society consistent with our stated values versus the vicious defense of a status quo that works only for some. Yet even at a moment like this, when the stakes are so high for everything we profess to believe in, we struggle to find our voice.

Read the full article about the nature of true philanthropic leadership by Grant Oliphant at Stanford Social Innovation Review.