This negotiation speaks to an underlying but emerging problem. Philanthropy is no longer just about giving. It is also about power, coordination, and relevance in a rapidly reorganizing world. This shift begs the question: Is philanthropy still doing good, or just doing good PR?

Answering the question well requires structural reform in how philanthropies see themselves, their internal structure, and how they interact with partners. What is required is a non-siloed, ecosystem approach while what exists now is highly fragmented.

Philanthropy is structurally risk capital—tax-advantaged and free from the need to answer to voters or shareholders. Yet it often behaves as if it cannot afford to fail. Failure should be expected and studied. When a grant does not work becomes reputational risk rather than learning asset, decision-making defaults to safe bets and short-term grants.

This is most visible in what we continue to fund without actually solving. Food systems, education, poverty, health access, democracy. The list is long, the pattern consistent. The focus of philanthropy should be on learning from the failure to solve, and put funding toward redesigning the systems that generate the problems.

Local interventions should not be forced into a growth model if that strips away the conditions and contexts that made it successful. A systemic habit of rewarding scale as the ultimate metric of success incentivizes funders to chase what looks big instead of what works.

Adopting venture-style discipline— an institutional reconfiguring of failure as a learning asset and how the next bet is sized—would let philanthropy take risks and reap long-term rewards from either success or failure. Projects like Climate Breakthrough, The Resilience Fund, AVPM, and The Kampala Principles illustrate this approach.

As trust thins among and in institutions, between new actors and old, between funders and systems, everything slows down or fractures. Building trust requires space and time for relationship building, so actors can be vulnerable and forthright about what isn’t working, what they would like to try, what incentivizes them. Philanthropies are structurally suited to these longer-term projects.

Philanthropy is still built to fund institutions, yet change increasingly is driven by individuals, informal networks, and social movements who don’t fit legacy templates but have influence, legitimacy, and proximity to the work. Recalibrating to grant catalytic capital to SMEs, which represent around 90% of employment in most economies, would bridge a tricky, prevalent funding gap.

We’re negotiating a new social contract across the board, and philanthropy is in a position to be part of constructing what that will be for the greatest human flourishing. This is not the kind of project it is used to. But it is the project of this moment. There is a window in which that work can be done, and then it will be over, and we will be on a new trajectory.

There is an operating problem in philanthropy: a chaotic marketplace with few external incentives, where many small differences get treated as if they were big ones, the narcissism of small differences means that while collaboration sounds soft and nice, failure of coordination gets at the actual stakes.

We set up a tax-advantaged structure precisely so this capital can be at the forefront of what we need collectively, and that requires risk. Venture capital takes risk and fails a lot, and there is a culture of what to do with failure and what that means. There is no culture of failure in philanthropy, so it cannot take the risks it should be taking.

Trust has shifted from institutions to individuals. The creator middle class is roughly 200 million people around the world, sometimes a side hustle, sometimes accidental influence from a single post. They are de facto civic leaders, and no one is treating them as the civic class they have become.  

Strategic plans should operate on three-month timelines or thirty-year timelines. The five- and ten-year strategic plan that takes two to three years to write and assumes the world will look roughly the same a decade from now that is gone, for everyone.

A next-gen client says she wants 40% of her portfolio in climate, and the manager says we have done it this way, this is how it works. There is a massive deadlock in decision-making. Philanthropy talking among itself does not move that.