Wasted Resources – $250,000,000 down the progressive drain?

Imagine the situation where a progressive funder, wanting to sympathetically address a true social problem, decides to give his money to relatively conservative, pretty ordinary service oriented models of care. No effort is made to change the causes of the problem, and the challenges that continue exist remain substantial.

Under this scenario, is it worth the money, say $250,000,000, to hold the situation stagnant by offering simple remedies for direct care because care is needed? Should the donor dump it down this drain knowingly right now, or hold out and invest in progress that fixes the core problem later?

Now judge the same guy when three years of a stopgap intervention shows that the money in fact didn't do much because of the very fact that his investment didn't get to the heart of the problems, didn't make systemic change. And what if it turns out that he choose the route he did because he didn't seem to know that there was a viable social justice advocacy infrastructure in existence--but that he didn't know it because that very infrastructure was nearly invisible because it steadily received so little funding from traditional philanthropic donors who tend to shy away from advocacy.

Whose fault is the situation? The person with millions to give who didn’t assess what was there or the agencies that didn’t scream enough to get their value noticed?

Or put another way: how does one Blend Values when no one knows one side even has value to offer?

I blame the guy with big dollars—especially in this case when the one who gave the money draws his massive profits from the green energy and participatory environmental movement—a movement that draws its core strength from community empowerment, involvement advocacy.

If there is a place for Blessed Unrest, here is where it should prevail. Under no circumstances should the earth be rebalanced at the expense of balancing the justice of those who inhabit the planet.

No wonder that His Royalty of Wales sees Harmony as the missing resource of real change. And this is very much why progressive funders draw the ire of those who have the ability to make true change happen, even if these angry do-gooders cannot truthfully confront those with the bucks.

This is exactly why President Obama is falling short. He doesn’t understand how to empower his own family of allies let alone does he have faith in the faithful family of change agents! 

We must make him see this, and he, our president, must be the one to capture that attention of people with such large dollars and get them to place their ongoing philanthropic bets on real change.  


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