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What’s the Connection Between Tradition and Social Justice?

By Mike On January 30, 2013 · 2 Comments
Over the last twelve months I’ve spent a lot of time working on that question with the Engaging Tradition Project, led by my friend and colleague Urvashi Vaid and hosted by Columbia Law School’s Center on Gender and Sexuality Law. You can read the background papers for the project here, which explore how traditions that surround gender and sexuality can help or hinder movements for social change.
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The Big Philanthrocapitalism Debate

By Mike On December 1, 2012 · 1 Comment
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last four years pushing back against the idea that civil society groups should “work like a business,” and that philanthropy should “operate like the market.” This debate has spawned hundreds of contributions from me and others, so I’ve collected a few of the most important ones together on this page to make them easy to locate. In 2008 I wrote a pamphlet for Demos and the Young Foundation that kicked off the debate called Just Another Emperor: The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism, which you can download for free here. It [...]
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What’s the Future of Civil Society?

By Mike On January 20, 2012 · 1 Comment
Where is civil society heading in the future and what forces will shape its evolution in the coming years? Check out this interview with me at the INTRAC Anniversary Conference in Oxford.
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Thick Problems and Thin Solutions: Can NGOs Help to Bridge the Gap?

By Mike On January 18, 2012 · 1 Comment
Imagine life in a low-carbon community that delivers jobs, justice and human flourishing, all within the ecological limits of a finite planet. It’s an attractive proposition, but to get there we’ll have to transform our societies, politics and cultures in order to prosper together in an inter-locking web of steady-state economies. Eventually that will mean lowering our consumption (not just adding in more energy efficiency), as well as sharing work, resources and responsibilities with each-other, managing the conflicts that arise from scarcity and the turmoil that comes with change, and accomplishing a thousand other things for which we are completely [...]
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Could an Emergency Fund Help NGOs to Put the Humanitarian House in Order?

By Mike On January 17, 2012 · Add Comment
Let’s face it, humanitarian assistance is in a mess: increasingly reactive and politicized, ignoring emergencies that are out of the media spotlight, and “poorly coordinated and poorly integrated” when the system does respond, to quote the most rigorous assessment of earthquake relief in Haiti. Thousands of NGOs compete for money that – usually too little and too late – is delivered by donors entangled in bureaucracy and obsessed with branding and control. The result is that everybody loses, especially those most in need on the ground. But, complaints apart, what are NGOs doing to invent a better system? Read Full Article →

The Future of Philanthropy

By Mike On January 5, 2012 · 1 Comment
In 2011 the Rockefeller Foundation and IDS in Sussex launched the “Bellagio Initiative” to explore the future of philanthropy in the context of international development and wellbeing. I wrote one of the background papers for them, looking at different approaches to philanthropy in the global arena, which you can access here. In addition, the Foundation Center in New York asked me to write a series of blog posts about key issues in this debate which appeared on their website. Here they are: Well-Being’ and Philanthropy Can Philanthropy Put Humpty-Dumpty Back Together Again? Valuing What We Can [...]
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What can the ‘Big Society’ learn from history?

By Mike On November 14, 2011 · Add Comment
One of the strangest things about the current ‘Big Society’ debate is the absence of any historical perspective, as though ideas about civic participation were invented in 2010 rather than two thousand years before when Aristotle launched the first conversation about the rights and responsibilities of citizens, a conversation that has been embellished by an unbroken line of thinkers and activists ever since. As a US-based Labour Party supporter who has studied this stuff for thirty years or more, I’m quite impressed with David Cameron’s attempts to extend this conversation into the world of national politics. But this lack of [...]
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The Protean Nature of Philanthropy is one its Greatest Assets

By Mike On October 19, 2011 · Add Comment
More than 176,000 foundations exist in the US and Europe, and their spending on international development has risen by 60% in just four years. By far the largest contribution comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has quickly become the largest funder of global public health outside the US and UK governments. This amounts to a huge potential bonanza for poverty reduction and healthcare across the world. Yet the impact of philanthropy depends on how foundations use these resources, and whether or not they escape the problems that have undermined other approaches to foreign aid. On that question, [...]
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The New Frontiers of Development and Social Change: Religion, Spirituality, Love and Social Justice.

By Mike On October 5, 2011 · Add Comment
Speech delivered to the Coady Institute in Antigonish, Canada on October 5, 2011. I am delighted to be with you today to deliver this Gatto Chair lecture on “The New Frontiers of Development and Social Change: Religion, Spirituality, Love and Social Justice,” and to talk with you about such important matters. Having worked in the field of international development for the last 35 years, I have a sense, deep down, that these things are all connected, and that understanding and strengthening these connections provides some sort of key to increasing our effectiveness as agents of transformation wherever we live and [...]
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Why philanthrocapitalism doesn’t work

By Mike On September 1, 2011 · 1 Comment
In 2011 I gave a public lecture at the Coady Institute in Canada on philanthrocapitalism and its weaknesses. Here it is.
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