With 'Giving Circles,' Anyone Can Be a Philanthropist

In a world divided into factions, social entrepreneurs are connecting people in new configurations and helping them work together more effectively because social entrepreneurs tend to pursue an end in a communal way.

Water:Charity assumed that money and celebrity exposure would be able to solve the world’s access-to-clean-water crisis. But this approach often led to more abandoned water pumps. Charities – and journalists who cover them – are now working to concentrate on making their solutions sustainable.

Some problems are simply too complex to solve with any single approach. The “collective impact” strategy of creating alliances of civic and business leaders is being applied to social problems across the nation.

Nongovernmental groups – especially ones that depend on donations – hate to fail, and never make their failures public. But at new conferences, social activists share and learn from failure.

In Jakarta’s slums, families can’t buy their children nutritious food. So Mercy Corps started a for-profit chain of food carts selling healthy kids’ meals. A second column highlights the challenges NGOs face when they try to start for-profit businesses.

The philanthropic practice of buy-one-give-one can be ineffective if communities are given ill-fitting donations or if the donations supplant local markets. The company Warby Parker ensures lasting change by financing the means of local production of a pair of glasses for every pair bought.

Tuft University is training global organizations a new approach to create long lasting change. The process teaches locals to identify positive deviance in their community and design a way to spread the behavior, with only local ideas and administration.

New crowdfunding options can help even the smallest donor's contributions to have a meaningful impact, bolstering a sense of personal involvement, maximizing knowledge about causes, and inspiring greater participation.

For most well-meaning donors, it can be difficult to calculate which charities are most effective with their funding - that is those that aim to solve the most serious problems, use interventions that work, employ cost-effective strategies, are competent and honest, and can make good use of each additional dollar. Organizations like GiveWell are part of a new and welcome trend toward rigorous evaluation of social change programs, and helps people best decide where to donate based on what causes matter to them most.

In many parts of the world, not owning one's own land is more directly correlated to poverty than other factors such as illiteracy, but land reform is controversial, difficult, and expensive. A new program called Landesa is having success in India through a non-confiscatory model that gives families tennis-court size plots.