Product Details

• Region: All Regions
• Studio: Whole Earth Films
• DVD Release Date: September 6, 2007
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• ASIN: B000VSOZH0
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #165,040 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

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10,000 families in the US, Katherine Fulton reported, have assets of $100 million or more. That's up from 7,000 just a couple years ago. Most of that money is "on the sidelines." The poor and the middle class are far more generous in their philanthropy, proportionally, than the very wealthy.

Philanthropy across the board is in the midst of intense, potentially revolutionary, transition, she said. There's new money, new leaders, new rules, new technology, and new needs. Where great wealth used to come mainly from inheritance and oil, now it comes from success in high technology and finance--- and ideas and expectations from those business experiences inform (and sometimes over-simplify) the new philanthropy. Some of the great older institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation are radically reorganizing around new ideas and opportunities. But still the greatest amount comes from individuals, many of whom are now "giving while living" instead of handing over the task to heirs.

One major new instrument for philanthropy are the community foundations, "the mutual funds of philanthropy, where donors can outsource their strategy." There are 1,000 such organizations in the world, 700 of them in the US, led by innovators such as Acumen Fund, Social Venture Partners, New Profit Inc., and Women's Funding Network.

Online giving is growing rapidly, including the development of philanthropic marketplaces for direct, selective, fine-grain giving. Give India, for example, is a national marketspace of charity exchange. "By 2020," Katherine predicted, "we will see a headline, OPEN SOURCE PHILANTHROPIC PORTAL TOPS $1 BILLION IN GIFTS."

Katherine drew a matrix to classify kinds of philanthropy, with Short-term & Responsive on the left, Long-term & Systemic on the right; Personal & Local on the bottom, Global on the top. An important trend is from the lower left to upper right, from local and short-term toward global and systemic, exemplified by Bill Gates's move from bringing computers to American schools to bringing health to Africa.