Who Gets to Decide What the World Needs?

“Marketing opportunities”: while authoring a proposal for one of our biggest corporate funders, I enumerated three strategies below this heading. I suggested “Brand logo on answer sheets,” which would reach 400,000 students aged 10 to 14, while also thinking about the ethics of breeding consumerism amongst vulnerable and underserved kids. I thought of what Michael J. Sandel writes in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets: “It isn’t easy to teach students to be citizens, capable of thinking critically about the world around them, when so much of childhood consists of basic training for a consumer society.”

But capital has power, and it is well documented that, more often than not, power dynamics tilt in favor of the ones with the funds—the donors. As a result, much of fundraising involves translating social needs into terms that resonate with donor interests. In fundraising contexts, it isn’t unusual to hear colleagues say, “Sometimes, switching off your moral compass is a prerequisite for social change.” Working to mold the system on the values of public good while also molding ourselves according to it is a paradox that social workers learn to live with, a grey area we all exist in. Yes, collaboration is indispensable to the sector. Yet the pursuit of social good also demands a willingness to question those with the power to define it.

The newly wealthy are assuming an operational role, refusing to be mere catalysts. They are producing social goals, not just consuming them.

We witness the repercussions of concentrating power in the hands of a few every day. And now that our world has its first trillionaire, questioning this premise for society has taken on new urgency.

What Happens When Those Who Control Capital Shape the Social Agenda?

The new wave of philanthropy is led by what sociologist Paul G. Schervish calls “hyper-agents,” or high-tech business leaders. With profuse wealth at an early age, these individuals fashion themselves as visionary, creative, optimistic, transformative, driven, courageous, relentless, and risk-takers; more succinctly, they have an entrepreneurial spirit. According to a UBS report, citing a Foundation Source survey, the vast majority of next-generation philanthropists aspire to be recognized as “changemakers,” “givers,” or “advocates” rather than “philanthropists”—and this is what differentiates them from the older generation. The newly wealthy are assuming an operational role, refusing to be mere catalysts. They are producing social goals, not just consuming them.

Relying on metrics that work in the corporate sector and taking a project-like view that fails to engage with the structural or contextual causes isn’t just a simplification of what you cannot measure; it’s the status quo camouflaged as growth using narratives.

The belief that one has a responsibility to give back is cross-generational. Yet, what distinguishes the newly wealthy is that they are driven by confidence in their own ability to bring change. This recent drastic change in philanthropy led by the young is, firstly, rooted in their psychological sense of empowerment, in an unflappable confidence gained through their recent entrepreneurial success. Secondly, it is also based in spatial empowerment, or the ability to extend their influence far beyond their immediate presence through global reach, institutions, and capital. Thirdly, they wield temporal power, or the capacity to reinterpret the past, act effectively in the present, and shape the future. While the sector surely needs passion to innovate and commitment, it also demands a deep-rooted understanding of civil society’s nature and its invisible infrastructures. Research highlights that line between philanthropy and investing is blurring, and that there is a growing use of business terminologies to assess philanthropic impact.

What these measures, exactly, are those terms designed to evaluate? Scale, ROI, KPI, and efficiency are a few metrics I have encountered while working in donor relations. How many people did you reach? How much social value was created per dollar spent? Number of workshops, number of beneficiaries? How can we achieve more impact with fewer resources?

When viewed in isolation, the numerical characteristics of the answers to such questions can be mistaken for impact. For example, the number of women attending a menstrual hygiene session in a remote region cannot be deemed a success or narrated as women’s empowerment if you fail to even address the issue of water scarcity in the area—a prerequisite for hygiene—and the financial peril they face. Relying on metrics that work in the corporate sector and taking a project-like view that fails to engage with the structural or contextual causes isn’t just a simplification of what you cannot measure; it’s the status quo camouflaged as growth using narratives.

Yes, global challenges like poverty, inequality, and climate change demand an all-hands-on-deck approach. My concern isn’t about business leaders entering the development sector; it’s about how they understand these challenges. Education, social environment, family background, prior experience in the field, and other factors shape their perspectives. Leaders approaching issues using models that succeed in a completely different line of work, gravitating towards proven frameworks, and using the same lenses that ushered them to the top is a natural tendency, and that’s exactly why it counts. Their outlook has real effects because, for example, solutions rooted in a philosophy that understands your success as your own doing, as a result of meritocracy, cannot truly transform an indigent kid’s future. How donors interpret, evaluate, frame, and seek to resolve the issues is dependent on their career path.

Upper Echelons Theory (UET) suggests that organizational outcomes and strategic choices reflect the values, beliefs, perspectives, and biases of leaders working at the top, particularly the founder. Emerging issues need their relentless belief, but if accompanied by control and a desire to lead, it isn’t collaboration; it’s stewardship without accountability. A top-down strategy is the erasure of the community voice it is meant to serve. As Mark Robert Rank, author of Towards a Livable Life: A 21st Century Agenda for Social Work, puts it, “The limited role of social work in these movements challenges the profession’s leadership role in human services. Moreover, it challenges the ability to infuse social work values, ethics, and unwavering commitment to social justice into the widest circle of human services.”

Are We Short of Funds, or Are Grassroots Organizations Systemically Marginalized?

In India, more than four in five of the sector’s smallest organizations report operating with insufficient resources. A shocking 83 percent of micro-organizations and 66 percent of small organizations report a deficit. Why are grassroots nonprofits, rooted in communities and hence competent to intervene, scrambling for survival? The same report highlights a significant shift the sector is witnessing—business leaders and new-age philanthropists rerouting their wealth through their operational foundations, positioning themselves as implementing agencies rather than grant-making foundations. An entrepreneurial zest to be the solution is leading to an unintended consequence: power dynamics are being reproduced in a sector with a vision to eradicate those same dynamics.

India has 3,00,000 NGOs, approximately one NGO for every 400 people, with an average of three paid employees per society, with the remainder serving as volunteers. Micro NGOs besieged with frequent battles for survival lose even before they compete for funds, stuck in a loop—a starvation cycle of chronic underfunding of administrative and operational costs. Here, who gets to implement social projects is not a matter of ability but of who is more resourced. When wealth redirects to a founder-driven model from a community-driven NGO, we are not only eliminating the beneficiaries from the conversation. We are giving those already equipped with wealth the added power to influence conversations and redirect attention—a delegation to decide what constitutes social good.

Who Gets to Decide the Meaning of Social Good?

As capital gets progressively concentrated in the hands of private foundations, the acute question to raise is: will the goals of the development sector revolve around the worldview of individuals who acquired wealth from markets and businesses? If yes, will certain issues, challenges, and solutions receive consideration over others? Uneven funding is an appalling reality today, with easier-to-explain, politically safe, and measurable sectors—like education, health, economic development, and entrepreneurship—receiving substantial resources. Advocacy and policy change, gender justice, corruption and transparency, labor rights, civil liberties, and democracy work are relegated to the sidelines because of their complexity, controversial nature, regulatory risk, and difficult-to-measure outcomes.

As capital gets progressively concentrated in the hands of private foundations, the acute question to raise is: will the goals of the development sector revolve around the worldview of individuals who acquired wealth from markets and businesses?

Civil society is increasingly aligning its objectives with national priorities deemed necessary by the government and casting aside issues where the government cannot reach. As Emily Jansons, in her essay from From Gaining to Giving Wealth, stresses: “Being in ‘the eye of the storm’ is far from desirable, particularly for business leaders with political connections.” The development sector is often known for its capacity to work with the system and the freedom to direct efforts toward need. But if the deepening personal relationship between executives and the state commands which causes get attention and hinder the sector’s potential to lend a hand to the vulnerable, it matters who leads the way. It matters who the agents of social change are.

What Do We Owe Each Other?

What we owe each other is generosity with humility; collaboration, not control; solidarity, not alienation; empathy, not indifference; and a space to address ethical dilemmas, not eschew them. Every intervention and every measure should emanate from the values of social justice and social good. The banishment of any of these destabilizes the invisible infrastructure that sustains nonprofits.

The pressing issues we face today need more than a single stakeholder. Reducing the role of business executives in the sector to the size of their check negates the innovation and insights they can bring, but the corporatization of the table at which these issues are debated ultimately places the power to direct alongside the power to give.

The imperative is representation. As much as we need social leaders on the ground, we need them at the top, at the strategy level, to shape the goals—not just accede to them. We need a seat at the table for the communities to whom organizations devote themselves. No one is better positioned to spell out their needs than the people on the other side of the ever-widening chasm between the privileged and the vulnerable.

After all, the power to give should never become the sole power to define social good.