Six Problems Philanthropy Barely Tried to Solve in 2023
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The opioid crisis is one issue that received disproportionately small funding from the sector this year. Kimberly Boyles/shutterstock
As we barrel toward the end of another year, it’s always worth asking exactly where philanthropy is dropping the ball — and where it never bothered to pick it up in the first place.
Last year, I wrote up a list of seven problems that have defied philanthropy, a non-exhaustive look at areas where U.S. grantmakers have failed to make headway. In some of those cases, progress has been slim despite well-funded efforts to the contrary. In others, philanthropy has barely even tried.
Why is it that some issues are generously funded while other obvious problems get so little support? Sometimes it’s a simple matter of funders backing what they know, rather than diving into new, complex and seemingly inscrutable challenges. Sometimes it might look like there’s no way forward besides some vast public-sector intervention. Sometimes the problem is dauntingly global in scope. Sometimes it’s all of the above.
But if philanthropy wants to live up to its claims of being a space for experiment, innovation and the deft deployment of “risk capital,” it can't shy away from problems just because they’re hard. In that spirit, here’s a list of a few problems philanthropy barely tried to solve in 2023. May it soon be obsolete.
The opioid epidemic
This one headed up my list from last year, but it’s worth repeating: U.S. funders are falling far short on what may very well be the most serious — and heartbreaking — public health crisis in the country. In small towns and big cities, across lines of class, race and politics, the abuse of the synthetic opioid fentanyl in particular has driven a steady increase in drug overdose deaths, which rose to about 109,000 in 2022. And as daunting as that number is, it doesn’t begin to count the epidemic’s wider toll on families, communities and American society at large.
In a powerful piece this fall, IP’s Connie Matthiessen took an in-depth look at why philanthropy is mostly missing in action on opioids, taking major health funders like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to task for pulling back on the problem even as the national outlook darkens. And those are just two data points amid a broader lack of investment.
While a few big funders do give for substance use and prevention, like Bloomberg Philanthropies, Open Society Foundations and Arnold Ventures, the field is noticeably sparse given the vast and tragic toll opioid abuse is taking on this country. There’s plenty of space here for more funders to step up.
Suicide
As with opioids, the numbers on suicide are stark. Over 48,000 people died of suicide in 2021, and it was the second-most frequent cause of death for people in the age groups 10 to 14 and 20 to 34. But even as philanthropy begins to up its game on mental health more broadly, few national funders focus on suicide prevention.
In a recent overview, Dawn Wolfe looked at where the majority of charitable funding for anti-suicide efforts is coming from and found a field dominated by donations through community foundations — mostly from smaller donors — benefiting a limited range of nonprofits.
I’d hazard a guess that many of those small donors have very personal reasons for backing this work, another reflection of the private trauma these “public health crises” inflict on families and communities — trauma that cold statistics alone cannot convey. But assuming that institutional decisions are at least partially informed by cold stats and other numbers-driven “strategizing,” the paucity of support from much deeper-pocketed grantmakers is still hard to explain.
Part of the the problem may be that suicide intersects with other philanthropic weak points — like funders’ failure to address the problems facing struggling men and boys (who are far more prone to “deaths of despair”), or the field’s lack of headway on gun violence (the majority of gun deaths in the U.S. are from suicide).
Racial segregation
It might seem odd to see a racial equity issue on this list considering funders’ numerous and well-warranted efforts to close gaps disadvantaging people of color. Indeed, while philanthropy’s attention to racial justice may be flagging somewhat since those heady days circa 2020, the field has largely united around the need to address racial inequity.
But put yourself in the shoes of a civil rights activist back in the 1960s. Segregation, the paramount issue from back then, hasn’t gone anywhere. It may no longer be upheld in law, but it’s still the de facto reality for most U.S. neighborhoods — and, by extension, most U.S. schools.
A quick look at a “racial dot density” map like this one based on 2020 Census figures makes it clear that the dream of a desegregated U.S. society is nowhere near achieved. In cities and in rural places, most Americans live among people who look like themselves. The negative effects of this segregation on many people of color have been well-documented, and extend to everything from a lack of education and career opportunities, poor availability of local services, health and nutrition challenges, environmental pollution, shoddy and exploitative financial infrastructure — the list goes on.
Racial equity commitments from philanthropy have been many and laudable, but to date, they haven’t managed to get much of a handle on the stark, ground-level reality of racial segregation and the disparities it fosters. Novel approaches are warranted, like diving into the land use and zoning debate, or taking on financial systems (and industries) that punish the poor and hinder their economic and geographic mobility.
Nuclear weapons
This is another repeat item from my piece last year, published when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had already elevated the specter of major power conflict to its highest level since the fall of the Soviet Union. Subsequent developments have only stoked those fears. Russia’s Ukraine war continues, as do the stirrings of conflict between the U.S. and China. Meanwhile, a new conflagration in the Middle East is heightening global tensions even further.
In the midst of it all, U.S. civil society has pulled back from the problem of nuclear proliferation. With a few exceptions, the old threat of atomic armageddon hasn’t ranked high on philanthropy’s list of priorities.
The world’s nuclear arsenal remains intact, its civilization-shattering potential undiminished, so it’s hardly for lack of justification that funders haven’t been very active. Perhaps it has to do with the difficulty of finding a way in, or of measuring success. The impact of peace and security funding is tricky to evaluate, after all, and it’s subject to the whims of international politics.
But advocacy funding — which is what a lot of peace and security funding amounts to — is hardly uncommon within the U.S., despite being subject to the vagaries of politics. With that in mind, a bet on funding that could help stave off the end of human civilization seems worth taking.
Cybersecurity
It might not rise to the level of nuclear armageddon, but the threat of cybercrime and cyberattacks should be taken seriously in a society grown so utterly dependent on digital technology. At the very least, lax attention to cybersecurity can mean billions in economic losses — and at the worst, vital infrastructure and even military systems could be crippled, endangering lives.
Philanthropy has barely tinkered at the edges of this challenge. As outgoing Hewlett Foundation President Larry Kramer explained in David Callahan’s recent accounting of his legacy, dealing with cyber threats has been left almost entirely up to government and the private sector. “There was no field,” Kramer said. “There were sporadic people in some think tanks, in academic centers, thinking about it a little. But they didn't use the same language, they didn't talk to each other at all.”
Under Kramer’s leadership, Hewlett has been pretty much the only major U.S. philanthropy working on this issue. And that’s very strange, given the omnipresence of digital tech in our lives and so many big-money grantmakers out there with origins in tech.
Honorable mention: Outdated philanthropy regs
This one is a bit inside baseball, but worth including. Philanthropy and nonprofits may be the “third sector” in the U.S., but what sway and impact they do have derives, at least in part, from two things. One is independence — the ability to work outside the bounds of profit motive and (much) public-sector regulation. The other is trust among the wider public that this work is well-intentioned and achieves some level of social good.
Both of those strengths are endangered if philanthropy continues to sidestep a major problem — that the laws governing charitable giving in the U.S. are obsolete and fail to mandate either transparency or actual giving.
Every year, this underlying tension remains unaddressed, the risk mounts that Congress will launch some sort of punishing, partisan regulatory barrage against the sector. And, simultaneously, Americans’ trust in philanthropy-backed nonprofits will continue to ebb. That should worry anyone rooting for the nation’s nonprofits to make a difference in any issue area, well-funded or not.
