Big Philanthropy’s Lost Children

The below article originally appeared in Compact on December 12, 2024.

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Brooke Orr, the protagonist of Rumaan Alam’s captivating recent novel, Entitlement, lands what she thinks is a great new job as a program officer at a big New York philanthropic foundation. The book is about money and morality in general—but also about power and how people perceive or misperceive it, purposefully or not. While the foundation in Alam’s plot, the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, is gauzily liberal, he doesn’t really “impose” any ideological template on Entitlement. Instead, the author offers insights into the effects of money and power on the professionals who work in establishment philanthropy, which is almost monoculturally progressive.

As those of us in this world know all too well, the baleful effects are difficult to overcome by even well-intentioned individuals; often, they end up only perpetuating the corruption and monoculture.

Judging by my experience on the program staff of Milwaukee’s conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, its observations about how program officers are perceived could easily apply just as much to conservative philanthropy. Indeed, Alam’s details evince an in-the-know familiarity with the “trade”: the hurriedly developed staff “expertise” in a subject newly determined to be part of the foundation’s mission; the just-below-the-surface chafing at the power differential at play in discussions between staff and grant applicants; the grant-amount expectations raised and dashed.

Entitlement can improve our understanding of how what conservatives used to call the New Class, now called the “managerial elite” or something similar, became and remains the way it is. Alam’s novel has empathy for members of this class, as represented by Brooke Orr, even as it is also sharply critical of them. Brooke is a 33-year-old black woman who was adopted and raised by a single white mother, a lawyer who runs an organization dedicated to abortion rights. After graduating from Vassar, Brooke became a teacher but fared poorly and was soon dismissed. In Big Philanthropy’s unique labor market, she secured a position on the program staff of the Jaffee Foundation.

Self-made billionaire Asher Jaffee, a white octogenarian, created the philanthropy with wealth generated by decades’ worth of successive business successes—in paper, catalogs, malls, and other real estate. He and his wife enjoy uber-expensive art. He discreetly paid to make sure his longtime secretary’s aging mother was provided the living arrangement she needed. With his money and through the foundation, he wants to—and believes he can—change the world. That’s the foundation’s institutional mission.

Brooke believes in Asher and the mission. She has to. It’s her job. The lack of any depthful articulation of this abstract goal means many of the novel’s observations are perhaps of greatest interest to philanthropoids: how to discern true donor intent; how to best implement it; how to find and select the right grantees; whether and how to measure success and failure and with what data or “narratives”; how to interact with colleagues who have different ideas about and answers to all of these questions; basically, how to give money away. The amount of money at hand itself can make this so much easier.

Asher, whose only daughter died when she was about Brooke’s age, takes a liking to Brooke. The liking is a professional one, but as the story progresses, it may be becoming personal, too. Early on, he tells her that she is his protégée, of which she is very proud and about which she tells her mother, other family, and friends. His money allows her to do, see, experience, and participate in things that would otherwise be of no avail to her. It allows her to, well, “be” someone. That’s who she is—someone.

She isn’t sure at first, of course. There’s a little bit of warranted “impostor syndrome” on her part. But she slowly becomes more confident, gathers greater authority, is more demanding, feels more entitled. She comes to think she deserves it—the same way these ultra-wealthy people do, or everyone thinks they do.

Who are they, after all? Who is she? Alam gently and incrementally, though speedily at the end, brings the reader along with Brooke as she moves along this spectrum from internally fretful “imposter” to entitled. Humility yields to the temptation of being swayed by affluence, or proximity to it, and its many benefits. Including status. At one point, having called in sick for the day—“a white lie, but she was feeling worn down”—Brooke goes shopping at a tony department store for expensive new clothes and other personal effects, all for her own personal use. She uses the foundation’s credit card. Alam describes her thoughts:

What difference was there between Brooke the person and the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, really? The tiny sound of the card on the table was Brooke’s contribution to the symphony of American commerce, a whisper that said she was there, she was alive, she was this person, she was worthy of these things, and deserved so much more than she had.

Existing and would-be nonprofit grantees institutionally operate on a spectrum like this, too—how much to morally “give in” to, to compromise with, the money and the grantmaker who has it? How much to risk “watering down” or ultimately just jettisoning the charitable group’s original mission to be able to pay the light bill that’s due or maintain employment that underwrites children’s educations? The grantmakers are individually on a spectrum, as well, along with the professional, New Class staff serving them.

At various points on this spectrum, Alam’s Entitlement relays many entertainingly astute tidbits in passing, longer anecdotes, and running storylines. Brooke’s grantmaking “portfolio,” for example, includes a project to revive the oyster population in New York Harbor, and she becomes an “expert” on the topic—one of the novel’s numerous instances striking verisimilitude.

Throughout the book, people she loves—and who know and love her—express skeptical curiosity about what she’s actually doing at the foundation and why. Increasingly, to Brooke, they all just don’t understand. At one pivotal point in her movement along the spectrum, Brooke skips her beloved aunt’s funeral to take Asher to a central-city school that Brooke recommends the grantmaker substantially support.

The school’s founder, when approached by Brooke, doesn’t want any grant money, in part out of a fear of what accepting it might mean for its true founding mission, but much more than that. “You come here and tell me that I need something,” the founder, a woman with dignity and purpose, frankly tells her. “But, sister, I did not ask you here. And I did not tell you that we were in need.” Dignity, purpose, and truth, and thus beauty there.

Then there is the resentment. The school founder’s daughter gets involved in the ongoing discussions, and the daughter gets a friend of hers who’s running for local office even further involved, which Brooke resents. The Brooke-advised and -recommended “ask” of Asher’s and his wife’s foundation is well-prepared, and huge in amount—to ambitiously construct an entire new building for the school. The foundation could easily afford to make such a large, “world-changing” gift in pursuit of its mission. Asher authorizes a $10,000 grant. (There are several competitors in the novel, but this little part may perhaps ring truest.) He says to Brooke, “I thought we were talking about graham crackers and art supplies?” As the narrator writes, “a million dollars for oysters. Ten-thousand for the souls of Black children.”

There’s a rich friend of Brooke’s, who got a substantial inheritance from her father and is spending it, including on a nice new apartment. Resentment here, too. Brooke wants a nice, new, expensive apartment but can’t afford one as nice as her friend’s, at least not yet. Brooke will get it, though, she knows. And she tries. She demands, as it were. It’s a personal mission she intently and passionately pursues. She’s done with tentatively questioning who she is. She’s changed, even if the world isn’t.

No spoiler here, but for Alam’s entitled Brooke, the temptation is overwhelming. Who is she? She is someone—and that someone is endowed with an all-too-human nature. Entitlement helps show that this nature, even of a human with freedom, may be too omnipresent, too unchangeable, in the world supposedly in need of so much change—in this case by maybe well-meaning, idealistic, but overly ambitious, if not utopian, philanthropy and its New Class managerial elite. The nature of the too-much money and its effects, including on the class’s members, may be too unchangeably omnipresent in entitled Big Philanthropy, too.

More largely, the degree to which mere money in and of itself justifies the accretion and exercise of power—whether by the class of people with it, the class of their employed professionals just invoking it on their behalf, or both—should cause us all enough concern to seriously question how it got, and whether it should stay, this way.

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This article appeared in the Giving Review on December 12, 2024.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/big-philanthropys-lost-children/