Why is there so little love, or humanity, in today's philanthropy?

The "why" of this whole project

Hello, Dear Ones!

I’m so glad you’re here.

Welcome!

I wrote this to give myself, and you, a generative starting point (a seed, if you will) for the rest of what will unfold and grow here in this place.

I also wrote it to introduce myself and my perspective to you, so those who don’t know me yet can start to, and those who already know me can perhaps get to know me a bit more than you do.

With Love,

Cecelia 💗

I love humans.

I especially love humans in community.

I love the magic that happens when people gather together, and care about each other, and work together to help each other and be helped, and prioritize their collective well-being.

There is nothing else quite as lovely as the experience of being in community — feeling your heart, mind, and whole being tune into the joy of connection and care within a group, a sense that is as much about receiving as it is about giving.

This is philanthropy.

The roots of the word philanthropy are Greek: philos, meaning love (think Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love”), and anthropos, meaning humanity (think anthropology, or the scientific study of humanity).

Yet, in the many years that I’ve worked in the field of professionalized philanthropy, I’ve observed that there is very little love, or humanity, in the prevailing practice of “philanthropy” today.

---

More About Me & This Work

Before I go any deeper, let me introduce myself to you.

I’m a social worker, a professional fundraiser, a mystical priest, a teacher, a coach, a guide, a mentor and mentee, a writer, a reader, a global citizen, a community member and nurturer, a co-liberation seeker, a natural world-lover, a musician, a photographer, a gardener, a wife, an auntie, a sister, and more.

I use this framing as a way of introduction to who I am, because I’m interested in, knowledgeable about, and skilled in a wide range of things. And I aim to bring all of my varied experiences to who, and how, I am here… and to how I guide this project of For the Love of Humanity.

We’ve grown accustomed to fractionalization in every area of our lives — and inevitably, that translates to our inner selves too. We’ve grown to normalize being one person in one setting… and another person in another setting. We’ve been taught that we’re not supposed to bring our whole selves into certain scenarios — most especially ones that we’ve dubbed “professional.”

This should change.

This is not healthy for us as human beings.

We are made to be whole.

So I will model bringing my whole self here, and I ask you to do the same. We will practice a new level of integration together, here.

I started my adulthood living within two monasteries, while studying for and earning my Bachelor’s degree in English. After that experience, I moved into one intentional community, followed by another… and soon, I had moved into what was essentially an ashram, where I dedicated my days to study and growth within the inner mystical spiritual path. I have often joked that I have “monastic tendencies,” and those tendencies continue to this day.

I was eventually ordained as a mystical priest, while in the process of attending graduate school to become a social worker and earning my MSW.

Soon, I found myself engaged in lots of nonprofit-based work, as many social workers do. And I began to realize just how important the funding for the work was. Without that, nothing else was possible.

My wheels got turning: I had studied writing and communication and was interested in these things I was hearing about, something called “grants.”

What if I learned how to write grant proposals?

I then set out to do just that, by working alongside and learning from a life-changing mentor, a woman who was a grant writing teacher at several area colleges and universities and was also a consultant. I loved learning by doing.

And I soon moved into practicing all the other elements of nonprofit fundraising and development, as well (from working with boards, to PR, communications, and marketing, to event-planning, to building relationships with donors, to writing fundraising appeals). I voraciously studied and followed so-called “best practices.” I was a true generalist. And I was responsible for collaboratively raising millions of dollars, from both public and private sources.

I was really getting the full picture of this work.

And before long, I started becoming uncomfortable.

Things felt weird.

Perhaps because of both my spiritual and social work training, or even simply because I was especially in touch with my own humanity, I often noticed how much various gnarly societal dynamics — related to race, class, gender, and more — were creating lots of opportunity for dissonance, extra stress, and unique pressures.

Not fun.

Not life-giving.

Not very loving, that’s for sure.

I’ve now been working in this field of philanthropy for more than a decade-and-a-half. And I’ve been working to transform its unhealthy, problematic daily realities and pervasive systems for most of that time.

But changing entrenched realities and systems is hard.

We all know this.

Change of any kind is hard for us humans.

True change often seems unreachable.

So.

Instead of struggling to change what is anymore, For the Love of Humanity is a new set of seeds I’m planting. And I ask you to join me in helping them grow.

Let’s stop trying to change what is.

Let’s grow something new.

Together.

---

A Journey of Remembrance

Come with me now.

Let’s climb, together, to the top of a mountain.

From that peak, we will still have our feet planted firmly on Earth, but we will have a chance to rise above the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, to take a wider view of these human lives we’re living.

Join the journey here.

---

On Being Human

A time without any buildings seems pretty far away, doesn’t it?

Here’s the thing, though.

We haven’t evolved that far beyond those humans.

See what I mean here.

---

On Why There Should Be No Charity

Here’s where the tragedy of this state of affairs grows.

I know you may be reading this and thinking, “I care about my fellow humans! I donate!” Or “I volunteer!” Or “I’ve dedicated my career to this work!”

You may even give a large percentage of your annual income as “charitable” contributions. And/or spend many hours a week on unpaid labor to help others and better your community.

Many of us do.

I certainly do.

And yet.

The very idea of “charity” is actually at odds with what I’m talking about.

See what I mean here.

---

The “Systems Change” We Actually Need

As I mentioned, I’ve been involved in efforts of systems change in the “industry” of philanthropy (including nonprofits and fundraising) for a long time now.

In a word, these efforts have been trying.

Rough.

Hard.

Here are eight words, also very true to my experiences in these efforts: like banging our heads against a brick wall.

Notice the our? I used that language to make clear that I’m not just talking about myself, here. This kind of work is never the work of an individual, and I have many collaborators who have struggled alongside me over the years.

We are tired.

We are worn down.

Some have even started to lose hope.

With good reason.

And here I am, asking you not to do that. Because I am seeing another way, one we haven’t tried yet, one that was right in front of me the entire time.

I didn’t see it, because I was playing the game the way I had been taught to play it. I was being “professional” and only accessing, and revealing, certain parts of who I am.

Lots was compartmentalized, tucked away.

Meanwhile, I did my best to navigate the universes I found myself in, striving to keep my integrity intact.

But do you see the conflict, there?

Maintaining one’s integrity is actually pretty difficult if you are not allowing yourself to bring your full humanity to the table.

Integrity means “the state of being whole, undivided.”

So yes.

I wasn’t in full integrity.

And that stops now.

I was ordained a mystical priest before I became a professional fundraiser.

And I prioritized my spiritual development long before I started learning about “development” as a means to raise funds for mission-based work.

This focus on spiritual development and growth is absolutely core to who I am. And it is core to who I’ve been as a fundraiser.

Yet, I’ve never explicitly talked about that in my work — and I’ve certainly never written about it publicly.

To be clear, it wasn’t a secret.

Many who know me knew this about me already — though most people who knew me professionally did not.

Yet.

I have often heard some version of this feedback from people, often in professional settings: “You have such good energy.” Or “There’s just something about you. Something special.” Or “I just really like to be around you. I always gain so much just by being with you.”

When I’ve heard things like this, I’ve smiled, because I’ve known exactly why they were experiencing what they were experiencing. But they didn’t have all the information to know exactly why. And I didn’t offer it. Because it seemed like that was something to keep apart from my professional life.

No more.

And it took a life-threatening disease to bring me here….

For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been in what I’ve jokingly called an “unplanned sabbatical,” as I’ve walked the long and winding, difficult journey of a breast cancer diagnosis and its necessary course of treatments (multiple surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and more).

There’s nothing like a disease that brings you face-to-face with your mortality to make you re-evaluate your life, yes?

And re-evaluate I have.

One of the things I’ve reflected a lot on, during this long-needed time away from a professional life that had often been consuming, overwhelming, and difficult, is that I’ve been going about my work to grow a better philanthropy all wrong.

We’ve been “struggling” against, “fighting” to change, trying to dismantle a well-established system that, like all systems, is built to function a certain way and generally operates like machinery, with the occasional tune-up to forestall a blatant break-down. But like most machines, this system is built to keep on working, in the manner in which it was created.

Systems are huge.

Systems are, by definition, more-than-human.

They are the ways in which humans endeavor to collaborate with each other, to create a means to accomplish things bigger than just one or two could alone.

Systems have SO much potential to be powerful forces for good.

Yet, systems so often become powerful forces for maintaining a status quo that is actively harmful to many of the human beings within them.

The professionalized field of philanthropy (including all work in fundraising and nonprofits) is an example of this happening.

At scale, this field is now largely de-humanizing, rather than humanizing.

This may come as a shock to some, given the public image of this field as all about doing good and helping people.

Here's why this has become true: the more “philanthropy” has yielded to the wider, dominant culture we live in (one yoked to the realities of coloniality, capitalism, patriarchy, androcentrism, the supremacy of “whiteness” and “white” ways of being, heteronormativity, lack of inclusion for those with disabilities, etc.), the less good it has done — and the more harm it has done.

Quite a lot of harm, I'm pained to say.

And this is what I have been working so hard to change…

…while seeing very little progress.

So.

What have I been missing?

What have we been missing?

Our perspective has been off.

We keep looking at the problem as one being “out there.” The system, as we talk about it, is something that we are pointing to.

We may talk about “fighting against” it.

We may talk about “dismantling” it.

We may shake our heads at its problems.

But the system is not out there.

The system is in here.

We need to take our pointer fingers, the ones we’ve been using to point to a system “out there,” and turn them towards ourselves, landing right on our own solar plexus.

The system is in here.

And “in here” is where we need to work on changing it.

I’ve realized that integrating inner development and growth into the work of philanthropy, particularly systemic change, is essential to solving all of the problems we’ve been trying to solve within the field.

Change From Inside-Out

Think about it.

Each and every moment that we are living within a system, actively functioning as a part of it, we are co-creating that system.

We may feel powerless within that system — and as an individual, we may be, to a degree. But when we widen our view and see the collective of humans that is a part of that system, we can see that the system would not exist at all without the people within it. And thus, each of the individuals is an essential part of a whole that functions as one, much like our own bodies and all of their cells.

Actions of individual cells can take down an entire body…

…like the cancer I experienced.

At the same time, the health of individual cells, mutually affecting and working in concert with each other, is what creates a reality of robust health for the whole body.

Here’s another metaphor to illustrate this truth:

Think of a rock being thrown into a pond.

Circles ripple out from where it went in.

This is exactly how change happens among humans, since we all share a common field of energy, like a pond — and our energy is directly affected by others’ energy.

Here’s how it works:

We transform ourselves.

The people around us start to change too.

Then the people around them start to change.

And so on…

…as the concentric circles reverberate out, getting bigger and bigger.

So OK.

Great.

Concentric circles of transformation.

So what?

How does that change anything… really?

Here’s an abiding truth that has probably been spoken many times. One of the people it’s been associated with is Albert Einstein — who is attributed with saying, essentially, that no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. Similarly, I think of Audre Lorde’s teaching that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Our consciousness — who we are — is what really matters.

Remember.

We are human beings.

Not human doings.

Or human goings.

Our consciousness is what we need to focus on transforming.

If we can do that, we will have a whole new way to see and understand our problems… and to work together on changing them. If we can transform our consciousness, then — and only then — we can transform our shared reality.

We are human beings.

Being involves our essence. Being involves who we are at the most core level. Even more, our being carries inherent value. There is nothing it needs to do, nowhere it needs to go, to earn that value.

Is this the way most of us live?

I’d say no.

Wouldn’t you?

The mystical spiritual path is a process of going deeper and deeper into our inner being… until we get to our core, which is — spoiler alert — pure love.

Can you believe it?

I can.

Because I’ve been on that journey myself.

And I want you to come on that journey, too.

Because can you even imagine?

Can you even imagine how different this world would be, how different all of its systems would be, if they were being created by human beings who were fully conscious of their true selves? People who were fully attuned to love?

Wow.

What a revelation.

What a revolution.

---

Are you ready?

Are you ready for an entirely different philanthropy… which will create an entirely different world than what we have today?

Something more whole?

Something more human?

Something more loving?

We can find a better way forward.

Together.

Are you in?