This post was published on The Athena Advisors blog on 1 November 2022

Sixteen years ago, I fell into my first role in philanthropy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. My background was in public diplomacy and international studies. While I had heard of the Foundation’s work in global health, I didn’t know anything about working in a philanthropic foundation. As I started in my role, I realised that other people had a similar experience of stumbling into philanthropy. I began to wonder who we all were and how we got here. It was the seed of a research idea I would carry for over a decade.

Philanthropy is often referred to by its Greek etymology – the parts of the word, philein, meaning ‘to love’, and anthropos (as in anthropology), meaning ‘humankind’. And so, philanthropy means love of humanity. Giving our private resources, through time, treasure, and talent, for public purposes has been a quintessential part of the human experience. Philanthropy has a long implementation history and innumerable variations across jurisdictions and cultures. And because it is human, philanthropy is complex.

Philanthropists, fundraisers, advisors, and community members all struggle to understand the mechanisms of how philanthropy works and how to make it work best. In the day-to-day of any charitable or nonprofit role, the pace can be so fast that there is little time to reflect upon the structures we’ve created to enact philanthropy. After all, social issues are pressing, and there is an urgency to address the causes we hope to impact.

In response to day-to-day needs, the field has developed a capacity to produce ‘how to’ and ‘best practice’ guidance to facilitate our work on the ground. This research has been valuable because it is often driven by the immediate needs of practitioners and can facilitate our work better (efficiency, effectiveness, intentionality). Its purpose is for practice, and that is where it excels. However, in focusing on immediacy and implementation, this type of philanthropy research misses an opportunity to reflect more deeply on the structures or assumptions about how philanthropy is undertaken. It overlooks a chance to conceptualise our work in vastly different ways or to pick up on more esoteric questions of who we are and how we all got here (into this field).

Philanthropy is not an academic discipline in itself. It is a topic studied through various views – management, leadership, public administration, nonprofit studies, political science, sociology, history, etc. There are rich histories within academic research looking at elements of social change. Still, they are often fragmented and siloed within these various disciplines. While there is some movement to cast philanthropy as a discipline, it is slow to emerge. As such, our conceptual research on philanthropy borrows from other fields. But by looking through these other lenses, we have an opportunity to view our work in wildly different ways. We have a chance to rise above the daily fray and see how our field may or may not be so unique from the tensions within other areas.

As I continued my roles in philanthropy, I could not find answers to my initial questions about the people working alongside me and how we got here. I finally decided I needed to do my own research to answer these questions. It took me ten years to find somewhere to conduct the study and six years to complete it. Standing on the other side of a PhD, I can say that the links between research and practice have never been more needed – and still, they are fraught with difficulty and division.

Academia and practice operate with different incentives. The immediacy of meeting needs requires practice-based research to be quick and precise. It is valued through implementation and by changing practices. Academic research operates within the institutional complex, which values recognition through a slower peer review and publication process. Yet, it can ask deep questions, collect rich data, and generate innovative insights. It links with other fields and with different experiences of similar significance. As practitioners, access to academic research provides valuable reflection opportunities. For academics, practitioner reflections help refine their questions, foci, and future research. Yet, academic research sits behind paywalls, and practitioners are not often granted the time in their roles to read and digest. Academics often ask and then answer questions that are too far from the field’s interests and needs.

In my work in philanthropic advisory, it is a better blend between research and practice which I am striving for. A current project focused on next-generation giving has coincided with emergent research on young givers. My goal is to find ways of tying research findings to improve the project and translate research for audiences who wouldn’t necessarily see it otherwise. I’m battle-weary enough to know the challenges of this liminality. Still, I believe without more examples of the benefits of blending research and practice, our natural incentive systems will allow us to shrink back into our tribes. The unfortunate outcome of not knowing each another better is that our practices will not be as good as they could and our research not as impactful as it might have been. A better blend is not only possible, but it is timely – as our social causes require new solutions and our age-old structures need reconsideration.

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