Author: Terry Mazany, Board Vice Chair, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
Humanity finds itself at a crossroads facing complex challenges not likely to be solved with existing solutions. Increasingly, it seems that the only path forward is through innovation, scaled solutions, and systems transformation.
The events in recent years underscore the existential nature of these complex challenges including: the global pandemic exposing weaknesses in health systems and supply chains; collapsing economies and military conflict forcing mass migrations displacing tens of millions of people; widening wealth gaps and the reversal of gains made lifting global populations out of poverty; rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence affecting the opportunity structures of society and eroding social trust; and climate change fueling devastating weather events of greater magnitude and increasing frequency.
Philanthropy is not immune to the reality of complex challenges, but its lack of accountability to society it seeks to serve calls into question whether philanthropy can change and change quickly enough to meet the moment. This is not a novel observation or opinion, but rooted in historical concerns:
As John Stuart Mills wrote: “reformers and philanthropists … nibble at the consequences of unjust power, instead of redressing the injustice itself.”
And there is the more contemporary and recognisable critique from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”
This leads to the fundamental question: What is the role of philanthropy in times of massive and accelerating change? To answer this question, several other questions must also be considered:
- What is the accountability of philanthropy to society in times of change?
- What is the nature of a complex challenge and how does that differ from complicated problems?
- What are the criteria defining transformational philanthropy?
- What type(s) of leadership are required for transformational philanthropy?
- What systems are most relevant to consider?
- What opportunities within a system will yield the greatest return?
To address these questions philanthropy and its leaders will need a much more sophisticated understanding of three disciplines: 1) innovation and what constitutes new solutions to persistent challenges, 2) scale and how to develop grant and co-investment strategies commensurate with the scale of complex challenges, and 3) systems transformation, what is required to transform systems and what is the role of philanthropy in doing that.
While philanthropy is considered risk capital for societal innovation, it is often risk adverse, investing in current trends rather than forging new paths for communities and governments to follow. Educational philanthropy over the past three decades illustrates both important risk taking and reinforcing the status quo. For example:
- Investments in child development have led to extraordinary advances in understanding brain development and the need for high quality early childhood education for more equitable educational opportunities – and yet, the availability of high-quality early childhood education options remain scarce.
- There have been breakthroughs in curriculum and instruction, standards and accountability, the roles of parents and community, teacher preparation and principal leadership, as well as advances in whole-school change and district reform – and yet, education continues to be delivered in much the same way it was delivered fifty years ago.
Each wave of school reform has contributed to our understanding of the essential components of change, each has fallen short of achieving scale, and separately none are sufficient to significantly change the opportunities for those who have never benefited from the old systems. Instead, assessment results continue to decline, and disparities continue to widen.
The next frontier of educational philanthropy is to fundamentally rethink the systems of education, beginning with the purposes of education, the nature of the human experience of learning (for young and old alike), and ways those experiences are organised. Philanthropy alone could be best poised to answer questions about the nature of new systems that:
- Meets the developmental needs of the whole child.
- Places the child at the center of their learning and within the context of their community.
- Considers adults as co-learners and honors their roles transmitting timeless human values, the sum of human knowledge to the next generation, and the thirst for new knowledge.
- Loosely holds diverse educational settings and learning experiences leading to the meaningful recognition of a wider range of valued achievements.
This is not and cannot be business as usual, and in fact, philanthropy must reinvent itself if it is to transform the systems of education to achieve more equitable and better results preparing young people for the uncertain future they face. It must recognise the need to convene the entire system and to keep the stakeholders of the system together long enough to break through the orthodoxies, existing policy regimes, and take on self-interests holding in place the status quo to make space and create demand for innovation and scaled solutions leading to new systems that more successfully solve for the shortcomings of the current system.
A Philanthropic Roadmap for a New Education Ecosystem
The five action areas of Learning Creates Australia form a hard-earned framework for philanthropy to re-conceptualise the systems of education in ways that work for the most disadvantaged, and for all young people. What’s at stake is nothing less than the future of Australia. Foundations should consider the implications that each of these five action areas pose for their current philanthropic strategies and outcomes. An initial set of questions are offered to start this introspection:
- The Broader Recognition of Learning Success – How can philanthropy help to legitimise and support the authorisation of broader domains of learning and demonstration of that learning?
- The Relationship Between Learning and Wellbeing – How can philanthropy support the scaling and normalisation of learning that invests in and integrates attention to the whole child?
- The Future of the Teaching Profession – How can philanthropy support new models for roles for adults and professional practice?
- Digital Transformation of the Learning Experience – How can philanthropy fund the development of safeguards and guardrails while tapping into the power of personalisation enabling the finely tuned customisation of learning journeys?
- Power Sharing and Shifting with People and Places – How can philanthropy promote new arrangements of power (such as students as producers with agency for their education and communities as owners of the educational grammar of place-based learning) and support reinforcing systems to formalise this realignment of power?
