MacKenzie Scott has given away $26 billion and says she won't stop "until the safe is empty." Most billionaires give about 1.2% of their assets a year — the same share they gave in 2017, even as their wealth compounds at 9%.
A new Stanford Social Innovation Review essay calls this "slow philanthropy." The money isn't sitting still because donors don't care. It's stuck because of how they think about giving: fear of failure, an obsession with low overhead, a refusal to hand anyone else the checkbook.
Sound familiar? Because this is exactly what I see inside companies.
When we demand a return on every social dollar, we quietly decide that generosity has to earn its place at the table. So we fund what measures cleanly. The tutoring program with a test-score bump gets greenlit. The organizer building trust over ten years — the work that never fits on a dashboard — gets a polite no. We end up backing the most legible work instead of the highest-impact work, and those are rarely the same thing.
Worse, the ROI frame turns a grant into a transaction and a partner into a vendor. Real returns here compound on a timeline no quarterly report can hold. The payoff often shows up years after the grant closes, long after anyone stopped tracking it.
The most honest thing a funder can say is, "I believe in this, and I can't prove it yet." That's not sloppy giving. That's the whole point.