In this episode, Rebecca Megson-Smith speaks with Jen Shang, co-author of Meaningful Philanthropy: The Person Behind the Giving, about the high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals behind philanthropic giving.
Having had unparalleled access to some of the world’s most reflective and thoughtful philanthropists, Jen explains how philanthropists experience what they do and the psychological challenges they need to overcome.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Jen Shang is Professor of Philanthropic Psychology and Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy. Jen Shang is the world’s only philanthropic psychologist.
Meaningful Philanthropy is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £27.99.
Bristol University Press/Policy Press newsletter subscribers receive a 25% discount – sign up here.
Follow Transforming Society so we can let you know when new articles publish.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Image credit: Contimis Works via iStock
You may also be interested in George Miller’s conversations with Rhodri Davies about philanthropy:
What is philanthropy and why does it matter?
Is philanthropy charity’s more rational cousin?
What should we do about tainted donations?
SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:24 – How did you get these philanthropists to talk to you?
2:32 – What is meaningful philanthropy?
4:36 – What is identity ceding and why is it important?
10:05 – What is the connection between philanthropy and entrepreneurs?
11:57 – Can philanthropy be meaningless?
14:01 – Why are philanthropists important to study and understand?
21:50 – What impact do you hope your book has?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Rebecca Megson-Smith: Many high and ultra high net worth individuals are philanthropists, people who readily give their resources to a variety of causes. At one level, this can seem inevitable. I’m sure many of us would readily agree that we would give or give more if we had an excess of time and money available. However, examining not only the why of philanthropic giving, but also the how and the what has really enabled Jen Shang and Adrian Sargeant to uncover a hitherto unexplored richness of information.
And that’s really useful for donors, recipient communities and the wider philanthropic ecosystem. Their book, ‘Meaningful Philanthropy: The Person Behind the Giving’, reveals the different and transitive stages experienced by individuals as they journey through, becoming and embedding as a philanthropist. How they interpret their experience of giving may actually express itself differently, but essentially their actions are motivated by a clear sense of self, which shapes meaning from and through their philanthropy.
I’m really delighted to have one of the authors and the world’s only philanthropic psychologist, Jen Shang, Professor of Philanthropic Psychology and co-director of the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, here with me today. Jen, thank you and welcome. It’s really great to have you here.
Jen Shang: It’s very nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
RMS: Lovely. What- Do you know what the first question that came to mind was as I was reading the book, was, some people feel really uncomfortable talking about kind of their giving. So I actually wanted to just start by asking you how easy it was to get these people, these philanthropists, to talk to you about their activities.
JS: I am not the best person to answer this question, because actually, most of our interviewees, they agreed to participate in our research through our friends and the key funder of our research, Mr. Tony Bury. So he is a remarkable, special individual who is passionate about philanthropy. So he has a very engaged network of philanthropists, that he could connect us with for this research, and we’re immensely grateful for what he has done.
RMS: That’s really interesting then it’s about even in order to do this research, it was important that you were already connected into a network of people. That’s that’s absolutely fascinating. And, you know, therefore you’re able to get access to insights that, you know, potentially others may not be able to. Amazing.
JS: We’re very lucky.
RMS: Yeah. Okay, well can you talk to me about this term meaningful philanthropy. I mean, on one level, isn’t philanthropy inherently meaningful?
JS: Yeah. That is a really interesting way to think about it. Usually when I talk about the concept of meaningful philanthropy, I distinguish the term meaning from the word impact. So when people talk about impact, if I read a sentence that says 160 million children were malnourished in the first 1000 days of their lives and hence I want to provide them with sufficient nutrition.
That is a statement of impact. That is, you know, what need to be provided for whom so that what goal can be achieved. Meaning on the other hand, is what the impact means to an individual and how an individual makes sense of their own role in creating this impact. So when a philanthropist describes the meaning of philanthropy, he might say, you know, I grew up in one of the Western countries.
I was not stunned when I grew up because my family provided me with food, but 160 million children, you know, he would use his own personal story to relate to the people that he wanted to make an impact for in this particular way, so that he will give his money, his time, his talent, and in a large extent, his own sense of who he is in everything that he does for this community.
So the difference between meaning and impact, for me, meaning is a lot more internal subjective and to a way private and important for philanthropists.
RMS: Very personal I suppose is the key word here isn’t it as well. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. Meaning versus impact. Yeah. That is a really good, way of, defining the, the two things. And impact being the external, and meaning being the internal. That notion of identity, that notion of, that meaning being part of who the philanthropist is, is something that you talk about in this notion that you propose of identity ceding.
And I think this is a quite a new concept, certainly applied in this field as well. I wonder if you could talk to me a bit more about what identity ceding is and why it’s really important for our understanding of philanthropists.
JS: Yeah. I’m glad you chose that identity concept amongst the, you know, over 50 that we covered in the book, because that is indeed the one that we had to really scratch our head and come up with this term ourselves because we just couldn’t find anything in the literature that actually describe what we’re seeing from these philanthropists.
And obviously is something that I didn’t walk into the project thinking, this is what we’re going to find. I was just like, what is this process that people kept telling me about, you know. And, and what that is, eventually we described it as people’s willingness to morph any part of themselves in order to achieve a shared goal with a community.
But in order for someone to experience identity ceding, they’re actually five different types of complex, self based process that need to happen, which we’re not going to go into here. But in essence, what this means, going back to the difference between meaning and impact, is that when philanthropy interact with a community, he doesn’t go in and have a predefined understanding about what impact need to be created.
He comes in as an individual with an open mind to listen. What is this community about? Who is this community? What do they want? What do they think are important to be their impact? And they would go as far as not only letting go what they originally thought to be important impact to themselves, but they would let go their own sense of who they are.
Like, am I listening here as a individual with financial resources, or am I coming here as a family member or friend to listen? You know, like am I listening here through almost no personal relationship at all, just like an outsider parachuting myself into the community and trying to create some sort of impact, or am I actually walking the day to day life of the community, listening as an insider?
You know, they’re willing to transform and morph any part of their sense of who they are. So that they can walk alongside with the community as a part of it. And very valuable part of it, because with their connections, their resources, they’re able to achieve goals for the community that the community can’t achieve on their own. But they are not a fixed mindset or even a fixed individual who come in with a set of impact goals and who leaves with a set of impact goals.
Like everything is changeable and morphable for the benefit of the community.
RMS: And that’s a process. So that’s a process that they go through though, that that’s not necessarily, you know, a person. Did you find that your kind of research subjects start, often started in a place where they did think they had an idea, and then they were able to move through that ability to be more changeable to the to the need of the communities. And it sounds like more empathic as well.
JS: Oh, absolutely. So, you know, like almost nobody goes into philanthropy without having some kind of definition of impact, right? That would just be purposeless. Right. So everybody come in. The difference of how deeply people can experience the meaningfulness of philanthropy, however, is partially correlated with the degree to which people are willing to morph along the way.
To listen and to change and to transform the relationship they have with the community and therefore change the articulation of what the impact is, the ownership of who actually owns the agency of creating that impact and what is needed in order for this modified concept of impact to be reached, and also fundamentally who they need to be in order for those goals to be achieved.
RMS: I noticed in the book there was a sense that the group you were studying considered themselves as entrepreneurs, and the sort of it felt to me like there was a fluidity between what it means to be an entrepreneur, which presumably also requires that degree of curiosity when it comes to, you know, solving a problem and what it means to be a philanthropist. And those, those, those terms at times felt almost interchangeable.
JS: Yeah, absolutely. Entrepreneurs, especially, many of the people that we interviewed not only started their own organizations and made them successful, but many of them started many organizations, and many of them started organizations that leads the trend in certain sectors, right? So they’re highly innovative people. And so when, when these highly innovative people then enter into a philanthropic domain where complex social problems need to be solved through innovative solutions, very often they find their entrepreneurial skills transferable.
But that is also partially where, their philanthropic experience can be quite meaningful because when they shift from the for profit parameters or the business parameters into a nonprofit, a charity set of parameters, all their parameters change. So they find their own curiosity and intelligence being, in a way, challenged but not in a suffocating way of challenging, but almost like it becomes quite exciting.
It’s like a very exciting opportunity for them to transfer their skills into, very often, a set of more complex and more difficult problems.
RMS: Right. Okay. Alright, no, that’s that’s really helpful. I’m interested if it’s possible for there to be such a thing as meaningless philanthropy. Is it possible to be a philanthropist and to not have this identity ceding, to not have this sense of kind of meaningfulness coming back from the engagement that you’re having?
JS: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got people told me point blank their philanthropy is not very meaningful at all for them that they find their business life is where they draw the meaning from. They do their philanthropy because they felt like they had to. It’s just not right for them not to do philanthropy, but they can’t experience any personal meaning from it.
RMS: Right. And, is an element of this book, though, that if they were to, if they were to be enabled to derive a greater sense of meaning from their philanthropy, that would that would have some further benefit or is it sort of okay that you’ve got different categories of people that are, achieving different levels of kind of meaning from their efforts?
JS: Well, I think the, the psychological processes like identity ceding, like how we define meaning, how we differentiate meaning from impact. I think those psychological skills are transferable. You know, some people can apply those skills into their philanthropic activity. And I think as a result, they can experience more meaningful philanthropy. But for the philanthropists that I just mentioned who find all his meaning in his corporate world, then exactly the same type of tools can be applied to all the corporate thinking that, they do.
So I don’t necessarily think that people have to get into philanthropy in order to experience meaning, but when people utilize the set of tools to analyze any aspects of life, my hypothesis is they would experience deeper meaning and greater impact in any areas they apply the tools to.
RMS: So, I suppose leading on from that, I’d really love to understand why, you know, I mean, this is obviously it’s your specialist area. It’s something that you’ve really, you know, you’ve worked really in-depth in and it really and it’s way to to apply those that psychological base in that understanding to this very specific kind of group of people.
Can you tell me a little bit more about why you feel this is such an important group of people to study and to understand?
JS: There’s a lot of pressure that is being put onto these people. High and ultra high net worth individuals where the society expects them to do philanthropy and the society expects them to make impact. And I have read a lot of writing on, you know, what they should do. And for every article that I read about why they should do something, there would be another article saying why they’re not doing what they should be doing.
There’s a lot of writing that sounds like that. The reason why I have been interested in exploring this population is because I’m not entirely convinced that this population have all been equipped with the right tools, to live up to this level of moral standard that is in, in a way, much higher than what we would put on ourselves.
You know, like like you said, you know, if we all have more money and more, more time available, we would all want to do more. But even if we want to do more, do we really know how to do it well? You know, so I it’s just if not for anything else, I just would like to know, you know, what kind of psychological process that is required for someone to live up to that kind of moral standard.
I mean, maybe this population has been equipped with the knowledge and they all know how to do it, then that would be a brilliant finding from the research. And say yeah, they really have got it all together and they should have done what the society think that they should be doing. Right. But it’s equally possible that there just hasn’t been enough research done so that the right tools are not given to them.
Which one is it?
RMS: And you and your experiences through this, through the study, your experiences that they they aren’t necessarily equipped with those tools?
JS: No, not in this systematic way. You know, some in some interviews I ask people explicitly, you know, what are all the sources that you use to gain philanthropic knowledge? Many of them took, you know, philanthropy based courses, have philanthropic advisors, have like leadership coaches, psychologist, organizational psychologist, clinical psychology, like, you name it. Like they are trying to find the best resources.
That is accessible to them, to be the best philanthropists they can be for the community. But more than half of the people said, but nobody have asked me the question that you did. I was like, isn’t that strange that these essential questions are not asked? Especially when most of the people that we interviewed, they have had more than ten years of philanthropic experience, like and most of the people before they go into philanthropy, they do so much research about the areas that they were going to go into.
You would have thought somebody along the way would have asked about these introspective, meaning based questions, but I think because our focus is so much on the impact and the external, it’s not just we don’t spend enough time on the internal. It’s almost like we feel bad or guilty by spending time in this introspection. And if anything, I think that is a huge missed opportunity to both grow philanthropy, inspire new philanthropy, and to sustain the people who have given their lives to philanthropy.
Literally, you know, like if they have made the choice, then they should be given the right support.
RMS: It is interesting, isn’t it, because I was like, yes, as I said in the introduction, that there are all of these, I suppose, unquestioned expectations. If you have time and money, you will give back into the community. That is what you will do. And actually, there’s I don’t know that there’s a feeling that there’s almost, like a guilt.
I can’t be thinking about myself. I have to be thinking about the other people. I think one of the things you say in the book is that actually there’s a really limited, as you just said then, sort of time and scope for reflection. And yet reflections are really powerful kind of way of taking stock, stock and getting a sense of meaning out of things.
And I think that’s sort of one of the things that you’re really kind of, advocating for through, through this work is the importance of having time to reflect.
JS: Yeah. And, and when people do like one of the most, you know, consistent finding is this meaning are rarely ever reflected in the context of one single individual. They are always reflected in relationships. Right, so it’s almost like by definition, when people reflect on themselves, they reflect on their relationships with other people. And it’s almost by definition they experience more meaningful relationships.
And those relationships is is what’s going to inspire more people, new people, and to sustain themselves, to go on this philanthropic journey for longer. Right. I mean, those are just such vertical building blocks to sustain long term and meaningful philanthropy that missing the opportunity for that inner dialog and that dialog about relationship is just sad.
RMS: I guess, you know, if if you were a, an organization that’s a recipient or a community that’s a recipient of, philanthropic giving, I imagine as well that the your impetus is to focus on impact versus meaning. So you want to be constantly saying to your, you know, to your benefactor, well, look, you know, we’ve we thanks to you, we’ve been able to do this, this, this and this.
And so actually the whole relationship ends up being, without this kind of sort of intervention, the whole relationship ends up being very kind of external and fact based and over there almost rather than in here. And, and we rather than I and them, isn’t it.
JS: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s where I apply exactly the same way of thinking, which is, well, let’s not tell our charities and nonprofit what they should be doing. Let’s understand what tools have they got to do the right things right. It’s only when we recognize they actually have the tools, and then they choose not to use or not to use the well or whatever.
That’s when we say, well, they should have done it better. But, you know, most of the people I interacted with, they absolutely want to learn about the best tools and they want to take care of their philanthropies. They want to do the best they can do for other people. They feel guilty for for asking money.
You know, like they’re in exactly the same boat. They just need to be supported with the right philanthropic tools.
RMS: There’s a there’s really interesting sort of interplay of guilts there isn’t there? Guilt that I have so much and therefore I’m giving, guilt that I’m asking for and needing this money even though. Yeah, it’s that’s that’s absolutely fascinating.
JS: Yeah.
RMS: I suppose sort of sort of coming through that then what are you really what are you sort of what, what’s your hope for this work? What do you think would you like to be the impact that comes, off the back of the, the study that you, that you’ve done and that you’ve shared through, through the, through your book?
JS: So our project funder, Tony Bury, Mr. Tony Bury, like I said, one of the kindest person that I have known, his original hope for the research was that this research is going to be able to help inspire more and more people to do philanthropy. And I think the particular solution that we offered to solve that problem is to say, well, can we provide philanthropists and the nonprofit professionals to support them with the tools to have more discussions about what meaningful philanthropy looks like and to help people grow more meaningful relationships with each other so that it is both the causes themselves, but also the individuals involved in the causes that will attract more people into philanthropy. And these relationships will also then help sustain the people who are attracted, retain that relationship in the philanthropic sector. So it’s a very particular solution to the question that Tony raised, which is how can we inspire more philanthropy. So I hope this research can help him achieve that goal in a small way.
RMS: Amazing. That’s wonderful. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time today, Jen. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you. And, I’ve definitely learned lots. and that there’s so much more to the psychology of the philanthropists that I’d imagined as well. I think it’s very easy to fall into those, into those categories of assumption. ‘Meaningful Philanthropy: The Person Behind the Giving’ is written by Jen Chang, professor of philanthropic psychology, and Adrian Sargeant, professor of fundraising. They are co-directors of the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, and their book is published by Policy Press.