"In Verdant Pastures: The Centrality of Voluntary Association
for the Prominence of Philanthropy." Paul G. Schervish. In Papers in Honor of
Brian O'Connell, edited by Elizabeth Boris. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Forthcoming
In my commentary on this paper, I will attempt to do three things based
on the analysis John Havens and I are conducting of the same biennial IS/Gallup
Survey examined by Hodgkinson, Carson, and Knauft. I begin by highlighting the
relational meaning of voluntary association. While a voluntary association is
an organizational entity, voluntary association is an act of dedicated engagement.
In the second section, I elaborate a five-variable theoretical model of the
factors that induce such philanthropic commitment. In the third section, I present
some preliminary findings from our efforts at Boston College’s Social
Welfare Research Institute to operationalize the theoretical model and to measure
the relative strength of each of the five variables. While our conceptual focus
is on the factors leading to both giving and volunteering, our empirical analysis
focuses exclusively on the factors that lead to giving.
"Inclination, Obligation, and Association: What We Know and What We Need to Learn about Donor Motivation." Paul G. Schervish. In Critical Issues in Fund Raising, edited by Dwight F. Burlingame.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997. 110-138.
This paper reviews the status of questions surrounding the issue of motivation for charitable gifts of money and assets--what I will call financial philanthropy. In exploring the mobilizing factors
that induce financial philanthropy, it is important to distinguish between those influences that lead people to become givers in the first place and those that lead some donors to make larger than
average gifts or to increase their giving. The guiding principle of my approach to charitable giving is represented by what I call an identification model rather than an altruism model of motivation.
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“The Inheritance of Wealth and the Commonwealth: The Ideal of
Paideia in an Age of Affluence”
Paul G. Schervish. Philanthropy Across the Generations (Dwight F. Burlingame,
ed.). New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising, no. 42, Winter
2003, pp. 5-24. Cathlene Williams, Lilya Wagner (Coeditors-in-Chief)
The transmission of philanthropy across the generations is the transfer of a
spiritual agency of material capacity, care for others, and a process of conscientious
decision-making and choice. The intergenerational transmission of philanthropy
is less a matter of shepherding heirs to become caretakers of existing philanthropic
instruments and endeavors as it is a matter of guiding heirs to become agents
who reconstitute for their own time and in their own way the relation between
wealth and the commonwealth. In the first section of the paper I draw on an
essay by John Maynard Keynes to set the stage for an understanding of the material
and cultural conditions in the offing during the early twenty-first century.
In the second section, I summarize several elements of the material heritage
we will leave our children, including a substantial transfer of wealth, and
indicate the implications of these trends for the historical circumstances of
wealth and philanthropy that our heirs will face. The third section examines
the meaning of moral biography as the confluence of material capacity and moral
compass, and how our calling today is to provide our heirs the opportunity to
conscientiously shape their own moral biographies tailored to the distinctive
characteristics of the future in which they will live. In the fourth section,
I explore two elements of how we might best go about to help our children and
grandchildren form their own moral biographies. I focus especially on the communication
of paideia, the Greek ideal of formative education and the meaning
of culture, as the ideal of our teachings and on discernment as a process of
decision making aimed at clarifying one’s philanthropic resources, purposes,
and mode of implementation. In the conclusion, I exhort those in my generation
to make it our vocation to help our children freely discover their own vocation.
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