The Way to Give—Wisely

Banner photo by Money Knack on Unsplash. Other photos courtesy of the Philanthropy Lab

People—individuals, that is, not corporations—donated more than $300 billion to organizations in the US in 2022, according to Giving USA, which publishes an annual report on charitable giving. And that has Joshua Pederson wondering: do the people who make these donations know how to give wisely?

Pederson (GRS’08), an associate professor of humanities whose research interests center around ethics, religion, and trauma, says he’s long been interested in how people give to charities. What kind of research do they conduct before they decide to donate? Have they considered how to maximize their impact?

His interest has been fueled in part by moral philosopher Peter Singer’s book The Most Good You Can Do (Yale University Press, 2015), which explores effective altruism—or finding the most effective ways to do the most good for the most people. Pederson was teaching the book in a CGS Modern and Applied Ethics course a couple of years ago, when one of his students told him about a course on philanthropy and altruism that a friend had taken at Columbia University. She asked why BU didn’t offer a similar course.

The class at Columbia was taught in partnership with the nonprofit the Philanthropy Lab, whose goal is to increase students’ interest and participation in philanthropy. The organization provides funding to classes at colleges and universities around the US; students in those classes can then donate that money to charities of their choice after learning about thoughtful giving.

Pederson looked into the program and liked the idea. He attended a leadership summit run by the Philanthropy Lab that gathered professors from around the country who have taught or will teach similar courses. They discussed their methods and bounced ideas off each other. “It seemed like the trend is that the first half of the course is theory, and the second half is practice,” says Pederson. He decided to organize his class this way and began offering CGS HU 450: Giving Well during the spring 2024 semester. He designed the course to teach students how to discern which philanthropies are the most impactful and have the lowest overhead.

The Philanthropy Lab has provided all grant funding for this first class to distribute to the charities they choose and will continue to fund the class in subsequent years at lesser amounts. CGS has committed to raising the remainder as part of its development initiatives. The amount of funding from the Philanthropy Lab depends on if the class meets certain goals. For example, Kenneth Freeman, BU president ad interim, has agreed to visit the final session this semester, so the class gets a $10,000 bonus to donate to organizations.

“My sense is [by meeting other benchmarks] we’ll be able to give away around $85,000 this year with the Philanthropy Lab’s support, which is awesome,” Pederson says.

Pederson has had students write about their personal giving philosophies and evaluate charities they would want to support. Ultimately, he says, they can donate the grant money any way they see fit.

“They could give away 25 different grants, or they could give away one grant,” he says. “Usually what happens is, it boils down to three or four organizations. That’s going to be a lot of the work at the end of the course—getting a list from 25 students who have specific ideas about charities to give to and winnowing it down to a handful of them.”

Pederson plans on having students give presentations in which they make the case for particular organizations after careful evaluation.

“I have strong feelings about places that I think we should be giving money to and places that I don’t think we should be giving money to,” he says. “Mine will be one voice, but one among many, because this is really intended to be a student-driven course, with student-driven decisions.”

Doing the Research

One of the books Pederson will teach in the class is Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018), which argues that global philanthropy reflects colonial structures. Villanueva suggests ways for remedying systemic imbalances in giving. “We’re talking about how you give in such a way as to undermine and deconstruct the colonial aspects of giving and aid,” Pederson says.

He also has his students read The Most Good You Can Do. “It proposes an effective altruism framework, which has rightfully come under scrutiny in the last couple of years,” he says. “But its central tenets remain really important to me.”  (The scrutiny he refers to includes the questionable business practices of some of its supposed adherents, most notably Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange company FTX, who was convicted of fraud in November 2023.)

“Singer writes that two-thirds of Americans, when they give to charity, do no research at all,” Pederson says. “They give blindly. The idea is, if you’re giving blindly, you’re probably not doing very much good at all, or at least you have no idea how much good you’re doing.”

He notes that someone might give to an organization that then funnels the donation into another fundraiser. “And then you’ve potentially done no good,” he says. “If we’re entering a landscape wherein two-thirds of people don’t think at all about the charities that they’re giving to, I hope one of the things this course does is give students a framework for thinking about that—how do you evaluate, how do you reflect, how do you get out of that two-thirds and into the one-third that thinks carefully about how they want to give?”

He points to Giving Tuesday, the initiative that falls in late November or early December and encourages generosity, as a time when careful reflection before donating is essential. “Thoughtful giving is really, really important, because there are so many examples of bad philanthropies out there,” Pederson says. “It’s a time when everybody asks for money, and the assumption is that if you pony up, you’ve done a good thing. But then you look at some of the organizations that are asking for money and it’s barely even charity. The money that’s being requested won’t alleviate some of the real suffering in the world. A majority of charitable dollars are really not effectively addressing people’s pain.”

Learning to Give

Pederson, who plans to offer the course each spring, says he encourages lively debates in his class and is excited to offer a course on a topic not widely covered in colleges and universities. “There are exponentially more courses devoted to how you make money than how you give money away,” he says.

One source of debate he envisions students having, based on reactions to Singer’s book in the past, is around charitable giving to international organizations. “The vast majority of American charitable dollars go to domestic causes,” he says. “But the US, globally speaking, is a very rich country. Poverty in the US is horrific, but there is poverty internationally that is much worse. That’s one of the things that Singer and others in this field say—if you really want to do a lot of good, give outside the US.”

He is also conscious of the challenge of teaching the subject to students who have yet to start their careers and may face debt when they graduate. “We will ask that students establish a longer-term plan for giving and keep philanthropy a part of their life, on the assumption that for the first however number of years out of college, they’re not going to have a ton of money to give away,” Pederson says. During his class, students will submit a giving goal statement to the Philanthropy Lab, which will contact them periodically to remind them of that goal. “The hope is to establish a reflective approach to philanthropy and giving now so that later on, when people are more financially secure, they will already be hardwired to think that way.”