Keywords

Fundraising was a second career for Mavis. As a wills and estates lawyer, she took notice of press attention to the idea that a generation of seniors had amassed substantial wealth and would ultimately bequeath some of it to charity (Dalby, 2003; Fennell et al., 1990). “This seemed to be a new part of fundraising,” she said, “and it was something that really interested me.” So, she left her law practice in the mid-1990s to work for a major arts organization, setting up its first formal planned giving programme. After seven years, she joined a large community foundation where she worked to create endowment funds. In this position she discovered that small charities needed legal expertise if they were to start receiving charitable bequests on their own. Within a few years, she had started an independent consulting business to help agencies that lacked specialized fundraising staff to manage planned giving.

Like other fundraisers I interviewed, Mavis provided leadership within more than one professional association for fundraisers and specialists. Beyond the work of advancing the fundraising industry by enhancing its reputation, promoting ethical practices, accrediting members, keeping their knowledge up to date, offering mentorship, and so on, these professional associations adopted a more ambitious political agenda. Mavis summed it up with an expression I heard frequently in my interviews: “You know,” she said of her associations’ work, “we’re creating a culture of philanthropy.”

This chapter examines the goal of creating a culture of philanthropy as an expression of fundraisers’ political agency within the context of Canada’s neoliberalization. As I described in Chap. 2, and as Mavis explained further, the imperative to fundraise arose when the nonprofit sector experienced “a pretty dramatic cutback in government funding a decade ago, at least.” She elaborated on how, beyond the cuts, nonprofit funding arrangements had been permanently restructured:

There’s now an expectation on the part of government. I mean, they still really do the majority of the funding, particularly for social service groups and that sort of thing, but there is an expectation that I’m finding on the part of the government for the organizations they’re funding to be proactive in terms of fundraising in the private sector. (Mavis)

Fundraising grew up out of a welfare state crisis, as Mavis explained:

If these organizations want to survive and if we don’t want to see our social safety net totally obliterated, they’ve got to go into philanthropy. […] It’s kind of, do or die. (Mavis)

Given the requirement to secure funding from private sources, nonprofit leaders and fundraisers began to recognize that their success required broad-based change—the inception of a culture of philanthropy.

Fundraisers like Mavis, who were aware of how neoliberal policy had “caused tremendous stress in the sector,” took up the challenge of growing a philanthropic culture by providing its political rationale. On the one hand, she lamented that the “social safety net” had been lacerated. “On the other hand,” she said, “I do see some benefit in terms of having a society where individuals are more active in terms of their community, a sense of being involved and maybe move away from this expectation, well it’s the responsibility of somebody else.” Lowering citizens’ expectations of government, then, and instilling a sense of personal responsibility to help fund the work of nonprofit institutions had become a political mission.

Promoting a Culture of Philanthropy Through Charitable Tax Policy

Rather than take up collective advocacy to restore direct public funding of nonprofit institutions, fundraisers worked through their professional associations to lobby for policies that would engrain philanthropy culturally and institutionally. Their most concerted appeal was for revisions to the Income Tax Act to enrich existing charitable tax incentives in ways designed to stimulate large gifts, such as exempting donors from paying capital gains tax on certain donated capital assets, as explained in Chap. 2.

Successive reports of Senate committees looking into tax treatment of donations reveal the strength of fundraisers’ advocacy. In 2004, for example, the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce recommended that the government eliminate capital gains tax on donations of publicly traded securities after multiple professional bodies associated with the fundraising industry dominated two days of hearings (Standing Senate Committee, 2004).Footnote 1

In a critique of the prior Department of Finance decision in 2001 to make permanent the 1997 temporary halving of the capital gains tax on donated publicly traded securities and certain other forms of capital property, tax law scholar Lisa Philipps (2003) problematized the Department’s reliance on research by nonprofit sector advocacy bodies. “Such advocacy is entirely legitimate,” Philipps wrote, “in view of the increasing responsibilities being given to charitable organizations in Canadian society and the accompanying pressure on their resources” (2003, p. 924). However, given the nonprofit sector’s stake in generating large philanthropy, she argued, independent analysis was also needed to assess whether this policy instrument, known as a tax expenditure—an attempt to promote a behaviour by reducing an otherwise applicable tax—was both cost-effective and fair.

To prove cost-effective, the nonprofit sector gains from donated securities would need to more than offset the cost to government in foregone taxes. It turned out that more securities were donated after 1997, but the increase in the total value of donations of all forms from 1998 to 2000 was consistent with the pattern of year-to-year increases over the previous 15 years. The prior rule change in 1996, to raise the ceiling on allowable donations, more clearly triggered an increase in aggregate giving than did the reduced capital gains tax on donated securities in 1997. Moreover, the increased donations of publicly traded securities did not necessarily represent new charitable sector revenues. Rather than giving more, many donors may have simply opted for the more tax-advantageous form of giving (Philipps, 2003, p. 921).

Evaluating the fairness of the reduction (and subsequent elimination in 2006) of capital gains taxes on donated securities requires attention to how the charitable income tax credit itself is already weighted in favour of affluent donors by crediting large donations at a higher rate per dollar donated. To be specific, the federal charitable income tax credit is calculated using the lowest federal marginal tax rate (15% as of the year 2000) for donations under $200 and the highest marginal tax rate (29%) for donations above that threshold.Footnote 2 Similarly, provinces calculate an additional charitable income tax credit based on the same $200 donation threshold, with the lowest marginal tax rate applied to small donations and the highest rate applied to amounts over $200. This two-tiered structure (three-tiered since 2006), which provides the most tax assistance to those who donate more than $200 annually, is class-biased, as tax filers who benefit the most tend to be the affluent who can most afford to give.

Like ordinary donors of cash, donors of publicly traded securities receive the income tax credit by claiming the market value of their donation. In addition, these donors receive tax savings from the lowered (now waived) capital gains tax of their appreciated assets. In this way, the policy of reducing (and then eliminating) capital gains tax amplified the regressive structure of the income tax credit by benefiting those who own shares over those with only cash to give. For regular monetary gifts, the donor’s share of the gift is approximately 50% to 60%, depending on the province, whereas for gifts of securities, factoring in savings of capital gains tax, the donor’s share is 40%, at most. To put it the other way, the tax subsidy of large gifts comprised of securities is at least 60% of the value of the gift (Standing Committee on Finance, 2013).

The regressive design of the charitable tax incentives may be justified if the philanthropy it stimulates is redistributive in its effects, if, in other words, people at lower income levels experience its benefits. However, tax expenditures in general, including the charitable income tax credit, lack transparency because the question of who benefits is difficult to answer and seldom investigated (Duff, 2003; Rushton, 2008). At the time of the 2001 decision to permanently halve the capital gains tax, effective 2002, little was known about how the increased gifts of publicly traded securities were spread among charities over the preceding four years, except that “a disproportionate amount of such gifts was received by larger charities, educational charities, and public foundations” (Philipps, 2003, p. 922). These were the type of recipient organizations that first employed Mavis until she went to work trying to increase the capacity of small charities to receive gifts of securities, that is, gifts that carry the largest tax subsidy.

Besides Mavis, my sample of 50 fundraisers included only one other self-employed fundraising consultant serving small charities. Ultimately, Mavis and those like her would have limited success in changing how the benefits of the tax expenditure tended to flow to large charities. Large charities such as universities have significant fundraising resources, including financial advice for benefactors about how to make the most of tax incentives. Such organizations can offer additional incentives for major philanthropy, including publicity, membership in elite circles, and access to exclusive audiences such as alumni or the organization’s other patrons. A further regional bias arises in philanthropy because wealth tends to be concentrated in large urban centres (Reich, 2006). As donors typically give close to home, the charitable donation tax expenditure is weighted towards charities in high-income, urban neighbourhoods.

Tax incentives, as hidden subsidies that disproportionately benefit certain donors, types of charities, and locales, are difficult to debate when other policies for nonprofit sector support are not on the table (Duff, 2003). In the absence of policy alternatives, Mavis supported the new tax incentives, seeing them as the least way the federal government could compensate for cuts to social spending:

The federal government has at least responded in terms of its tax policy. You know, they’ve created a lot more options for people to make philanthropic gifts, particularly larger gifts. So they have been very definite in their policy of trying to promote giving. So, at least, if they see the cutbacks on the one side, at least they haven’t just walked away from the table. (Mavis)

Philipps (2003) offered further explanation for the charitable tax policy. At a time when markets were soaring, tax-avoidant constituencies of Canadian society were pressuring the government to reduce capital gains taxation: “While the prospect of reducing taxes for this group [Canada’s wealthiest citizens] may be generally unpopular with the vast majority of Canadians, such an initiative may be rendered politically saleable if it is packaged in a way to finance charitable activities that benefit less-privileged citizens” (p. 924). The remainder of this chapter explores fundraisers’ work to “package” this regressive tax policy along with a broader neoliberal programme under the rubric of fostering a culture of philanthropy.

Defining a Culture of Philanthropy

In addition to Mavis, several of the fundraisers I interviewed spoke of their political commitment, above and beyond their day jobs, to introduce a culture of philanthropy. For example, Leah, who had worked in three large fundraising departments within a university, hospital foundation, and arts organization over 18 years, told me, “My biggest soapbox [speech] is [about] making philanthropy a Canadian social norm.” Other fundraisers, who located themselves across a spectrum of political identities, similarly used the interview as a soapbox to expound the need to cultivate philanthropic norms. Their arguments illustrated Nikolas Rose’s (2000) analysis of the rhetorical shift from “society to community” accompanying the neoliberal transformation of welfare states (p. 1400).

Twentieth-century welfare states such as Canada have been described through various analytical lenses such as liberal-democratic, Fordist, Keynesian, regulatory, redistributive, and social states. However they are defined, welfare states were basically founded on promises of relatively stable conditions for corporate capitalist accumulation coupled with social protections against capitalism’s worst harms. These protections included government provision of health care, education, and leisure opportunities, support for the arts and scientific research, environmental protections, insurance against unemployment, and basic supports for people whose age, health status, or care of dependents placed them outside labour markets. Critics of neoliberalism should not be tempted to romanticize welfare state arrangements, which depended on nuclear family forms, required the daily and intergenerational reproductive labour of women, and excluded or marginalized large groups of people by citizenship status, race, indigeneity, sexuality, and disability (see Braedley & Luxton, 2010). Nevertheless, welfare state arrangements, underpinned by progressive taxation, were hard-won results of social struggle. For a few decades after the twentieth-century world wars, as Rose (2000) put it, “[the welfare state’s] image of social progress through civility, solidarity, and security won out over both the image of social revolution on one hand and that of unfettered competition on the other” (p. 1400).

The historic compromise between capitalist classes and revolutionary labour to provide social security in exchange for stable conditions for profit began to fail as the financial economy outstripped corporate capitalism. As Rose (2000) put it, replacing the image of the “welfare” state, we have, “the facilitating state, the enabling state, or the state as animator” (p. 1400). To put it differently, capitalism’s neoliberal turn has shifted the state’s priority to facilitating, enabling, and animating markets and quasi-markets.

Neoliberals cast the welfare state as a costly, inefficient, bureaucratic encumbrance to economic growth. They also discredited it on moral grounds as a restraint on competitiveness, the preeminent value of neoliberal regimes. Market mentalities and market solutions were deemed morally preferable to the dependency instilled by the state’s excessive, misplaced generosity. In short, for neoliberals, the welfare state demoralized its beneficiaries, whereas competition spurred them on, sharpened their abilities, improved their performance, and fostered efficiency all-around (Dardot & Laval, 2013, p. 230). Even as waves of privatization and cutbacks widened social disparities along the lines of class, race, and gender, neoliberalism pushed a fierce moral critique of welfarism and evaded the age-old condemnation of market society as based in greed and exploitation.

As Rose (2000) observed, a shift in rhetoric from “society” to “community,” marked the neoliberal transformation in welfare state politics:

Populations that were once under the tutelage of the social state are to be set free to find their own destiny. Yet, at the same time, they are to be made responsible for their destiny and for that of society as a whole. Politics is to be returned to society itself, but no longer in a social form: in the form of individual morality, organizational responsibility, and ethical community. (Rose, 2000, p. 1400)

The hallmark of “government by community” would be personal caring, donating, and volunteering (Vrasti & Montsion, 2014, p. 340). As fundraisers spoke of “community,” this hope animated their politics: that individual morality and community ethics could take the place of government social welfare.

Fundraisers’ talk of creating a culture of philanthropy resounded with support for neoliberal values and policies. However, fundraisers’ talk also exposed the continued tensions between neoliberalism and competing discourses. At times, the vision of a “culture of philanthropy” was constructed in opposition to welfarism. At other times, it seemed to awkwardly incorporate aspects of welfarism. As Woolford and Curran (2012) explain, “Neoliberals are not strict ideologues in the sense that neoliberalism has shown a remarkable capacity to borrow and redeploy the discourses, programs, techniques, and policies of other competing theories, blending them to fit a neoliberal agenda” (p. 54). Irrespective of occasional clashes or overlaps between neoliberalism and welfarism, even fundraisers who disagreed politically on the role of the social state and taxation found common ground on the need to promote philanthropy and to use tax incentives to do so.

Fundraisers’ near-consensus across ideological differences also revealed that neoliberalism is suffused with paradox, as Wendy Brown (2015) has illustrated through the example of public-private partnerships. Public-private partnerships are complex, long-term arrangements for public infrastructure and service provision, which involve governments working with for-profit businesses and financers, and which typically require a substantial “local share” generated through philanthropic fundraising (Whiteside, 2016, p. 105). Brown writes: “[Neoliberalism] seeks to privatize every public enterprise, yet valorizes public-private partnerships that imbue the market with ethical potential and social responsibility and the public realm with market metrics” (p. 49). Public-private partnerships, or P3s, represent more than privatization; by blurring the lines between public and private, P3s turn profit-making into an overarching public good, which public and nonprofit partners jointly work to support.

Philanthrocapitalism, epitomized in P3s, further illustrates Brown’s argument about paradox: that neoliberalism repudiates government and public morality, but at the same time relies upon them to advance market logics. The standard critiques of philanthropy apply also to philanthrocapitalism but on a new scale. If philanthropy is a strategy for individuals and families with extreme or ill-gotten wealth to rehabilitate their reputations by giving away some of their fortunes (Wagner, 2000), philanthrocapitalism performs this reputational rehabilitation for neoliberal capitalism itself. Premised on the “hyper-agency” of the ultra-rich and the discovery that markets-with-morals can facilitate business-as-usual, philanthrocapitalism is the attempt to reconcile social responsibility with continued accumulation and consumption (Bishop & Green, 2008; Vrasti & Montsion, 2014, p. 340).

Fundraisers obscured the political work of philanthrocapitalism by conflating philanthropy and charity. If charity seeks to meet an immediate need, and philanthropy aims for a lasting impact, philanthrocapitalism is a more entrepreneurial style of philanthropy that regards the gift as a strategic investment and seeks a “return” in terms of measurable results (see Special Report: Wealth and Philanthropy, 2006). However, for fundraisers, the “culture of philanthropy” seemed to refer to all donors—casual, monthly, annual, major givers, and venture philanthropists alike. All groups were deemed united in giving what they could, according to their means. This framing rightly acknowledged that the rich are not more generous than the poor when giving is evaluated as a percentage of income (Wagner, 2000). However, the notion that everyone can be a philanthropist erased the politics of wealth and inequality inherent in philanthropy, and especially in the turn to philanthrocapitalism. Ivan Drury (2014) made this point in an essay in Briarpatch Magazine about urban development in the city of Vancouver:

Taking moral cues (but not policy) from social democracy, philanthrocapitalism aims to replace taxation and state-driven redistributions of wealth with voluntary acts of charity and “innovative” micro-market projects. To sell their charity as social change, philanthrocapitalist leadership draws on potent cultural symbols associated with social justice and sustainability, obscuring structures of inequality and exploitation.

In this way, philanthrocapitalism, “represents a friendly alternative to the ugliest aspects of capitalism” (Drury, 2014).

In the remainder of this chapter, I flesh out three aspects of the “Canadian social norm” of philanthropy that fundraisers sought to create. As Leah and her colleagues spoke about philanthrocapitalism and other philanthropic trends, they focused on three interrelated ideals: a widespread culture of philanthropy would instil an ethic of generosity; it would enshrine democracy; and it would transform social infrastructure in a positive direction. I have emphasized that not all fundraisers thought alike, but most interpreted these three ideals—generosity, democracy, and societal transformation—through market logic and in reaction to welfarism. To be specific, they defined generosity in opposition to paying taxes, painted philanthropy as democratic, and lauded major philanthropy as transformative, so long as that transformation was oriented towards investment, competitiveness, practices of calculating and maximizing outcomes, and entrepreneurialism. As Wendy Brown (2015) would say, fundraisers’ pervasive economic rationality transferred the sphere of politics into the sphere of the market.

A Better Society Through Generosity: “Not Something That Can Be Left to Government”

At minimum, a “culture of philanthropy” for Canadian fundraisers referred to the ideal of making generosity widespread; it meant individuals voluntarily embracing expanded responsibility for the charitable entities of their choice. Vance said as much when he shared his impression that a culture of philanthropy was growing in Canada. Over his 16-year career working for an environmental NGO, an independent school, a university, and two hospital foundations, he claimed to have witnessed a shift in Canadian’s attitudes:

I think there’s more of an understanding that we all have more of a role to play. […] This is not something that can be left to social service organizations and government. That is, on an individual basis, we need to do what we can in regardless of what form, big donors, small donors, volunteerism, whatnot, to make Canada a better society. (Vance)

By equally problematizing reliance on government and social service organizations, which are largely state-funded, Vance voiced scepticism about the role of government as both a deliverer and a funder of social services. In this vision of the “culture of philanthropy,” typical of the fundraisers in this study, societal betterment depended on voluntaristic giving—people donating what they can of their time and money. Vance welcomed the emerging understanding that “we all have more of a role to play” to compensate for shortcomings of social service organizations and government and fill a service void.

How is it that, for fundraisers like Vance, uncoordinated charitable acts, small and large, had the potential to “make Canada a better society” in ways that tax-funded programmes could not? I got insight into this question from my interview with Dawn, a major gifts fundraiser who had worked with two universities and a hospital foundation. I asked her whether tax policies to incentivize philanthropy shift some of the responsibility for social provision from government onto individuals. “Yes, I think, absolutely,” she agreed, but promptly asserted that promoting philanthropy is important in itself as a moral project that remedies the welfare state’s moral failings.

It’s interesting because I do believe though in a philanthropic culture. I do think that it makes individuals better and it makes a society better when people are philanthropic. (Dawn)

Fundraisers working in social welfare agencies did not necessarily hold stronger commitments to welfarism than their colleagues in charities less tied to state funding. For example, Sharlene’s varied 16-year career had led her to an executive position with a national social service charity that served vulnerable populations. She had thought about the politics of philanthropy as someone who witnessed the effects of government cutbacks on her agency and its clients. In response to the question I posed to Dawn, she first referred to the Canadian political writer, John Ralston Saul.

His [Saul’s] position is that philanthropy is a very inefficient way to support community need.Footnote 3 And from a practical, tactical point of view, I see that side of it. The other part of me really does believe in the importance of community engagement and of people voluntarily giving some of what is theirs, and sharing, right? […] I do think that that’s a really important communal value in a society, that if you just leave it all to taxation, you’re missing that whole thing that can create something quite lovely. (Sharlene)

In this remark, Sharlene’s endorsement of welfarism acknowledged the “practical, tactical” advantages of state provisioning; however, she distinguished this pragmatic stance from her moral position, which advocated individualized generosity. Sharlene could have conceptualized taxation as “sharing” and as a “communal value” through a welfarist orientation but, typical of her colleagues, she spoke of philanthropy in contradistinction to taxation. Donating, not tax-paying, was morally improving of individuals and society for Sharlene, and so philanthropy has indispensable societal value, even when promoted at the expense of, admittedly more efficient, tax-funded social programmes.

While most fundraisers generally agreed with Sharlene on the moral necessity of philanthropy, their general views of taxation were conflicted. Representing one pole was Charles, who had headed capital campaigns in top fundraising positions, first for a university and then a consulting firm, over his 19-year career: “How much do people want to pay in tax to the government at the end of the day?” Charles asked rhetorically. “I think government should get out of the way in some ways. Be a strategic partner but let these [nonprofit] organizations develop themselves as well. Grow, thrive, succeed!” Supporting a platform of low taxation and few government-administered programmes, Charles argued that people would donate more only if government did less.

In contrast, Glenn, who identified as a social democrat, defended welfarism. Reflecting on his 16 years working for a disease-related health charity, social service organization, and hospital foundation, Glenn argued that tax-paying, like philanthropy, should feel important and meaningful:

One of the arguments why philanthropy is so important [is] because it’s a voluntary giving to a cause, and it can be redemptive, it can be meaningful. My hope would be that people also, to a degree, feel the same way about their taxes, that that [taxpaying] is an important thing that we [citizens] are doing as well. I think politicians do a bad job of making that case (laughing), and there are ideologies that are fully against that and are not trying to make the case. So that’s a big fight as well in our society. (Glenn)

While Charles and Glenn appear to be far apart politically on the issue of taxation, they both positively evaluated their work as fundraisers against what they saw as a failure of government. When Glenn said, “I think politicians do a bad job of making that case [for taxation]” he implied that fundraisers do a superior job of what they call, “making the case for support.” In a similar way, Charles argued that governments fail to perform the most basic, obligatory task of fundraisers: thanking donors in a personal way.

If I make that donation to charity of $200, that’s $100 that I can take off the taxes that I would pay to the Receiver General. I’m happy with that decision and I’ve done good for a community that I believe in. Salvation Army, Red Cross, Big Brothers and Sisters, whatever it is, YMCA, I’m going to support them and they’re going to thank me. [But] I write a cheque for the government, they never thank me. You know, I bust my butt for them, you know, and I never get a thank you from the prime minister, the finance minister, in all the years that I’ve been doing it. So, you know, people are just fed up with it. And they want to do something that’s good for their community. (Charles)

Charles’ exhibition of “tax rage” (Patriquin, 2004), and his sympathy with the chauvinistic wishes of “fed up” people to benefit “their community” and not pay taxes, may seem polar opposite to Glenn’s stance on the “big fight” for fair taxation, but these ideologically dissimilar fundraisers expressed common ground on the need to cultivate civic generosity. Like Vance, Dawn, and Sharlene, who emphasized the moral benefits of philanthropic culture, Charles and Glenn saw themselves as doing vital work that government was unwilling or unable to do. They all advanced a neoliberal culture of philanthropy by defining generosity in tension with tax-paying and by elevating the virtue of individual giving to make up for the insufficiency of tax-funded programmes.

Charitable Tax Incentives as Power to the People

Democracy was the second ideal I heard repeatedly associated with the goal of creating a culture of philanthropy. Democratic ideas arose especially in discussion of fundraisers’ lobby for more tax incentives for charitable donations. In each interview, I explored views on the gradual augmentation of tax incentives over the years. Fundraisers held that the multiplication of major gifts in number and size, one of the most significant changes of their careers, was directly owed to these incentives, particularly the elimination of capital gains tax on donations of appreciated publicly traded securities. The success of the revised tax code in raising more and bigger major gifts made it patently good public policy.

To better understand the consensus on tax incentives, I introduced the objection that the tax credit for charitable donations was undemocratic because it allowed individuals to trigger a government subsidy in the form of a tax expenditure for the charities of their choice. In other words, individual whims would allocate money that would have gone into public coffers and been expended through a budget process. Tax incentives were also class and gender biased, I pointed out, in that they allow those who make the largest donations, disproportionately wealthy men, to trigger the largest government subsidy. If there were no statistical differences in who donates how much and where, tax incentives would be less objectionable, but differences exist. For instance, the tax expenditure assists hospitals, universities, and large cultural institutions, which are favoured by the richest donors, more than social service organizations and religious charities, which are the preferred causes of ordinary donors (Duff, 2001, p. 47).

Some fundraisers admitted to being unfamiliar with these arguments, saying they had regarded their professional organizations’ advocacy of increased tax incentives as uncontroversial. In response to the challenge I raised, most backed the tax incentives on the grounds that they successfully stimulated major gifts, which were needed and would not happen otherwise. Interestingly, their defence of government-supported philanthropy was often framed in democratic terms. For example, Diane, whose 18 years’ experience was with children’s and disease charities and a large hospital foundation, justified the tax credit when I reminded her that large and mega-donors were, in effect, allocating the expenditure of “public money” because over half of the value of their donations would be returned to them as tax credits. Diane’s response applied the language of popular sovereignty to multi-millionaires:

I say it [the portion of the gift that is offset by the tax credit] is still public money. It’s just that you’re allowing the donor to choose where it goes versus it going into the pot and the government. You’re putting power back into the peoples' hands. (Diane)

Diane’s identification of philanthrocapitalists with “the people” illustrated Wendy Brown’s (2005) argument that neoliberal governmentality (governing mentality) “resignifies democracy as ubiquitous entrepreneurialism,” and as “thoroughgoing market rationality in state and society” (p. 50).

Another fundraiser of 15 years, Duncan, who had worked for a large Christian charity, as well as nonprofit organizations in the arts sector, took issue with the argument that the people who make the most use of the tax incentive have different value systems, material interests, and political priorities than the majority.

I don’t see the major gifts that I’ve encountered doing anything that would shift value systems or shift interests or shift priorities. I wonder if that’s coming from an elitist approach thinking that, ‘Well they’re just giving 10 million to the opera and the opera only deals with the elite.’ The thing is that I think that for many of these major gifts, the money wouldn’t be coming in any other way. […] People who say that are being a bit elitist thinking that major gift donors are going to wag the dog, the tail is going to wag the dog, and I don’t agree with that. (Duncan)

Both Diane and Duncan’s statements attempted to deny or reverse class hierarchy. In another instance of what Brown (2015) called “the language of democracy used against the demos” (p. 128), economic elites became “the people.” People who challenge class privilege became “elitist.”

Fundraisers’ most common defence of the charitable income tax credit policy likened donating to the neoliberal touchstone of consumer sovereignty, “the economic power exercised by the preferences of consumers in a free market” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). They argued that the free exercise of individual preferences in donating was akin to voting and an instantiation of democracy. For example, Elizabeth, whose 20-year career was with both small and large hospital foundations, a large arts organization, an independent school, and a national consulting firm, justified the tax-sheltering aspect of philanthropy saying, “Maybe that’s okay, maybe that’s a way of voting for certain causes, for what people believe in.”

While analysing a different social policy (Canada’s long-form census), sociologists William Ramp and Trevor Harrison (2012) described this analogy between everyday consumer activity (shopping or donating) and voting:

If a commercial organization cannot continue to attract “votes” in the form of dollars freely offered, the argument goes, it has no right to patronage; indeed, no right to exist. By extension, this transmutes into a justification for neoliberal resistance to state intervention in the economy; to state provision of goods and services; to state “monopolies” in areas such as education and health care, and ultimately, to “mandatory” state interventions in private life or business that do not derive from some specific and freely expressed majority preference. (Ramp & Harrison, 2012, p. 284)

By the same logic, the charitable income tax credit was justified because it appears to organize state support for the charitable sector through a voluntaristic process, like shopping or voting, which appealed to neoliberal populism.

Charles, referred to earlier, illustrated a fundraiser’s expression of neoliberal populism. As a service to the clients of his consulting firm, Charles created digital tools for charities to help donors calculate their tax savings. He argued that the tax system ought to reward donors (in his view, refrain from punishing them), and emphasized that donors have the right to support their selected charities with their own tax-exempt money:

I just think that the people who’ve made the money and choose to share it, that’s their prerogative. […] And so by the very nature of having an opportunity, this is the democratic process. […] You vote with your cheque book in this case. (Charles)

When I responded that, “Only a very few get to vote with their cheque book,” suggesting that donating is more an exercise of economic power than a universal right, like voting, Charles disagreed. He maintained that donating is so widely practiced, and available to anyone, it is virtually a universal practice:Footnote 4

No, but 22 million people donate to charity every year. So, whether you’re supporting somebody who is going to run for breast cancer, walk up the CN Tower, [whether somebody] goes to a gala, supports a cause, writes a cheque to whatever organizations that they want to, 22 million is the adult population. It’s almost a hundred percent giving across the board. So, everybody votes. Everybody has the opportunity to participate. It’s just not the elite. The elite happen to get their name on a building but the differentiation between the elite and the person who is the token donor to an organization, there’s no difference. […] The differentiation is the person who gave five million dollars, or ten or twenty million dollars, did it and has been recognized for it in a more public way. So, there is no, there’s no issue. (Charles)

In arguing that “everybody votes” or has that opportunity, and “there’s no difference” between six-figure philanthropists and people who sponsor a friend’s charity bike ride, Charles transposed the principle of formal equality between citizen-electors into the neoliberal image of the market as the proper sphere of democratic politics. Both ordinary and mega-donors were equally valued contributors to charity in Charles’ understanding and it was not relevant that the wealthiest philanthropists received the most attention of fundraisers, a disproportionate share of tax incentives, and the greatest opportunity to shape an emergent culture of philanthropy and the nonprofit and voluntary sector. In this way, neoliberal discourse performed a levelling operation in conjunction with another move that Ramp and Harrison (2012) called, “the consumerization of political rights [and] … of politics itself” (p. 284). Through such discursive work, fundraisers such as Charles sought to align philanthropy with a particular interpretation of democratic values. In doing so they substantiated Brown’s argument that neoliberalism is stealthily “undoing democracy” by “converting the distinctly political character, meaning and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones” (Brown, 2015, p. 17, emphasis in original).

Transformative Philanthropy and the Business of Changing Lives

Societal change is the third ideal fundraisers associated with a “culture of philanthropy.” Just as Todd, introduced in Chap. 1, described fundraising as “the business of hope,” Myrna, a fundraising consultant for 23 years, similarly said, “We’re in the business to change lives […], you know, fundraisers, we’re agents of change where money just happens to be the vehicle. It’s all about changing lives.” Tamara elaborated on this theme. Drawing on a 16-year career that started in a social service charity and transitioned to a national, multi-sector nonprofit network, she summed up fundraisers’ purpose this way: “We are in the business of engaging citizens actively in the life of their community over a period of time in ways that have transformative potential.” Each of these fundraisers compared themselves to salespeople marketing hope to prospective donors that a gift of money could change lives and communities for the better.

Most fundraisers also boasted a distinctly neoliberal brand to their business: self- and community-entrepreneurship. They made clear that the old welfarist brand of hope, whatever its merits or flaws, had been retired. For example, Darlene, who had developed many fundraising specializations in her work with a hospital foundation over 20 years, reiterated the neoliberal axiom that there is no alternative to devolving responsibility for personal and civic wellbeing to individuals when she said: “I mean the government, it just simply can’t be everything to everybody. And we have to embrace as humans what we can do for our own wellbeing.”

The job of many of the fundraisers I interviewed was to pitch hope for social change primarily to potential major donors, ideally those with philanthrocapitalist mindsets and extraordinary net worth. For example, Leah, who expressed the populist-sounding aspiration to “make philanthropy a Canadian social norm,” later described the emerging trend towards “transformative philanthropy,” another term for philanthrocapitalism, which Drury (2014) has also referred to as the charity of the super-rich with, “the discursive sparkle of social change”:

A lot of the transformational gifts are gifts that will affect […] public policy. So, a lot of the large gifts are really looking to address very significant needs within society. […] It’s [become] that much more strategic, where I [the philanthrocapitalist] see a problem in society that needs to be fixed and I recognize that a million dollars isn’t going to do it. We need a $30 million gift to do it because we need the buy-in from all parties and I need to be a big player in it. (Leah)

In this business of changing lives by helping mega-donors strategically solve social problems, fundraisers needed to establish the political legitimacy of major philanthropic interventions. In the interviews, I heard them apply two criteria, one an explicit, professional standard, the other a taken-for-granted political logic, when deliberating on whether to support donors’ strategic use of wealth. First, they considered whether the terms of the gift were consistent with established priorities. Fundraisers’ ethical practice required that their solicitations correctly reflected the recipient organization’s mission.Footnote 5 They took seriously this professional mandate to help donors match their personal philanthropic goals with organizations’ greatest needs without causing “mission drift,” which Mavis explained as follows:

Donors want to be engaged, they want to be involved. So, there are some repercussions to that. I mean, that can create a tension within an organization between [pause], well, some people would refer to it as “mission drift,” if you get donors who are, kind of, calling the tune. You know, if you’ve got a big donor who is walking up with $5 million but they have their own particular vision, that’s great, as long as that coincides with the vision of the organization. But does it skew things? (Mavis)

To Mavis’ rhetorical question, after resolving concerns about “mission drift,” did donors’ influence on organizations “skew things,” a second, more implicit criterion came into play. The political legitimacy of transformative gifts depended on the type of politics they advanced. Gifts were acceptable when the change they proposed appeared to be market-driven, and therefore, supposedly outside the scope of the political. Elizabeth (cited earlier) spoke this tacit rule aloud during a discussion of small charities’ disadvantages compared to those with big fundraising shops:

Unfortunately, I think that the mean, lean, fundraising-machine organizations […] they really get a huge, huge percent [of overall donations] versus something like the food bank that probably is really, really important in society in general. And, in fact, a contribution a similar size to what a big university might get would have a huge impact, probably even too big of an impact. It would change the dynamics of it. So, I’m a believer in letting the market do what it should when it comes to fundraising. (Elizabeth)

Elizabeth rejected the idea of soliciting gifts on the order of tens of millions, such as large universities occasionally receive, for food banks. Funding of this magnitude would change the dynamics of food banks, potentially reducing hunger and increasing food security to the point that the food bank mission of providing short-term emergency rations was no longer needed. For Elizabeth, this would be, “too big of an impact.” Instead, allocating wealth to social needs was best left to a “market” in which philanthropic opportunities compete. Elizabeth recognized the vital work of small charities but ruled out rectifying their inequality. As Wendy Brown (2015) explained, “Inequality is the premise and outcome of competition. Consequently, when the political rationality of neoliberalism is fully realized, when market principles are extended to every sphere, inequality becomes legitimate, even normative, in every sphere” (p. 64).

Elizabeth’s example of the food bank revealed the neoliberal standard for transformative philanthropy: social inequality and its consequences, such as hunger and food insecurity, were not to be transformed. Rather, competition—in particular, the uneven competition among charitable organizations to land major gifts—was to arbitrate the political questions of transformative philanthropy. So long as philanthrocapitalists were perceived as players in a market, and their gifts reinforced market mentalities involving innovation, evaluation, investment, and entrepreneurialism, they could operate as change-makers. Likewise, when fundraisers represented themselves as responsive businesspeople, they could exercise their political agency in doing the work of neoliberalization: transforming political, moral, and ethical spheres along the model of markets.

Fundraisers’ Political Agency

Fundraisers in the 1990s and early 2000s, in response to the urgent needs of de-funded nonprofit organizations, set themselves the ambition to develop a culture of philanthropy. In doing so, they made themselves agents of neoliberalization. Working through professional associations, they successfully advocated overhauling tax rules to promote philanthrocapitalism, the highest expression of the culture of philanthropy. They were rewarded by career mobility across organizations and up the ranks in a growing industry centred on soliciting major gifts. Their advocacy helped consolidate the renegotiated relationship between the state and nonprofit organizations that I described in Chap. 2, which threw charities into intensified competition for donors and entrenched the fundraising industry in Canada’s political economy. In the conduct of their jobs, the establishment of their careers, and the work of their associations, fundraisers instilled a philanthropic culture according to the same neoliberal rationality of economization that guided the programme of reduced social spending.

Fundraisers circulated legitimizing discourses of neoliberalism as they defined the culture of philanthropy in particular ways. Specifically, they presented a moral vision of philanthropy as a vehicle for generosity, democracy, and social transformation. Their individual ideological differences did not seem to affect the coherence of this vision, as they consistently represented philanthropy as an alternative to tax-funded social programmes. They understood generosity as individual giving and as antithetical to taxation. They cast plutocratic activity and donor-centrism in the egalitarian language of liberal democracy, and peddled hope for social change, with the proviso that change must be along a neoliberal trajectory that maintains social inequalities, and with the parallel message that there is no alternative.