The Problem with Giving Tuesday

Remember when Silicon Valley hacked the cold-press juice market?

In 2013, Doug Evans—a self-proclaimed Steve Jobs-like savant—laid plans to bring his $700, Wi-Fi-enabled, fruit and vegetable squeezer, Juicero Press, to market.

Backed by $120 million in venture capital, the Wi-Fi-driven device strangled the contents of proprietary pre-blended fruit and vegetable packets sold exclusively by the San Francisco-based company with four tons of pressure on your kitchen countertop.

Months after Juicero Press launched, the hyped-up company imploded.

As The Guardian writes, Juicero and its backers were “roundly mocked” when Bloomberg News reported that “users could easily squeeze the packets with their hands and turn the contents into juice at a faster rate than the expensive cold-press juicer machine.”

Juicero lived a brief life. Its memory, nevertheless, endures as a lively emblem of what journalist Claire Reilly calls “a dazzling shitshow of Silicon Valley bluster.”

Every year when Giving Tuesday—the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving—rolls around, I think about the short-lived, high-tech countertop juice and vegetable annihilator, because Giving Tuesday is the Juicero of Big Philanthropy.

The Globalization of Everyday Givers

Giving Tuesday, the self-proclaimed “movement that unleashes the power of radical generosity around the world,” employs the same self-aggrandizing marketing hype as the defunct Silicon Valley juicer to pump up its inscrutable value.

The organization’s website and social media drip with aspirational language that lays claim to pre-existing achievements belonging to others, namely, all of humanity: “Our global network collaborates year-round to inspire generosity around the world, with a common mission to build a world where generosity is part of everyday life.”

Generosity is already a part of everyday life. It was a part of everyday life long before 2012, when Giving Tuesday bestowed itself upon the world, just as people imbibed fruit and vegetable nectar for millennia prior to venture capital delivering Juicero unto humanity.

Generosity exists without Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday, however, needs generosity to justify its existence. Giving Tuesday is parasitic upon human goods not of its own making, even as it touts itself as generosity’s predicate and cheerleader-in-chief.

Also like Juicero, Giving Tuesday dazzles with the trappings of technology and isn’t shy about hyping it. The Giving Tuesday Data Commons website proudly says it “partners with hundreds of collaborators and 50 global data labs.” It’s the largest philanthropic “data collaboration ever built,” one Giving Tuesday report gushes over itself.

I couldn’t find a list of the 50 global data labs on the Giving Tuesday site. Admittedly, I don’t really know what a “global data lab” is, if having 50 is better than having, say, only 40, or if anyone is more generous as a result of the globe having even one. Global data labs feel a lot like Juicero’s proprietary integrated Wi-Fi technology: a marketing ploy implying some vague techie wizardry intent on dazzling and distracting naive consumers.

Indeed, click and scroll through the glut of Giving Tuesday Data Commons quarterly, annual, and special reports; data dashboards and roadmaps; and data-visualizations library. The work product all seems derivative of the hundreds of major giving reports, sector analyses, case studies, surveys, and white papers churned out by universities, think tanks, policy groups, and private-sector fundraising factories and consultants year after year.

What’s never made clear is how all of this big data actually “inspires more giving around the world,” which the Giving Tuesday Data Commons claims as its raison d’etre. Product from the self-described “revolutionary” Data Commons seems like the same old data juice squeezed through a different, more-costly machine with better hype. Does Giving Tuesday’s big data really make people around the globe more generous, I mean, radically generous?

During Giving Tuesday’s tenure, millions of American households have in fact stopped giving to public charities. Were it not for an increase in giving among the violently rich, overall charitable giving would be in radical decline.

The strategic quintessence of the alliance between finance capital, technology, and marketing is to sell people new products and services for things they already have, are already doing, or don’t really need. There’s nothing new under the sun, but that marketing and technology backed by Silicon Valley venture capital makes it so.

The concentration of wealth coupled with the abundance of cheap money in our era of monetary liberalism, finds venture capital chasing dubious and even fraudulent projects one after another: WeWork, Theranos, FTX, Juicero, etc. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023—the third-largest bank collapse in U.S. history—intimated the scale of the sucking financial black hole lurking beneath Silicon Valley puff.

The rise of charitable ventures like Giving Tuesday likewise gives us a glimpse into the emptiness at the heart of many of America’s largest philanthropic enterprises.

Giving Tuesday Secures the Bag

Giving Tuesday wasn’t a thing until 2021. That’s the year, according to Foundation Directory, big money skulked in, when the Chicago Community Trust distributed a $7 million gift to the public charity, swelling its annual budget from the low six figures to more than $10 million annually.

The ultimate source of Giving Tuesday’s $7 million 2021 payday is unknown. We don’t know who gave the money to the Chicago Community Trust to deliver to Giving Tuesday. Neither public charity discloses that information to any “global network of collaborators” or the general public on its website.

It’s difficult to know who Giving Tuesday’s funders are because, although their website boasts a cavalcade of corporate, finance, and big foundation sponsorship logos, it doesn’t disclose amounts, and I couldn’t find any data in the Giving Tuesday Data Commons about the generosity of the group’s own funders. The Giving Tuesday Data Commons is like an eye that sees everything but itself. Maybe more “global data labs” are in order.

What could be gleaned from the organization’s 2023 IRS Form 990 and Foundation Directory shows that in 2022, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gifted $10 million to Giving Tuesday, the bulk of the group’s 2022 budget.

Foundation Directory also reports that the Gates Foundation has contributed $15,642,981 to Giving Tuesday over the years, making the Gates Foundation Giving Tuesday’s biggest donor.

The Gates Foundation money is important because, like the $120 million in venture capital that backed the founder of Juicero, it appears to have fueled the organization’s drive to market, to better tell its radical generosity story with the help of a platoon of marketing consultants, and to supersize its Data Commons.

It also played a part, one imagines, in securing the public charity’s founder, CEO, and president Asha Curran, $563,533 in total compensation in 2023.

“We are immensely grateful for this generous gift and for the longtime partnership we have with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,” Curran effused upon the occasion of the Gates Foundation’s 2022 gift.  With the Gates Foundation’s financial underwriting, Giving Tuesday would  “unlock even more of the transformational power of giving.”

Bill Gates long imagined a better tool for measuring human behavior.

In a 2013 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, he noted how the advent of the micrometer led to the harnessing of steam power, which ushered in the Industrial Revolution. By extension, he argued, if a better yardstick for measuring the value of philanthropic output could be developed, society would realize a great leap forward.

With better tools for measurement, Gates concluded, “progress isn’t ‘doomed to be rare and erratic.’ We can, in fact, make it commonplace.”

In the Giving Tuesday Data Commons, Gates thus found an acolyte in Curran and a big-data surveillance, collection, and calculation instrument for tracking and measuring human generosity: “unparalleled and comprehensive data sets of generosity behaviors around the world,” the Data Commons proclaims. Together, they would “use data to power a more generous world.”

“Each act of generosity, each act of kindness, and each moment where someone gives whatever they can to a neighbor, a cause, or a community,” Curran extolls in praise of the Gates Foundation gift, “takes us one step closer to creating the world that we all want to live in.”

Humans, of course, aren’t steam engines. They cleave to the mystery of their being and unlike locomotives, resist easy calibration. “I am a little world made cunningly,” the poet John Donne once wrote.

No matter, flush with Gates Foundation funding, Giving Tuesday is on a mission to squeeze every bit of juice out of the fruit of human generosity.

By hacking generosity and making it radical, Curran would recreate the world in a manner that Bill Gates imagines that “we all want to live in:” a quantifiable world of perpetual human progress driven by big data and billionaire intellectual dilettantes.

The Juice Isn’t Worth the Squeeze

Bill Gates isn’t the first billionaire who has tried to pluck the mystery out of the heart of human generosity.

In the early 2000s, Sir John Templeton’s namesake charitable foundation invested millions of dollars to uncover the “science of generosity.”

“What are the biological, psychological, and social factors,” the Templeton Foundation asked, “that encourage people to give time, money, and assistance?” “Are there evidence-based strategies for cultivating greater degrees of generosity?”

Like Bill Gates and Giving Tuesday, the Templeton Foundation reasoned that if science could demystify human generosity, then giving could be scaled up and a new era of human flourishing based upon the science of generosity could be unleashed upon the world.

The Templeton Foundation’s multi-million-dollar Science of Generosity project culminated in an infographic called “The Joy of Generosity” that explores the “fifteen surprising benefits of generosity,” like how generosity makes people more attractive as romantic partners—“sexual selection may have played a role in human social evolution,” we learn.

The Foundation’s grantmaking also produced a 2018 white paper by The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley that “provides a high-altitude overview of more than 350 studies and meta-studies.”

The upshot of all of this decades-long scientific research? “The broad occurrence of generosity across species suggests that generosity may be an evolutionary adaptation that has helped to promote the survival of these species—and our own.”

The juice hardly seems worth the squeeze. Predictably, nothing much seems to have come from the Templeton Foundation’s penetrating scientific insights into generosity.

I visited the University of Notre Dame’s Science of Generosity Initiative website, but it hasn’t been updated since 2017, when the most recent news item was posted. Was 2017 the year that Notre Dame’s $5 million Templeton Foundation grant ran out? Or perhaps nothing more on the topic could be said, science having uncovered generosity’s guarded evolutionary secrets?

Like Giving Tuesday, the Templeton Foundation’s Science of Generosity project embodied the idiosyncratic intellectual proclivities of its billionaire funder. Sir John, like Gates, believed that science could be the gateway to unlimited human progress—the key to all mythologies.

The tools of modern science, Sir John is quoted on the Templeton Foundation’s website, would reveal “the deepest realities of human nature and the physical world,” including religious truths. This he called “the new spiritual information” upon which real human insight and progress are predicated.

For all of the intellectual sophistication that millions of dollars in philanthropic backing bestowed upon the Templeton Foundation’s project, the Science of Generosity, like Giving Tuesday, turns out to be yet another Juicero—a Big Philanthropy vanity project as hollow as it is grandiose.

The Decline of Charitable Giving

There is a belief current among philanthropic elites that the rise of enterprises like Giving Tuesday, commercial donor-advised funds, and crowdfunding platforms, signal the democratization of philanthropy. Technology, they claim, has opened up philanthropy to the masses, tearing down exclusionary barriers that once prevented every American from becoming their own Bill or Melinda Gates. Such is the formula for a more just, caring, and equitable world.

“The technology and financial services sectors,” Cor Hoekstra exudes in Alliance magazine, “are now aiding a cultural shift that is well underway—the potential for the 99 per cent to join forces with the one percent in funding the nonprofit causes that will make the world a better place for us all.”

“Donor-advised funds,” the Philanthropy Roundtable likewise claims, “are not just changing the face of philanthropy, they are democratizing giving and accelerating positive change … making philanthropy more accessible, flexible and efficient.”

If the data are to be believed, the opposite is happening: millions of average donors have stopped giving to official charities while philanthropy is concentrating at the top. America has 20 million fewer donors since 2000.

Those on the upper and rarified side of the income and wealth divides are giving more and more, but giving to philanthropic instruments sequestered from working charities and public scrutiny. Forty percent of all individual giving in 2022 went to private charitable foundations and donor-advised funds.

What Giving Tuesday enthusiasts and Big Philanthropy cheerleaders can’t bring themselves to admit, is that the conventional philanthropic landscape in America is shrinking, not expanding. Everyday Americans are abandoning traditional forms of giving by the millions because 40 years of wealth and income inequality is driving them out. They have nothing to give. In 2024, 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

The income inequality devastating everyday givers provides the capital fueling billionaire vanity projects like Giving Tuesday and the Science of Generosity. These projects may not be the reason 20 million households have stopped giving. They are nevertheless emblems of a philanthropic regime in which fewer and fewer Americans participate or have a meaningful voice. They insulate Big Philanthropy’s gated community from public participation and scrutiny.

The problems that billionaire-funded projects like Giving Tuesday tilt at have no real insight into the provenance, growth, or decline of generosity. Billionaires like Bill Gates, as journalist Timothy Schwab has put it, are forever trying “to collapse the yawning divide between Big Philanthropy and small philanthropy, presenting billionaire giving as little different from the small charitable gifts that the rest of us make.”

Giving Tuesday exploits the generosity of average givers by marketing to them a level  philanthropic playing field that slopes decisively in favor of America’s most wealthy, including its billionaire patron. It raises the specter of an American society where the concentration of philanthropic capital into fewer and fewer hands results in more and more public charities—like Giving Tuesday—serving the interests of their wealthy funders at the expense of the public’s interest.

Giving Tuesday, in other words, represents the retreat of charitable giving, not its democratization.

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This article first appeared in the Giving Review on November 26, 2024.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-problem-with-giving-tuesday/