"...She had our attention now — but what was she doing? Emerson Collective did not appear to conform to traditional models of philanthropy. Its worldview seemed more or less clear — center-left politics with a dash of techie libertarianism — but its grand plan was unstated while its methods of spurring social change implied that simply funding good works is no longer enough. The engine Powell Jobs had designed was equal parts think tank, foundation, venture capital fund, media baron, arts patron and activist hive. Certainly, it was an original creation — and potentially a powerful one. “I’d like us to be a place where great leaders want to come and try to do difficult things,” Powell Jobs told me recently. “I think we bring a lot more to the table than money. … If you want to just be a check writer, you’d run out of money and not solve anything.”
"...Powell Jobs is frank about the pain of “losing my husband and life partner — seeing him through a terrible illness, then losing him and raising my kids as a single mom. And in doing it, dealing with the public in that way. Having to grieve but also manage the public grieving, and buttress my kids as they managed the same thing.” She told me the experience may well inform her in her current efforts: “There are a lot of people who have experienced loss and suffering, but sometimes they haven’t done the work to allow them to connect to someone else’s loss and suffering.”
"Even when the couple knew there would soon come a time when Laurene would have a whole lot of money to spend as she saw fit, they didn’t talk much about how she would go about it. Steve left it to her to design that future. “He had a lot of faith in me, and he definitely believed I could figure out many things,” she says.
"...It all has to do with democratizing access and opportunity for voices she thinks have been shut out. “I don’t like that money and wealth equates with power, and then that power can be used for good or for ill,” she told me. “I actually think that the power base should be distributed and there should be other reasons that individuals have power, and I’d like to see much more edifying reasons rise to the top. And so as a philanthropist and as someone who actually now has the ability to create a different type of organization to do a certain type of work, I don’t mind modeling what I think is a better way to do things, a better way to solve problems.”
"The paradox is obvious. She is using her money and power to try to make sure the money and power of people like her will matter a little bit less, because those who don’t have it now will have access to a little bit more. There is something undemocratic about her mission to democratize the ability to pursue one’s potential. And yet, it has ever been so for liberal reformers. Ralph Waldo Emerson and his fellow New England transcendentalists weren’t rich at this scale, but they were privileged white men, for the most part. Through their abolitionism, their pacifism and their recognition of genius in every soul, they advocated for a world of more broad-based privilege.
“It is a paradox,” Powell Jobs says. “Martin Luther King spoke about that paradox himself, absolutely, where he said philanthropy is a very useful and good tool, but it should not ignore the conditions that created the philanthropy, that the philanthropy is trying to address. Now even more so, the way that wealth is accumulating at such a fast pace to the top 0.1 percent, 0.5 percent of the population, that wealth accumulation has to be used to correct the system that created it. … As a philanthropist, I think the most important thing is to be awake and cognizant of that, and honest about how that wealth accumulation happened, and to be smart about how you’re trying to go about changing things.”"
Comments
Post a Comment