 Okay at the last couple people I guess we're I guess we're all set here. Good morning. Good late morning I guess or early afternoon. My name is Mark Schmidt. I run the political reform program here at New America and we are we are thrilled to have a conversation today with with an old friend of mine David Callahan who's the author of this important book The Givers, Wealth Power and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age. This is the reason we wanted to do this as a as a program of political reform program really when we were when we launched this program at the beginning of 2014 one of the phrases that we used we don't use it quite as much now but we used to use the phrase the marketplace for power what we really wanted to look at was not just you know just a particular thing like money in politics or redistricting but really the structures that create the marketplace for power in in the United States and globally and I I've always felt like as important as money in politics and other things are is is really the role of philanthropy in setting policy agendas defining what's possible and and in basically in some ways playing a role in our future that is at the very least complex and having worked for for a foundation I'm I'm acutely aware of that and I think it's also changed in very significant ways during that period when I was working in a foundation I got to know David Callahan who at the time was I think a resident scholar at the Century Foundation later was was one of the founders of Demos which was a think tank that in New York that started about the same time that that this one did and we were we were kind of on parallel tracks of of encouraging foundations to speak out about public issues not just provide services but to really be be engaged in in the in the public debate and I think his views about that have have changed a bit over the over the years and is very much reflected in in this book David is the founder and editor of inside philanthropy a digital media site that covers the world of of donors and foundations which is you know I've always felt like there needs to be at the very least a lot more journalism of all kinds about the worlds of philanthropy and and nonprofits as I said before that he was a senior fellow at Demos which he co-founded working on economic and political inequality and wrote a book about the culture of cheating and a number of other a number of other books as well and he was the earlier in his career he was managing at the American prospect where I worked much later so our paths have intersected in many ways over the over the over the past several years I'm really thrilled to have a have have David wants this conversation in conversation with David Kristen Goss is associate professor of public policy and political science at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke and also everybody's a founder she founded and directs the University's Duke in Washington program and her focus has been on civic engagement and interest groups she's written about gun gun safety movement and and and and women's groups and has recently been writing herself a lot of research that's been very important about philanthropy and public policy so will be an important has it be and began her career in fact as a journalist covering philanthropy at the Chronicle of philanthropy so now there are two major sources of journalism about these issues so what we'll do is you know if you've been here before David will talk a little bit about his book basic argument Kristen will engage him in some conversation I might raise a question or two and then we'll open it up to a broader conversation so with no further ado I'll turn over to you well thanks for that introduction Mark I'm grateful to be here you know I was just remembering actually that the first book event I ever had for my first book was in Washington DC quite some time ago and exactly one person showed up and it was my my my girlfriend's father who was really suspicious of the fact that I was a writer like clearly I must be on the road so loser dumb and that confirmed it to him so I'm grateful to be here and have all of you here and also grateful to be writing about philanthropy right now because this is really the most exciting moment in philanthropy ever and the biggest story in philanthropy right now is all these new big donors who are arriving on the scene with mind-boggling amounts of money in many cases and the way to think about this story is to think about it as kind of the next chapter in this second gilded age that we've been living in since the early 1980s this massive run-up of these great fortunes during this period of record economic inequality we've heard a lot about how that inequality came to be and the drivers of it we haven't heard so much about how it's likely to play out in decades and perhaps centuries to come as those great fortunes are harnessed to philanthropic ambitions of a wide of a wide array of sorts just to give you a sense of of how much money has sort of piled up at the top consider a few statistics so in 1982 the Forbes 400 published its first the Forbes published its first Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America to get on the list you needed 80 million dollars there was only 13 billionaires on the list the richest person on the list had two billion dollars fast forward to earlier this spring Forbes released a 2017 for 400 list lots of billionaires didn't even make the cut poor souls because you needed a 1.7 billion dollars to get on the list the richest person on the list has 86 billion dollars that would be Bill Gates and the list has a those 400 people a small enough group to fit into a you know a hotel ballroom those 400 people have a combined net worth of about 2.5 trillion dollars which is more than the net worth of like the bottom 60% of us households put together and many of those people on the Forbes 400 list have signed the giving pledge which is this pledge developed by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to get more rich people to give away their money about a hundred and fifty billionaires in the US and also around the country around the world have now signed the giving pledge and many others who haven't signed the giving pledge George Soros for example plan to give away almost all of their money statistics suggests their projection suggests that as much as two trillion dollars may flow into the charitable sorry 20 trillion dollars may flow into the charitable sector in the next half century so kind of a phenomenal windfall and we're already seeing that money start to flow every time you turn around it seems there's some new billionaire who has stepped forward with some big new commitment or initiative or plan in late 2015 Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced that they were going to give away 99% of their of their Facebook fortune at that time that money that stock was worth 45 billion dollars it's now worth 60 billion dollars and in fact it's just phenomenal to watch how the wealth of some of these people has grown in the last few years or the last decade the Koch brothers for example if you're wondering why they have some spare change to put into politics and public policy well in 2005 the Koch brothers were worth nine billion dollars to get it now the Koch brothers are worth over eighty billion dollars George Soros I mentioned earlier was worth seven billion dollars in 2005 now worth twenty six billion dollars George Soros could be still around in a decade he could well be worth fifty billion dollars I believe Mark Zuckerberg will someday be the richest person in the world and the the the kind of flow of this money into philanthropy as I describe it in my book is is very inspiring in many ways and deeply alarming in other ways it's inspiring because if you read about what these philanthropists these mega givers are doing there's a lot that you'll want to cheer for example I write in the book about Mike Bloomberg's philanthropy Bloomberg by the way was worth about three billion dollars when he became mayor of New York New York City when he left that post he was worth about 35 billion dollars he's worth over 40 billion dollars now almost all of his money is going to go into philanthropy he's been giving it away hand over fist about 500 million dollars a year as much as the Ford Foundation Bloomberg is now giving away and one of the causes he's embraced is shutting down coal-fired plants he's the single biggest donor in the history of the Sierra Club he's given 130 million dollars to the Sierra Club since 2010 to try to shut down coal-fired plants they've succeeded in a remarkable way closing hundreds I believe of coal-fired plants at this time and you know that is a very inspiring story I love that Bloomberg is using his money in that way he's doing a lot of other good things by the way as well I profile philanthropist Tim Gill who made his fortune in technology he developed a desktop publishing system called quark he sold it for 400 million dollars he turned around and put about half that into the Gill Foundation which became the most important LGBT funder particularly around the push for marriage equality Gill's philanthropy his strategy his ability to get all the LGBT rights groups around the table together his collaboration with other funders helped accelerate this this move to marriage equality kind of pushing this up through the court systems I look at a bunch of other very inspiring examples of philanthropists who make you want to cheer there's a lot going on in health and medical research that I could go into but there's also a really scary dark side to all this which is that all of this new philanthropy these sort of what I call supercitizens stepping forward with these mind-boggling amounts of money and these big ambitious plans this has been happening at the same time that many Americans already feel like their voice doesn't count in the public square with surveys showing that Americans believe that the wealthy already have too much power people are already concerned about the way that the wealthier using their wealth through political donations through lobbying to push their own ideas and there's a whole pile of evidence of research that shows that the economic inequality that has grown to record levels in recent decades has translated into political and civic inequality that has grown alongside which is not a particularly counterintuitive idea of course these people with more resources are going to find a way to have more say in the public in the public square and all of that that that voice that they have is going to only get stronger as more of them become involved in philanthropy because a lot of these people they're not interested in charity they're interested in change they're not interested in giving their money to hospitals and museums and universities lots of that money still flows but many of them are interested in pushing systemic change they're interested in deploying their dollars in public policy battles to try to make America as they see it a better place and they're doing so often in tandem with their use of political dollars so Michael Bloomberg is also giving a lot of money to push climate change a lot of political donation Tim Gill for him it's been a dual track strategy gives money to LGBT rights friendly politicians he gives money through his philanthropy more of the super rich are getting really sophisticated about pulling every possible lever to advance their agenda it's great when you like what they're doing it's not so great when you don't like what they're doing and I can you know I can I can give you examples of that I mean you need to look no further than this town to see the way in which an influx of conservative money into think tanks over the past few decades has really helped pull economic and fiscal policy to the right there's been a massive imbalance in the amount of philanthropic dollars that have come into the think tank sector around those economic and fiscal issues places like the Economic Policy Institute struggle to have a budget of more than five million dollars while AI has a budget of 50 million dollars and heritage now has a budget of 90 million dollars after the health care law was enacted by Congress and signed by President Obama conservative funders set out to kill it in the strategy they invested most heavily in one of them anyway was litigation and they you know tens of millions of dollars flowed into conservative litigation outfits that pushed help push those two Supreme Court cases challenging the Affordable Care Act upward through the through the courts till they reached the Supreme Court one of them managed to successfully knock out the mandate for Medicaid that states had to expand their had to expand Medicaid as required by law that was knocked out as a result millions of people in those states some 20 states to not get health insurance that and and studies show that thousands of people died as a result of not getting have died and continue to die as a result of of that Medicaid expansion not happening that is sort of the hard edge of philanthropy in the United States right now I could give a bunch of different examples but we can maybe get into those in the conversation and just to wrap up so we can go to that conversation I make a number of suggestions in my book for how we can try to rein in this use of philanthropy to to push a policy agenda in the grand scheme of things I suggest we need a better balance between the value of philanthropic freedom which is that donors can do whatever they want with their money and the value of civic equality which is very important to we Americans you know we may we may disagree about economic inequality and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing and how much is tolerable but there's much stronger consensus that all citizens should have an equal voice when it comes to to shaping our democratic society and philanthropy is increasingly I think undermining that that civic equality in ways that that many people haven't quite caught on to yet and there's still a lot of controversy among people who follow this closely as to how big of a problem it is but my book is really trying to put that issue on the table and start a discussion about this because I think that looking ahead particularly as government continues to decline as an agent for kind of collective solve problem solving by citizens I mean the trajectory of government at federal state and local level is downward as the boomers retire as pension obligations kick in as as debts come due that ability of government to solve problems to be an agent of change that we as citizens use is going to be severely constrained government will increasingly just be trying to meet its existing obligations meanwhile all these new philanthropists with their big ideas and their resources are going to be stepping into that void so this conversation about you know democracy and philanthropy could not be more timely thank you David Krista yeah so thank you all for being here the really exciting book it's a really important book it's a really beautifully written book so it's a good read as well and I have no doubt that that that the book will inspire and guide what I see is sort of a boomlet of scholarship on this topic which had been really neglected by academics for a long time as well as and more importantly I think inspires some really important policy conversations both in Washington and and perhaps around the country as well the way I read this book is is that it's it's fundamentally about how sort of a broken politics and an accretion of decisions of policy decisions or non choices non decisions over the years have sort of combined to shift power to the most elite of the elite and perhaps as David mentioned in the process really exacerbated the sort of growing disconnectedness that many people feel from their government and from their leadership the book sort of addresses some age-old questions about the rationale for private philanthropy for these large wealthy relatively unaccountable relatively non-transparent institutions that you know are sort of been given more or less free reign with some limitations to insert themselves in all sorts of public questions and so scholars in the past have really thought about what you know what's the basis for this you know American philanthropy is somewhat unique around the world what on what grounds do you know do organizations and individual donors gain legitimacy what's the rationale for allowing this system to exist and you know are these legitimacy grounds sufficient to sort of justify the wide berth that we give to people and institutions of extreme wealth to again set agendas define problems advocate for solutions reform public institutions and so forth so some of the rationales that have traditionally been offered for philanthropy include that it redistributes wealth that it offers a vehicle for individuals to express their values we have a vigorous First Amendment right in this country that it contributes to innovative problem-solving in ways that government and markets don't and that it advances a marketplace of ideas in other words that it allows democratic pluralism to flourish so David's book you know questions some of these premises and rationales but I think actually more fundamentally asks whether even if all these rationales are firmly grounded in reality has philanthropy gained so much power relative to more accountable institutions of government such that we should be concerned and he also offers some policy recommendations and I suspect some of that the policy recommendations will be the subject of conversation here so I you know I I should note that I think I'm a political scientist by training scholars political scientists are increasingly seeing these institutions even though they're nonprofit charitable organizations as actually political actors and that these vigorous living donors are exercising power both in the ways that are you know so well documented in this book you know through their philanthropy so that they're giving to nonprofit organizations through their political giving increasingly and increasingly those strategies are intertwined but they're also acting in as Paul is political actors in sort of less even less visible ways so as conveners as you know advice you know private advisors to politicians I mean a lot of these donors carry a lot of sort of moral weight they've made a lot of money they are presumed to have you know a good head on their shoulders good good business sense you know a problem solving ethic an innovative mind I mean so all these kind of intangible characteristics that you know make them you know along with their wealth you know very appealing as sort of counselors to elected officials and others so there are these intangible ways that they're setting agendas by you know and creating organizations that and coalescing around sets of ideas about how to reform for example the public schools so they're really important political actors even though they're operating in the civil society space for the most part so I think the way we're going to work this is I'm going to ask maybe a couple of questions to for David to reflect on some of the bigger questions in the in the book Mark may jump in as well and then we want to turn it over to you because we know you will have a lot of I would imagine questions from this really provocative opening so so my first question for you David so you demonstrate how philanthropy is coming to rival government as a mechanism for doing the public business and you raise them really powerful so philosophical or normative questions about this kind of system that's evolved through an accretion of choices and non-choices but to me looming in the book is this larger question which is compared to what and I suppose the answer is we could have a system whereby you know as in the post-war era we have much higher marginal income tax rates and so we collect more money from people and we distribute it back out through more democratic and more accountable mechanisms of government through congress and state let's legislatures and so forth if we were to shift back to that sort of post-war world order what would we gain and what would we lose well thank you thank you for your remarks and it's great to have Kristen here because she is part of this movement of academics who are paying increasing attention to philanthropy which has so often kind of operated under the radar and hasn't attracted much scholarly scrutiny there was a recently a data Scotch pull one of the great scholars of political and social life wrote a wrote a piece of calling recently last year calling academics to undertake more scrutiny of this sector and hopefully that you know that cake is going to rise so in regards your question in comparison to what you know I it's to me one of the troubling things that's happened is that we have gone from a situation say in the middle of the 20th century where civil society the major voices in the nonprofit sector were groups that spoke for people mass membership based organizations when they were at the table whether it's unions or other kinds of associations when they were at the table you knew that they spoke for people and we had if you think of sort of the power arrangements in in mid 20th century society it was sort of collaborative governance between business government and civil society and the civil society groups of labor particularly had a had a mass base everything has changed since then and starting in the 1970s we saw we've seen sort of the steady decline of mass membership groups in civil society and the steady rise of nonprofit organizations funded by wealthy donors run by professional smart people and activists and lawyers in this age of kind of checkbook activism grass tops astro turf call it whatever you want but the nature of civil society has has fundamentally changed and that change has accelerated just since since the early since 2003 2004 there is a research report published by the Institute for Policy Studies last year which found that donations to unprofits by people making over 10 million dollars had more than doubled since 2003 donations by people making under a hundred thousand dollars had fallen 8% and we see this play out in different ways we recently reported on how this playing out in universities which is average alumni are giving more universities including public universities are increasingly relying on these big donors and that has you know to Tocqueville imagine civil society is kind of like the realm of the every man all these you know little groups that are giving voice to common people's aspirations well increasingly civil society is becoming more like the realm of the super donor and so in terms of the alternative to you know I I'm not I don't see an easy way to roll back the clock but my point is is that it has been different in the past and in this system that we have now of so much sort of politicized philanthropy and high this kind of high energy high ambition giving by sophisticated donors who understand public policy want to move an agenda this this is a relatively new phenomenon and and just in the past 20 years it's accelerated dramatically so you've identified an issue and then you've identified some potential interventions and so if we are to be concerned about elite philanthropy is relatively unaccountable power you know you identify a number of policy recommendations most of which are really targeted at philanthropy itself so greater transparency perhaps different rules for what what you can take a tax deduction for that kind of thing and I know you're going to talk more about that and I suspect the audience will have some questions about that but I as I was reading the book I kept thinking you know this is this is about philanthropy but it's also about kind of larger issues in society that you know has allowed the issues of philanthropy to spring to the to the fore and you know so income and equality you know has has enabled this philanthropy but it didn't cause it right so you know what about you know what what kinds of policy remedies might we think about beyond those targeted at big donors and their institutions that might help with some of the deeper issues of governments and governance and decision-making and agenda setting that you're raising in the book so to put it simply I mean should we just raise the marginal tax rate to some mean if it were politically feasible you know just some astronomical rate or you know our tax you know tax wealth as we tax work with this with a more equitable with more equitable rates or you know are there other mechanisms for enlivening civil society other other interventions well it's probably time that I issue the standard disclaimer about this book which is that it is more of a problem book than a solution book so the solution book is one where you have your blueprint and 200 300 pages of spilling out and detail exactly how your grand plan is going to work to solve some problem the problem book is more where you identify a argue that there's a problem that maybe hasn't yet been noticed and the book is all about drawing attention to the problem and then usually you sort of slap a chapter on the end where you have some have some suggestions which which which I have done and and this is I think if this is a subject or this book asks a bunch of obvious questions about how much power the wealth should have and that the wealthy should have in a democratic society but it doesn't have any obvious answers and which makes it fascinating but also frustrating and in particular you know I I make some suggestions about how to try to limit the the role of big philanthropy in public policy in broad strokes I think that the that the campaign finance movement offers some some instructive parallels which is the effort there has been to try to push the big money out limit the amount of size of donations of mega donors will try to pull more money in through matching gifts or through greater get more citizens involved and thus sort of even the playing field I think that you could we need a sort of similar strategy when it comes to when it comes to philanthropy to try to limit how much money can speak in civil society and get more ordinary people involved particularly as small donors but I'm under no illusions that this is gonna ultimately make that much of a difference and so the question does come back down to wealth inequality and and what do we do about that because as long as these great fortunes are amassed at the top and the you know the 1% and the or really the zero point zero zero one percent has such resources it's always going to translate into they will always find a way to extra to deploy those resources in civic and political life especially as long as we still have a First Amendment right and and there's only so much you can do or you want to do to try to try to limit that meanwhile there are a bunch of ways to get traction on the inequality problem such as you know higher tax rates particularly on capital gains which is the way the wealthy make the super rich make most of their income is through capital gains which are taxed at a lower rate than regular income as well you know revitalizing the labor regime so that labor gets a bigger share of the pie there's lots of great work in this town at this institution going on around those questions before I started writing about philanthropy I wrote about those issues for for you know 20 years in one way or the other through my previous work at think tanks so my book doesn't elaborate in detail and how to conquer the inequality problem but it does point out that it you know ultimately that's where the conversation comes back to and it's hard to escape it well I guess David why not call on philanthropy to do more about the inequality problem the way you know the Ford Foundation and others have I mean I think I mean I'll just state that as a question so some foundations and some individual philanthropists certainly have tried to do something about the inequality problem a lot of different things I mean the Ford Foundation for example has given millions and millions of dollars in the past five years as we've reported it inside philanthropy to try to revitalize the labor you know labor rules and you know deal with the rise of the gig economy and and get a better deal for retail and restaurant workers who make up and health care workers who make up such a large percentage of so far we haven't found a way to export health or or or automate health care jobs which are one of the biggest biggest growing areas of jobs coming up in now and in future years and there's a lot of that there's a lot that can be done that can kick more more income to those workers so they share more broadly in the nation's prosperity some individual philanthropists Herb Sandler who I profile in the book is he made his money in this in the savings and loans industry grew up on the Lower East Side always had a real passion for economic justice and when he walked away from his business with his wife with a couple billion dollars he committed himself to advancing those progressive ideas he's the person who underwrote the creation of the Center for American Progress with with I think it was 10 million or 20 million dollars at the time he's the guy who funded the Center for Responsible Lending which is the now the main think tank that is challenging predatory lending and irresponsible lending practices also Pro Publica and American Constitution Society yes and a number pretty impressive pretty impressive pretty impressive record and and there's a there's a number of other of these living donors who have tried to take on inequality in some ways but here is the unfortunate truth which is that the beneficiaries of the economic status quo tend to not be the main people who want to who want to challenge it I mean they they have been the winners and most of these people do not want to do not want to fundamentally use question our current system of capitalism most of them if they are care quite a few of them aren't concerned about poor poor people particularly poor kids and in inner-city schools but there and they want to tinker to me that's that's very important work but it's tinkering at the margins because it doesn't do anything about the systemic drivers of inequality so it's very unlikely that the beneficiaries of today's system of extreme capitalism are going to be the people who lead the charge against extreme capitalism thank you so just as an aside I was on the board of the Sunlight Foundation and I think Esther Dyson okay Esther Dyson was on the board of the Sunlight Foundation and I think transparency is one small solution but I want to focus on something else which is much less about the money and more about the education and the time I'm now working in five small God forsaken communities and until they can do it for themselves it's not really going to happen I mean you can pour money into these places which people have been doing and it gets spent badly so the challenge is really two fold one how can we get communities to form their own civic societies in the first place and the most exciting thing that I've ever seen is jury duty which is so different from voting but second how can we dramatically improve the education and health care system perhaps by creating not just food vouchers but stamp vouchers rather than a kind of broad tax that seems punitive to the rich people and doesn't do much for the poor people because they have no education so healthcare healthcare vouchers but not just not just sick care but prenatal care early childhood education gym coach diabetes counselor dietitian that kind of stuff raise their salaries and give people the opportunity to pay for them right well these are these are you know tough challenges and I don't pretend to have that to have the answers and I will say this though I think that the way in which the share of the nation's income is distributed bears on all of these issues because if people living in these communities can't make more than $9 an hour as a home health aid while the middle while some middleman company racks up billions and billions of dollars in profits or if they're working at Kentucky Fried Chicken who CEO yum yum brand CEO makes 40 million dollars and the average employee of those fast food restaurants makes you know eight or nine dollars an hour everything is going to be harder to do in these in these poor communities and so to me finding a way to get a handle on it on these labor issues and economic challenges is key and it's getting more complicated because of automation and more and more jobs disappearing and interestingly there are some philanthropists who are thinking about that sort of jobless future and one idea that is gaining surprising traction in certain philanthropic circles particularly in Silicon Valley is is the idea of the of a basic of a basic minimum income guaranteed basic income or whatever it goes by universal income goes by different names but a number of these tech people have been interested in this Carrie Tuna and Dustin Moskowitz he's one of the founders of Facebook so I and we'll see how much traction I don't know whether that's a discussion that's happening here we'll see how much traction that gets but you know again the income to me the income issues are all important that definitely gets I want to maybe go to a different angle of the same question which is couldn't we I mean you have for example the the the story of like Mark Zuckerberg and school reform in in Newark which is really a story of you know first okay we're we're rich we're brilliant here's a salute you know we're gonna impose some solutions and ultimately turns into a story of well you actually kind of do have to pay some attention to what the community is is looking for can we create a culture in philanthropy where there is more of you know openness about creating those kinds of broad-based institutions that help that that help direct resources to where a broader base of people feel they're needed I mean we had a you know we were in this room all day yesterday with a group of people are doing that kind of work and it's it's it's pretty impressive often it's you know when I was at Bletherby you'd always hear that code word of like we we want the people affected by decisions to have a voice in the decisions but often that just meant we just want a certain policy and we're gonna you know but could you make that genuine and can that offset I mean understand I understand yes it's always been the case that philanthropy doesn't challenge the economic roots of the system you know poverty is sort of an exception in what we assume is an other otherwise healthy system and I think we have to get away from that but can a kind of participatory lens help fix that there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in philanthropy right now that involves better listening and figuring out what communities really need whether it's some kind of voucher or whether it's different kinds of services putting the more foundations are kind of trying to put their ear to the ground we've seen this in Los Angeles with the Weingart Foundation and Oregon with the Meyer Memorial Trust in Chicago and with a number of other funders and certainly one thing that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chen walked away from having learned from Newark is that no reform effort succeeds without buy-in from the stakeholders and the people who orchestrated the reform effort Cory Booker for first and foremost believed that you didn't want you know the input of the people who are on the ground because they've been presiding over the failure of the situation for the last 30 years those people were seen as the problem so the idea was you know you parachute in with your squad of McKinsey consultants and impose imposed change from the top down with you know Mark Zuckerberg and some other philanthropists picking up the tab you don't even have to go through a city council to raise the money this is brilliant and and it didn't work out so well and when Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chen turned around to do another major gift like the two years later in Silicon Valley two schools for education they proceeded completely differently got to know all the stakeholders Priscilla Chen when I interviewed her for this book said I know every leader in all the schools where we fund and those people are part of the team and so there is some hope that's more collaborative that the philanthropists who really want to have impact will embrace these more collaborative models and better listening in the back corner so Michael Demange of council G state school officers just curious what role do you see venture philanthropy playing and do you think that's gonna have an outside influence or role in the type of what they're going on as far as given what you said at the beginning you mean venture philanthropy is in terms of impact investing in for-profit social enterprises or just the venture philanthropy model of taking you know more risks and yes both okay yeah so I mean venture philanthropy is one of the another really interesting thing happening in philanthropy right now and it takes both forms of treating philanthropy philanthropic dollars more as venture capital giving it out in larger chunks to organizations to scale and also more of this impact investing of you know giving my quick getting a stake in for-profit organisms businesses they're trying to solve social problems I think it's cool because one of the most frustrating things about the nonprofit sector that everybody complains about is that foundations give too much of their money in the form of program support and project grants and nickel and diming their grantees you know with these year after year renewals and grantees are constantly chasing after that next program grant and can't can't get the kind of institutional support they need to scale their organizations and make those kind of core investments that are required for an organization to succeed a new crop of philanthropists who come from the business sector are bringing a venture mindset saying we want to do it completely differently if you believe in an organization you should give it money to scale right this is how venture philanthropic venture capitalism Silicon Valley or elsewhere don't give you know a hundred thousand dollars just for a business's IT system and say come back for come back in a year we'll see whether we'll give you another hundred thousand dollars they invest them you know they give what's called growth capital and or build capital and so in my book I profile one of the great pioneers in this area venture philanthropy a woman named Vanessa Kirsch who runs a group called new profit and she sort of took that venture capitalist mentality and brought it to the nonprofit sector she's done extremely well she has a lot of venture types who are who are on her on her board and has really grown brought it brought that amount of money up dramatically in recent years because a lot of the business people get it so that's cool and the impact investing you know that's a longer conversation but another very important trend a lot of these new donors are looking for sustainable ways where you could use you know business models for-profit mechanisms to solve social problems in a way that doesn't require that year after year infusion of grant dollars you know I think that these models are you know and I when I was a reporter Vanessa was starting this new problem and it's been amazing and it's a really interesting model they're business centered I think you know sort of you know everything everything has an opportunity cost or downside to and I know that you know at least people who are concerned about sort of you know political engagement worry that too much of a focus on you know business metrics what you know what we can count could systematically bias philanthropy against things that actually might in the long run you know really help with some of these underlying issues that we've been talking about here so my colleague Jeff Barry is a political scientist at Tufts wrote an article for the same symposium that you alluded to with the discussable piece about how you know for example advocacy will be systematically probably neglected if we are just applying sort of business models and metrics and everything you know so it's that old expression that not everything you can count is what actually counts so you know a lot of the work of philanthropy and part of the rationale for its existence is that it can really think long term build capacity you know empower people all these things that are really hard to measure you know not counting widgets right so you know I would say that that's just one possible caveat to this otherwise very you know positive story about these innovative models well there's two other there's two other concepts that fit under their umbrella of venture philanthropy one is will be like venture capitalists and we will be on your board and we will appoint the CEO if we decide to you know to have that much more direct involvement in the grantee organization which can there are moments when that's probably right moments when that's more problematic and also the idea often that you know this is your you this is your you know your first stage funding or in that at a certain point you want to become sustainable outside of philanthropy and that's often I think an illusion because you know some some things are just sustainable because they're just going to get money from some other philanthropic donor there's no magical world where they just take off and fly on their own in the shine in the middle of the thanks hi Gabrielle Schneider I work at a nonprofit called issue one and I used to be the communications director at the sunlight Foundation thank you for what you said by the way because you can always gain metrics that you just things that you count quantitatively I might have had a role in that my question to you is your in your analysis and talking to philanthropists what do you see is the role in the rise in philanthropy and the mega donors and the rise of polarization in America that's a great question I think that in a way the role has been quite analogous to what's happened in philanthropy has been analogous to what's happened in politics which is that as we've seen that kind of political parties lose traction as these kind of real vehicles for mass sentiments about politics and we've seen the rise of sort of mega donors increasingly in the driver seat of politics electoral campaign places like the club for growth heritage action these big super packs often with a very ideological agenda that's fueled polarization in the political sphere net what we've been seeing in philanthropy is something similar which is that the decline of mass based membership groups being replaced by donor driven institutions with a very often with a very ideological outlook the heritage foundations creation in 1973 is often seen as the beginning of that era heritage foundation as I said is now has raises almost a hundred million dollars a year much of it they have a lot of small donors but much of it comes from these very big ideological donors AEI is also has a record budget now Cato which is that was created in part by the Cokes and the left finally kind of got hip to this and started creating its own very ideological organizations that you know Demos is part of that the the democracy alliance founded in 2005 which organized progressive donors to build the progressive policy infrastructure the Center for American Progress as I mentioned a number of other media matters for America this whole new infrastructure has arisen in the past 12 years on the left funded by progressive mega donors and tax all driven subsidized by tax deductible dollars I'm sure the public has no clue that that's happening and you know a result has been sort of more more combat in the in the on these policy issues and having you know I say that as somebody who who worked in that world for a long time and it is there are a lot of incentives in that world to stick with their talking points and to not you know give way any kind of ground to the other side you get no rewards from moving to the center you often you mobilize your donors but with those sort of ideological red-need approaches the new America Foundation was created to find a to find a way down the kind of non ideological way and it has you know had some fundraising challenges in terms of being able to pull in those ideological donors I certainly want to hear a political scientist view on that question as well yeah I mean it's a really interesting question of you know whether it's correlational or whether there's some cause and effect and you know I think you you drew out a pretty persuasive causal argument I mean I think political scientists are still trying to figure out what's happening with polarization and it's actually you know sort of different dimensions to it so there's polarization in Congress where you know there's sort of the most liberal Republican and you know the most conservative Democrat there used to be a bunch of people between those of both parties and now there's nobody between them right that there's just you know part of this is the issue parties have gotten much better at sorting people by issues so I study gun politics you know the number one if I wanted to know what your political party is one without asking you the one question I ask you is what do you think about gun policy and you know what based on what you said I could probably guess your party pretty easily that'd be a really good or are you a gun owner actually be also a good question that wouldn't have been true in 1995 wouldn't have been true no and so you know so there's what's happening at the elite level there's what's happening at the mass level I mean I think the media has a lot to do with it I think the decline of these mass membership organizations which by the way are not targets for philanthropic funding because they're not in the right part of the tax code for the most part you know so I think there's just a lot of things have been happening over a long period of time but I think definitely the you know you know the the role of sort of ideological donors and the ideas industry has been you know and certainly sped along or enabled the the part of the polar polarization that has probably many parents so seated in the back I'm curious about whether your book looks at all at oversight and regulation of the nonprofit sector the IRS has pretty much gotten out of the business of oversight there were I read recently there were 80,000 new nonprofits started last year alone and we make few distinctions between C3's and C4's and what they can do in I'm thinking of other countries the UK Canada for example they make they make a distinction between charities and nonprofits and charities are required to show some kind of social benefit each year in order to get their status so I'm wondering if you delved into that at all in your book thank you I do address those issues and I point out as you say that that the IRS has been falling down on the job you know that I read up there is an estimate that you know so every there is 90,000 private foundations in the United States every year each one of them is required to file a 990 tax form with the IRS which says you know where the money went and where it came from where it went what the administrative expenses where about 2% of those forms are reviewed by the IRS annually and of those you know some smaller percent are flagged for more in-depth the more in-depth look at what's going on translation we have no idea what's going on in among private foundations and it was reminiscent to me seeing that 2% statistically reminiscent to me because I you know I used to write about financial fraud and cheating and Wall Street and before the Enron scandal at top SEC official gave a speech saying that only about 10% less than 10% of earnings reports filed by public companies were ever reviewed by the SEC and we know how that story ended I mean when the watchdogs are asleep bad things will happen and bad things are less likely to happen in the philanthropic sector because there's not the greed driver that there is pumping up your earnings and earnings fraud had huge paid huge dividends for stockholders and there's a lot of reasons to do it there's less there's fewer incentives to cheat when it comes to private foundations but there's a lot of potential for bad behavior and but we really have no idea what's going on so I suggest in my book that we need to dramatically beef up that IRS oversight I also suggest that we need to beef up oversight at the state level because the state attorney general state attorneys general generals I always have a problem states attorneys general are the main watchdogs when it comes to police in the nonprofit sector that's part of their job and those offices have very few resources to do that job effectively most don't even have a dedicated staff person to police what can also often be thousands of nonprofits in their state which is why we've had some huge scandals in the nonprofit sector like a few years ago when the this cancer charity turned out to have been the total fraud it had pulled in 200 million dollars over a period of like ten years and nobody noticed and finally the regulators caught up with it and it's been a number of other scandals like that and I could imagine even bigger scandal and it's interesting after that cancer scandal happened I wrote it at op-ed times for the new op-ed piece for the New York Times suggesting that we beef up oversight and and every single almost every single nonprofit trade group came down on me like a ton of bricks that the nonprofit associations and foundation associations seem hardwired by reflex to swap down every regulatory proposal that that comes along on principle it seems in the name of philanthropic freedom and my message to them is we now have we've seen this movie before because the accountant said we'll handle it before and run in the world calm other industries have said we got to cover we can regulate our ourselves and but when there's big loopholes in the potential for bad behavior abuses occur so I would like to see this sector get ahead of the curve and learn a little something from recent history but I could point out I think the the big takeaway from your book is that a lot of the things that we find potentially worrisome are perfectly legal so you know the IRS you know by an act of Congress state AG's you know went to the extent that they're regulating foundations or nonprofits they're looking for things like you know are you enriching your uncle with these charitable funds instead of giving money to the homeless shelter or are you you know exceeding the the limits on political activity you know that the law prescribes the IRS and the AG's are sort of neutral or not empowered to police whether you know substantively you know your approach to school reform or your approach to gun policy or your approach to you know shutting down coal fired plants is a good idea you know or and and the you know the definition of what is a charitable operation is quite broad so you know sort of ideological reports and you know sort of messaging campaigns would be just as charitable in the eyes of the law as giving to the soup kitchen so you know I you know my reading of your book is that it is not fundamentally about oh there's this kind of fraud and abuse going on rampantly in the foundation world I mean maybe there is they certainly don't you know certainly is not a lot of oversight capacity but you know to me you know you're raising a much more complicated set of issues rather than just are you enriching Uncle Bill you know like should you be able to get the same tax deduction by giving to an effort to abolish food stamps as you give to get a tax deduction for giving to a local food pantry right now you get the same tax deduction I think that maybe that's something we want to re-examine well although I you know you'd have to you'd certainly have to give the same tax deduction to an advocacy effort to expand food stamps as you would an advocacy effort to abolish and maybe that's something I don't understand maybe maybe that kind of advocacy doesn't get I do want to say the one thing I want to add is I've always thought there's a need for two levels of more journalism about philanthropy one is basically what you're doing which is really helping people understand these institutions that are fundamentally playing by the letter and spirit of the law and the other is yes there is a world where there's a lot of self-dealing and a lot you know world most of us don't see partly because sometimes there he doesn't actually go very far out the door and I I do think you know David Farron holds Pulitzer for the his reporting on the Trump Foundation I hope will encourage more you know because that is not the only foundation that is essentially enriching you basically basically becomes this is the tax exempt box for my money you know and I'm gonna do the same things here but it happens to be the tax exempt box I mean that's there are there maybe there are a hundred maybe there are thousands and probably journal if you don't have some journalism reinforcing the regulation I don't think you'll have in the front in the second row hi Alex Toma peace and security funders group one of the hi nice to see you again one of the funder affinity group folks so a lot to say I'll sort of focus my remarks to just say that you all can be watch dogs too this is the beauty of our democracy all the 990 form that David is talking about you can pull them up we could do it right here you could do it for free go to guide star you pull up the 990 forms you are the watch dogs we are the watch dogs and so yeah you know all the government agencies are understaffed underfunded but that's the beauty of American democracy is that we can all do it and so that I would I would encourage you all to do that all the funder affinity groups have websites we have a website peace and security funders you can look us up we have all lists of all our members you go to their website you can check out their annual reports where they have they tell you where the money goes who it goes towards call them up they most of them not all of them most of them have phone numbers and I think you know in this day and age I think more and more are wanting to become transparent and so that's that's sort of one big thing is to let people know that there's a way in which you can look at them as well and if you Google you know New York Foundation a bunch will pop up and go to their websites go to their 990 forms that actually Alex's question makes me think of another issue which is you know the emergence of these affinity like funders really working together in a field and I was co-chair of one of these at one point and I wonder one of the questions that you know we talked about earlier is like shouldn't why isn't there kind of more pluralism of approaches among the different funders is there a kind of fattishness that gets created maybe by some of these collaborations so that all of a sudden everybody's moving in one direction and this other field gets kind of left behind because of this collaboration among funders one thing we have seen is more diversity and approaches over recent years because all these new business and tech donors have arrived on the scene so when I first started paying close attention to philanthropy in the 1990s it was pretty much a field dominated by institutional funders Ford MacArthur Rockefeller Carnegie this is who you thought about when you thought about philanthropy now the big shift in the past 15 years is we've seen the rise of living donors being much more of a force and many of them are coming from the tech sector or other sectors with different approaches so there's no more philanthropy establishment in terms of everybody kind of being on the in the same page and I think that's a good thing my colleague Sarah Wrecker I was at Michigan State and done some of the best work out there on education philanthropy would suggest that that actually this sort of norm of pluralism is being violated in the sense that most of the big funders have coalesced around the same agenda for what we need to do about our public school so it's charters it's teacher accountability it's test scores it's you know I'm not an education scholar but it's you know there's sort of this menu that they that all the big players have signed or signed on to and so I think one of her questions is okay where is the pluralism of approaches here so you know I think it's probably you know more I think this bandwagoning effect can still happen in some pretty major fields even as others might entertain a greater variety of views yes yes because it is there's two two things that are happening when it comes to small donors one are new technology platforms that are coming out that make it easier for donors to give especially those millennial donors who need new ways to engage we have a section inside philanthropy called crowd cash where we track all the developments and online fundraising and crowdsourcing and it's it's it's quite exciting there's a lot of tantalizing possibilities there which again have some parallels in the political space because we really saw starting with Howard Dean's presidential run in 2004 the kind of rise of the small donor being a major force in politics which was facilitated by some new platforms but also reflected this kind of populist and whether you call it resistance or persistence this kind of desire for people to get more engaged that the a big trend of the past you know number of years has been people wanting to sort of push back from left and right at the kind of elite control of American politics of seemingly of American life and small donations are one way that they have have done so unfortunately in the philanthropic space it's yet to really change I mean the overall statistics is has been donations by big donors rising donations by small donors flat or falling and we'll see whether the Trump effect as we call it an insight philanthropy which has produced a windfall of small donations for Planned Parenthood ACLU ProPublica other organizations we'll see whether that translates into something more more profound and lasting money is one form of political participation whether it's happening at the small donor level or at the more elite donor level but you know the most equitable form of participation at least in theory is voting and you know I know that I for the for just until this past summer was a president of a local legal women voters and our league in the last year you know this is one of these legacy organizations that really brings people into intensive consensus and dialogue it's the my I wrote a book about women's organizations it's testified before the Congress more than any other women's group in American history our little league increased its membership increase since the summer by about 50 percent five zero so you know I think that your impulse is right now whether that's a sustainable or not I don't know the other thing to think about is so on the one hand if you want to think about democracy this is a good thing you've got more people involved the vote is still the most equitable way you know I happen to think the reason the NRA is so powerful is not because it has a ton of money necessarily but because you know gun owners go to town hall meetings they make a lot of noise and they call and and so forth I mean the money enables that but it's not primarily their campaign contributions so you know people power I think is really important and we are seeing a surge in this I think the difference is that you know lots of small donors are not setting agendas in the way that one big donor is or driving you know organizational strategy or you know constraining you know the choices of leaders of organizations so you know it's in one of those you know on the one hand on the other hand answers but I you know I certainly don't think it's a bad thing that more people are finding a stake and are latching on to sort of old-fashioned groups in the ACLU of the League I mean these hundred-year-old legacy organizations that still have you know a really powerful role to play in you know what we think of as sort of democratic politics. I think it's a really important challenge to progress especially progressive philanthropy to recognize that the two sort of big new organizations or brands that have emerged in the last four or five months the Women's March and Indivisible basically had nothing at all to do with large funding at all and probably haven't connected to them yet you know and made of you know had a huge impact already right that's right also. Betsy Clark I'd like to ask a strange question a lot of the billionaires that Trump has brought into his administration are connected with very far right religious groups and organizations and the beliefs of some of those groups are for example that poverty is a choice and and that you shouldn't work through a secular institution i.e. government to correct social welfare inequities and inequality and this hasn't gotten any or not much attraction and coverage in the media but I wonder if you could comment on why we shouldn't be talking about that because among other things it impacts the separation of church and state some very practical issues so I'd like your comments. One of the things that can be achieved with strategic philanthropy and has been achieved by the conservative movement or the and as well as the evangelical conservative wing of that movement is to move fringe ideas to the mainstream. Conservatives have worked very hard and have given a lot a lot of money to take ideas that 20 or 30 years ago were considered outside the public you know norms of public debate and to move them to the center and Betsy DeVos you know her her father her parents were were among some of the most important and biggest donors to the to the Christian right starting in the as far back as the 70s and and her father-in-law her parents-in-law were among the most important donors to the conservative right giving money to groups like heritage and you know if you say the same thing loud enough and you get PhD scholars to to write on it and communications experts to push it out and policy wonks to package it you know in digest digestible ways it starts to sound more reasonable and a great example of that is social security privatization the Cato Institute funded by the Koch brothers and others as I mentioned started working on social security privatization in the 1970s they had what one of the executives at Cato called a Leninist strategy for moving social security privatization to the kind of center of public policy debates and they spent billion well not billions but many millions of dollars not just the Cato but at other conservative think tanks to create this whole array of of of work that question the finances of social security that question it on on moral grounds on sustainability grounds they spend enough money to the boil down into a calculator online where you could see how much better you do with your private account you know under privatization system and social security they look for ways to mobilize minority groups against social security and it was and that effort kind of culminated in George Bush's 2005 proposal to partially privatize social security it took 25 years or more to get that on to the president's desk and in front of the Congress it didn't ultimately go anywhere because of pushback from from from people who like social security so that's an example of how people people power can can still prevail but you know that story as long as well as the story of the Christian right is really an example of the power of wealth to move ideas to the mainstream pushback was also not funded until it was almost over it was you know a great story there as well second row thank you my name is Kate Kennedy I'm actually the new chief development officer at the League of Women Voters so nice to meet you I mean this is my first time at a new America event so thank you for today I have worked at multiple I'm the like I said I'm in development and I've worked at multiple organizations all of which have the iteration and iteration of the word women in it Girl Scouts League of Women Voters I'm curious of any insight you might have into philanthropy but through your book through the lens of women and their role as we know women are much more they want to get engaged before they give but they also are not the best at asking for money right so we have the League of Women Voters an organization that really has struggled in terms of figuring out how to fund themselves thank you I appreciate you asking about this because as it happens I have a section in my book on women and philanthropy and and as it happens we have a section on on inside philanthropy about women and in philanthropy and it's one of the most exciting stories in philanthropy right now the growing salience of women in raising money and giving away money and also directing money to gender to gender causes and gender equity and the story has three parts one is that more and more highly capable women are playing a leading role in family philanthropy so it may be Mark Zuckerberg that gets the credit oh Zuckerberg gives gift for blah blah blah but it's actually Priscilla Chan who's doing most of the most of the work you know I went and visited their foundation their philanthropic organization Chan Zuckerberg initiative note her name is first and you know she is the hands-on person scaling this this organization Carrie Tuna who is giving away the fortune of Dustin Moskowitz who is another Facebook co-founder she's the hands-on person Jennifer Buffett I mean there's just you the list could go on go on we have a published speaking of list we published a list of the 50 most powerful women in philanthropy which and many of them are are engaged in that driver's seat of family philanthropy the second part of the story is more women have their own money and they are they there's a number of women billionaires and they are moving they're moving into philanthropy and in new ways there's a couple of them on the giving pledge Oprah Winfrey is most well known but there's but there's a number of others and the third and by the way there's also some inherited wealth that is part of this that would sort of fit into the family philanthropy piece but the third part is women have been the amazing networkers of the philanthropic sector they you know the men like the great man theory of philanthropy is you know you stick your name have a foundation named after you stick your name on something come up with your big idea women often operate differently they they they organize other women in funding collaboratives women's funds now exist all over the country and in fact all over the world for this issue for this book I interviewed Helen the Kelly Hunt who is one of the great kind of pioneers and architects of modern women philanthropy there's an organization called women moving millions which has brought together over 200 high net worth women to give money to gender causes and because women donors have realized that you know if you want gender equity issues funded you can't rely on the men to do it and and they have so women raising money for gender equity is has really gained a lot of traction lately you're not a talk on this one I just I'm looking at the clock and thinking you have other people but yeah we can talk after I wrote a book about women's organizations and I think just bottom line I mean the the you know women both in the pre-mass work world you know women's organizations where women have public policy influence those organizations have been declining but they've been different kinds of organizational forms have been taking their place so Facebook you know so you have these online communities but also giving circles I think are replacing you know all the league is doing really well right now but you know the women's clubs of old you know are giving circles of new and and so I would echo everything you said and just say that it's happening at all you know the regular person regular woman level too in the back row hey David hi I'm Lauren Strayer I'm the director of communications at the Democracy Fund which is founded by Piero Midyar who created eBay in the book so I think this discussion is really important to us at the Democracy Fund not only because we're a foundation but because we care about the state of our democracy and so we talk a lot about accountability and the most concrete lever we have for creating public accountability is transparency so we're transparent about the grants that we make on the C3 and the C4 side we're going to be transparent about what we believe is a framework for a healthy democracy we're going to publish our metrics you know all of these things kind of add up to some measure of accountability but my question is what else should we be doing to be a good actor and then secondly related to that how do you view the tension between accountability and flexibility in that part of the reason that philanthropy is able to do a lot of good things is because they're not accountable to shareholders or constituents or whatever it is two good questions on the first one what can you do it sounds like you're doing a lot and that is kind of a model of how foundations nonprofits should operate unfortunately many do not operate in the same in the same way and the story of transparency as I tell it in my book when it comes to philanthropy has been one of kind of one step forward and two steps back because for every organization like yours we're seeing new foundations that aren't transparent or are operating through donor advised funds which has have exploded so for those who don't know donor advised funds are held by public charities which have to report where the money goes but they don't have to report where it comes from so Silicon Valley Community Foundation gave out 1.3 billion dollars in grants last year they say where that money went but we have I as a journalist I have no idea who is putting it up it's a number of billionaires in Silicon Valley or the main contributors there in terms of what else you know something you could do I would suggest talk to Pierre Amity are your funder because the Amity our network and unfortunately is not very transparent it's an LLC we don't I can't tell where its money is where its money is going Pierre Amity has been a groundbreaking funder in a great many ways the Amity our network was one of their earlier philanthropic vehicles to incorporate as an LLC so it has more flexibility to do different things it can make impact investments in political contributions traditional grant making the product and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have an LLC Lorraine Powell Jobs has an LLC more people are going this way the problem is LLCs are black boxes you know there's no there's no there's no tax form that you can pull to see at least publicly that you can you can pull so that's been a worrisome trend in terms of the sort of meta question of accountability versus freedom it's a really important question and one I struggle with through the book because the whole I mean one of the great added values that may be the great added value of philanthropy is that it's society's risk capital in that it can be society's risk capital because you don't have a bunch of voters or shareholders looking or even really the media for that matter looking over your shoulders say hey wait a minute you know maybe you shouldn't be spending your money that way or we're going to vote you out next time or there's going to be a shareholder revolts or whatever you can do whatever you want and so philanthropy is able to to do more experimentation it can work on long term problems where maybe they're not going to see a solution for 20 years but they don't have to worry about anybody getting impatient because they're just the donors and so we don't want to limit that we don't want to infringe no my point is is that the donor the donors don't have to worry about being accountable yes of their if you know if they want to we were writing yesterday about some tech guy who's put a hundred million dollars until searching for alien life right you know it's a 10-year project he says he's willing to make go it on for another 10 years after that right like he's not accountable to anybody and if you were he probably wouldn't be spending his hundred million dollars looking for tech life I mean looking looking for looking for alien life but so you know I don't suggest any major clampdown on the on that that kind of freedom meaning I want more transparency I would like to see some limits on the politicized giving but otherwise I appreciate philanthropy's role in society's risk capital for sure I think the alien life is gonna have the last laugh I did the woman in red in the back row had been wanting to ask questions we have to wrap up quickly I thought you'd be out of time by now okay my name is Joe Freeman I'm a political scientist and this is a political question churches are already a tax exempt and they're philanthropic in some senses of the word there is a movement to expand the degree to which they can be specifically political and they are full of small donors how do you think that will impact on the overall distribution of agenda advocacy so for those who don't know the history here in the late 1950s Congress passed something called the Johnson amendment named after Lyndon B. Johnson which restricted the ability of religious institutions to engage in electoral activity there is now a movement to repeal the Johnson amendment Donald Trump has made it one of his pet clauses I can't imagine he'd heard of the Johnson amendment 18 months ago but if you hang out with the Christian right and donors like Betsy Betsy DeVos you learn about the Johnson amendment pretty quickly so this previously obscure issue has come to the top of the or near the top of the agenda although it's hard to know what's on the top of the agenda these days and and so that this sort of legislation going through who knows whether this will get anywhere if it did succeed it would open up a real sort of loophole in the in the electoral financing and allow religious institutions to become a conduit for one more conduit for for potentially some very big money and it might have a discouraging effect on small donors in those institutions as they watch as these big donors sort of take over their institutions and turn them into vehicle political vehicles but you know I haven't I haven't seen much sort of researcher projections on how that how that might go and I don't think it's likely to happen and it all and it would extend beyond religious and we would basically create a tax-exempt channel for political contributions both religious and non-religious mainly but what they talk about it they talk about it yeah well I said I want to Chris do you want to have any last words here thank you all for coming well that's the last word then thank you very much plenty of copies of David's book out front please buy one it's worth every penny and more yeah