From TV’s ‘The Gilded Age’ to the Fight for Reparations: Lessons for Philanthropy in 2024

What binge watching a popular television show taught me about philanthropy’s ongoing efforts to move away from antiquated notions of charity.

Illustration by Maria Mottola

Editor's Note: Lisa wrote this opinion piece for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. You may view the original here.

I did almost nothing during the last two weeks of December. I took time off from work and made no plans other than hanging out with my family. My goal was to read, watch, and listen to anything that looked fun or might serve as inspiration for the New Year. This eliminated almost all news about the state of the world and many work-related publications.

But three seemingly unrelated pieces of content and information made it through my self-imposed screen. Together they speak to the past, present, and future of philanthropy and what it means to effectively (re)distribute resources. The connection among the three motivated me to finish up with the resting and get ready for 2024:

The Gilded Age

I watched two seasons of The Gilded Age on MAX. Like many series I enjoy, it features beautiful actors in fabulous costumes. But this one also includes an interesting historical take on charity.

The show documents a slice of New York society during the American Gilded Age — a period of immense economic change, conflict between old and new systems, and huge fortunes made and lost. The series follows a young woman who moves in with her old-money aunts and gets entangled in a social war pitting them against their new-money neighbors.

The upper-crust ladies in the show don’t do a whole lot with their days beyond drinking tea and dressing for dinner. Charity work seems to be one of the few socially acceptable activities. Agnes — of the old-money elders — explains to her niece Marian that charity has two functions: “The first is to raise funds for the less fortunate, which is wholly good. The second is to provide a ladder for people to climb into society who do not belong there.” Charitable works for these ladies involves giving their cast-offs to the needy, setting up schools to train poor children to become servants, and allowing their servants one afternoon off each week.

Even if you haven’t watched the show, perhaps you’ve read Anand Giridharadas’s book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. The book explores the “new gilded age” of contemporary philanthropy in which the “rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can — except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they … constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm.”

The book stayed with me through each episode because it’s clear we’re still stuck with 19th-century notions of how to help others. The society ladies of The Gilded Age fail to connect the conditions the poor live in to how they themselves live. Similarly, many of today’s donors continue to feed the hungry without changing the conditions that cause hunger.

Charity Navigator

In between episodes of The Gilded Age, I occasionally checked my email and, even more occasionally, read something sent to me. A piece by Michael Thatcher, CEO of the rating organization Charity Navigator, caught my eye. Charity Navigator provides data on nonprofit organizations, along with resources to guide philanthropic decision making and help donors support causes.

In the article, Thatcher explores how his organization’s orientation has changed. Where it once reported on the percent of a nonprofit’s budget spent on overhead versus program costs, it now assesses groups based on other harder-to-quantify metrics, including results, leadership, and adaptability. Thatcher does something unusual by naming the harm Charity Navigator’s methodology may have caused and describing why a shift was needed.

“It is time to move on from that focus [on overhead]. It is an outdated and inappropriate way to measure the effectiveness of charities, one that my organization, Charity Navigator, used to perpetuate,” he writes. “Today, we focus on organizational health and results. Donors should be aligned with a charity’s mission and then validate that the mission is effectively being achieved.”

I appreciate both the shift in emphasis and Thatcher’s transparency in describing those changes. But I wonder if Charity Navigator and philanthropy in general could go further. Rather than collecting information to help donors evaluate a grantee, and thereby capitalize the return on their investment, is there a different way to set up the relationship? Like the ladies’ charitable efforts in The Gilded Age, Charity Navigator’s approach still centers on those with money and power.

Instead, philanthropy should frame its redistribution of resources as a matter of justice and equity, not a show of generosity or largess. That requires that the people and institutions that bring the financial resources partner differently with the organizations doing the work. Together they could try to learn what is functioning well and what is not, rather than creating hoops for one partner to jump through for the other.

Could Charity Navigator go so far as to leave behind “charity” in both word and orientation? Could the rest of us?

Reparations Commission

The most significant and celebratory reading I did was about New York State’s new reparations commission. On December 19, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation to create a committee to consider reparations for slavery — studying the history of slavery in New York State and what reparations could look like. New York is only the third state in the country to do this, following California and Illinois.

Reparations are meant to repair a previous injustice. While redress may come in many forms, the most common is monetary compensation by the government that sanctioned the wrongdoing. The connections between slavery and decades of discriminatory laws are clear in almost every facet of life for Black Americans, including education, employment, housing, health, and the criminal-justice system.

This year brings another chance for my home state, New York, to reckon with and repair the grave injustices created by that structural racism. The commission is not tasked with coming up with philanthropic or charitable ways to give money to Black communities but rather finding structures, strategies, and funding streams that systemically repair harm caused by the American government and ruling class. It’s not a matter of “generosity” but of justice.

Meanwhile, I’m back in full work mode and no longer spending leisurely vacation days on my couch in front of the television. But I’m still reflecting on the ways philanthropy and charity were inscribed and defined by the wealthy during the Gilded Age and how many of those patterns continue today.

Perhaps by naming what the field got wrong in the past, we can finally let go of those old ways. And perhaps by repairing some of the evils enshrined in racist policies and systems, the reparations commission might inspire philanthropy to shift its work from giving to returning. Maybe then we will finally leave those notions of gilded charity to the dustbin of history, like the binding corsets worn by those rich ladies.

We have a chance to reinvent the work of philanthropy in 2024. I’ll happily to get off the couch and turn off the TV for that New Year’s resolution.