Everything old is new again

Here's an article from the Sarasota (Florida) Herald Tribune that talks about a "new breed" of philanthropist. It sounds like an awesome program. He is training low-resource people to be medical assistants, which is great, especially given the local context where the job market for medical services is rather good.


A quote from the article

"These are people who have learned to solve problems, and they're now bringing their money and the critical thinking skills to bear in the nonprofit sector," said Leo Arnoult, a fundraising consultant and past chairman of the Giving USA Foundation, which publishes an annual report on giving trends.

Unlike donors of the past, who were content to write a check, knowing that their money was supporting a good cause, entrepreneurial donors take a more hands-on approach.

However, even if rich folks may have taken a hiatus on this style of giving for awhile, the foundations of philanthropy in this country are based on "entrepreneurial" giving, for example Carnegie who very much believed that he should use not only his own money, but also his skillset to tackle society's problems. See here and here for more of this kind of thing.

Note: I'm going to use more pictures on my blog, because a) I like pictures and b) I've been inspired of late by Ben Martin's use of the visual medium, and also I really like the illustrations in Creating Passionate Users. So imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that, now you know.