impact driven philanthropy Simplified:

kansmus@gmail.com

There are various types of philanthropy. This paper though will explain the impact driven philanthropy, its definition and its principles. Impact-driven philanthropy is a personal journey that offers many paths for exploration and discovery.  To further simplify the work of you our dear reader, this philanthropy will be defined in context.

Impact‐driven philanthropy is the practice of investing our time, interests, talents, and resources thoughtfully and intentionally to advance meaningful change. It is one intended to leverage our potentials and result into potential impact on society. This drive for impact can be invested in any field be it education, medical care among others. However, impact driven philanthropy is further driven by unique principles. As we rhyme with the principles and practices below, we make it possible to lean into harder issues and find solutions that make a lasting difference.

There are those principles as stated above, common to our daily lingual package, that are homogenous to all well intended impact driven philanthropists and they are highlighted below.

There’s, as a search in the history of options may equally suggest, no one‐size‐fits‐all formula for causing change and creating a world we all want to see. It is in the best interest of this diversity of solutions that we have, through research and thought, agreed that a uniform set of principles can guide us toward effective practices and away from unnecessary pitfalls so we can do the best for the causes that motivate us.

• Humility. As impact drivers, we can’t always assume to understand the problems at hard more than the people being directly affected. We all understand we can’t have all answers and solutions and therefore we should be humble to listen from others especially to those in a near inter-marriage with the problems we are seeking to address. In most cases they have the best solutions but don’t have the resources needed to do it. 
• Growth Mindset. As we have learnt overtime, that learning is a task we embark in every observation that we make, every line that we read and every statement that we hear. We come to this work of philanthropy with a passion for learning and improving the way we do things. We assess our giving so we can learn from our successes and our failures. We share our knowledge for the benefit of others and yes for our own benefit as well. The wellness of society transmogrifies into the benefit for all. We are mere small subsets of the communities that web set out to change. We are not only benefactors, but first hand beneficiaries since we understand the advantages wrought by the work of our hands and hearts.
• Transparency. Impact driven philanthropy, given that it is well intended, subscribes to the tenets of openness about we are doing especially on how we arrived at the decisions we are making. This revolves more principally on our clarity about the intent of our kindness and giving.
•  Integrity. Almost all the other principles are vested in the understanding of this principle. In all our actions to give we must be guided on a compass of morals and an ethical philosophy. Even whether our activities are for a community, country, any mosaic of people, we author and practice the best practices to co-create a world we all want to see.
• Fairness. We live in a world of, yes of potential, though with opportunities that vary from community to another.  We believe that potential is evenly distributed but opportunity is not. In our work as impact driven philanthropists, we should make efforts to understand the historical, structural, geographical and cultural differences that may author the heterogeneity in the distribution of opportunity. In doing so, we can gauge our efforts to meet the demands of different communities that we set out to serve.
• Collaboration. As already stated in principle of number one, humility, impact driven philanthropy isn’t done as a monopoly of sorts, we must leverage on our potential to garner people around a bigger cause and help them to help us create the impact we set out to create. Powerful giving results from harnessing leadership within and working in partnership with the communities we seek to support.
• Empowerment. Empowerment of communities aims at ensuring sustainability and harnessing the roots of resource mobilisation. We therefore ensure social cohesion, political stability and economic empowerment of societies to endure to exchange the hand of resources with time. Amongst team, we ensure the internal capacity building and growth and making sure there is internal empowerment, economic in a sense that it defies the forces of lack. We build the capacity of leaders and organizations to provide people with the resources required to change systems and improve, through innovation, the dimensions and way things are done.
• Joy. To cause impact, we gauge our outcomes on the wellbeing of people, their comfort with the results that we wring compared to their past situation and experiences. If our impact doesn’t cause joy, it is either a good impact in a wrong environment or both the environment and impact are wrong. This could guide us on which changes to make in the modulus operandi. We intentionally draw upon our values, ethics, and life-experiences to identify the causes we want to address and guide our giving, which increases meaning and joy and inspires us to sustain our efforts.

Thank you to our readers, in the next blogs, we shall be delving more deeply in each principle stated above.

By Kansiime Onesmus

kansmus@gmail.com