Amid growing social inequality and ecological collapse, a critical and pluralistic movement known as justice philanthropy has emerged within the philanthropic sector. This movement seeks to confront systemic injustice and question the role of mainstream philanthropic foundations in perpetuating it. While justice philanthropy has introduced innovative approaches, many of its practices remain tied to a dominant ideology of perpetual economic growth—often termed growthism—which is itself a root cause of the crises it aims to address. In this article, we draw on degrowth scholarship to argue that without a decisive break from growthism, justice philanthropy risks reinforcing the very extractive and unequal systems it seeks to dismantle. We begin by tracing the role of philanthropic foundations in sustaining capitalist growth imperatives. We then examine the points of alignment and tension between degrowth and justice philanthropy, revealing a core contradiction in current philanthropic foundation practices. To address this, we propose a framework for degrowth praxis in philanthropy, outlining three transformative roles that foundations can adopt: capital decumulators, solidarity vehicles, and growth objectors. By reorienting justice philanthropy strategies around degrowth principles, foundations can more effectively contribute to systemic transformation and social justice. This analysis offers both a critique of dominant philanthropic foundation models and a roadmap for more radical, justice-driven alternatives in an era of deepening social and ecological crises.

Concerned with the intersection of early Indian medicine and religion, this article examines the scope, scale, and influence of the medical philanthropy undertaken by Śaiva Hindu communities in medieval South Asia. It begins first with a non-exhaustive survey of epigraphs in Sanskrit, Tĕlugu, Tamiḻ, and Kannaḍa from various regions of South Asia during the Śaiva Age. Doing so, it identifies a substantive pattern of Śaiva monasteries, temples, and patrons building hospitals, donating medicines, establishing endowments for physicians, and/or teaching medical texts. It then proceeds to recognise the Śivadharma corpus, especially the Śivadharmaśāstra and Śivadharmottara, as a key theoretical guide that almost certainly informed and incentivised Śaiva medical interventions through its conceptualisation of the ārogyadāna (gift of health) as a highly meritorious act of dharma. The article also speaks to how the Śivadharma corpus helped nurture among Śaivas a broader concern for therapeutic interventions and longevity, which I suggest was also reflected in their engagements with alchemy and in their development and circulation of curative Sanskrit tantras. Finally, using philology, this article identifies the impact that the Śivadharma corpus had on both influencing the conceptualisation and normative importance of medical philanthropy in broader Hindu (esp. Smārta) discussions of charity in late medieval digests on dharma.

In 2025, unprecedented disruptions to federal cultural funding exposed longstanding structural vulnerabilities within the public humanities. This article examines how some state humanities councils—key institutions connecting national resources to local communities—are navigating this instability. Drawing on original interviews with executive directors from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Minnesota Humanities Center, and Connecticut Humanities, the essay identifies two distinct but complementary models of sustainability: an entrepreneurial model, in which organizations generate new revenue through mission-driven innovation, and a coalition model, in which broad-based alliances secure public funding through policy mechanisms such as state tax initiatives. While each model offers a viable pathway, neither fully addresses the fragmentation of support across the field. The article argues that federal funds, which make up the largest share of unrestricted operating support for councils, are fundamental to generating additional streams of revenue. The gap in private-sector engagement and the potential for developing structural interventions to align corporate and philanthropic investments at scale are also identified. Together, these approaches offer considerations for building a more resilient and integrated humanities funding ecosystem.

This article highlights the role of a Parisian primary public school serving elite demographics in shaping children’s class identities by teaching privilege management. Based on a year of ethnographic observations in 4th and 5th grade classrooms, this study examines the daily practices of a privileged school and its philanthropy program, Giving is Good. Drawing on critical scholarship on the education of elites, exposure and intervention are the two mechanisms through which the class transforms children’s immediate social environment into a resource for philanthropic engagement. The results indicate that privilege management generates a disposition to talk about and navigate inequality with ease while maintaining face and privilege. Results also show a profound gendered discrepancy in how children “learn to give.” In light of recent evolutions in citizenship education, the article discusses the implications of teaching philanthropy in public schools for political culture and how privileged children learn to think about other children who do not belong to the same social class.

This article makes an original contribution to the study of philanthropy by applying an adaptation of Nancy Fraser’s theoretical framework of social justice to a case study. Fraser’s framework encompasses three dimensions: redistribution, representation and recognition. Drawing on an in-depth case study of a Quebec foundation active since 1990, we demonstrate how these dimensions are hierarchically structured and articulated differently across historical periods, actor profiles and social and political contexts. By identifying three successive configurations—each primarily focusing on redistribution (1990–2000), representation (2001–2021) and recognition (2022–2025)—the article highlights the internal tensions, blind spots and normative evolutions within the philanthropic sector. Our main theoretical contribution is to shed light on how philanthropic practices can integrate and support a vision of social justice, both internally, through the foundation’s operations and team composition, and externally, through its donations, financial investments and public statements. Rather than treating social justice as an abstract ideal, we show how it materializes in governance, funding, relationships and public discourse. This comprehensive framework offers valuable insights for analyzing and supporting foundations seeking to pursue critical emancipation and empowerment.

Large grant-making philanthropic foundations in the UK and the EU can have a significant influence over environmental law and as such are worthy of more attention from environmental law scholars. Through analysis of publicly available documents, we identify in this paper an absence of consistent transparency by these foundations. This makes their influence hard to understand, hard to research, hard even to see at work in the world. Transparency is complex and challenging, however. And so, rather than berating problematic approaches, we explore through interviews with actors in the field, as well as the academic literature, both the difficulties that foundations experience in pursuing transparent practices and the benefits of transparency. We conclude by identifying some principles for improved visibility of foundation work.

Elite donors are a crucial and sought-after source of funding for many nonprofit organisations, but there is a dearth of substantive empirical studies presenting primary data on such donors’ motivations, experiences and perspectives. There are challenges for social scientists in conducting interviews with elites, notably: gaining access to elite donors; developing sufficient rapport to discuss a topic that involves money and morals; and making sense of data without being dazzled by striking surface differences between elites and non-elites. These barriers have resulted in a long-standing over-reliance on secondary sources and on interviews with proxies such as foundation staff and wealth advisers. This paper reviews the small body of work that presents findings from interviews with elite donors and draws on my experience of conducting interviews with 46 wealthy UK donors, in order to critically analyse the implementation of this research design. This paper adds to the literature by extending understanding of elite donors’ reasons for agreeing to be interviewed and contributes to advancing third sector research by highlighting strategies to overcome challenges in conducting elite interviews in order to gain a less mediated understanding of the contexts, cultures and subjectivities of their focus of study.

In the present study, we examine the determinants associated with variations in the level of funding allocations among 112 grant-making philanthropic institutions in Israel. Drawing upon the hypotheses developed in Creative Philanthropy and the New Philanthropy approaches, we test the extent that social, economic, and organizational performance affects the level of funding allocations. Evidence indicates that (a) the level of resources raises the level of funding allocations to economic performance but not social performance; (b) a higher number of institutional stakeholders from the public sector, local authorities, and private organizations, eligible for support, raises the level of funding allocations to social performance; and (c) a higher number of volunteers in the workforce increases economic performance. The results assess assumptions promoted in the New Philanthropy approach, suggesting that philanthropic institutions in Israel develop a clear focus on professional management and a wise rather than “romantic” approach to philanthropy and altruism.

This paper examines the extent to which communication strategies may influence willingness to volunteer. Research on persuasive advertising and the “arousal: cost-reward” model serve as theoretical foundations. The results of two experiments indicate that advertisement-induced (ad-induced) emotional arousal, message framing, and manipulations of self-efficacy perceptions can impact willingness to volunteer. Analysis detected a significant interaction between perceived self-efficacy and message framing. In the low (high) self-efficacy condition gain frames (loss frames) were more persuasive. When gender-related differences were considered, analysis revealed that ad-induced emotional arousal and manipulations of self-efficacy had their impact solely on men’s willingness to volunteer. Based on the results of the empirical analyses, implications for management and starting points for future research are presented.

The paper investigates processes and consequences of ‘philanthropic kinning’, that is the use of kinship and family idioms in constructing and maintaining personal relations between donors and recipients in philanthropy. Usual studies collapse the occurrence of kinship metaphors in philanthropy either as evidence of ‘prosociality’ (e.g. trust, care or love) or more frequently as evidence of ‘paternalism’ (power and domination of donors over recipients, and their objectification). This paper claims that introducing kinship and parenting studies into researching philanthropy would greatly refine our understanding of donor–recipient relations. In the framework of a qualitative case study of a philanthropic ‘godparenthood’ programme organised in Hungary supporting ethnic Hungarian communities in Romania, this paper looks at the roles, responsibilities and obligations various forms of philanthropic kinship offer for the participants; and relations of power unfolding in helping interactions. With such concerns, this paper complements earlier research on hybridisation of philanthropy, through its sectoral entanglements with kinship and family. Also, it contributes to research on inequalities in philanthropy, by showing how philanthropic kinning may recreate, modify or reshape donor–recipient power relations in diverse ways.

This paper examines the effects of aggregate government payments to nonprofit organizations on aggregate private philanthropy. Four behavioral models of private philanthropic giving are proposed to formulate four hypotheses about those effects: no net effect (null hypothesis), crowding in (positive effect), crowding out (negative effect), and “philanthropic flight” or displacement (negative effect across different subsectors). These hypotheses were tested against the evidence from 40 countries collected as a part of a larger research project aimed to document the scale and finances of the nonprofit sector. The data show that, on the balance, government payments to nonprofit institutions (NPIs) have a positive effect on aggregate philanthropic donations to nonprofits, as stipulated by the crowding in hypothesis, but a field level analysis revealed evidence of “philanthropic flight” or displacement from “service” to “expressive” activities by government payments to “service” NPIs. Due to the limitations of the data, these results indicate empirical plausibility of the hypothesized effects rather than their incidence. The findings demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between government funding and philanthropic donations to nonprofits, which depends on the goals of the actors (donors and recipients) and institutional settings mediating the transaction costs of difference sources of nonprofit support.

In the United Kingdom, there has been a resurgence of interest in philanthropy amongst the media, policymakers, and scholars alike. In this context, the analysis of new and innovative forms of philanthropy is paramount. This paper focuses on an innovation in the philanthropic form: the community foundation. The success of community foundations in the United States provided the impetus for the establishment of community foundations in the UK in the 1980s. This paper examines how the community foundation form has been adapted to the UK and the factors which have influenced the development and roles of British community foundations. It is argued that this study is both timely and important for three reasons. First, the analysis of new structures through which people give furthers our understanding of Britain’s culture of giving. Second, the paper examines the role of community-based philanthropy in the civil renewal of Britain’s communities. Finally, the study makes an important contribution to efforts to promote the community foundation form worldwide as it highlights the challenges of transferring philanthropic forms from one context to another.

We examine if the presence of minority individuals in the community affects the decision to give to charities by majority individuals. We focus on two giving decisions by the majority population. The first is giving to any charitable organization; the second is giving to organizations geared to international causes. We also examine these two decisions when the sample is split into religious and non-religious individuals. We find that the larger the proportion of minorities in a given community, the less likely that members of the majority group give to charity in general—supporting the idea that heterogeneous communities deter outreach—but the more likely they are to give to international causes, giving credence to Allport’s ‘contact’ hypothesis.

This paper explores cross-country variations in charitable giving and investigates the association of welfare state policies with private philanthropy. Hypotheses are drawn from crowding-out theory and considerations about the influence of a country’s mixed economy of welfare. We add to the on-going discussion concerning the crowding-out hypothesis with empirical evidence by looking at specific charitable subsectors people donate to across countries. Using Eurobarometer survey data that include 23 countries, we find no evidence for a crowding-out effect, but rather a crosswise crowding-in effect of private donations. Moreover, giving behaviour differs between non-profit regimes.

Scholars have long been interested in what influences philanthropic behavior. However, little is known about the effects of length of residency on charitable gifts to local and non-local organizations. Using 2010 survey data from 470 older individuals, we examine whether donors’ geographic relocations influence philanthropic behavior and whether these moves are a bigger challenge for some types of nonprofits than others. We find variations in giving to specific types of nonprofits based on residency duration. The giving patterns we uncover add depth to our understanding of philanthropic behavior and inform nonprofit managers seeking to better understand older adults’ giving to local and non-local religious, human services, arts, and education nonprofits.