For more than a century, the Boys & Girls Club of America has had a pretty simple mission: providing somewhere for kids to go after school so they stay out of trouble. A 1982 PSA put it simply: “It’s a place to go besides the streets,” a man sings, as a video plays of (mostly black) boys running into a club.
But in 2018, that message isn’t enough to attract local money to the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula, which serves Silicon Valley, where the biggest donors tend to favor causes that use novel solutions to “disrupt” poverty, or that can employ data to show just how many problems their money solves. Many are fans of effective altruism, a philanthropy philosophy that espouses “evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on” rather than “just doing what feels right.”
Benioff of Salesforce (not SV but tech) for one has done a lot of philanthropy. He gets VIP treatment and king table at San Tung if he wants it…
So that’s what Scott Forstall is up to now.
It’s long past time we stopped just throwing money at what feels good and start measuring actual results. If we truly care about helping people, then the results should be the most important part.