Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [12]
The $100 option brings me to the last, and potentially most important, giver in this chapter: you. The vast majority of you who read this book can’t give anywhere near the amounts the Hohns, the Stamos brothers, and the Cullmans do. But if all of you searched your heart for the causes you really care about and gave what you could to them, the aggregate amount and its effect would be significant. Many people work for businesses that match their employees’ contributions. It’s a great way to double the impact of your gift.
BECAUSE I GREW UP in a family without a lot of money, in a place where most families had to watch how they spent every penny, I’ve always respected people who found a way to give when it isn’t easy to do. The most astonishing example of this kind of giving I ever saw occurred in 1995, when Oseola McCarty, an eighty-seven-year-old black woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, gave $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students in financial need.
For more than seventy-five years Oseola McCarty had eked out a living washing and ironing other people’s clothes. She dropped out of school in the sixth grade to take care of her sick, childless aunt and never returned. She never married. From 1947 on, she lived in a modest home her uncle gave her. She never owned a car and at eighty-seven still walked over a mile to the nearest grocery store to buy food, pushing her own shopping cart. All this time she was saving, and her savings were earning interest in the local bank. At the end of 1994, the arthritis in her hands forced her to give up washing and ironing. She met with her banker and decided that she wanted to give 60 percent of her savings to help deserving young people go to college, with the rest going to her church and relatives.
In August 1995, Stephanie Bullock, an eighteen-year-old Hattiesburg High School honor student, won the first Oseola McCarty scholarship. The next month Oseola took a train to Washington, D.C., where she was honored at the annual banquet of the Congressional Black Caucus. A couple of days later, I welcomed her to the White House and presented her with the Presidential Citizens Medal. Meeting Oseola McCarty was a real treat. Intelligent, articulate, and straightforward, she clearly enjoyed the recognition Washington gave her, but wasn’t carried away by it. She had saved all her life both because she knew the perils of being penniless and because she thought it foolish to spend on things she didn’t need. She accepted the obligations life had imposed on her but wanted young people to have the educational opportunities she’d missed. In her mind, she was balancing the scales, and that was reward enough.
Most people of modest means can’t save as much of their income as Oseola McCarty but are willing to give a little money every year to a good cause. Unless they contribute to a local fund-raiser, they’re often unsure that their $25 or $50 will make a difference. That question has been resolved in an innovative way by Kiva, an NGO that offers people the chance to become microcredit lenders of as little as $25 to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Here’s how it works. A lender goes to the Web site Kiva.org, which displays photos of prescreened people and tells you what they need money for and how much they need. The lenders make a choice and pay by credit card. Kiva then transfers the money to a local partner, which makes the loan to the business. During the period of the loan, the partner provides updates to the lender on the business’s progress and collects the repayment, which the lender can withdraw from Kiva or reloan.
I first learned about Kiva at my 2006 Clinton Global Initiative. Neal, one of the hundreds of people following the webcast, wrote us to say his commitment was to help eliminate poverty in developing countries by making $25 loans to assist