Philanthropy will be ‘eclipsed’ by big government, says Malloch-Brown

The outgoing head of Open Society Foundations is predicting that philanthropy giants will be “pushed aside” as governments step up to confront the world’s gathering crises, in a rerun of former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal response to the Great Depression in the 1930s. Mark Malloch-Brown suggested the world is approaching a crunch moment on par with the Great Depression, which sparked a realization that only governments could tackle emergencies on a scale beyond the efforts of the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations. “I'm very struck that, during the Gilded Age — which was, in America, the last period of this sort of runaway, out-of-control, fortune-making and the inequality that arose on the back of it — the foundations tried to fill some of that gap to deal with some of that inequality,” the OSF president said at a London event. “But then Roosevelt got elected president, and basically pushed them aside and said, ‘this is the job of government to deal with this inequality’. And I suspect we may see something similar happen now, whoever gets elected president of the U.S.” Malloch-Brown, a former United Nations deputy secretary-general who has led OSF since 2021 and will step down on June 1, said it was no longer possible to believe “foundations can fix the problem” because “the level of societal stress and breakdown is just too great for that.” “We are going to enter a period where foundations are going to be somewhat eclipsed because people are going to say, ‘nice lot of people, but simply not big enough, not accountable enough, not systematic enough, to deal with what's going wrong with our country,’” he argued. He pointed to the way foundations attempted but failed to plug the gap left by governments to deliver vaccines equitably during the COVID-19 emergency. It became apparent that it “needed its own New Deal solution.” And, speaking at an event hosted by the ODI think tank, he pointed out that even OSF — at “north of a billion a year” — was only providing a sum equivalent to the aid budget of the Czech Republic, or “twice the size of Luxembourg's.” With trillions of dollars of climate finance required, that amounts to, as Malloch-Brown put it, “literally a drop in the ocean.” Malloch-Brown, who is stepping down to make way for board chair Alex Soros to restructure the organization established by his father George Soros, also argued that “a youth revolution” is underway. “Something very profound is happening now,” he said, both on “the American campuses” and in a series of government changes across West Africa, most notably in Senegal. It was happening through “unexpected channels,” in “social movements” rather than in “alienating, unfriendly, aged” political parties. “I think it will be out of Extinction Rebellion, a bunch of other places that activists will move across into party politics [from] — and the challenge is to make them do so,” he said.