Reclaiming the Moral Life of Philanthropy

Gara LaMarche believes the nation’s charitable organizations have lost “moral clarity,” growing more concerned with “the fix, the intervention, than about reasons for doing or caring about what is right.”

After many decades laboring in large, private foundations, LaMarche has an intimate perspective on this drift in philanthropic mission and practice. He draws several telling examples from his own experience. As head of the Texas Civil Liberties Union in the mid-1980s, LaMarche failed to sway diehard capital punishment legislators with the “traditional ACLU rights talk,” which was viewed either as starry-eyed idealism or dangerous radicalism.

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