ABSTRACT

With the emergence and growth of ‘venture philanthropy’, the traditional, and very close, relationship between philanthropy and the nonprofit sector has seen major changes. Keen to break away from ‘old fashioned’ ways of philanthropy, venture philanthropists are seen as concentrating their support on innovative answers to social challenges. Rooted in the ideals of New Public Management, an approach first developed in the UK and focused on using ‘knowledge and expertise acquired in business management and other disciplines to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and general performance of public services in modern bureaucracies’ (Vigoda, 2003: 1; Van Haeperen, 2012), venture philanthropy tries to overcome the perceived weaknesses of traditional philanthropy and charitable actions. These are prominently spelled out in Salamon’s (1987) critique of the field: ‘voluntary failures’, ‘philanthropic amateurism and inefficiency’, as well as ‘philanthropic insufficiency’, that is, an ‘inability to generate resources on a scale that is both adequate enough and reliable enough to cope with the human service problem of an advanced industrial society’ (Salamon, 1987: 111). Venture philanthropy, through its support of social enterprising claims to address some of these concerns. To this end, venture philanthropy specifically looks to, and borrows its practices and vocabulary from, the finance and venture capital field (Wei-Skillern et al., 2007). As such, it moves beyond some of the ideas and ideals of entrepreneurial philanthropy discussed by Gordon and colleagues in Chapter 21.