PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY

Current issues, news and ethics
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kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

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If employee dies due to COVID-19, family to be paid salary till deceased's retirement age: Tata Steel

In addition to this, for all its frontline employees, who as part of their job, met with an unfortunate death due to COVID-19, Tata Steel would bear "all the expenses of their children's education till graduation in India".

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Tata Steel would continue to pay monthly salary to the family of all employees who die due to COVID-19, the Jamshedpur-based steel manufacturer has announced.

The salary would be paid till the retirement age of the deceased - that is 60 years. The monthly pay would be the same as the last salary which the person drew before his demise, Tata Steel said in a statement issued on May 23.

Along with the salary, the company would also provide medical benefits and residential facilities, it said.

"Tata Steel's best-in-class social security schemes will help ensure an honourable standard of living for their families, whereby the family will get the last drawn salary till 60 years of age of the deceased employee/nominee along with medical benefits and housing facilities," Tata Steel stated.

Also Read | Tata Motors to pay monthly allowance to kin of employees who died of COVID-19 until retirement age

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/busin ... 31741.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Podcast

How to Do the Most Good


Listen to podcast at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3

Do we actually know how much good our charitable donations do?

This is the question that jump-started Holden Karnofsky’s current career. He was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn’t find a service that would help him do that, so he and his co-worker Elie Hassenfeld decided to quit their jobs to build one. The result was GiveWell, a nonprofit that measures the effectiveness of different charities and recommends the ones it is most confident can save lives with the least cost. Things like providing bed nets to prevent malaria and treatments to deworm schoolchildren in low-income countries.

But in recent years, Karnofsky has taken a different approach. He is currently the co-C.E.O. of Open Philanthropy, which operates under the same basic principle — how can we do the most good possible? — but with a very different theory of how to do so. Open Phil’s areas of funding range from farm animal welfare campaigns and criminal justice reform to pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety. And Karnofsky has recently written a series of blog posts centered around the idea that, ethically speaking, we’re living through the most important century in human history: The decisions we make in the coming decades about transformational technologies will determine the fate of trillions of future humans.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

In all of this, Karnofsky represents the twin poles of a movement that’s come to deeply influence my thinking: effective altruism. The hallmark of that approach is following fundamental questions about how to do good through to their conclusions, no matter how simple or fantastical the answers. And so this is a conversation, at a meta-level, about how to think like an effective altruist. Along the way, we discuss everything from climate change to animal welfare to evaluating charities to artificial intelligence to the hard limits of economic growth to trying to view the world as if you were a billion years old.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

How to Know Your Donations Are Doing the Most Good

Nearly a decade ago, when my wife and I first reached a station in life that allowed us to consider giving an annual sum to charity, I stumbled into an unexpected intellectual rabbit hole — the complicated ethics and moral philosophy surrounding the act of giving away one’s money.

We didn’t have a fortune to give — if I recall correctly it was less than a couple thousand dollars — so I wanted to make sure that our contribution would have the maximum impact. But what kind of “impact” was I looking to maximize? I had no idea. There are all sorts of ways to use money to improve the state of the world, and they vary widely in cost and outcome. Should I donate to feed the needy where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area? Or was it better, in a utilitarian sense, to feed the poor of Kenya, where my money would likely go further, and where people’s need for food might likely be more dire?

But if it was direness that counted, was feeding people even the right way to go? Wouldn’t our $2,000 be put to better use by paying for cheap but lifesaving medical interventions, like providing $5 bed nets for children in areas of the world ravaged by malaria?

And this was not even to consider the more practical questions: Even if I found the most effective use of my money, could I have any assurance that a particular charitable organization was taking care to spend my donation wisely? By this point readers familiar with this line of vexation might be screaming at their screens: GiveWell! I understand the enthusiasm — when I discovered GiveWell back in 2012, I felt like its founders had been reading my mind.

GiveWell is a charity and research organization that was founded in 2007 by Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky, two former employees of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates who had, like me, been confounded by the moral dilemmas involved in giving money away. Unlike me, they decided to do something about it. For more than a decade, GiveWell has been investigating the central question in the philanthropic movement known as “effective altruism”: What is the best way to help other people?

Every year, GiveWell distills its in-depth research into a list of top charities — the organizations that accomplish the most good in the world (in terms of lives saved or improved) for the least cost. In recent years GiveWell has also become a major charity itself; its Maximum Impact Fund collects hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and distributes the funds to its top charities every quarter based on which organizations can use the funding most effectively. Because its giving is backed by rigorous research and monitoring — it now employs nearly two dozen researchers — GiveWell is one of the few ways of donating money that can offer an estimate of the amount of good you’ve caused in the world. For instance, GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis finds that its top charity, the Malaria Consortium, which treats infected children with malaria medicine, spends about $4,500 to save one human life.

GiveWell has grown enormously in the last decade. Its empirical approach to philanthropy has been a hit among tech and finance employees, a group that has done quite well in recent American history. GiveWell says it will raise more than $500 million to give toward its top charities in 2021; it aims to raise more than a billion dollars annually by 2025, which would make it one of the largest charities in the country. A major funder is the Open Philanthropy Project, a foundation mainly funded by Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and her spouse, Dustin Moskovitz, one of the founders of Facebook and Asana, a company that makes teamwork-management software. In addition to being a co-founder of GiveWell, Karnofsky is a co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy, which started as a GiveWell project.

This year, Open Philanthropy donated $300 million to GiveWell. Much of the rest of GiveWell’s donations came in far more modest quantities. My wife and I have been giving annually to GiveWell since I first discovered it. What I like about donating to the group is having the confidence that our money is being used directly toward efforts to save lives.

Every year around this time I begin singing GiveWell’s praises to everyone I know. There’s one problem that people tend to bring up when I explain the group’s objectives — proximity. GiveWell’s top charities operate in the poorest parts of the world, mainly in Africa. That’s a direct consequence of seeking to maximize cost effectiveness, because GiveWell argues that donations go further overseas. But what if you want to give money to people closer at hand?

I asked this of Hassenfeld, GiveWell’s chief executive, in a recent conversation. “Giving locally is not a bad thing — GiveWell is not here to be the moral overseer of how people give,” he said. But he also suggested that donors “try to picture the people who are not right in front of you, people who live in rural Kenya and might be in need.”

People living in the world’s most impoverished countries can have their lives turned around for relatively little money with things like malaria medicine and vaccines to prevent common infectious diseases. In the United States, by contrast, GiveWell has found that relieving poverty is much more expensive and complicated, and many approaches don’t measure evidence in the ways it prefers.

Hassenfeld told me that it’s helpful to think of giving in the way you might think of an investment portfolio — to spread your donations among more than one cause or region of the world. I find that advice wise but somewhat difficult to carry out, because it’s difficult to find the sort of detailed cost-effectiveness measures for local charities that GiveWell maintains for overseas groups. And so, other than donating to my local food bank a few times a year, I’ve come to direct the bulk of my giving to GiveWell. It’s the best way I know of to have some certainty that I might be doing some good in the world.

This column is part of Times Opinion’s Holiday Giving Guide 2021. The author has no direct connection to the organization mentioned. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in the guide, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Microsoft launches initiative to help 25 million people worldwide acquire the digital skills needed in a COVID-19 economy

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Around the world, 2020 has emerged as one of the most challenging years in many of our lifetimes. In six months, the world has endured multiple challenges, including a pandemic that has spurred a global economic crisis. As societies reopen, it’s apparent that the economy in July will not be what it was in January. Increasingly, one of the key steps needed to foster a safe and successful economic recovery is expanded access to the digital skills needed to fill new jobs. And one of the keys to a genuinely inclusive recovery are programs to provide easier access to digital skills for people hardest hit by job losses, including those with lower incomes, women, and underrepresented minorities.

To help address this need, today Microsoft is launching a global skills initiative aimed at bringing more digital skills to 25 million people worldwide by the end of the year. This initiative will bring together every part of our company, combining existing and new resources from LinkedIn, GitHub, and Microsoft. It will be grounded in three areas of activity:

(1) The use of data to identify in-demand jobs and the skills needed to fill them;

(2) Free access to learning paths and content to help people develop the skills these positions require;

(3) Low-cost certifications and free job-seeking tools to help people who develop these skills pursue new jobs.

At its heart, this is a comprehensive technology initiative that will build on data and digital technology. It starts with data on jobs and skills from the LinkedIn Economic Graph. It provides free access to content in LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and the GitHub Learning Lab, and couples these with Microsoft Certifications and LinkedIn job seeking tools. In addition, Microsoft is backing the effort with $20 million in cash grants to help nonprofit organizations worldwide assist the people who need it most. One-quarter of this total, or $5 million, will be provided in cash grants to community-based nonprofit organizations that are led by and serve communities of color in the United States.

[Free online courses to boost your digital skills here https://opportunity.linkedin.com/en-us .]

Our vision for skills extends beyond these immediate steps for job seekers. Employees will also need to skill and reskill through their careers, and we want to make it easier for employers to help. Our vision is a connected “system of learning” that helps empower everyone to pursue lifelong learning. That is why we are also announcing today that Microsoft is developing a new learning app in Microsoft Teams to help employers upskill new and existing employees. This will bring together best in class content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, third-party training providers, and a company’s own learning content and make it all available in a place where employees can easily learn in the flow of their work.

We are also pledging that we will make stronger data and analytics available to governments around the world so they can better assess local economic needs. Finally, we will use our voice to advocate for public policy innovations that we believe will advance the skilling opportunities people will need in the changed economy.

While this represents the largest skills initiative in Microsoft’s history, we recognize that no company can come close to closing the skills gap alone. Sustained progress will require a renewed partnership between stakeholders across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, and we’re committed to supporting this. Following is a complete description of our thinking and plans.

The problem we need to solve

Within only a few months, COVID-19 has provoked a massive demand shock, setting off job losses that far exceed the scale of the Great Recession a decade ago. The world will need a broad economic recovery that will require in part the development of new skills among a substantial part of the global workforce.

According to Microsoft calculations, global unemployment in 2020 may reach a quarter of a billion people. It is a staggering number. The pandemic respects no border. In the United States alone, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the country may witness a 12.3 point increase (from 3.5% to 15.8%) in the unemployment rate, equating to more than 21 million newly out-of-work people. Many other countries and continents face similar challenges.

More...

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/0 ... 9-economy/
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

The Duty of Responsible Stewardship

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Video Quote: The Duty of Responsible Stewardship

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Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3_UWOFD7sQ

#Speech made by His Highness the #AgaKhan at the Conference of Indigenous Philanthropy in Islamabad, Pakistan on 17 October 2000.
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Mega-donor Esmail Bharwani reveals his secret formula

Post by kmaherali »

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How does splitting an order of eggs Benedict and a tea bag allow someone enough capital to create not one, but hundreds of awards and scholarships?

ot that we’re counting, but if we were, Esmail Bharwani and his wife, Safana, stand out for the sheer volume of scholarships they’ve created and contribute to at the University of Calgary.

And not just here, but other post-secondary institutions from Bow Valley College and Mount Royal University to Athabasca University. All benefit from the 90-plus annual scholarships (perpetual) that are distributed through the Bharwanis' family foundation.

Some of their student scholarships target newcomers to Canada, while others aim to help single parents — some are $250, others are as high as $1,000.

“It’s quite simple, really: I am interested in maximizing the number of students who can benefit from our gifts,” explains Esmail, LLB’04, over a shared lunch at OEB Breakfast Co.

Splitting a lunch, down to a tea bag, precisely reflects his outlook on finances.

“Of course, we don’t have to split an eggs Benedict,” Esmail chuckles. “But it’s why I don’t have to eat at a posh restaurant or have a $70 steak . . . I can find a $20 meal and be just as happy. Why waste $50 when I could put that money into the Foundation or give somebody an award? I tell my kids that I don’t waste money on anything that really has no value in my life.”

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The Bharwani family

But will a $250 scholarship make that much of a difference in someone’s education?

“My thinking is this,” explains the Tanzanian retiree, whose career saw him progress from stenographer to accountant to UCalgary-educated lawyer. “It's better to give small amounts to 10 people than give one large amount to one person. I like to think of the process like a Lotto 6/49 ticket. Sure, one person could win the $49-million jackpot but, frankly, I'd rather see 49 people get $1 million each. That way, you make 49 families happy.

“Over the years, lots of students have told me that even a small amount has helped them buy groceries that month because they had just spent all their money on student fees or tuition."

In the world of philanthropy, the Biblical parable of the loaves and fishes is one that’s frequently replayed, just as it is in many religions, including something similar in the Ismaili faith, which the Bharwanis ardently follow. Indeed, Dr. Sheila LeBlanc, DBA, associate vice-president of Continuing Education at UCalgary, confirms that, by 2027, the Bharwani family foundation will have contributed to 149 awards at Continuing Education, alone.

Like the miracle that fed 5,000, one of the tenets of being an Ismaili is sharing your material wealth in order to improve the quality of your community — something that greatly influenced Esmail while growing up with seven siblings in Tanzania.

“There was never a lot of money, but, somehow, we always had food or a cup of tea to share,” he says. “I remember once saying to my dad, ‘But, we are struggling ourselves.’ That’s when he explained the principle of barakat, which is, when you share what you have with someone, the god gives you barakat. In other words, barakat means bounty . . . good health, happiness. It’s a multiplying factor, a theory I’ve worked with all my life.”

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Safana and Esmail Bharwani

And, if anyone knows the power of multiplying factors, it’s Esmail, who spent most of his career toiling over numbers. It started with a large family: eight children. The obligation of being the oldest son was to help with the family business while supporting his siblings through school. To do so, he quit school in Grade 9, helped run the business, and learned (and, soon after, taught) stenography, all the while aching for something more academically challenging. Years later, he found it in a professional accounting designation in Newcastle, England, and convinced his father that it was his turn.

Despite his frugal ways, Esmail had no capital after a year and was just about to return, defeated, to Tanzania when a white knight, in the guise of a professor, found him a job and a room at a Methodist hostel which carried him through to graduation. The years that followed saw Esmail, later with Safana, work between Africa and the U.K. before moving to Calgary in 1973, where, he says, “I learned what a parka was . . . it was freezing!”

Just 11 days after arriving in Calgary, Esmail secured a job as an accountant with S. J. Thomson Truck Equipment. A few years later, he began teaching a course in running a small business for UCalgary Continuing Education, which he did for the next 20 years. He earned a BA from Athabasca, an MBA from the University of Wales/Manchester Business School, and an MSc in entrepreneurialstudies from the University of Stirling in Scotland. Somewhere in those busy years, he began writing a weekly column in the Calgary Herald (which ran for 10 years), was a UCalgary senator for six years, and ran his own accounting practice, from which he retired in 1999. Impressive as those credentials are, Esmail discovered he was still hungry to learn, even as a retiree, and pounced on the opportunity to study what he’d always dreamed of taking — law.

“As a little boy, I used to go the courthouse and listen to all the big diamond-smuggling trials in Africa,” Esmail recalls. “So, I thought, why not? I have nothing else planned for the next three years.”

But nothing prepared the then-60-year-old for law school. “That first year was so tough,” he says. “Classes started at 8 a.m., and I would finish up at 2 in the morning in our basement, where I would have been studying since dinner.”

The oldest graduate of UCalgary Law’s Class of 2004, Esmail readily admits to crying as he walked across the stage in his cap and gown, thinking, incredulously, “I’m actually a lawyer now.”

After articling with Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, Esmail joined the Miller Thomson LLP firm where he focused on income tax planning and compliance and worked until 2011. His law practice also allowed him to advise clients on setting up funds and charities, which is how he soon found himself running legal seminars from Toastmasters breakfasts and entrepreneurial student groups to UCalgary seminars and Canadian Bar Association lunches.

Esmail funnelled much of his income as a lawyer into the Esmail Safana Farzana Fayaz Bharwani Foundation, where he learned how satisfying philanthropy can be.

“Again, and I say this a lot . . . philanthropy comes from creating a surplus, however small that is,” says the grandfather of three. “I treat it like an accounting exercise. I ask myself, ‘What can I cut to create a surplus?’ But, remember — the goal is to help others, not to increase your business’ bottom line. You don’t have to be a millionaire to be a philanthropist. What you need is the desire, and then you need to make the effort, to create a surplus.

“Honestly, it’s simple math.”

https://alumni.ucalgary.ca/news/mega-do ... et-formula
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Charitable Giving | How To Spot Professional Beggars | Why Give? Who To Give? And Pitfalls

Post by kmaherali »

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgVvr8KbXTU

Why do we give to charity?
What's the best way to donate?
What should we be careful about when giving?
How can we be effective when giving?

These are questions that we need to think about when engaging in charitable giving and they are addressed in this video.

Charitable Giving
How To Spot Professional Beggars
Why Give? Who to Give? Pitfalls

Publisher: JollyGul (AI+Human) Micro-Documentary Channel
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