How donors should choose beneficiaries and ensure that their donations are effective.
Acceptable marketing practices for grant seekers.
A recipient may violate the
donor's intent in spirit or in law.
A donor's activities may be considered incompatible with those of the institution's mission.
Specifically, a recipient may be perceived as complicit with or oblivious to a donor's unethical practices, thus tainting its own good name, especially when an institution grants
naming rights.
A donor may receive a quid pro quo for all or part of a donation.
Giving effectively
Choosing suitable recipients of philanthropy, and ensuring that the aid is effective, is a difficult ethical problem, first addressed by
Aristotle.[1][2]
Many gifts are accompanied by a statement of intent, which may be a formal, legal agreement, or a less formal understanding. To what extent the recipient must respect that intent is an ethical and legal issue, especially as circumstances and
social norms change.[citation needed]
Incompatible missions
When a person's activities are incompatible with an institution's mission, associating with them or accepting donations from them may be considered inappropriate or dishonest marketing (cf.greenwashing), a form of
conflict of interest.
For example, children's museums generally refuse sponsorship from manufacturers of
junk food.[3]
Funds derived from, and donors engaged in,
unethical,
immoral, or
criminal activities pose a problem for the recipient, as accepting a donation or continuing to benefit from it may be interpreted as benefiting from or ignoring the disreputable activity.[4] Such donations have been characterized as "toxic philanthropy".[3]
This is an issue for the donor's behavior both before and after the donation. Institutions may react by returning the money, removing the acknowledgement, or by keeping the money.[5]
The
Sackler family has been a major donor to many cultural and educational institutions, and has had many buildings and programs
named for it. Their association with the
opioid epidemic has caused many activists to urge the recipients to remove the Sackler name from their buildings and programs,[6] and some institutions have announced that they will remove the name or accept no further donations from the family.[7][8] Harvard has said that it will not remove the name from the
Arthur M. Sackler Museum because "Dr. Arthur Sackler died before
Oxycontin was developed. His family sold their interest in the company before the drug was developed.... he had absolutely no relationship to it".[9]
Similarly, the sex offender
Jeffrey Epstein was a major donor to many university programs, even after his conviction for sex crimes. After it emerged that the director of the
MIT Media Lab,
Joi Ito, was aware of Epstein's misdeeds and took steps to solicit donations while hiding their source, Ito resigned.[10][11]MIT and
Harvard have both initiated reviews of donations by Epstein.[12][13] The MIT review concluded that:
Since MIT had no policy or processes for handling controversial donors in place at the time, the decision to accept Epstein's post-conviction donations cannot be judged to be a policy violation. But it is clear that the decision was the result of collective and significant errors in judgment that resulted in serious damage to the MIT community.[14]
Donors are generally acknowledged publicly for their donations, which benefits their reputation. It has been argued that this should be treated as a business transaction.[15] Many philosophers have argued that donations should be anonymous for this reason.[16] Receiving something of value in return for a donation is also considered both legally and ethically a quid pro quo.[17]
^Paul Dunn, "Strategic Responses by a Nonprofit when a Donor Becomes Tainted", Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly39:1:102-123 (February 2010)
doi:
10.1177/0899764008326770
^Lawrence S. Bacow, "A Message to the Community Regarding Jeffrey Epstein", Harvard Office of the President
September 12, 2019Archived January 12, 2020, at the
Wayback Machine