Global Social Problems and Promising Charitable Solutions

Dr. William F. Schulz (Executive Director, Amnesty International USA) has recently published his comments which he presented as the The Joseph Trachtman Lecture, 33 ACTEC J. 137 (2007).

Here is an excerpt from his article:

Now when I speak of philanthropy, I do not mean the kind of traditional charity that we associate with organizations that flourished in Victorian England and went by such names as the The National Trust Society for the Ruptured Poor or The Queen’s Conglomerate of Wizened Widows Who Have Seen Better Days or my favorite, naturally, The National Society for Poor, Pious Clergymen Who Have Retired to the Country. Instead, I mean giving that is designed to attack the root causes of social problems and change the world in which we live, and remarkably enough, we are beginning to see evidence that such change may actually be on the horizon. We have all heard of the epiphany that struck Bill Gates a few years ago when he learned that half a million children in the developing world die every year from an entirely preventable disease, rotavirus, the most common cause of diarrhea, and he asked himself, “How could I not have heard of something that kills half a million children a year unnecessarily?” But it is not just the admirable examples being set by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. It is the fact that the Carter Center and its donors have been able to practically eliminate river blindness. It is the fact that the number of donations to eleemosynary institutions of $100 million or more almost doubled from 2005 to 2006 and has grown from two in 1996 to 21 last year.