The Giving Review: Philanthropy in Divine Disruption

This article first appeared in the Giving Review

Fritz Steiger is a businessman, philanthropy professional, and longtime conservative public-policy and school-choice activist. A storied figure among those in and around the initial grantmaking that supported choice as it was being introduced in America, he recognizes many of them in his newly revised and republished memoir Divine Disruption: Restoring America to God’s Providence—nicely including Giving Review co-editor Daniel P. Schmidt.

After serving as the founding executive director of the Walmart Foundation, the corporate foundation that Walmart founder Sam Walton asked him to establish in 1981, Steiger and San Antonio businessman James Leininger co-founded the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in 1989. The always gentlemanly and good-natured Steiger, a nephew of onetime Wisconsin congressman William A. Steiger, served as TPPF’s founding president. School choice became one of its early priorities, and in 1991, Steiger and Leininger launched a privately funded scholarship program for low-income families in San Antonio.

Steiger subsequently worked with John Walton and others to take the model national, leading what became Children First America—which helped establish nearly 100 privately funded scholarship programs around the country, while also advocating publicly funded vouchers and tax credits.

A change of mind

His Divine Disruption offers great insight into the very purpose of philanthropy. While working for Walmart and its foundation, Steiger says he accepted the conventional description of corporate philanthropy as “giving back” to the communities in which the company operated. He later decided that the phrase carries a false premise. “The problem is that ‘giving back’ suggests that something was taken in the first place,” he writes.

“Giving-back” language, he thinks, implicitly casts philanthropy as some sort of penitential reparation—the corporation accumulated wealth at someone else’s expense and therefore owes some of it back. The phrase, he writes, reinforces the merely transactional notion that “the company needs to make amends for having done something wrong.”

Perhaps understandably in a book entitled Divine Disruption, Steiger’s alternative is rooted in morality. Drawing on the Greek roots of the word philanthropy, he writes,

Philanthropy is what it looks like when a corporation puts its values into tangible action.

It is not giving back—it is giving, freely and generously, out of love. Corporate philanthropy on the scale of the Walmart Foundation is not a replacement for government, but it plays a vital role in sustaining and uplifting communities. Through targeted and thoughtful giving, philanthropy disrupts poverty and despair in ways the state never can.

Philanthropy, to him, isn’t repayment of any social debt created by wealth accumulation. It is a voluntary use of wealth that was legitimately created in the first place.

Disruption

“Private foundations and companies can be incubators of connection, innovation, and the disruption we need,” Steiger concludes the book’s passages on philanthropy. “They are the means by which we sustain and nurture the promise handed down to us.”

While government tends toward established systems, philanthropy can disruptively experiment, connect people and institutions, identify unmet needs, and act. Earlier, he praises Sam Walton precisely for seeing “what was needed, or would be needed in the future,” and then finding people capable of making it happen. Philanthropy in this conception is entrepreneurial, which was also pursued at the separate Walton Family Foundation (WFF) that Sam and Helen Walton created in 1987.

In 1992, Helen Walton visited Milwaukee for the Bradley Foundation’s announcement of its initial infusion of support for the Partners Advancing Values in Education (PAVE) group at the Southside Community Center. Like the San Antonio program, PAVE was a privately funded voucher program to demonstrate parental support for choice in education, including religious schools. It was also supported by WFF. For Bradley, PAVE was meant to “pave” the way for a publicly funded state program that would include religious schools—which later did, in fact, become law and was immediately challenged in court, ultimately unsuccessfully.

An animating morality

Steiger’s thinking is well within a recognizable tradition of American thought about philanthropy—private wealth creation followed by voluntary, decentralized social experimentation. In presenting it, he uses a bracingly explicit moral and religious vocabulary—love, abundance, providence, inherited promise—rather than some efficiency-based one.

As well, he criticizes corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs and companies’ pursuit of what he calls “left-leaning causes.” He praises recent Walmart moves as returning to Sam Walton’s values and proposes “dedication, excellence, and integrity” as an alternative “DEI” implementation.

For Steiger, philanthropy is at its best when it is neither penance nor public relations. It is private action, freely undertaken, and it has room to experiment in ways government often does not. That understanding animated his own decades of work in philanthropy and school choice. Divine Disruption makes clear that, to him, this is as much a moral proposition as a practical one.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-philanthropy-in-divine-disruption/