Thirty years on, philanthropy is asked whether it ever chose a destination
Alliance magazine marked its 30th anniversary with a live debate framed by managing editor Elika Roohi around a single question: have the last 30 years of philanthropy been a failure? The event, hosted with Forum for the Future and Accessibility Partners, set that question against a sector estimated to control $1.5 trillion in assets and to spend $150 billion each year.
Roohi said colleagues pressed her to soften the prompt, suggesting the sector instead list what it had made possible, or argue that success cannot be measured without unified goals. That objection is itself the finding: three decades of grant-making answered whichever crisis was loudest, while the organisers concluded the pace of change never matched the pace of breakdown, and that the work stopped at managing symptoms rather than systemic change.
Source: Alliance Magazine · September 28, 2026