By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors
Diehard punk rock fans may know Peter Murphy as the former
front man for the once-popular British goth band Bauhaus. Bauhaus broke up in
the early 80s, but Murphy is currently back on stage with a 40th
anniversary reunion tour.
Getting excited? Getting your ear plugs ready? Calm down.
This story is not about that Peter
Murphy.
This Peter Murphy teaches
philosophy at the University of Indianapolis. He’s a bit more genteel, but in
many ways, beats a philanthropic drum as loud as his namesake rocker.
Murphy, who teaches a graduate course at U of I called
“Poverty, Ethics and Effective Giving,” trumpets a philosophy known as
“effective altruism,” or more simply EA.
As part of the class syllabus, students are introduced to
the tenets of EA, and their final assignment is designed to apply what they’ve
learned. Each year, Murphy secures funds from local donors, and as a group, students
must reach a consensus about which organization or organizations will be the
recipient of those funds.
“When they try to persuade one another that this is the
organization we should give money to, they always set up rules. (One is) you
have to give evidence, and the evidence that you give has to meet some kind of
rigorous standards,” he said, which is an EA hallmark.
But for Murphy this isn’t just a course. Over the past 25
years, his philosophy students have studied Peter Singer and other scholars who
have written about poverty ethics. Murphy was introduced to Singer’s 1972 paper
“Fame, Affluence and Morality” as a college student, but his interest in the
plight of the world’s poorest people was actually sparked earlier by his
brother.
“When my brother went to college in the mid-1980s, he
brought home a book that was quite popular at the time called “How the Other Half Dies: The
real reasons for World Hunger” by Susan George. It was a best-selling book in
the United States, and it was reporting on how roughly half the people in the
world were dying of easily preventable causes,” said the Canadian-born Murphy.
Curiosity led him to
continue to investigate EA, which has Singer’s ideas at its core. EA, a philosophy and social
movement, started in
2011 at Britain’s Oxford University and uses evidence and reasoning to
determine the most effective ways to benefit others. It differs from other
philanthropic practices because of “its emphasis on quantitatively comparing
charitable causes and interventions with the goal of maximizing certain human
values.”
“I really see effective altruism as the convergence of
people in philosophy who have been interested in ethics with social scientists
who came in with randomized-controlled trials,” said Murphy. “The trials have
brought out a lot of surprises at least in international giving. There are all
sorts of things that have turned out to be absolutely ineffective that are very
counter intuitive.”
Effective altruism has also provided a framework for Murphy
and his wife, Dana Harrison, for
personal donation decisions.
“When we met, we were
almost kind of at extremes, and for both of us individually, our personal
charitable giving was really important. When I first learned about effective
altruism, it was really challenging, and I definitely had a defense response,”
said Harrison, who, when she met her now husband, had just left her role as
executive director of Dress for Success Indianapolis. He challenged her to
think about her investments based on scientific data, not just emotion, in
order to do the most good.
The couple encourages others to learn about
EA’s framework when making charitable contributions, and they also think it’s
important that Indiana’s nonprofits are aware of and keep track of the
movement.
Cindy Collier couldn’t agree more.
For the past 15 years, she has been a consultant to
corporations, government, foundations, nonprofits, and prior to that, worked
for Health and Human Services at the national and state levels. She believes
that the EA movement is helping to harness commitment, good work and people’s
desire to make a difference.
“Instead of just trying hard, we’re
going to succeed more often, and I think that’s the really wonderful aspect of
the whole movement. It’s not just caring and trying, it’s taking the caring and
the trying, and really making change,” said Collier. She has read “Doing Good
Better” by William MacAskill, one of the co-founders of the EA movement, and
has recommended it to friends.
“You want to feel good about helping
people, but if the next year you come back and nothing has changed, that good
doesn’t really feel so good when you haven’t really made a difference,” she
said.
“We need to be more agile and try
something different to get the results that we want whether it’s health,
education, poverty reduction, no matter what the topic might be. If the
needle’s not moving, we really need to think about investing in a different way
to get different outcomes,” said Collier.
Harrison has often described the
movement as “outcomes and evaluation on steroids.”
People who are EA followers believe in
flexibility and open-mindedness, said Murphy, and are prepared to abandon a
project if it isn’t working.
Local funders, too, have changed evaluations
about programming to include data, but not yet to the level of executing
randomized-controlled trials.
As a board member for Project Home Indy,
Collier remembers the Women’s Fund asking for evidence that the group’s local
model would work. As the first funder of a program for teen moms at risk of
homelessness, it sent a due diligence committee to meet with staff.
“We
have a lot of great foundations, and I have uniformly seen them ask those right
questions, thinking about metrics. I have seen them ask what it’s going to be
like after services, what’s the impact and what is being tracked. That really
changes the culture,” she said.
Harrison thinks that at a minimum every
nonprofit should research what models work before adding new programs in order
to ascertain that its model hasn’t been disproven already in a dozen
communities.
Which
is why she was excited to recently learn about the work of the George and
Frances Ball Foundation in Muncie. The foundation’s team just completed a study
of 130 communities in the U.S. that have had cradle-to-career efforts. The
team’s intention is to compare the components and identify what change
happened. This is of special interest to Harrison as she serves as TeenWorks’
interim chief executive.
Daydreaming a bit, she wonders what could change if the foundation presents its findings to its nonprofit community and shares which models work and which don’t.
“How would nonprofit leaders react if the three things that worked they would never consider or the things that didn’t work were core to their programming? What is the impact of that and what is our readiness to hear those messages?”
Both Harrison and Collier believe
applying EA’s model to areas like arts and culture would be difficult, and
acknowledge that measuring poverty and education gains are easier than
measuring enjoyment.
Small nonprofits don’t normally have
researchers or statisticians on staff or empirically researched randomized-controlled
trials. However, they do see
steps for nonprofits to take.
Collier has witnessed some funders
asking: When we give you this money, what will be different?
“The nonprofit has got to be able to
tell them, ‘Here’s what will change. Here’s the impact we can have.’ It’s thinking about the measurements and the
expectations.’
“To me, the great part about this
movement is not to make people cynical, but to make them more questioning,”
said Collier, and she believes it will become a permanent way to determine what
gets funded.
“When you are talking to donors, you are
appealing to hearts or checkbooks to make an economic difference. But effective
altruism is really about both. I think it’s a way to totally raise the bar
about what we want to support.”
And while MIT and other social scientists
are aware of EA, there has been limited application in the U.S. with most
trials being done in developing countries.
One area, though, that Murphy and others
have said is ripe for application is mass incarceration and sentencing. For
people in prison or jail, it may be possible to lessen hardship in communities
by cutting down the use of incarceration, and that is the leading conjecture of
those in organizations that are based on EA principles.
“Do you get any additional deterrents by
sending a person away for 10 years for cocaine rather than just 18 months or do
they actually become a more hardened criminal if you send them away for 10
years? So, they’re trying to measure things like outcomes on families,
employment rates and the economy in a local community. Oftentimes these young
men if they can turn it around, they can be at their peak economic performance
in terms of productivity and they can really be out there helping themselves
and their communities thrive,” said Murphy.
He also believes there are good candidates in the community
that meet EA’s principles and standards, making it a movement worth paying
attention to.
