Photo credit: Mark Stehle
Katherina Rosqueta calls it “The Million Dollar Question”: If you had $1 million to give to charity, and wanted to make sure your money had greatest social impact possible, where would you spend it?
It’s a simple question—one the philanthropic world has been asking for decades.
“There’s some very basic questions you need to answer in order to make that decision,” says Rosqueta. “Like, what works? What doesn’t? How much does change really cost? What can I reasonably expect for my $1 million?”
Penn’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy—the research center Rosqueta has headed up since its launch in 2006—is working to provide those answers.
Created by a group of Wharton alums frustrated by the difficulty of measuring and maximizing the impact of their charitable donations, the Center is now working to become, in Rosqueta’s words, “the Bloomberg of philanthropy,” providing philanthropists with much-needed objective information about which charities and programs actually work—and which ones don’t.
Q. Tell me about the Center and why it needed to be created.
A. There are a lot of reasons why I think this Center needs to exist right now. People talk about the upcoming transfer of wealth. There was a Boston College study that estimated that, with the Baby Boomers coming up on retirement, there’s going to be a tremendous intergenerational transfer of wealth—something like $41 billion. Now, some percentage of that is going to go to charitable organizations. And just like those philanthropists who founded the Center knew, there are some questions that we as a sector haven’t been answering.
Given the amount of money going into this sector, to not have better answers to these question means that we’re missing an opportunity to do a lot of good. We know this already from the interviews we’ve conducted with high-net worth philanthropists. There are people out there who are literally sitting on money because they don’t know how to give it well. That’s what this Center is about—providing the kind of objective and reliable information that can help people answer that Million Dollar Question.
Q. Why hasn’t anyone answered these questions before?
A. They have answered them, but they’ve answered them in silos. Some of the information that can help answer the question lies in the academy, where you have some people who have spent their lives trying to answer bits of that question. Some of the information is in the hands of policy makers. And some of it is just not in a place where it’s easily accessible to philanthropists. Each of those sources of information has part of the answer … and that’s part of the reason it’s so difficult to answer the question from the point of view of an individual philanthropist. The information is kind of locked up in places that are inaccessible to these folks. And even if you have the information, it’s in a language that is incomprehensible to them—it’s in academic speak or policy speak.
Q. So how can you help improve the situation?
A. Remember, these philanthropists are primarily business people … and even if the information was put in front of them, it’s not going to be in a form that could help them make a decision now. So there’s an enormous synthesizing and translational role that we here need to play.
Frankly, part of the problem is that these are tough problems. I’m talking about urban education and global public health [which the Center focuses on]. If the answers were easy, then why do we have a persistent achievement gap? If the answers were easy, and if all the information was just there, how do you explain that burden of disease that is being shouldered by developing countries? So while [the Million Dollar Question] is a deceptively simple question, it can be maddeningly difficult to answer.
Q. And I assume that’s the main problem you’re working on now?
A. I think of us, again, as the uber-synthesizer and translator of the available information, to help people make smart philanthropic decisions. We are in a way an oddball in the University and in the world of philanthropy, and we’re an oddball because we’re not grant-making, and not grant-seeking. That is intentional, because some of the obstacles to accessing and the distribution of information are there because everybody is one side or the other. So even though we’re founded by Wharton alumni, our information and services aren’t just for Wharton alumni. We’re not just doing this for the people who founded the Center, and it’s not just for people who are affiliated with the University. We really see ourselves making a contribution to the sector.
Q. How are you going to measure your success?
A. What we’re holding ourselves accountable to is not how broadly published our research is, or how many citations our staff gets. What we care about is whether or not the information we generate is actually used by philanthropists to allocate their capital. We are on the very applied end with a very distinct group of players that we’re trying to help, which makes us different than a more academic center on philanthropy, where they are thinking more broadly about philanthropy—how it works, who’s doing it. We will use that information, and we’re happy that other universities have done that work, but it’s not enough to understand [philanthropists]. We actually need to help them. We think there’s a role that a university like Penn can play in making philanthropy more effective, and that there is tremendous intellectual capital here that so far has not been tapped in helping these people make better decisions.
Originally published Jan. 24, 2008
