Philanthropy is often seen as society's risk capital. That means the onus is on philanthropists, nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs to innovate. But philanthropic innovation is not just about creating something new. It also means applying new thinking to old problems, processes and systems.
Interpretation
Philanthropy is a crucial driver of social innovation and requires new thinking to address existing challenges.
In this quote, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen emphasizes the transformative power of philanthropy, suggesting that it serves as a source of financial risk akin to capital in a business environment. Philanthropists, nonprofit leaders, and social entrepreneurs are urged not only to create novel solutions but also to rethink traditional approaches to age-old problems, highlighting that innovation can stem from reimagining existing processes and systems rather than solely from new inventions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a conference about social entrepreneurship to highlight the importance of rethinking traditional approaches.
Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenor of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal?
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes Beholds his hereditary skies.
One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't, then it's bad. But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do.
We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with.
I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.
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