By Chelsea Teixeira
Addressing the American Opportunity Divide
Our class, SOCI 306, is a group of twenty-something year old college students from different races, genders, social classes, and cultures. While each of us have things about ourselves that make us who we are, we all enrolled in this course for a similar reason: it is a course requirement, we heard it was a good class and we want to learn about how people work together and help tackle social problems. A group of people, all working together to learn about philanthropy and nonprofit organizations (NPOs), receiving $10,000 from the Learning by Giving Foundation to give away to a nonprofit of our choice, sounds pretty perfect, right? I guess you could say so, but philanthropy and the NPOs we are learning about wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the societal problems Americans face every day due to the opportunity divide.
What is the opportunity divide?
Our professor, Ira Silver, assigned us to read an article written by himself that discussed various social problems in American society. Some of the problems we learned about were: poverty, the pursuit of the American dream, race, economic inequality, resources and upward mobility. Unfortunately, these are only a few of the social problems that folks in our society face daily, but as I said before, this class and foundations like the LBG Foundation exist to help diminish or eliminate these social problems through giving back. In that class discussion, we found that we must be actively conscious of what the article calls, the opportunity divide. The opportunity divide is the notion that people with more social problems, due to systems in place that create and enforce them, do not have the opportunity to be freed of their problems and have a gap in upward mobility and ability for a ‘successful’ future. People affected by the opportunity divide in America are often the individuals that need the help from philanthropists and foundations, yet with the amount of giving Americans do a year you’d think that the opportunity divide would be near extinct, yet this is not the case.
Although philanthropy and giving back time and money is often well-intentioned, philanthropy itself has a dark history and we must learn how to give in a way that is rooted in justice, not charity.
What is the difference between justice and charity?
Philanthropy that stems from a sense of charity is catering to a narrower view of a social problem. Take the example of giving canned food to people who are hungry, yes, it’s an amazing gesture, however it doesn’t help to address the origin of the problem. Philanthropy rooted in justice, however, does address the origin of problems. Instead of giving cans to hungry people, teaching people how to cook and giving them skills that will help tackle and prevent the cycle of hunger problems continue.
How knowing about the opportunity divide will impact our giving
By knowing about the opportunity divide and the difference between being philanthropic through charity versus justice measures, we are trying our best to ensure that we are giving back to a nonprofit that will help provide more than just a charity band aid to the cause they are servicing. We have agreed that it is our responsibility to acquire knowledge of why the social problem that our NPO is serving to help end exists and how they are acting in a justice-based way
