4 Ways Philanthropy Has Shaped Our Lives

Written by, Gill Tataev founder of Ruthless Giving.

Most advancements of the world we live in today were catalyzed by the law of profit and competition. Philanthropy plays a distinct role on issues that lie outside the domain of the market, like a careful friend that watches out for his gifted but somewhat reckless colleague.

Let’s take a moment to step back, and look at four examples of philanthropy that have shaped the world as we know it today, from the local and relatively simple to the global and complex.

Sesame Street

It began with a simple chat over dinner. In 1966, Joan Ganz Cooney, a documentarian, and Lloyd Morrisett, the Vice-President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, found themselves sitting across the table from one another. The talk turned to early childhood education. Research had recently revealed the educational needs of disadvantaged preschoolers weren’t being met, and classroom-based programs like Head Start were an expensive and ineffective solution.

“What if we could teach and entertain via TV?” thought Cooney and Morrisett. And so Sesame Street was born. Having conducted feasibility studies, a budget of $6 million was settled upon, an enormous sum for an unproven TV concept. Happily Morrisett pulled some strings at Carnegie, and on the back of this initial support, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting also came on board.

The results were rather incredible:

• By 1993, 77% of the country’s preschoolers watched at least once a week, including 88% of those belonging to low-income families.
• Children who watched were more likely to be kindergarten-ready, and were 30%-50% less likely to fall behind grade level (the impacts were highest in the most disadvantaged children.)
• A recent study found the show had a positive impact on preschoolers’​ thoughts on diversity, and attitudes to those who looked different to them.

What’s more, the financial returns generated by Sesame Street would exceed the initial $6 million dollar investment many times over. In fact, by 1980 global broadcasting rights would make the program a money-making operation.

Highway shoulder lines

There was a time when highways and roads had but a single line: the one in the center. That might sound perfectly practical, but if you found yourself driving on a rural road, late at night, in driving rain, and with headlights coming at you, this single line was your only point of reference. You could choose to hug it, and narrowly miss the oncoming car, or take a guess at where the shoulder was, and risk hitting soil instead.

Dr. John Dorr and his namesake foundation saw this issue and decided to do something about it. After writing to government officials in 1952 and failing to solicit a response, Dorr took his quest public. He wrote to newspapers and spoke in public. By 1954 his message began to cut through, first with a test in his home state of Connecticut, then in New York, where shoulder striping on a stretch of highway saw injuries and deaths more than cut in half.

The Dorr Foundation funded study after study in the late 1950s, and despite the striping costing $150/mile — then a princely sum — sentiment began to change, and by the 1960s, highway departments across the US began to heed the call. The Dorr Foundation transformed from an advocate to a consultancy, as officials sought advice on the best way to mark their roads. In the end, Dorr’s work would save many thousands of lives.

911 Emergency Hotline

It’s drilled into us from birth. If there’s an emergency, dial 911. But those under the age of 40 might be surprised to learn that 911 is a (relatively) recent phenomenon.

The US is a sprawling network of jurisdictions and municipalities that are notoriously difficult to get on the same page. And in cases of emergencies as recently as the 70s, they weren’t on the same page. While AT&T had made 911 the designated emergency number in some places, it was far from a blanket rule. Those not familiar with local systems would be left scrambling for the hospital or fire department’s number, or if you go back far enough, be left dialing ‘0’ to speak to an operator. People would be stuck on hold in burning homes, or kneeling next to someone in serious need of care. But thanks to a few individuals, things would begin to change in the early 70s.

Robert Wood Johnson II had taken his father’s company, Johnson & Johnson, and turned it into a global powerhouse. While he passed away in 1968, he left a significant sum to his namesake foundation. It saw the need for a uniform emergency number, and got to work.

The foundation began by focusing on 44 underserved rural areas. In 1973, 11% of people in focus areas had access to 911. By 1977, 95% did. Spurred on by this success, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began to lobby government to fund programs that made 911 the go-to emergency number across the nation.

In 1979, just 25% of the population had access to 911 services. Today, while it’s not 100%, the system does cover 85%. We have the Johnson family to thank not only for pushing the system into the mainstream, but for Band-Aiding our wounds once we get the care that we need.

The eradication of polio

The year was 2010, and the global polio eradication effort seemed to have stalled. Recorded cases were rising, from 719 in the year 2000 to 1352 a decade later, and Margaret Chan, Director of the World Health Organization (WHO), described India as the world’s “most tenacious reservoir” of the disease.

Just two years later the country would celebrate its first year without polio, and this particular success was thanks mainly to the work of a single organization: The Gates Foundation.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was set up by the WHO, UNICEF and the Rotary Foundation in 1988. While there were early successes in eradicating the disease in the developed world, efforts in the developing world proved less effective, and as one journalist put it, eradicating the last 1% was like trying to strangle Jell-O. The reasons were many and varied, but two were most prevalent:

• For every paralysis victim there were 200 carriers that showed no symptoms.
• Terrorist groups were disrupting eradication efforts, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

In strangling that last, slippery 1%, The Gates Foundation took healthy inspiration from two historical eradication efforts: hookworm from the Southern US, and smallpox from the face of the earth.

In the hookworm eradication effort, driven by another wealthy medical philanthropist in John D. Rockefeller, the key to success was found to be a local approach. Rockefeller realized that you won’t get buy-in as an out-of-town savior, arriving, solving problems, and leaving. You needed to get key local stakeholders on board, and drive the effort from the ground up.

The smallpox eradication effort simply showed that eradication was indeed possible — before then it had never been done. While the often asymptomatic nature of polio made its eradication far more difficult, it was possible.

In the first six months of 2021, just two ‘wild’ (not vaccine-derived) cases of polio had been recorded on planet earth. With the Jell-O squeezed to within an inch of its life, eradication is on the horizon… although as Gates himself says, a disease rebound is an eminent possibility — “If you don’t keep up the pressure on polio, you’re accepting 100,000 to 200,000 crippled or dead children every year.” Nonetheless, the progress has been incredible.

This article is sponsored by People’s Foundation.