More than eight hundred years ago, Maimonides wrote that the highest form of giving is to make charity itself unnecessary. That wisdom feels newly relevant today as questions about power and purpose continue to shape modern philanthropy. Last week, writing in The Wall Street Journal Laurene Powell Jobs revisited the idea, warning that too often wealth becomes a substitute for participation. In her words, “giving that expects control is anything but generous.” When donations become instruments of direction—when benefactors seek to decide what matters and who gets to belong—philanthropy drifts from “love of humanity” toward a contest for influence.

MacKenzie Scott offered another image: a murmuration of starlings, millions of birds moving as one without a leader. Their direction, she noted, emerges from continuous response to one another’s movements. Her metaphor captures what the next evolution of philanthropy might look like—decentralized, adaptive, and animated by trust.

Both women are describing, from different vantage points, a common transformation. Powell Jobs warns against power disguised as generosity; Scott imagines generosity as shared participation. Each challenges the notion that change flows downward from donor to recipient. And both point toward what many frontline and movement leaders across the Global South have long understood: real and lasting progress happens through proximity, not prescription.

Philanthropy rarely lacks ambition or compassion, but its operating systems often remain transactional. The habits that define much of institutional giving—short cycles, risk aversion, and an insistence on measurable outcomes—shape behavior even among those trying to act differently. Metrics matter. Accountability is essential, and ideally mutual. True partnership asks funders to be as transparent and self-examining as they ask their grantees to be. Yet the search for certainty can flatten what matters most. The work of social transformation is rarely linear; it unfolds through trial, learning, and the slow accrual of trust.

Scott’s own practice has become a large-scale test of this idea. Her team’s process of “seeding by ceding” replaces oversight with faith in the judgment of those closest to the problems and solutions. Her question—what if the liabilities of trust are actually assets?—invites reflection across the field. The gifts she has given, unrestricted and grounded in trust after rigorous review, have allowed local organizations to hire staff, pay fair wages, and rest. Many report that unrestricted support strengthened not only their programs but also their sense of dignity.

That dignity is the quiet through line connecting all three perspectives. Powell Jobs argues that true generosity “builds capacity, not dependency.” Scott writes that every act of care—financial or otherwise—has ripple effects that can’t be tracked but are real nonetheless. And frontline leaders remind us that the value of support is measured not in outputs but in staying power: whether people have the means, safety, and resilience to keep showing up. A youth climate group in West Africa once used a modest grant to pilot a community emissions project that initially failed. Years later, after renewed support, it became the model for national policy. Failure became the seed of persistence.

Seen from that perspective, the real challenge for philanthropy is not merely to disburse more money but to govern it differently. Its deeper task, as Maimonides suggested, may be to make its own intervention unnecessary—to strengthen the conditions under which generosity becomes ordinary, not exceptional. That ideal remains distant in practice. Money alone rarely shifts power; the governance of money often does. Few community leaders sit on foundation boards, yet their presence in decision-making would change how priorities are set and how success is defined. Many funders say they wish to support holistic approaches yet continue to evaluate proposals in thematic silos that force groups to flatten their complexity. The result is a familiar paradox: many funders speak the language of systems thinking while the structures around them still reward narrow deliverables.

A more resilient model might treat funding as a relationship rather than a transaction. That means underwriting the unglamorous foundations of endurance: salaries, security, rest, and well-being. It means accepting that some efforts will fail in ways that teach more than they lose. And it means acknowledging that the people experiencing a particular challenge every day are better positioned to understand and address it than those reading quarterly reports about it or selecting it as their latest pet cause.

Scott’s imagery of fluid coordination applies here too. Each participant influences the other, adjusting in real time. No single actor dictates the course, yet the collective still moves with coherence. In that spirit, funders could think of themselves less as directors and more as participants—shaping movement through attention and responsiveness rather than command. They can still measure, but what they measure changes: leaders strengthened, networks sustained, risks shared.

In many ways, the current norms of philanthropy mirror how societies share power more broadly. Its future may depend less on innovation than on humility—a return to basics and to the original aims of philanthropy. The sector’s most durable achievements have come not from the invention of new tools but from patient partnership with those already doing the work. When funders move from control to accompaniment, from visibility to listening, they make space for others to lead. The impact that follows is often slower, less headline-grabbing, but more enduring.

The Hopi elders whose words Scott cited wrote that “the time of the lone wolf is over.” In their view, survival depends on letting go of the shore and entering the river together. For philanthropy, that may mean loosening the assumption that control guarantees effectiveness and recognizing that the current itself—our interdependence—is the medium of change.

Perhaps real generosity lies less in the power to direct than in the willingness to belong: to a community of exchange where the roles of giver and receiver blur and change with time. Its measure is not what it buys but what it helps to build—a culture of trust and solidarity that outlasts any single fortune, and a shared capacity to keep moving together toward the horizon none of us can see alone.

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Rhett Butler Editor

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