December 2021 - Alliance magazine

Welcome to our focus on food systems philanthropy

In the aftermath of the UN Food Systems Summit and UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), it’s clear that building a more sustainable food system is more critical than ever and also an area where philanthropy can and should play a catalytic and systemic role.

Food systems have seldom been explicitly addressed in funding strategies despite billions donated to issues connected to food systems.

This special feature, guest edited by Ruth Richardson of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, argues that philanthropy should take a more systemic approach and ‘situate food systems transformation centrally in climate, biodiversity, hunger and health agendas’.

Elsewhere we discuss…

Why is asking wealthy people to give more philanthropically or requiring them to pay more tax is presented as a binary choice. Graham Hobson – an unusually modest philanthropist who made his fortune through the sale of online photo printing company Photobox– explains why multi-millionaires like him should give more and pay more.

The Bridgespan Group’s co-founder, Jeff Bracdach tells Alliance why ending racial disparities is the route to social justice in the US and beyond.

Special feature

A moment between then and now

30 November 2021
Ruth Richardson

We must take the opportunity offered by events to reconfigure the world’s food systems – and that involves seeing them as systems When we first sat down to conceptualise this issue, we thought about the need to speak to the journey philanthropy has been on when it comes to food systems and where it goes next. 2021 has, in many ways, been the portal, to use Arundhati Roy’s metaphor, between the past, or normal as we …

Charles Keidan

Editorial

Hobson’s choice – tax and philanthropy

Too often, asking wealthy people to give more philanthropically or requiring them to pay more tax is presented as a binary choice. But does it have to be this way? Graham Hobson is an unusually modest philanthropist who made his fortune through the sale of online photo printing company Photobox. In this issue, he explains why multi-millionaires should give more and pay more. The recent emergence of the Patriotic Millionaires movement in the US and its international counterpart, Partners in Progress, which calls on those with the broadest shoulders to pay more tax is especially significant. After all, as noted in our anniversary issue, there are five times more billionaires today than when Alliance was …