Charities That Hate to Just 'Give'.(new face of American philanthropy)(Brief Article)

Bill Gates is not the only American entrepreneur with a business plan to save the world. There are thousands. Consider Steve Kirsch, who had just turned 35 when he concluded he had everything he could want. Adobe, the software giant, had just purchased one of his start-ups, Eframe. The sale made Kirsch very rich, with a share in a private jet, an estate in California's Los Altos Hills and a burning question: what to do with the rest of a $50 million fortune? After a few tedious years of doling out money to traditional charities--his alma mater, the United Way--Kirsch got ambitious. He set up his own foundation to benefit "everyone," funding research on everything from cancer to near- earth objects. "It is guaranteed that we will be hit by an asteroid sometime in the future," perhaps "before we end this phone conversation," Kirsch explains. "It would cost several billion lives, and we can absolutely save those lives for $50 million, which is less than the cost of a private jet. I call it enlightened self-interest."

American philanthropy isn't what it used to be. Gone are the days when old money was doled out by bureaucrats from mahogany-paneled rooms. More people are giving out more money than ever before, at much younger ages, and to a much wider variety of causes. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's call for private charity to replace government largesse was greeted with hoots of liberal derision--and an outbreak of giving. The number of private foundations rose from 22,000 in 1980 to 55,000 today. They now dole out about $23.3 billion a year, a 700 percent increase since 1980. And many are the offspring of capitalists, who bring the language of business to charity. Vanessa Kirsch (not related to Steve), president and founder of New Profit Inc., one of the new entrepreneurial charities, says, "There's this new breed of social entrepreneurs coming out of Harvard Business School or failed dot-coms, and they're saying, 'I want to make big things happen'."

Their outlook is increasingly global, in the Gates mold. The share of funding that the 1,000 largest foundations devote to international causes jumped from 11.3 percent in 1999 to 16.3 percent in 2000. And while the U.S. government is often criticized for stingy foreign aid (well under 1 percent of GNP each year), the same can't be said of private donors, ...