The outgoing head of Open Society Foundations is predicting that philanthropy giants will be “pushed aside” as governments step up to confront the world’s gathering crises, in a rerun of former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal response to the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Mark Malloch-Brown suggested the world is approaching a crunch moment on par with the Great Depression, which sparked a realization that only governments could tackle emergencies on a scale beyond the efforts of the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations.
“I'm very struck that, during the Gilded Age — which was, in America, the last period of this sort of runaway, out-of-control, fortune-making and the inequality that arose on the back of it — the foundations tried to fill some of that gap to deal with some of that inequality,” the OSF president said at a London event.