Building a new type of giving in China

Out of want and need, a big venture is born

According to American philanthropist Lance Fors, the model for Social Venture Partners was born in the late 1990s in the US, along with the dot-com boom.

At 47, Seattle entrepreneur Paul Brainerd sold his software company to Adobe in 1994. PageMaker, the desktop publishing program his company created, had revolutionized printing and publishing and left him an unexpected millionaire.

A year later, he founded the Brainerd Foundation, an organization that brought technology answers to environmental nonprofits.

He was not alone. As the dot-com boom was in full swing, Seattle was brimming with young, retired professionals who wanted to give back their fortunes to society, but didn’t know how to do it.

Brainerd invited colleagues, friends and community members to discuss how to get thousands more people highly engaged in philanthropy.

In 1997, they founded Social Venture Partners. SVP members would not just write checks. They would work shoulder-to-shoulder with nonprofits — using their professional skills to tackle Seattle’s most pressing problems, according to SVP’s website.

Since then SVP Seattle has grown to include more than 500 partners. There are SVP member organizations in 39 different cities throughout the world and the international network has more than 3,500 partners.

“What happened in the US in the last 20 years is we really activated the middle class to become more than just check writers,” Fors said.

“In the US, we gave about $300 billion a year in philanthropy. Almost 75 percent from individuals like us, not from big foundations, not from the government, from just middle class individuals. Venture philanthropy has got a lot of people to say I can do more … besides just writing a check.”

CHEN LIANG