By Maksim Grinbgerg
There’s sometimes a tension in how people talk about charity — as if private giving were a substitute for public responsibility, or a way for individuals to paper over what governments should handle. I see it differently. In a city like New York, private giving and public institutions work best as partners, each covering ground the other can’t.
Public systems are built for scale and consistency — schools, transit, sanitation, social services. But they move slowly, and they can’t easily respond to a specific block’s specific problem. Private giving fills that gap. A donor can fund a pilot program a city agency would take years to approve, or keep a small nonprofit afloat through a rough quarter, or seed an idea that later grows into something a public budget eventually adopts.
Nonprofit work, in particular, depends on this. Most of the organizations doing essential community work in New York — in housing, education, food, the arts — run on a blend of grants, public funding, and private donations. Pull the private piece out and many of them simply close.
My own philanthropic interests run toward education, literacy, food security, and services for children, both locally and internationally. I support private giving not because I think it lets the public off the hook, but because I’ve seen how much good it does in the seams — the places where the big systems can’t reach but a focused organization, backed by donors who care, absolutely can.