The Dollywood Foundation has asked the world to “Give Like Dolly.” A month after Dolly Parton’s death, it was a fitting tribute to a woman whose generosity became almost as much a part of her public identity as her music.
“I never know what I’m going to do or why I’m going to do it. I just see a need and if I can fill it, then I will,” she said.
Sabrina Habib
That line from Parton has stayed with me. Philanthropy has become a highly professionalized field. We can get obsessed with strategies, theories of change, evidence, impact, frameworks. Dolly was describing something much simpler: I see a need and I respond.
There is something refreshing about that, especially now that people are literally being encouraged to “give like Dolly.” But it also raises a harder question: Would her deeply personal approach be considered responsible philanthropy today, or have we become so focused on making giving rational that we have lost something along the way?
A couple of years ago, Melinda French Gates gave me the opportunity to distribute $20 million to support women’s health and well-being globally, as a catalyst for extending the impact of philanthropy. I approached the responsibility much as I thought I was supposed to. I spoke to experts, read everything I could, developed a strategy and tried to understand where the money could do the most good.
“I became preoccupied with my own biases and with finding ways to remove them from the process.”
Underneath all that work was an assumption I did not fully recognize: If I researched enough and spoke to enough people, eventually I would arrive at the right answer.
I never did.
The hardest decisions rarely were between a good option and a bad one. They were between different kinds of good — helping more people now, investing in longer-term change, backing something proven or taking a chance on something risky that might have a much greater impact. No amount of refining the framework made those choices disappear. Eventually somebody still had to make them, and that somebody was me.
For a while, that realization sent me in another direction. I became preoccupied with my own biases and with finding ways to remove them from the process. A friend eventually reminded me of something that seems obvious in retrospect: Melinda had chosen people, not algorithms. I had been selected in part because of what I knew, what I had experienced and what I believed mattered. Perhaps trying to remove myself entirely from the equation was missing part of the point.
Parton’s philanthropy makes that unusually easy to see. Her father could not read, and so she created the Imagination Library, which has given hundreds of millions of books to children. Her niece survived leukemia, and Parton gave to pediatric cancer care. A doctor she knew and trusted told her about promising COVID vaccine research, and she funded it.
“Our experiences inevitably shape what we notice.”
Those decisions were deeply personal. In the language of philanthropy, we might even describe that as bias. But our experiences inevitably shape what we notice. They influence which problems bother us enough that we cannot look away. That does not necessarily make the solutions we choose good ones. But it has made me wonder whether we sometimes treat perspective as though it is the same thing as bias.
That is easy enough to accept when the person exercising that judgment is Dolly Parton. It becomes much more uncomfortable when the person is Elon Musk.
Musk has recently criticized MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy, even as he remains listed as a signatory to the Giving Pledge, a commitment to give away the majority of his wealth. His foundation’s giving reflects many of the things he himself cares about, including science, engineering, education and technology, with much of its recent giving directed to entities he controls.
If we believe Parton was entitled to bring her worldview and her life experience into her philanthropy, I am not sure we can deny Musk the same allowance simply because we trust his judgment less.
That is where the idea of giving from the heart becomes more complicated. Philanthropy gives wealthy individuals enormous freedom to decide what they believe will do good.
The temptation is to imagine that we could solve the problem by making philanthropy more objective, even leveraging AI to get us the “best” answer. Yet even the most carefully constructed strategy has values built into it.
Over the year I spent developing my own giving strategy, I eventually found myself back in the place I knew best: Child care. At first, I worried that returning to my own field was evidence that I had failed to think broadly enough. In time, I came to see it differently.
Years of experience had taught me things I could not have learned from a briefing paper. I understood the gaps, knew many of the people doing the work and had a sense of where relatively small amounts of capital might unlock something larger.
That did not mean my instincts were automatically right. We pressure-tested our assumptions with others in the field, used intermediaries to reach people much closer to communities than I could and changed our thinking when what we heard did not fit our original assumptions.
I still believe philanthropy needs rigor. But I no longer think rigor means pretending the giver has disappeared. You cannot take the person out of the giving, but the giver never should be the only person in the room.
Which brings me back to Dolly. Maybe seeing a need and feeling compelled to respond is a perfectly reasonable place to start.
Sabrina Habib is the co-founder of Kidogo, Kenya’s largest child care network, and leads the Zera Fund, spurring new investments into child care globally as part of Melinda French Gates’ Global Leaders Initiative. She also is a Public Voices Fellow on Tackling Poverty, a partnership between The Op-Ed Project and Acumen.