Critical, But Overlooked: Ethics Is a Tough Sell to Funders. Is That About to Change?
"Strong ethics may be all important to the healthy functioning of American society, but this is an area that's historically fallen through the cracks of foundation grantmaking programs. Fundraisers for ethics work routinely have to shoehorn their proposals to fit into the issue areas that foundations do care about, like public health or campaign finance reform. Individual donors play a critical role in supporting ethics research, but contributors interested in this area are hardly plentiful. If you search "ethics" in the Lilly School donor base of gifts of a million dollars and up, you'll get a mere five results...
AI is much in the news right now, and ethics giving often follows headlines. A few years back, after the financial crisis, business schools received a string of gifts aimed at teaching ethics to tomorrow's executives and financiers. But as memory of the financial crisis faded, so did this stream of money...
Indeed, if reporting persists out of Trump's Washington regarding conflicts of interest, it seems likely that the ethics field writ large will get a Trump bump when it comes to fundraising."
