The new philanthropy - thoughts on a conference
Create More Givers – Global Conference on “Enhancing the Role of Philanthropy in Challenging Times” was a conference held on the 22 and 23 July, at Hotel Nikko in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Conference’s claim to being Global came from the range of speakers – even though the majority were from Malaysia, there were others from Indonesia, Australia, India, and one speaker from Trust Africa, Senegal.The participants however were mostly Malaysian: mostly Malaysian academics and NGOs – the latter from ‘charities’ rather than development NGOs, and several activist NGOs, mainly because I suspect Josie Fernandez, the Managing Director of Philanthropy Asia, comes from an activist background. A distinction that I remember we made a couple of decades ago when Professor Hiran Dias initiated the NGDO (Non-governmental development organizations) Management Consortium in AIT. There were I understood later, some representatives of Malaysian corporate giants in the audience, particularly of their trust