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irsa.institute › library › single-use-philanthropic-capital
A grant is single-use capital: it funds an activity once and is consumed, regardless of whether that activity created recoverable value. This architecture produces three endemic failures — value leakage, dependency by design, and the deployment-once horizon. Reform (multi-year, unrestricted, trust-based) improves the experience without altering the architecture. Single-use remains correct where value is non-recoverable; everywhere else, a recoverable instrument produces more social value from the same corpus.
Where it sits. Diagnostic of the grant as a capital structure. The philanthropy-instrument half of the systemic-investing critique; forward-cites the recoverable grant (CADA) and Regenerative Capital Theory as the constructive answer.
The long-form argument for this work still lives on the existing explainer at /explainer/single-use-philanthropic-capital. This page carries the abstract and the corpus metadata — the frame the argument would move into unchanged.
The works either side of this one in the canon order — what it builds on and what builds on it.
Where to go once you have the argument — the paper it comes from, the instrument that measures it, or the next thing it depends on.