Social Ventures
Philanthropy has often been characterized as having 2 different modes -
- giving a person a fish so that they can be fed today and live.
- teaching a person to fish so that they can feed themselves tomorrow
In this hierarchy, the Small World Institute funds fishing universities.
In other words we like to fund opportunities where the art or science of fishing can be advanced and where the teachers of fishing are themselves taught. Sometimes this results in long term research efforts that do not produce any short term benefits for society. But by funding “fishing universities”, we are trying to broaden our overall knowledge.
If you look at the 20th century, it started out looking like it would be the century of scientific discovery. In the first couple of decades discoveries of quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, nuclear energy, super conductivity, semiconductors, structure of our galaxy. But after this burst of scientific creativity, there followed many decades of more engineering than discovery where the ideas discovered early in the century were developed into practical stuff for our lives.
As we did this and the success increased, many more people engaged themselves in the using of existing science as opposed to helping discover new science.
So SWI works with various groups and individuals to provide funding to increase the number of people engaged in science and discovery as opposed to just engineering.
SWI funds activities at universities and with other institutes. Our primary focus is in the area of biology and specifically in the study of natural systems (i.e. we do not focus on human biology) and how we can take long term data that will form useful baselines as human impact on our planet increases. SEI does not seek to have things revert to the way they were, but rather we want to understand the complex interactions on earth. By long term data collection, measurements of the environment and the life around us, we can see what happens as various proposals and policies change human activity.
SWI funds small scale manipulative experiments where changes in the baseline trends can be seen or measured over long periods of time. One such experiment is in the Agua Salud area of the Panama Canal watershed. Here are some articles about that project -
- A story on NPR – entitled Do Trees Worsen Draughts?
- Scientific Paper detailing the project’s experimental plan
Finally, SWI funds other individuals who have similar goals but with expertise outside that of Frank Levinson’s. This work goes on under the name – “The 12″ and you can read about it on this web site.