It was a lovely spring evening. Guests sipped signature blue martinis and listened to the sweet sounds of a live jazz quartet that featured conservatory faculty, a student scholarship recipient, and a former K&L Gates attorney. I’d like to think that lawyers working late hours throughout the twelve-story downtown DC building could hear the wafting sounds of jazz floating up to their cubicles.

The Washington Music Conservatory is an alternative “boutique” neighborhood music school that runs a community orchestra, provides master’s music lessons on both a scholarship and affordable tuition basis, and sponsors a community concert series. The school’s enrollment is smaller than other DC counterparts (about 600 students), but the WCM holds a coveted national accreditation and offers a personal one-on-one experience to its students, young and old alike, setting it apart from larger community music schools.

And unlike many for-profit music schools, the conservatory does not turn away students based on their audition, in accord with their vision that everyone should have the opportunity to study with the very best music international artists—and with the masters: Schumann, Mozart, Liszt, Beethoven, Holst. The school has never turned away a scholarship applicant.

I had delightful conversations with the WCM’s leadership. The board chair is a partner at K&L Gates, a one-time participant in the conservatory’s community orchestra, and now passionate spokeswoman on the impact music has on the mind and the heart—especially as a lawyer and in Washington, a city that tends to prize left-brained achievement over artistic experience.

The conservatory’s executive director believes that the practice of music is a model for diplomatic, professional, and personal relationships. If world leaders negotiating for world peace, she says, had to sit down and play chamber music together, then we’d actually achieve world peace.

The practice of music cultivates attention and attentiveness, nurturing the ability in its students to possess simultaneously both a broad and narrow focus. Everybody’s soul needs music—from early elementary children to senior citizens, from low to high income backgrounds, and everyone in between.

Funding for the WCM comes predominantly from individual donors, with only a smaller fraction coming from large grant-making foundations or from government grants. This made me realize that community music schools are a beautiful feature of civil society, the space between the individual and the government, where “the good life” of shared art, music, and culture is pursued.

The sponsoring law firm K&L Gates does work pro bono for the WCM, as well as for an impressive number of other DC charities. There may be an increasing trend in pro bono hours given by DC law firms, especially given decreased government funding for local charities. Plus many firms firms count and compensate lawyers for their pro bono hours.

“President Obama announced Wednesday that acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller would resign in the wake of the agency scandal in which conservative groups were targeted — though Miller was apparently set to step down anyway.” — FoxNews.com

“For the I.R.S.’s bipartisan legion of critics, the agency’s record has underscored its contradictory and seemingly confused response to the fastest-growing corner in the world of unlimited political spending: tax-exempt groups that have paid for at least half a billion dollars in campaign ads during the last two election cycles.” –Nicholas Confessore, the New York Times

Grant argues that there are three archetypical types in work and professional life: givers, takers, and matchers. Takers—we’ve all met those—are people who mooch off of others, always looking out for #1 and taking advantage of every connection and opportunity for credit and glory. Matchers are those with a tit-for-tat approach: willing to help others in return for a favor or in anticipation of a favor, generous, but only with a definite expectation of a “return on investment” for their generosity.

Givers, who are willing to give to others of their time, energy, enthusiasm, and networks, are more complicated. Grant begins with the observation that, in a wide variety of professional settings, givers tend to do either very well or very poorly:

[M]edical students with the lowest grades have unusually high giver scores, but so do the students with the highest grades. . . . Even in sales, I found that the least productive salespeople had 25 percent higher giver scores than average performers—but so did the most productive salespeople. . . . Givers dominate the bottom and the top of the success ladder.

Grant explains this paradox by arguing that givers are of two types: those who are too altruistic and unable to say “no”—these turn out to be the least successful in business and professional life; and, on the other hand, “self-interested givers” who give generously of their time and energies but are able to detect and say “no” to takers and who judicially channel their energies into those who are willing to return a favor, even if in the distant future. Grant distinguishes these types of givers as “selfless” and “otherish”:

Selfless giving, in the absence of self-preservation instincts, easily becomes overwhelming. Being otherish means being willing to give more than you receive, but still keeping your own interests in sight, using them as a guide for choosing when, where, how, and to whom you give.

Grant’s message is obviously appealing: good guys can be winners, not chumps! If you think of yourself as a giver, reading his book can be an appealing exercise in self-congratulation.

While Grant focuses his arguments on business and professional life and not on philanthropy (indeed, he claims “givers and takers aren’t distinguished by how much they give to charity”), his argument is relevant to what makes for the success of the organizations and associations that make up civil society. Certainly organizations of civic life require time, energy, enthusiasm, and connections to be successful—just as do business organizations.

Reading Grant’s description of self-interested givers, and thinking of the connection to civil society, it seemed to me that the best exemplar of self-interested givers must be Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a self-interested man who became one of the most influential figures of his day—a Founding Father, governor of Pennsylvania, and ambassador to France—as well as extremely wealthy. And, at the same time, he was extraordinarily generous with his time and talents, contributing to the establishment of Philadelphia’s first library and fire departments, the University of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society, the advancement of natural science as well as the careers of fellow scientists, among many other contributions to American society, especially in Pennsylvania.

Franklin’s Autobiography is not merely an account of Franklin’s life but a guide to the type of person the new American nation needs to succeed—and that sort of person is exactly the sort of self-interested giver described by Grant. One could read the Autobiography and draw many of the same lessons of behavior Grant presents in his Give and Take.

Grant himself, in spite of his announced focus on business and professional life, describes self-interested givers contributing to what are best described as civic associations: computer app designer Adam Rifkin, for example, is one of Grant’s most frequent examples of “a bona fide giver,” and Grant chronicles Rikfin’s cofounding of 106 Miles, a engineers’ networking group, which is not so different in spirit from the American Philosophical Society and other local groups that Benjamin Franklin organized. And, Grant reports on a study of Caring Canadian Award Winners that found that award-winners scored high on measures both of other-orientation and self-interest.

Grant’s book is really a study of what Tocqueville called “self-interest, rightly understood”—a quality that it important well beyond business and the professions and is essential to the richness of American civic life.

They argue that the development and implementation of the Common Core, “is constitutional federalism at its best.”  

There are those of us with decidedly different views.  I introduced some of my concerns about the Common Core in an earlier essay, “The Death of Personality,” here at Philanthropy Daily.  

My May 14 essay in The Freeman asks us to think more deeply about the meaning of federalism, which has been lost somewhere between the carrots and the sticks of the educational-industrial complex growing up in the District of Columbia around 400 Maryland Ave., SW .

Please see Common Core: A Tocquevillean Education or Cartel Federalism? in The Freeman Online.

“The controversy now unfolding at the Internal Revenue Service — that it targeted for rejection the nonprofit status of the Tea Party and other conservative groups that raised concerns about ‘government spending, government debt or taxes’ as early as 2011 — raises again the problematic oversight at the agency of a nonprofit sector that now is about the size of India.” — Elizabeth MacDonald, Fox Business News

“A new online course featuring investor Warren Buffett and baseball great Cal Ripken Jr. as speakers will teach the art of philanthropy by letting students give. Students in the class will be able to recommend a charity to receive all or part of a $10,000 grant from the charity Warren Buffett’s sister, Doris Buffett, runs.” — the Associated Press