Happy Birthday, Yo-Yo.
When Yo-Yo Ma writes, “We can only face the world together,” he’s not being poetic; he’s being practical. He’s describing a kind of survival instinct that’s easy to forget in an economy obsessed with individuality. He’s reminding us that humanity’s great project has always been collaboration.
Philanthropy, at its best, is a form of that collaboration, a collective act of repair. But we’ve allowed it to become a symbol of excess, something ornamental or optional. We forget that fundraising is not fluff. It’s infrastructure. It’s how communities compensate for public systems that have broken or withdrawn, how we fill the void left when governments defund the public good and markets ignore what isn’t profitable. And that work, the work of filling the gaps, has never been more important than it is today. Every social safety net that frays, every arts program that closes, every service that disappears because the numbers don’t “pencil out,” lands on the shoulders of fundraisers, nonprofits, and community builders. We’re not just raising money; we’re holding civilization together at the seams.
When Ma describes himself as a “citizen of Planet Earth,” I think of every fundraiser who holds the line when no one else will, the ones trying to fund shelters, orchestras, youth sports, or cultural sanctuaries in neighborhoods long abandoned by policy. These are planetary acts of humanism too. They are the quiet antidotes to isolation.
Good fundraising is not begging; it’s bridging. It is the art of connection, between abundance and need, between the fortunate and the forgotten, between what is and what could be. When we fundraise, we are saying that we still believe in each other enough to try.
Yo-Yo Ma plays his cello to make sense of the world; we ask for gifts to keep it humane. Both are acts of translation, of turning fear into belonging, and belonging into action. If we can see philanthropy not as charity but as coordination, the synchronization of compassion, then perhaps we’re not so different from the cellist himself: instruments in the same orchestra, tuning ourselves toward harmony in an often dissonant world.
At BIPA, this is our guiding philosophy: fundraising isn’t a side project; it’s civic infrastructure. We help nonprofits, philanthropists, and companies coordinate compassion at scale, turning ideals into impact. It’s not charity. It’s systems repair.
