When will we recognize patronage?

In recent weeks, the media have echoed the state of the Reform of Law 49/2002, popularly known as the Spanish Patronage Law.

A law that, when approved, championed pioneering European regulations, but unfortunately was born with insurmountable shortcomings that would condemn it to dozens of requests for modifications and threats of reform over two decades, until today, when for the first time its articles are being discussed in the Congress of Deputies. We will see if politicians finally allow it to come to fruition.

We have been able to read in the media an extensive exposition of what patronage means, the treatment it currently has and what the new legislative reform seeks, but nothing will advance if we do not manage to change how we perceive philanthropic actions as a society. Here is the crux of the matter.

I read with sadness the comments that digital newspapers received in their articles, where part of public opinion raged, seeing in the reform only a tax evasion tool at the service of the affluent civil society, or at least, patronage was understood as a reputational cleansing machine for the rich and privileged.

We are very wrong as a society if we do not know how to recognize the benefits that patronage brings to everyone. And that is why this Law needs a clear reform. Not in the percentages of tax deduction for donations, which also, but to establish, as the French Aillagon Law does, the great regulatory reference in philanthropy in Europe, public policies that through the institution of the Mission du Mécénat has managed to explain to the whole country, department by department, what patronage is, how it can be carried out by everyone and what its benefits are, personal and as a member of a community.

Here, unlike Anglo-Saxon societies, where participating and returning to society a part of what one obtains is a source of pride and is assumed almost as an obvious obligation, we are very far from appropriating a feeling of community co-responsibility in this regard.

It seems incredible that it costs us so much to understand it when Catalan society still lives partly from the economic return generated by the bets that great patrons left as a legacy at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. But at some point in more contemporary history, this commitment of the Catalan bourgeoisie, the business community, towards artists, suffered a disconnection that has never flowed in the same way again. Or at least, its necessity or perception.

We are very wrong as a society if we do not know how to recognize the benefits that patronage brings to everyone

Although skeptics do not believe it, the patron donates from the heart, because he wants to, there is an implicit will in the act of making a donation that responds to a conviction and willingness to collaborate and be part of the cause one believes in. If the donations that each and every one of the country's philanthropists are currently making were to disappear, the Foundations and non-profit entities that sustain the welfare state far beyond the administration's capabilities would fall, and hundreds of thousands of people would be left unattended.

The next time you hear a patron criticized, stop and think about which foundation, NGO, or non-profit entity you or a family member benefits from. The day patrons stop collaborating, it will disappear. Science and research, the third social sector, and culture need patronage to survive, project themselves, and enrich all of us as individuals and as a society through the extraordinary work they do for the general interest. It is up to us to recognize this once and for all.