This morning on the train I opened the New York Times to find a special section called “Giving,” with a fascinating article called “Giving Away Money, Getting an Education.”

The upshot: A small foundation near Boston, the Crossroads Community Foundation, lets high school students give its money away. Teams of students read grant proposals, make site visits, argue over priorities and then dole out grants of $3k-$5k to about a dozen groups.

The money here is almost irrelevant. The point is to train young philanthropists. Most of these young “donors” are from rich white suburbs, and someday will be in a position to give their own money away. If you train them young in the ways of charity, the theory goes, you’ll create lifelong giving habits.

A good idea. But what if you took it even further? What if, instead of letting rich white kids give away the money, you let poor kids of color give it away … in their own neighborhoods? What if the “donors” were part of the affected community? What would happen if you flipped the paternalism of charity on its head?

It makes me think back to when I was in college, and I was chosen to be a “Writing Fellow.” We were juniors and seniors who taught freshman and sophmores how to write. We actually had impact on other people’s grades (and their futures) so we took our jobs seriously. The training was brutally intensive. We de- and re-constructed the art of writing in a thousand different ways. We practiced, we critiqued, we studied, we theorized, all in order to teach writing better. All in order to teach our fellow students.

Well, guess who learned most from the Writing Fellows program? Not the underclassmen we so earnestly wanted to serve. It was us, the Fellows, who really learned how to write.

And at the end of the semester, our professor made a startling suggestion. Writing Fellows were supposed to be the best writers in the school, she told us, chosen because we already had exemplary writing skills. “But,” she said, “Wouldn’t it be clever of us to take some terrible writers, tell them they’re the best, give them intense training, and see if we could turn bad writers in great writers … and great teachers?”

High expectations, accountability to others and deep training. It works.

That’s what would happen, I suspect, if a foundation allowed people in disadvantaged communities to give away money. The “donors” would probably get more than they gave, in pride, in wisdom, in social conscience. You could go as far as letting dropouts, addicts, even prisoners — yes, convicted criminals — give away the money. In fact, that’s a pretty dope idea. Those on the lowest rungs of socio-political ladder would have the most to gain from investing in others.

Let prisoners make charitable decisions? I can hear the critics now. I bet the same folks would say that a group of kids can’t make real decisions about charitable donations. To which the Times answers:

Crossroads executive director Judy Salerno said her board had never overturned a student team’s recommendation. The lesson? “When you give them adult responsibility, they rise to the occasion,” she said.

Swap the words “citizens” for “students” and “community” for “adult” and you’ve got a whole new bottom-up vision of philanthropy.