As the 2008 financial crisis rippled through world economies, debates were reinvigorated about the immorality of global capitalism and the free market economy. While greedy financiers and inept economists were crucified in the media, the ideal of entrepreneurship arose as the moral panacea to rising extremism and poverty. Newsweek declared in “Economics versus Extremism” that overregulated economies that “stifled entrepreneurship” were to blame for Islamist extremism. In turn, charitable entrepreneurs were hailed as the panacea to the ills of poverty and underdevelopment with the decline of the welfare state; the April 2010 Obama summit with Middle Eastern entrepreneurs is a good example of this trend. Since the 1980s Turkey also has witnessed the rise of conservative, Anatolia-based entrepreneurship that is intimately connected to the global markets and economies. These connections meant incredible riches for some, ongoing privatization of assets and land, and a rising disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor. Charitable entrepreneurship was seen as the panacea to societal ills and poverty, and a way to be a good Muslim and a productive citizen. Yet, despite the historical importance of charitable giving, more empirical literature is needed when it comes to the social and cultural context of giving and how these contexts shape varied meanings given to state, governance and citizenship. This paper is a study of the privatization of charitable giving in contemporary Turkey and its effects on conceptualizations of state’s role in Turkish society. In my analysis, I specifically focus on associations and vakıfs with projects to curb poverty, to invest in development, and to help in times of crises such as earthquakes, floods, and other disasters. The paper will discuss the current contours of charitable donations within the context of state-civil society relations. It will highlight charitable associations and vakıfs as not only places where formal and informal mechanisms of social protection manifest themselves, but also as places where new understandings of the role of the state are fashioned. Visibility of the poor, tinged with nostalgia, becomes a way to remember the “just” and “fatherly” Ottoman Empire and an Islamic charitable heritage based on transnational religious feeling of brotherhood/sisterhood.