Over here in Israel, if I understand my history correctly, the askan was the person who brought funds in to support the poor and their institutions as far back as the 19th century, when the poor and their institutions were pretty much all we had.  Our 20th-century socialist pioneers, strong on self-reliance, looked forward to the extinction of the askan and his fellow luftmenschen, and that pioneer contempt is nowhere better expressed than in the Morfix.com definition of askan as “go-getter, politico, wheeler-dealer.”