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The CEP blog aims to offer a range of perspectives, experiences, and opinions related to effective philanthropic practice. We welcome submissions that address crucial issues facing individual and institutional donors and are not self-promotional in nature. The views expressed in these posts are not necessarily CEP’s own.
As a lifelong New York Knicks fan, I watched last month's run to the franchise's first NBA championship in 53 years with a mix of disbelief and joy. But the more I sat with it, the more I became convinced that the title traces back to a single decision by a single...
The philanthropic sector is no stranger to headwinds, but the current storm is testing funders’ commitment to equity in ways we’ve never experienced before — and learning and evaluation is at a high-stakes inflection point. Whether foundations choose to reinforce or...
Midy Aponte-Vargas has written one of the clearest statements of philanthropy’s core problem I’ve read this year. The operating-system framing is right. Capacity-as-deficit is right. The argument that more flexible funding is only a gentler version of the old system...
When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), these are not merely interesting times. They are disorienting ones. The technology is evolving quickly, the claims around it are louder than the evidence, and much of the public conversation is driven by people with...
In 2016, my Freedom Fund colleagues and I met with lawyers preparing to represent three Eritrean refugees in a case against Nevsun, a Canadian mining company. The men alleged they had been conscripted through Eritrea’s military service and forced to construct a gold,...
A few years into my tenure as CEP’s president, when I was in my mid-30s, I made a confession to our board of directors in executive session. It was a big one. “I don’t really know what I am doing,” I said, explaining that the organization was growing quickly and that...
The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s annual State of Nonprofits report is out, and its findings were not a major surprise: nonprofit leaders are increasingly burned out at the exact moment philanthropy is asking them to take on more complex systems-level...
The nonprofit sector has a complicated relationship with endings. Organizational survival is often treated as an unquestioned good: funders reward persistence, boards equate closure with failure, and leaders internalize institutional decline as personal defeat. Yet...
It’s perhaps the understatement of the year — or, maybe more fittingly, the semiquincentennial — to say that it’s a challenging moment for the nonprofit sector. As CEP has shared in some of its latest research as well as other public forums, burnout is spiking,...
The operating system philanthropy uses to define nonprofit strength no longer fits the conditions we are in. It rewards what funders can measure, mistakes legibility for credibility, treats community rooted leadership as incomplete, and asks whether organizations have...
Center for Effective Philanthropy President Phil Buchanan recently made a strong case for why foundations should increase their payouts. He does not think all foundations should spend down and has long argued that perpetual foundations play an important role in the...
AI is not just changing the way foundations work — it is changing the world that philanthropy is trying to change. In 2026, we believe that foundations must go beyond responding to disruption or treating AI as an operational tool and actively examine how it is...
At its core, fiscal hosting refers to a model in which a nonprofit organization extends its legal and tax-exempt status to a project or initiative, enabling it to receive and manage funding without establishing a separate legal entity. Over time, this approach has...
When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced earlier this year that it was reversing the Endangerment Finding — the long-standing federal policy establishing that greenhouse gases pose a clear and present danger to public health — climate deniers...
Institutional neutrality has been all the rage these past few years, but it is time to recognize that it is a fallacy. Let me start with some background. Since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas in Israel, after which many CEOs took heat for their public...
The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) has recently shared some sobering survey data in “State of Nonprofits 2026: What Funders Need to Know.” The proportion of nonprofit CEOs who report that their own sense of feeling burned out is “very much a concern” has...
“We have had to be agile, flexible, and optimistic in ways that I haven't experienced before.” Elizabeth Lindsey, who leads the Washington, DC area location of the youth-empowerment nonprofit Genesys Works, has spent most of her career in the...
In CEP’s latest research report, “The State of Nonprofits 2026,” one of its three major findings is that “despite ongoing financial challenges, many nonprofits are making strategic adaptations to their work in order to survive.” That is absolutely right — but is...
There is always that part in the superhero movie when the superheroes themselves are beleaguered. Emergencies are burning all around them, while the rhetoric has been manipulated against them. They’ve never been needed more, yet they simultaneously have never been...
“Our biggest challenge is higher volatility in giving. More foundations than we would expect in a typical year have reduced or dropped their support." – A nonprofit leader This statement, included in CEP’s unflinching report on the state of the nonprofit sector,...