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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.
Every day, I’m struck by the courage it takes to lead one of the organizations we fund in K-12 education. Funding is getting harder to come by, and the political landscape certainly isn’t making things any easier for mission-driven work. As CEO of NewSchools Venture...
In the first two pieces in this series, we introduced the tidal foundation and explored when mission may require higher payout. But how much a foundation spends is only one part of stewardship — the other is how the endowment itself is invested. But payout and...
In the second half of 2025, CEP’s Assessment and Advisory Services Team worked with the teams at Philanthropy Together, Redstone, and Vital Impact to survey recent grant recipients of 21 “bright spot” collaborative funds. In “The Collaborative Effect: Grantee...
In the first piece of this series, we introduced the tidal foundation as an alternative to the fixed choice between perpetuity or spend down. In this piece, we will get a bit more practical: How do board members and leaders decide when the tide should rise? The...
During a recent review of the Pilgrim Foundation’s U.S.-based grant applications, one theme surfaced repeatedly in conversations with our nonprofit partners: everything costs more. Partners described higher expenses for staffing, facilities, technology,...
Approaches to foundation spending have too often been organized around a false choice. Foundations are expected to preserve assets in perpetuity while spending at or near the IRS-required 5% minimum, or to spend down by deploying resources over a fixed period and...
Seven days into the second Trump administration, after a raft of executive orders including several targeting “DEI programs,” we published a piece I authored on this blog titled “In Defense of DEI.” In it, I lamented, “the remarkable and rapid capitulation of many...
"So much of my work life was driven by the feeling that my work is who I am, and all I have. Realizing that isn't actually true was huge for me." – Sabbatical Grantee For decades, funders have invested in sabbaticals for nonprofit leaders — one grant, one leader, one...
I’ve appreciated seeing CEP’s leaders contribute thoughtful viewpoints in recent weeks on some of the burning topics facing our field. I’m thinking specifically about Phil Buchanan’s column about smart approaches to perpetual funding and Kevin Bolduc’s recent...
Two years ago, burnout in the nonprofit sector was a five-alarm fire — and it’s only spread and raged further since then. At the time, I wrote “A Call for Self-Care in Social Impact” for this publication where I pointed to troubling statistics about the rate and...
When it comes to effecting tangible improvements in local or regional systems, collaborations across the public, private, and philanthropic sectors are of paramount importance. That said, many in philanthropy will recognize a familiar challenge: those vital...
In our previous post, we shared findings from Let’s Keep Learning, a research initiative led by Engage R+D and ORS Impact, with support from the Barr Foundation and others. In that post, we suggested, based on what we learned, that the challenge facing evaluation and...
When we started the Let’s Keep Learning initiative in the spring of 2025, we had an initial hypothesis: philanthropic learning seemed to be declining during a volatile time when learning and evaluation could be providing key insights to inform shifts in strategy and...
CEP’s “State of Nonprofits 2026” confirms what many funders already sense: The sector is under severe strain. Burnout among nonprofit CEOs jumped to 46% this year, up from just under 30% in 2025. Fifty-seven percent of leaders say foundation grants are harder to get...
More than a few philanthropy observers have suggested that foundations are now (or will soon become) a less significant segment of the landscape of U.S. philanthropy than they once were. In a much discussed post more than a decade ago, journalist David Callahan...
The challenges created by a capricious and morally untethered federal government haven’t abated, and every day nonprofits are adapting to step into the breach. They're redesigning food distribution networks, organizing responses to new immigration policies and...
The Supreme Court's recent Trump v. Barbara decision upholding birthright citizenship is bittersweet. On one hand, it reaffirms a core tenet of our Constitution and reflects our longstanding commitment to being a welcoming and inclusive...
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...