The recent settlement reached in the case against the Fearless Fund, which provides grants to businesses led by women of color, should not deter funders from supporting racial and gender equity initiatives. As I recently wrote in TIME Magazine: “Targeted efforts like...
Blog
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.
Revisiting Big Questions for Philanthropy: When to Bridge and When to Fight
This is the third and final post in a series in which I revisit some of the big questions for philanthropy I discussed in a post published in the fall of 2022. The first dealt with whether changes in philanthropic practice made in the wake of the pandemic would be...
You Know What They Say About Assumptions: A Reflection on New Research About Intermediary Funders
CEP’s new research, Bridging the Gap: Grantee Perspectives on Intermediary Funders, makes one very clear point: Grantee experiences with intermediary funders mirror their experiences with originating funders (those that are often supporting intermediaries). As we’ve...
Knowing What We Don’t Know: Assessing Intermediaries’ Impact on Grantees
When I was approached by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to serve on the advisory group for a research project on intermediary funders, I was immediately keen to participate. From two decades of first-hand experience, I know how valuable it can be to...
Unmatched Influence: Remembering Joel Fleishman
Joel Fleishman, who died September 30 at the age of 90, is rightly being remembered as a man who was, in the words of the New York Times, “an unparalleled influencer among the nation’s wealthy and powerful.” Many of the beautiful obituaries and reflections on Joel’s...
How Collaboratives Can Advance Impact at Scale
For the past several years, my colleagues and I at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have been working with donors who are choosing collaborative funds — those that pool the donations of multiple funders to amplify the impact that any one donor could have — to...
‘Words Matter’: An Interview with Houston Grantmaker Long Chu
A funder’s choice to collect grantee feedback by partnering with CEP on the Grantee Perception Report (GPR) signals a commitment to learning, improvement, and ultimately, effectiveness. This is particularly true of the many funders who repeat the GPR and observe their...
The Power of Partnership: Insights from the CORE Collective Program
In the organizing world, a key tenet of power is that "power is the product of relationship," meaning people in strong relationships with one another produce power. At EdTrust-West, we embrace this principle of power-building through one of our signature programs, the...
A Moonshot for Disaster Prevention: Building a Framework for Transformative Change
The frequency and intensity of natural hazards, including hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, are reaching unprecedented levels and devastating communities across the globe. Just last year, we witnessed the destruction caused by Hurricane Idalia, which left thousands...
Catalyzing Civic Change: It’s Time for Philanthropy to Elevate Youth Voices
America’s public schools were founded with a clear mission: to prepare each generation anew for the responsibilities of citizenship. Over the last year, YouthTruth, an initiative of the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), set out to evaluate how well schools are...
Unlocking the Transformative Potential of Intermediary Funds
One of the fastest growing philanthropic practices in recent years is the use of collaborative, or pooled, funds — one form of intermediary funding, the subject of a recent CEP report. Like many others, the Ford Foundation participates in multiple funder...
Building the Intermediary Ecosystem: Three Core Tenets
Philanthropy has experienced an explosion in intermediaries in the past decade and I was privileged to have a front-row seat to that growth during my tenure at Arabella Advisors, a leading provider of fiscal sponsorship services to some of philanthropy’s largest...
What Do Grantees Think of Intermediary Funders?
Over the past decade, there has been a significant rise in both the interest in and number of intermediary organizations — those that primarily regrant funds from institutional sources on their behalf, including nonprofits that act as regrantors, collaborative or...
The Giving Done Right Podcast is Back for Season Four
Listen to the trailer here. I’m thrilled to announce that the Giving Done Right podcast is returning for another season! This summer, CEP’s president Phil Buchanan and I have been busy in the recording studio, and we’ll be bringing you 16 new episodes...
Navigating the Equity Journey at Lean Foundations
In the evolving landscape of philanthropy, lean funders — those operating with few or no staff — are playing a crucial role in advancing racial equity. The latest edition of Racial Equity in Lean Foundations, an annual report from Exponent Philanthropy, sheds light on...
As the Planet Heats Up, New Trends Drive Climate Giving
After the hottest year on record, 2024 has continued to bring unprecedented heat and extreme weather events. Today, 80 percent of people globally want their country to do more on climate change. The calls for bold action are louder than ever, and much more is needed...
Insights from Grantees: A CEP Blog Series
Funders have used CEP's Grantee Perception Report to gather candid, comparative feedback from their grantees for more than two decades. In addition to sharing confidential reports with individual funders to enable them to continually improve their own work with...
A Framework for Democracy Philanthropy
This post originally appeared on The Art of Association blog. It is challenging for philanthropic funders to get started and stay focused when it comes to strengthening democracy. The vagaries of our political system — really a complex system of systems cast on a...
Burnout and Well-Being in Grantee Organizations: A CEP Blog Series
Among the findings of Center for Effective Philanthropy's State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know, was a striking statistic: 95 percent of nonprofit leaders who responded to CEP's survey expressed some level of concern about burnout. Following the release...
What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Nonprofit World
It’s not easy being a corporate CEO these days. Just look at the recent travails of leaders at high profile companies like Boeing or Disney or Starbucks. They, and many others, are struggling to navigate multiple, often competing and invariably vocal, constituencies....