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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.
This piece was originally posted in October 2020. At the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (CDP), we say that all philanthropists are disaster philanthropists seeking to strengthen communities. Prior to 2020, this adage was a way to remind donors that no matter their...
MacKenzie Scott has made headlines for her fairly cryptic announcements that she has made several hundred grants collectively worth a few billion dollars. Her decisions seem out of the blue, even to grantees themselves, who find that without any application, they have...
Every nonprofit’s guiding star is its mission statement. Plans are developed, activities executed, and resources allocated all with the mission in mind. We’re held accountable by donors, the government, and various watchdogs to ensure that every dollar is invested in...
This piece was originally posted in February 2018. Transparency — being open, honest, and clear — is a key driver of strong relationships between funders and grantees. It’s valued by foundation and grantee CEOs alike, and grantees think foundations are doing a decent...
Nonprofit leaders and sector advocates have long called on funders to prioritize strengthening nonprofit organizations. Our research here at CEP has found that nonprofit leaders not only want help from their funders to strengthen their organizations, but they go on to...
When I first considered writing a defense of philanthropy, a number of friends tried to talk me out of it. They knew my card-carrying credentials as a lifelong member of (and onetime parliamentary candidate for) the UK’s Labour party, which lands some way to the left...
How might philanthropy change over the next ten years? The What’s Next for Philanthropy in the 2020s initiative engaged more than 200 philanthropy executives, professionals, donors, board members, experts, and grantees to look for possible answers to this...
How can learning and evaluation help philanthropy address the challenges of our time? The Funder & Evaluator Affinity Network (FEAN) was hatched on a sunny afternoon at a beer garden on downtown Oakland’s Telegraph Avenue. As two leaders of evaluation firms...
Listen now to the season two trailer. The needs in the world around us seem more urgent than ever: a seemingly unending global pandemic; the ravages of climate change; and countless humanitarian crises at home and abroad. We have seen that philanthropic foundations...
Communities around the world continue to battle the terrible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic beyond its immediate health effects; many are suffering from financial insecurity, losses in educational outcomes and enrollment, and decline in mental and preventative...
Since mid-2020, MacKenzie Scott has made charitable donations totaling close to $8.6 billion across more than 780 nonprofit organizations and universities — a philanthropic tsunami announced not with launch events or ribbon cutting, but with three blog posts. The...
As foundations with K-12 education strategies modify their approaches to support COVID-19 recovery efforts, funders would be wise to gather expert advice. And, frankly, there exists no better expert on what works and does not work in education than a student. So, what...
In 1929, in the grip of a global depression, Americans flocked to theaters to escape the harshness of their lives and catch a momentary peek at the glittering one percent doing well. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s bleak outlook on the concept, “Let me tell you about the very...
The American tradition of philanthropic giving should not be taken for granted, in part because it may well be in real jeopardy. “What’s the problem?,” you might ask. After all, charitable giving reached an all-time high in 2020 – some $471.4 billion given, according...
This post, which originally appeared on Giving Compass, is excerpted and adapted from Phil’s book, Giving Done Right: Effective Philanthropy and Making Every Dollar Count. I remember sitting in a second-year elective course as an MBA student at Harvard Business...
CEP’s new report Persevering Through Crisis: The State of Nonprofits illuminates the profound impact of the pandemic on the nonprofit sector, and its exacerbation of existing inequities. Within the sector, arts organizations were hit especially hard. Here are five...
Today, nonprofits and funders alike increasingly use equity-serving and participant-centered approaches in their program design, and it’s time to sharpen the equity lens on building evidence of a program’s impact. The shift calls for making program participants full...
This post originally appeared on the INNO blog. In a recent post, I highlighted a gap between foundations’ narratives about making general operating support accessible to grantees and their actual practices. Here, in the hopes that more people in philanthropy join the...
When funders gathered in 2015 to talk about ways to promote a fair and accurate 2020 census, none of us could have imagined perhaps the most fraught decennial census cycle in American history. For six years, a small group of funders working together nationally as the...
Individual donors and foundations alike seek to be effective in their giving. But what does that actually mean? The Center for Effective Philanthropy – an organization that has effectiveness as its middle name – has grappled with this question since we...