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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.
There’s a growing recognition that many of the gains of the last quarter century for children, particularly for the most vulnerable and marginalized children, are stagnating or reversing. Increasingly, philanthropy has begun to understand that shifting money directly...
As funders, our immediate response to the onset of a global pandemic early in 2020 was humanitarian: to increase our support and to provide it in more flexible ways. Now, as we see that COVID-19’s impact will be lasting and pronounced, philanthropy needs to shift to...
During the past year, we have seen an overwhelming show of support from the philanthropic community to help address the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only has there been an overall increase in giving, but many funders have loosened — or eliminated...
If you’ve read and appreciated a post from the CEP Blog over the past nearly seven years, then you have benefited from the thoughtful and skilled work of Ethan McCoy, CEP’s senior writer. Ethan joined CEP right out of Brown University, where he had been sports editor...
This is the final post in “Complicating the Narrative on Bridging and Division,” a six-part blog series from CEP and PACE (Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement). This series seeks to highlight community-informed perspectives from five leaders in the build-up to...
Prior to completing its spend down in 2020, the San Diego-based Legler Benbough Foundation worked with grantees in trusting relationships, built over time, for 20 years. Now that our doors are closed, our colleagues at the Foundation have had the chance to...
For funders planning to evaluate or review their strategies, a wide range of resources on program evaluation and assessment can provide guidance on methodology, data use, and analysis. And yet, the available literature on how to structure foundation-wide...
This is the fifth post in “Complicating the Narrative on Bridging and Division,” a six-part blog series from CEP and PACE (Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement). This series seeks to highlight community-informed perspectives from five leaders in the build-up to...
It takes boldness to bring big change in philanthropy. Our colleagues at Donors of Color Network recently put that boldness into action by launching a national campaign calling on funders to commit to giving 30 percent of climate-related funding to BIPOC-led groups,...
As president and CEO of The Wright Center for Community Health and its affiliated entity, The Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education, I’ve had the great privilege of voluntarily serving alongside 600 peer nonprofit CEOs on the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s...
This is the fourth post in “Complicating the Narrative on Bridging and Division,” a six-part blog series from CEP and PACE (Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement). This series seeks to highlight community-informed perspectives from five leaders in the build-up to...
Philanthropic best practices in arts and culture remain underexplored relative to other sectors of private funding. If funders are looking for best practices, it’s easy to become lost amidst varying objectives, rationales, and methodologies. For arts funders,...
Foundations and individual donors need to reconceive impact in a way that puts hearing firsthand the experiences of those they seek to help front and center. If any area illustrates this point, it is education. After all, listening to students should not be a radical...
Foundations say they are eliminating restrictions on existing grants, exceeding payout requirements, listening to their grantees on what they need to weather current challenges, and thinking about increasing support for policy, advocacy, and organizing. They’re also...
A Conversation with Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies In CEP’s recent publication, New Attitudes, Old Practices: The Provision of Multiyear General Operating Support, nearly all interviewed foundation leaders emphasized the importance of trust between funders and...
This is the third post in “Complicating the Narrative on Bridging and Division,” a six-part blog series from CEP and PACE (Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement). This series seeks to highlight community-informed perspectives from five leaders in the build-up to...
Philanthropy is not like investing. Nonprofits are not like business. Even the most casual reader of this blog or occasional follower of CEP’s work has heard me make this argument many times (too many, you might be thinking). But repeating this message matters. And...
A version of this post was originally published by Oxford HR. It is posted here with permission of the author. The best thing about becoming a funder is that people have started laughing at my jokes… The relationship between funders and grantees is asymmetrical. One...
“An old friend of Robert Frost’s was driving him home on a moonlit August night, with huge stars in the sky. The friend mused, ‘On a night like this, I keep thinking that life is so short, and there is so little time.’ Frost put a hand on his arm and said, ‘It’s the...
Funders have been pushed over the past year to make big changes to how they approach their work. They’ve been called on to provide long-term flexible funding, to shift power, to trust and listen to nonprofits, to increase payout, to fund more organizations led by...