When CEP released a report last June about the state of nonprofits during the COVID-19 pandemic, prospects looked bleak. Nonprofit leaders from our Grantee Voice panel revealed that the pandemic was devastating their organizations as well as the people and communities...
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.
This Pride Month, Let’s Talk About Trans Rights
In 2017, when the Trump administration moved into the White House, I remember my former employer ordering the entire staff pizzas as if in apology. I ate a slice during my lunch break while scrolling through my phone's newsfeed, trying not to panic about what this new...
Thinking Critically while Investing Responsibly
Responsible investors combine their financial objectives with environmental, social, and governance-related risks and impacts. This type of investing goes far beyond simple exclusionary screening or even the much-touted “ESG integration” (environmental, social, and...
Backlash: A Sharp Right Turn by a Philanthropy Membership Organization
It’s entirely predictable, I suppose, but the backlash to last year’s reckoning on racism is definitely here, a year after George Floyd’s horrific murder–and now it’s visible within the little world of institutional philanthropy. We are seeing, for example, both the...
Stretching Dollars without Straining Donors: The Case for Revolving Funds
Nonprofits large and small must strategically marshal resources to ensure that they have staff, resources and capacity to accomplish their goals. Such challenges are magnified when nonprofits take on systems change work where powerful opponents are arrayed against...
Take the Ethical Storytelling Pledge
A version of this blog post originally appeared on the CEP blog in July 2019. It is re-posted here as part of our Rewind series. Thanks to the digital age, we live in a new era of storytelling. Whether through blogs, emails, social media, or video, using...
Demographic Portrait of Grantees: What We’re Learning and Doing to Support Inclusion and Improve Our Practices
This post originally appeared on the Hewlett Foundation blog. It is reposted here with permission. The Hewlett Foundation began collecting information about the demographic makeup of its grantees in 2018 as part of our ongoing commitment to diversity, equity, and...
Takeaways from an Introduction to the World of Philanthropy
Among its many effects, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the experiences of many college students, preventing them from attending on-campus classes or experiencing traditional internships. At Oberlin College, third-year students had the opportunity to complete...
Six Things Funders Can Change to Better Support Child- and Youth-led Grassroots Groups
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...
How Rapid Assessments Can Help the Shift from Response to Recovery
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...
Why Flexible Funding Needs to be Philanthropy’s New Normal
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...
Elevating the Conversation: A Note of Appreciation and Thanks
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...
The Hard Work of Democracy: A Case for Leisure
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...
How Strong Grantee Relationships Lead to Unexpected Opportunities
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...
Foundation-Wide Strategy Reviews: Lessons from 13 Private Foundations
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...
To Bridge Divides, Act with Urgency — and Self-Awareness
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...
Centering Climate Giving in Frontline Communities
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,...
For the Future and the Now: The Difference of Multiyear General Operating Support
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...
Out of Many, One
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...
The Art of Philanthropy, The Philanthropy of Art
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,...