Reach out now to receive a discount on a 2025 CEP assessment or advisory project.
Contact Us
Search
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.
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...
This is the second 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 goes without saying that the coronavirus pandemic has had huge ramifications for civil society across the globe. From our perspective in the U.K., our side of the Atlantic has certainly seen its fair share of disruption. Almost overnight (in some cases quite...
I’ve been in and around the “bridging and civility” space for several years. For better or worse, these terms haven’t always been clearly defined and can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. As such, they have become somewhat of a colloquial catch all for “how we...
The term “nonprofit starvation cycle” describes the experience of many nonprofit organizations that struggle financially because most of their funding comes from project grants with strict limits on paying for indirect costs (or overhead). The cycle has plagued the...
This past week, many Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders welcomed the Lunar New Year under the dark shadow of spiking horrific violence targeting Asian elders, particularly in the Bay Area and in New York City. During the biggest holiday season for many AAPI...
As the country endures a period of division in which both elected leaders and regular citizens traffic in lies and conspiracy theories and seek to undermine democracy, the question of philanthropy’s role in charting a better future is crucial. The need for...
Within my role as senior adviser for Organisational Development and Capacity Building at Oak Foundation, I support the organizational strengthening of our grantee partners. At Oak, we give grants in a variety of ways that generally can be categorized as either 1)...
HOLD THE LINE! This rally call is used when a beleaguered force, sure in its moral authority but overwhelmed by opposing forces, is determined not to lose the ground it has gained. When PEAK Grantmaking’s President and CEO Satonya Fair calls for all of us in the...
Although many foundations continuously seek to expand both the impact and sustainability of the initiatives they sponsor and/or support, limitations in foundations’ financial, intellectual, and relational capital can thwart their ability to realize such objectives....
The crises this country has endured for nearly a year now have underscored the desperate need for donors to provide the kind of flexible funding and trust that nonprofits require to be effective. Nonprofits have been on the front lines of responding to community needs...
Amid the dual crises of a global pandemic and a national reckoning with systemic racism, the U.S. philanthropic sector faces tremendous challenges and opportunities. CEP’s Foundations Respond to Crisis study found that many foundations are making new efforts to...
Last year, one of my clients, a family foundation, realized that one of the biggest barriers to further improving their grantmaking process was their lack of a formal system for evaluating the effectiveness of the foundation as a whole. Until recently, the foundation...