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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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...