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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.
Brooklyn is home to the largest Black community in North America. Nearly 70 percent of the borough’s residents are non-white. For our staff at the Brooklyn Community Foundation, the events of the past year have revealed in the starkest terms that systemic racism is...
In the scheme of the foundation world, the Langeloth Foundation is tiny. Years ago, at a cocktail party, I met someone on the investment side of a large New York-based foundation who asked me what one foundation staffer inevitably asks of another: “How big is your...
This post originally appeared on the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) website. More than a decade ago, I was summoned to a meeting to provide advice to the board members and CEO of a new, very large foundation. I remember thinking I didn’t really belong...
In 2020, Luminate, a global philanthropic organization with the goal of empowering people and institutions to work together to build just and fair societies, commissioned CEP to survey its grantee partners through the Grantee Perception Report (GPR). A version of this...
Months ago, Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights organization Color Of Change, wrote, “We don’t get racial justice out of a true democracy. We get a true democracy out of racial justice.” The horror of the past week, in which a violent mob brandishing...
The events of January 6 were infuriating. The world doesn’t especially need another organizational statement decrying the violence, condemning the liars and conspiracy theorists, or lamenting the latest vivid display of racist disparities in policing. It’s been said...
When viewing the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) report New Attitudes, Old Practices: The Provision of Multiyear General Operating Support, several findings from the research stood out to me: Nonprofit leaders report that receiving multiyear general operating...
Unprecedented. Uniquely challenging. Tumultuous. Uncertain. There’s been no shortage of buzzwords to describe 2020 that we are all sick of hearing. Whatever language you use to describe this year, the crises of 2020 have demanded philanthropy to rethink...
In a brilliant presentation at the 2013 conference of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy (EPIP), Jessica Prue, then on staff at the Nonprofit Finance Fund, analogized nonprofit funding to water moving through a towering system of buckets and faucets until it...
Nonprofits and funders alike have long called on foundations to be more flexible and responsive; to provide more unrestricted funding; to reduce what they ask of grantees; and to build stronger, more trusting relationships with grantees. These calls for change have...
Foundations and Racial Equity in 2020 The second of three CEP reports on foundations’ response to crisis in 2020, focused on racial equity, reveals a striking truth about our field: we often don’t know what we don’t know. And that prevents us from acting, which,...
A growing group of nonprofit leaders and advocates for more effective philanthropy — joined by a small cadre of grantmakers — have been calling for multiyear general operating support (GOS) to be the norm for funding, rather than the exception. Our research at the...
Today, CEP released the second report in a three-part series about foundations’ responses to the crises of 2020. Foundations Respond to Crisis: Toward Equity? focuses on how foundations have changed their practices to support communities most affected by the pandemic...
This year, the philanthropic sector has had to grapple with four central crises converging at once: natural disasters sparked by climate change; the public health and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; outrage over racist violence and injustice perpetuated by...
2020 has been the kind of year where even the extremely well-insulated sector of philanthropy has been forced to do a bit of soul searching. With that in mind, I was very interested to read CEP’s new report, Foundations Respond to Crisis: A Moment of Transformation?....
On this Giving Tuesday, as I think about how I can be a better donor in the closing month of a year that’s been challenging unlike any other, I’ve been reflecting a lot on what I learned from the inspirational guests my co-host Phil Buchanan and I interviewed this...
The call for foundations to provide more core operating support is a common and needed refrain from nonprofits and philanthropy-serving organizations like the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO). The drumbeat is...
Research suggests that U.S. foundations trust Black-led organizations enough to give them money, but not enough to give them control. A recent analysis by Bridgespan and Echoing Green looked at a set of comparable grant-funded organizations and found that the...
The CEP report New Attitudes, Old Practices: The Provision of Multiyear General Operating Support highlights one of the most vexing paradoxes in the modern nonprofit sector: despite an understanding of the benefits of unrestricted, long-term funding, many...
"Our findings reveal a sobering disconnect between attitudes of foundation leaders and the experience of nonprofits. Moreover, we found a similar disconnect between the attitudes of foundation CEOs themselves and their foundations’ practices." - New Attitudes, Old...