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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.
Five Considerations for Funders Seeking to Get It “Just Right” The coming year will be a critical moment for philanthropy to aggressively fight the myriad threats to equity that have emerged from the COVID-19 crisis. Giving that helps individuals meet basic needs will...
In light of school closures caused by COVID-19, millions of students are home for the remainder of the academic year. Philanthropy will play a vital role in the response to this crisis. But how can education funders and donors ensure that they are allocating their...
The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s new report, Policy Influence: What Foundations are Doing and Why, provides a welcome snapshot of the sector’s recent approach to policy engagement. Policy Influence highlights a chronic condition in philanthropy: practice often...
Foundation leaders believe philanthropic collaboration is important to achieving their goals. Resources abound on this topic (see Bridgespan and GrantCraft for guides to philanthropic collaboration and collaborative advocacy, respectively). In CEP’s own research, we...
With schools gone virtual and live conversations with students no longer possible, listening to students can feel harder than ever. There is always an inherent challenge for teachers, administrators, and education funders in authentically listening to students, given...
Public policy engagement is emerging as a crucial element of the philanthropic response to the COVID-19 crisis. It is especially timely, then, that new research out today from CEP sheds light on how foundations think about and approach their efforts to influence...
As our team at Moses Taylor Foundation began responding to the impacts of COVID-19 in Northeastern Pennsylvania, we were uncertain where we’d land. But we knew exactly where to begin: with listening. And as we continue to wrestle with so many questions...
This post originally appeared on Hilary Pearson's blog. I participated this week in an important discussion facilitated by Tides Canada and Future of Good on the need for foundation philanthropy in Canada to step up its giving in response to the COVID...
Editor’s Note: Recently, in light of the COVID-19 crisis, there has been increased attention paid to whether foundations should step up their grantmaking from budgeted giving levels to respond to the unprecedented needs of the current moment. Last month, CEP and eight...
For years, every time I’ve traveled outside of Boston, I took a picture and turned it into a postcard to send to my now 97-year-old grandmother, who lives on her own in rural Maine. She replies with a card. We write about things little and big — our shared love of...
African civil society organizations (CSOs) make significant contributions to the continent’s wellbeing. Each year, they raise millions of dollars from individuals and foundations to serve their communities, often testing and scaling innovations and sharing new...
This post is the fourth in “Social Justice and a Relevant Philanthropic Sector,” a five-part series by Miles Wilson about where philanthropy is stuck in old paradigms — and where there lie opportunities to advance social justice both within the sector and across...
Earlier this month, BoardSource joined with CEP and seven other colleague organizations to call on foundation leaders to acknowledge and respond to the devastating and unprecedented realities of the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing grant support beyond their normal...
This post is the third in “Social Justice and a Relevant Philanthropic Sector,” a five-part series by Miles Wilson about where philanthropy is stuck in old paradigms — and where there lie opportunities to advance social justice both within the sector and across...
What does good leadership in crisis look like? In this time of unprecedented challenge related to COVID-19, what can we learn from the great leaders of the past? In a webinar conversation last week, Nancy F. Koehn, business historian and James E. Robison...
As COVID-19’s rapid spread has wreaked havoc on our sector, more than 550 foundations (at the time of writing) have signed a pledge to support our nonprofit partners and the people and communities hardest hit by the pandemic and associated economic impacts. The pledge...
The Costs of Losing Organizations Trusted by Their Communities Many endowed private foundations are wrestling right now with the question of whether to increase their grant spending from what they originally budgeted, even as their endowment values have shrunk, or...
The unprecedented challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic are upending norms in the United States and around the globe. We’re all doing things we never imagined doing. And we are doing them in the interest of the greater good. In order for philanthropy to...
“It was so important just to be treated like a human being.” “As a woman of color, I can’t tell you what it meant to be approached by a funder I didn’t know who saw me and trusted me.” “DO SOMETHING!” These comments from nonprofit leaders at three different funder...
Millions of people across the world are thinking about data and evidence today as if their life depends on it — because it does. The exponential increase in coronavirus (COVID-19) cases within a state or province, the impact of “flattening the curve,” and the evidence...