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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.
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...
In early spring this year, as the coronavirus pandemic worsened, foundations in the U.S. began to respond by shifting resources and practices. Some funders, nonprofits, and others in the field called for fundamental changes in how funders approach their work —...
If 2020 has reinforced any lesson, it is that the people and organizations seeking to advance social, economic, and racial justice need flexibility and stability to adapt to whiplashing context changes in already hostile environments. Those of us with the privilege of...
The case is closed: general operating support (GOS) is both good for grantees and communities and favored by funders. Further, in CEP’s recent study, New Attitudes, Old Practices: The Provision of Multiyear General Operating Support, the authors were “unable to...
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Approach The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is committed to building a Culture of Health that provides everyone in America a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. Achieving this goal requires valuing and...
For several decades now, it’s been a common refrain from funders that choose not to provide general operating support (GOS) grants: we can’t make those grants because it’s too difficult to measure and assess their impact. In CEP’s 2006 report, In Search of Impact, the...
A Black leader from Los Angeles recently texted me: “Why is it so hard to get a core support grant from foundations, even though I have been doing this work for 20 years?” Her question might as well have been: “Why don’t funders trust us?” While many funders claim to...
It was almost two decades ago that I got my first taste of how frustrating funder restrictions on grants could be. I had recently started working at CEP, and we were discussing a project proposal draft with a potential funder. The funder asked us to add additional...
This post originally appeared on the Taproot Foundation blog. COVID-19 has changed everything about our daily lives. People are keeping their distance. Businesses have had to completely shift their way of doing business or closed entirely. Organizations everywhere are...