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This post originally appeared on the blog in February 2022. We’ve spent a ton of time in foundation board rooms, for better and for worse. We’ve also been board members and guest speakers at operating nonprofits and one of us staffed two college boards decades...
Philanthropy and foundations exist and work for change within systems pervaded with racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism, among other harmful “-isms.” In fact, some foundations have amassed their wealth precisely because of these inequitable systems. These forces...
Within my first couple weeks of starting college, my Junior Advisor (Williams College’s student equivalent of a dorm parent) gathered a dozen of my “entry” mates for our Welcoming Williams session, which I now recognize was my first ever formal diversity, equity, and...
We’ve spent a ton of time in foundation board rooms, for better and for worse. We’ve also been board members and guest speakers at operating nonprofits and one of us staffed two college boards decades ago. Many of those experiences have been engaging and positive....
One of the founding ideas of our work at the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) was that funders could — and should — learn from each other’s experience — not just in an anecdotal way, but systematically. Today that doesn’t sound like such a wild idea, but back...
There’s essentially nothing a foundation must do when it comes to asking most nonprofits to provide reports on the grants they’ve received. In fact, there’s no regulation that requires a funder to have a reporting process at all. (Expenditure responsibility grants are...
This piece was originally posted in February 2018. Transparency — being open, honest, and clear — is a key driver of strong relationships between funders and grantees. It’s valued by foundation and grantee CEOs alike, and grantees think foundations are doing a decent...
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...
At CEP we are always thinking about the ways that strong funder-grantee relationships affect the success of foundations’ efforts. This topic has been a major emphasis in our research agenda for more than a decade, as we have continually investigated the questions,...
Data and measurement sometimes get a bad rap in philanthropy. Here at CEP, one useful role we try to play is to balance information about timeless topics, like how to build strong funder-grantee relationships, with data that is crucial for smart decision-making on...