Funders, make a plan to gather vital feedback on your work in 2026!
Contact Us
Search
On the CEP blog this week and next, CEP President Phil Buchanan is discussing, in a series of eight posts, recent critiques of large, staffed foundations and assertions that recently-established, “lean” foundations are paving a promising new path without being saddled...
On the CEP blog this week and next, CEP President Phil Buchanan will discuss, in a series of eight posts, recent critiques of large, staffed foundations and assertions that recently-established, “lean” foundations are paving a promising new path without being saddled...
This post originally appeared on the Social Velocity blog. When it comes to the debate about the social impact of endowment investments, college and university campuses — not foundations — seem to be where the action is. Foundations have hundreds of billions of...
The Ford Foundation’s recent decision to shift funding focus entirely to inequality has sparked further conversations about foundations’ responsibility to fund programs and initiatives combating socioeconomic and racial inequality. Recent events from Ferguson to South...
Impact investing at independent foundations is a mile wide and an inch deep. I think that’s a fair summary of CEP’s latest research report released in May, Investing and Social Impact: Practices of Private Foundations, based on a benchmarking survey of private...
A young donor behind a large, new foundation said something recently that really struck me — and in a good way. It happened in May in a session at CEP’s conference that I moderated on “new models in philanthropy” (some of which of course are not so new at all), and...
There’s been a great deal of turnover at the biggest foundations, prompting us to revisit our 2012 analyses of the backgrounds of CEOs of the largest 100 foundations by asset size. We reported last month on the professional backgrounds of foundation CEOs — noting a...
In a toughly-worded op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times headlined “Who Will Watch the Charities?”, Inside Philanthropy founder and editor David Callahan argues that philanthropy “is a world with too much secrecy and too little oversight” and...
Being a foundation CEO isn’t so easy if you’re going to do it well, as I noted in my last blog post. There are tough decisions to be made and today — in the opening plenary of CEP’s biennial conference in San Francisco — we at CEP will share data about three areas in...
Early on in my days as CEP’s first chief executive officer, when we were just trying to get the organization off the ground, I visited with a CEP Board member in her office south of San Francisco. She was new to the Board and very direct. “Show me your calendar,” she...