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When I first met Michael Bailin in the office of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF) in New York in 2001, he described a new effort the Foundation was undertaking: to identify organizations with proven strategies to help young people living in poverty and fund...
Trust-based philanthropy is the phrase of the moment, and all those associated with the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project deserve tremendous credit for the way they have influenced grantmakers. As we at CEP have documented in a series of research reports, foundations’...
This is the third and final post in a series in which I revisit some of the big questions for philanthropy I discussed in a post published in the fall of 2022. The first dealt with whether changes in philanthropic practice made in the wake of the pandemic would be...
Joel Fleishman, who died September 30 at the age of 90, is rightly being remembered as a man who was, in the words of the New York Times, “an unparalleled influencer among the nation’s wealthy and powerful.” Many of the beautiful obituaries and reflections on Joel’s...
If one thing is clear to me about philanthropy, it’s that there is no single right model or approach that makes sense in every context. We at the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) have developed a working definition of philanthropic effectiveness that lays out...
This is second in a series of posts in which I revisit some of the big questions for philanthropy discussed in a post published in the fall of 2022. I hear more talk about the state of philanthropy’s commitment to racial equity than perhaps any other issue when I...
This is first in a series of posts in which I will revisit some of the big questions for philanthropy discussed in a post published in the fall of 2022. The four years since the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill have seen unprecedented change in...
During his seven years on the CEP Board, Ricardo Millett would ask the same question at some point in almost every meeting: “Effectiveness for what?” His refrain was so common we used to joke about making it a drinking game. We joked, but we knew it was a serious —...
It has become trendy, for some reason, to argue that we’re paying too much attention to numbers, such as those tracked by Giving USA, that gauge contributions to nonprofit organizations. Generosity, the thinking goes, is about so much more than this, and, therefore,...
There is increasing evidence that the shifts in funder practices that began in 2020 are continuing in the years since. In a new CEP research study, released today, we have documented changes in the past year in how both individual and institutional donors work with...