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As a lifelong New York Knicks fan, I watched last month's run to the franchise's first NBA championship in 53 years with a mix of disbelief and joy. But the more I sat with it, the more I became convinced that the title traces back to a single decision by a single...
The philanthropic sector is no stranger to headwinds, but the current storm is testing funders’ commitment to equity in ways we’ve never experienced before — and learning and evaluation is at a high-stakes inflection point. Whether foundations choose to reinforce or...
Midy Aponte-Vargas has written one of the clearest statements of philanthropy’s core problem I’ve read this year. The operating-system framing is right. Capacity-as-deficit is right. The argument that more flexible funding is only a gentler version of the old system...
When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), these are not merely interesting times. They are disorienting ones. The technology is evolving quickly, the claims around it are louder than the evidence, and much of the public conversation is driven by people with...
In 2016, my Freedom Fund colleagues and I met with lawyers preparing to represent three Eritrean refugees in a case against Nevsun, a Canadian mining company. The men alleged they had been conscripted through Eritrea’s military service and forced to construct a gold,...
The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s annual State of Nonprofits report is out, and its findings were not a major surprise: nonprofit leaders are increasingly burned out at the exact moment philanthropy is asking them to take on more complex systems-level...
The nonprofit sector has a complicated relationship with endings. Organizational survival is often treated as an unquestioned good: funders reward persistence, boards equate closure with failure, and leaders internalize institutional decline as personal defeat. Yet...
The operating system philanthropy uses to define nonprofit strength no longer fits the conditions we are in. It rewards what funders can measure, mistakes legibility for credibility, treats community rooted leadership as incomplete, and asks whether organizations have...
Center for Effective Philanthropy President Phil Buchanan recently made a strong case for why foundations should increase their payouts. He does not think all foundations should spend down and has long argued that perpetual foundations play an important role in the...
AI is not just changing the way foundations work — it is changing the world that philanthropy is trying to change. In 2026, we believe that foundations must go beyond responding to disruption or treating AI as an operational tool and actively examine how it is...