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Phil Buchanan

CEP President

Phil Buchanan, president of CEP, is a passionate advocate for the importance of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. Hired in 2001 as the organization’s first chief executive, Phil has led the growth of CEP into the leading provider of data and insight on philanthropic effectiveness.

Phil is author of Giving Done Right: Effective Philanthropy and Making Every Dollar Count, published by PublicAffairs and named the “Best Philanthropy Book of the Year” by Inside Philanthropy in 2019. He is co-host of a podcast, also called Giving Done Right, with CEP’s Grace Nicolette. Phil is a frequent blogger for the CEP Blog, author of op eds that have appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times and Financial Times, and a frequent commentator on philanthropy in the media.

Phil is co-founder of YouthTruth, an initiative of CEP’s designed to harness student perceptions to help educators and funders accelerate improvements in K–12 schools and classrooms. In 2016, he was named the Nonprofit Times “influencer of the year” and he has been named 12 times to that publication’s “Power and Influence Top 50” list, most recently in 2023. Phil serves on the boards of directors of the National Council on Aging (where he has chaired the Governance Committee) and the Institute for Nonprofit Practice.

Born in Toronto, Phil grew up in Portland, Oregon before attending Wesleyan University, where he majored in Government and was awarded the Butterfield Prize for character, leadership, intellectual commitment, and concern for the Wesleyan community. He also has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Phil Buchanan's Blog Posts

Embracing Trust, Eschewing Dogma in Philanthropic Practice

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’...

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Unmatched Influence: Remembering Joel Fleishman 

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...

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Recent Blogs

An AI Roadmap for Philanthropy in 2025
An AI Roadmap for Philanthropy in 2025

As grantmaking organizations increasingly explore how AI tools can transform the way we work in civil society, the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG) recently released results from a global survey of grantmakers in our 2024 State of Philanthropy Tech report....

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