Exponent Philanthropy Senior Program Manager Sara Beggs spoke recently with two Exponent Philanthropy members with experience in collaborative models: Emily Tow Jackson of the Tow Foundation and Liz Sak of the Cricket Island Foundation. Tow Jackson has an extensive history with cross-sector collaboration to change the juvenile justice systems in Connecticut and New York. Sak... Read More
Why encourage philanthropists working with few or no staff who already limited time and money to take on evaluation? Two reasons: First, evaluation is a critical element for philanthropists that desire to increase their impact. Second, just because evaluation has been overwhelming or unproductive in the past doesn’t mean it has to be going forward.... Read More
What do you want to achieve with your foundation? Many foundations focus on a particular field of interest, population, or geography. Others focus by strategy (e.g., building technology capacity, developing nonprofit leaders) and bolster a range of grantees by applying those strategies. Settling on a focus is not necessarily an easy step—especially if your foundation... Read More
On an individual level, empathy is the ability to reach beyond ourselves and connect in a deeper way with other people—to understand their experiences, to get where they’re coming from, to feel what they feel. Widespread empathy scales that intuition from the individual to the organization. It connects a foundation’s staff and board to the... Read More
Exponent Philanthropy member Janis Reischmann of the Hau‘oli Mau Loa Foundation has spent the past several years working in a close partnership with 10 nonprofits to bring hope to some of Hawaii’s most disenfranchised youths. “The approaches used by our partners are reaching children who were previously very difficult to engage and challenged by typical... Read More
Developmental evaluation is a hot topic in philanthropy today. It emerged in response to the need for real-time learning in complex and emerging situations—just the situations in which funders tend to find themselves when working with others to find innovative solutions to social problems. “Evaluation is about critical thinking; development is about creative thinking,” writes... Read More