Stanford Social Innovation Review

With the economy in turmoil, funders are increasingly pressuring nonprofits to merge. Yet mergers are not always the right path for nonprofits in financial distress. For a healthier nonprofit sector, funders should consider a wider variety of partnership options.

In the time it takes to update your Facebook page, you could be making the world a slightly better place

The secret ingredient of radical innovation

Grantmaking initiatives often fail when the foundation remains isolated from its grantees and the communities they both serve. To remedy this problem, grantmakers must work more closely with their grantees, community leaders, and other important stakeholders. This engagement helps everyone involved gain a deeper understanding of the problems they are tackling, create new and better solutions, and build more effective organizations

How funders can help grantees track their progress more effectively

Improving the lives of disadvantaged populations—whether through better schools, after-school programs, or teen pregnancy prevention clinics—requires proven theories of change. The very development of a field depends on their diffusion, replication, critique, and modification. Yet some organizations refuse to articulate a theory of change and some funders think it would be intrusive to demand that they do so. The interests of all concerned are served by a developmental approach to creating and evaluating theories of change

“By paying so much attention to managing their own risks, philanthropists are no longer attending to the marginalized people who risk so much to make change happen,” says Sheela Patel in this First Person.

In recent decades, nonprofits have significantly increased the size of their endowments. Yet during the current economic crisis, they made scant use of their sizable holdings. Instead of drawing down their endowments to offset losses of income, nonprofits resorted to cutting programs and personnel, sometimes dramatically. To prepare for future financial downturns, nonprofits should treat endowments as rainy day funds, not cut programs to preserve the endowment.

Jeff Raikes takes over the Gates Foundation at a turbulent
time when philanthropic resources are down and social needs are up