The Social Impact Exchange is a new effort from Growth Philanthropy Network and Duke University with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Exchange is designed as a focal point for studying, funding and implementing large expansions of proven social purpose organizations. To that end the Exchange offers an “investment clearinghouse” (free registration needed) [...]
Category Archives: Capital Market Philanthropy
Trust in Philanthropy
November 19, 2009 – 7:56 am
My colleague Bill Somerville talks a lot about trust in philanthropy. Bill feels that funders do not trust grantees enough and that the reams of paperwork required by funders is simply a mark of their lack of trust. To the cynical person, trusting someone is equivalent to being naive. Trusting someone can be criticized as [...]
Social Innovation Fast Pitch
November 9, 2009 – 12:15 am
For-profit markets have mechanisms where groups of potential investment opportunities are vetted and then presented to potential investors. The success of this model, is that the potential investors come to the table looking for potential investments. This is radically different from most nonprofit fundraising interactions where the potential “investee” approaches the potential “investor” without having [...]
Social Venture Partners & Passionate Social Investing
October 29, 2009 – 8:52 am
I’m one of those people who uses words like “investing”, “leverage” and “impact” when I talk about philanthropy. For some people, this sort of language seems to imply a passionless approach to philanthropy. As if investing was nothing but a number crunching exercise. But having spent part of last week at the Social Venture Partners [...]
Fixing the Power Imbalance in Philanthropy
October 26, 2009 – 9:44 am
It is a recurring complaint in philanthropy that the huge power imbalance between funders and grantees skews the behavior of nonprofits in negative ways. This was one of the points made by reader Aaron Stiner in his critique of David Hunter’s essay on social investing: I still have some concerns that the model you are [...]
Do Social Investors Look Down on Nonprofits?
October 21, 2009 – 8:42 am
Responding to my post from Monday, reader Aaron Stiner, program manager for Advancing Philanthropy at the Arizona State University Lodestar Center for Philanthropy & Nonprofit Innovation, writes: It seems to me this conversation is looking at nonprofit organizations from a “we social investors know more than they do” kind of approach. This paradigm is very [...]
Social Investing & The End of Charity
October 19, 2009 – 8:53 am
In my recent writing defining the difference between Tactical and Strategic Philanthropy, I’ve focused on the concept of the Strategic Philanthropist as a social problem solver and the Tactical Philanthropist as a social investor. So I’d like to draw your attention to an article by David Hunter in the brand new Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal [...]
Philanthropists as Investors
September 29, 2009 – 7:29 am
This is my most recent column from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. You can find an archive of past columns here. Providing the Capital Organizations Need to Run — and Grow By Sean Stannard-Stockton October 1, 2009 | Link to Original Article According to Paul Brest’s excellent book Money Well Spent, strategic philanthropists devise ways to [...]
Why We Need Philanthropic Equity
August 17, 2009 – 8:18 am
My newest column in the Chronicle of Philanthropy appears below. You can find an archive of past columns here. Charities Should Be Held to ‘Philanthropic Equity’ Standards By Sean Stannard-Stockton August 20, 2009 | Link to Chronicle of Philanthropy It is time for nonprofit accounting standards to recognize the concept of "philanthropic equity." For too [...]
A Nonprofit Leader Responds to Debate
August 7, 2009 – 12:39 pm
Too frequently, the views of nonprofit organizations get left out of funder centric debates (see the 40 comments). So I was delighted to receive this comment today from reader Anisha Chablani, deputy director of Roca, whose website says “Roca is an outcomes-driven, high performing youth development organization… [we] deliberately seek out young people who other [...]
