Yesterday I went to a meeting and heard about the Bay Area Equity Fund (which I’ll talk about next week along with Good Capital as potential models for how foundations might align their investment policy with their grant making in the future).
After the meeting, I was walking down the streets of the San Francisco’s Financial District and talking about Aligned Investing and The Gates Foundation with one of my co-workers. I made a comment about some of the various opinions expressed on this blog when suddenly a passing pedestrian piped up and started debating us about the various intricacies of The Gates Foundation investment policy!
Philanthropy is truly going mainstream. While only a couple magazines like Benefit Magazine are focusing on philanthropy, mainstream media coverage has skyrocketed. Here’s a collection of interesting philanthropy coverage by mainstream media:
BusinessWeek’s website has a permanent Philanthropy Section.
Fast Company has their Social Capitalist Awards
The Wall Street Journal reports today about philanthropic grants being made to for-profit companies.
The San Francisco Chronicle recently devoted four pages of newspaper print to a story about the “New Breed of Young Bay Area Philanthropists”.
The LA Times ran the huge two part article about The Gates Foundation investment policy (here and here) as well as a story about Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll’s (EBay founders) impact on philanthropy.
The Washington Post published the article about Giving Circles that I commented on recently as well as an article about fun new ways that young people are raising money (the article quoted my sister Jessica, a co-founder of Future Leaders in Philanthropy).