Last year, Nonprofit Finance Fund released a report looking at the performance of the philanthropic equity deals they have done over the past four years. I was remiss in not writing about it at the time and I thought doing so today would be a good follow up to my last post about “crowding out” […]
Category Archives: Philanthropic Equity
Builders, Buyers & the Social Innovation Fund
July 26, 2010 – 8:16 am
On Friday afternoon, Nathaniel Whittemore of the Social Entrepreneurship blog sent me an email questioning the enthusiasm in my recent post about the Social Innovation Fund (SIF). Nathaniel is someone whose opinion I greatly respect and his points of contention were very valid. So I sent him back a detailed response, which (with his permission) […]
Curmudgeonly Comments: Online Capital Markets for Nonprofits?
March 15, 2010 – 9:13 am
This is a guest post from George Overholser of the Nonprofit Finance Fund. This post follows the bullet point format George used when he wrote the Bullet Point Manifesto guest post last year. By George Overholser Someone recently defined nonprofit “mid-caps” as organizations with revenues in the $5 million to $25 million range. We need […]
Social Impact Exchange
December 4, 2009 – 7:39 am
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) […]
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 […]
High Performance vs. High Impact Nonprofits
July 31, 2009 – 7:57 am
Yesterday I was part of a conversation about how to define a high performance nonprofit. One issue that came up was whether we were talking about “high performance” or “high impact”. Now bear with me, this isn’t semantics, it is critically important. A high performance nonprofit is a very well run organization. It has outstanding […]
Why the Social Innovation Fund Matters
July 8, 2009 – 10:18 am
On his Facebook page, Brad Rourke has asked why the Social Innovation Fund (explained here) is such a big deal: [The Social Innovation Fund] makes the government basically a grantmaker, giving away $50 million per year (which is not much as funders go). Sean points out that the original idea was that the government would […]
The Innovation Fund & The Serve America Act
July 2, 2009 – 3:11 pm
Yesterday I highlight the way that President Obama’s description of the Innovation Fund differed in fundamentally important ways from the policy recommendations of America Forward. The simplest way to understand the distinction is that the way Obama described the Fund would mean that it was making grants to nonprofits, while the American Forward policy recommendation […]
The Innovation Fund
July 1, 2009 – 12:34 pm
Yesterday, President Obama officially launched the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and the Innovation Fund (whether it is now call the Social Innovation Fund or just the Innovation Fund is unclear). He also named Melody Barnes to run the Innovation Fund. You can see video of the event here. Interestingly, President Obama described […]
Philanthropy Performance Do Over
June 12, 2009 – 8:36 am
I wish I was a better writer. Too frequently, I fail to communicate my point in the way I intended. This failing showed up big time yesterday in my post about the government backed Social Innovation Fund and they way the fund might spur a standardization of venture philanthropy performance measures. Note the comments that […]
