Paul Brest, president of the Hewlett Foundation, comments on my post yesterday: “I am not taking any part in the search for my successor as president of the Hewlett Foundation, but if I were on the Foundation’s search committee I would welcome ideas from readers of Sean’s blog.” Below is the list of people suggested […]
Tag Archives: featured
Paul Brest to Retire From Hewlett
August 31, 2011 – 10:58 am
Paul Brest, the president of the Hewlett Foundation and author of Money Well Spent has announced he will be retiring in 2012. Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that Paul and I don’t see eye to eye on some core principals of philanthropy. However, I think that Paul embodies a number […]
GOOD Buys Jumo, Seeks Social Connective Tissue
August 19, 2011 – 6:00 am
Jumo is supposed to be Facebook for nonprofits. Founded by Facebook co-founder and chief digital organizer of the Obama 2008 campaign, Chris Hughes, Jumo launched with great fanfare and grant funding from the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network and Knight Foundation. GOOD is a publishing and marketing company “for people who want to live well and […]
Tactical Philanthropy: The Next Chapter
July 27, 2011 – 6:00 am
When I launched the Tactical Philanthropy blog in 2006, I never would have guessed where it was going to go. The twists and turns and near “soap opera” quality of the narrative as I’ve chronicled the rolling Second Great Wave of Philanthropy have been fascinating to me and luckily have captured the interest of a […]
The Disenchantment of Philanthropy
July 18, 2011 – 9:40 am
In recent posts I’ve explored the “creative tension” between rigor and moral clarity, described effective philanthropy as a process of “learning how to love”, and published a guest post by Phil Buchanan about the need for passion to animate data driven philanthropy. At the risk having readers keep using the word “mushy” to describe the […]
Rigor & Moral Clarity in Philanthropy
July 14, 2011 – 9:00 am
In a speech last fall, outgoing president of the Atlantic Philanthropies Gara LaMarche spoke about “reclaiming the moral life of philanthropy”. In his speech, he discusses the need for a re-invigoration of moral discourse, especially within the effective philanthropy movement. After discussing the rise of evidence-based philanthropy and noting his own foundation’s support of the […]
Underperformance is Philanthropy’s Natural State
June 27, 2011 – 8:11 am
This is my latest column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Is Underperformance Philanthropy’s ‘Natural State’? By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Chronicle of Philanthropy The nonprofit world is full of technocratic conversations about how to measure and improve results. But two new books, Leap of Reason, by Mario Morino, and Give Smart, by Thomas J. Tierney and […]
Large Foundations Dropping the Ball on Government Programs
June 13, 2011 – 10:01 am
The Social Innovation Fund and the proposed Pay For Success program both depend on strong “intermediaries” to work. With the Social Innovation Fund, the government is providing funds to grantmaking organizations, which then use the money to support “subgrantees” (direct service nonprofits). In the Pay For Success program, the government would contract with an intermediary […]
What Should the Giving Pledge Do Next?
June 1, 2011 – 9:56 am
A few weeks ago, the members of the Giving Pledge met in person for the first time. The event was very hush, hush (except for AOL founder Steve Case’s tweeting), but I’ve had an opportunity to speak with someone who was there. Partly the event was about giving the billionaires who have pledged to give […]
Pay For Success
May 16, 2011 – 8:33 am
President Obama’s 2012 budget includes an innovative proposal called Pay For Success that has the potential to revolutionize the way the government provides funding for social services. The program creates a framework for government payments to be contingent on positive program results rather than paying for program delivery. Pay For Success is a nonpartisan program […]
