Racial Equity Requires Funding to Build Power
By focusing on power building to reverse the longstanding inequities that prevent communities of color and low-income communities from thriving, philanthropy can help build safe, strong, and stable communities for all of us.
Productive Partnerships
Twenty years ago, a small group of grantmakers launched a Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN), seeking to bridge health and environmental philanthropy and to focus more attention on links between human, wildlife, and ecosystem health. One of my first tasks as HEFN’s first staffer was to try to engage health funders in this enterprise.
New Tools to Combat Ageism
The idea that we live in a rapidly aging society is not news, but here is an important fact: in ten years (by 2030), the United States will have more people over the age of 65 than children under 18 for the first time in its history. And yet, our society has not responded to the opportunities or the challenges that this change provides.
Creating a Neutral Space, Pursuing a Common Mission
Importantly, FCAA created a neutral space for funders; one where individual organizational agendas took a back seat to a unifying mission. This space became an incubator for philanthropic action.
EITC Pooled Fund: Lessons on Ideas, Innovation and Impact
Since 2011, Economic Opportunity Funders (EOF) has been working to increase public support for state EITCs through the EITC Pooled Fund (The Fund). We provide a table around which multiple funders can align support to work on an area of mutual interest, and a mechanism by which funders can quickly and collaboratively deploy funding to help meet the needs of the field.
Boosting Philanthropic Investment in Healthy Food in Tribal Communities
Tribal communities in America receive only about a half percent of all philanthropic giving, and the total dollar amount of grantmaking in these communities by large philanthropic foundations actually declined by 29 percent ($35 million) from 2006 to 2014 according to a report by First Nations Development Institute. Additionally, only a small portion of those grant dollars go to Native-controlled organizations.
Calculating Risk: Considerations for Operationalizing Innovation and Planning for Failure May 2019
Philanthropy’s greatest freedom is, perhaps, the freedom to fail. This insight, stated in Terrance Keenan’s monograph (2000), “The Promise at Hand: Prospects for Foundation Leadership in the 1990s,” sparked robust dialogue during the 2018 Terrance Keenan Institute (TKI) for Emerging Leaders in Health Philanthropy.
The Art and Practice of Rural Philanthropy
Newly formed conversion foundations and community foundations, often with rural areas in their grantmaking territories, have identified the absence of significant regional and national philanthropic attention to rural America.
From 100-Day Challenge to Systems Change: An Unlikely Journey for Opioid Stakeholders in Palm Beach County
Palm Beach County, Florida became an epicenter for the nation’s deadly opioid crisis, with the number of opioid-related deaths hitting epidemic proportions in 2016.
Building the Will, and the Way, to Advance Equity at the Maine Health Access Foundation
In 2016, the Maine Health Access Foundation (MeHAF) Board approved an extension of its strategic plan, as a bridge between the founding CEO and a new leader. Two issues were added to MeHAF’s work: equity, and the opiate epidemic. We had ideas about how to tackle the latter. We did not know where to start with the former.