13 articles in this category
Matching grants sound like a win-win. A donor says they'll double every dollar you raise up to a cap, so you run a campaign, hit the goal, and everyon...
A foundation in the Pacific Northwest wanted to fund river restoration. They asked local tribes for a list of measurable outcomes—fish counts, water q...
Every grant officer knows the scene. A program officer presents a promising community project. The board loves the metrics. But when someone asks, 'Wh...
Here's a hard truth: the charity you're funding today might not exist in twenty years. Mergers, scandals, funding cliffs—lots of things kill nonprofit...
It starts with a spreadsheet. Then a dashboard. Then a portal that asks grantees for the same numbers every quarter. Before you know it, your foundati...
There's a quiet crisis sitting in the boardrooms of America's oldest foundations. Endowments have ballooned—thanks to a decade-long bull market—while ...
When the pandemic hit in 2020, foundations rewrote their playbooks overnight. They loosened restrictions, sped up grants, and trusted grantees. It wor...
Philanthropy loves the word 'sustainability.' But almost nobody defines what it means the day the grant money stops. When a foundaing announces a new ...
Every January, program officers at the Potters bench Foundation sit down with a colour-coded calendar. Q1 disbursements by March 15. Interim reports d...
Every year, millions of grant dollars vanish into programs with no measurable outcome. Not because of fraud — but because accountability was an aftert...
Ask a program officer what accountability means, and they will likely say 'measuring outcome.' Ask a grantee, and they might say 'trust.' These two de...
You are sitting on a pile of money—maybe $50 million, maybe $500 million. Your lawyer says: set up a foundaing, give in perpetuity, your name lives fo...
The question sounds academic until it lands on your desk: 'Do we shut the foundation down in twenty years or run it forever?' Most donors never answer...