Impact Investing
Beyond Unicorns
“Companies that prove it’s possible to deliver audacious social change and long-term financial sustainability deserve a language, a metric, and a measure of success worthy of what they’ve built.”
Arts & Culture
The Future of the Performing Arts Depends on Strategic Partnerships
As the industry and its financial model become increasingly precarious, a reimagining of how performing arts organizations can operate more efficiently is critical for survival.
Philanthropy & Funding
The Charitable Deduction and Its Discontents
Due to regulatory complexity, the charitable deduction has become a mirage. Only through careful planning can donors optimize their giving.
Health
How to Build Digital Health Platforms in Emerging Markets
In developing economies, the digital health platforms that actually work are not imported. They are built from scratch by the communities they serve.
Nonprofits & NGOs
Emergency Housing
Airbnb.org, the nonprofit arm of the homestay-platform company, is providing short-term homes to families in crisis, first responders, and medical patients worldwide.
Scaling
Scale Doesn’t Belong (Only) to Government
Choosing the right path to scale depends on the nature of the problem we're trying to solve.
Nonprofits & NGOs
Donor Retention Requires Transformation
To solve the nonprofit sector's donor retention crisis, we need to look past tactics and superficial reform: We need to transform philanthropy to make philanthropy truly transformative.
Environment
The Man and the Birds
Rodgers Oloo Magutha, 28, has become a local celebrity for rescuing and rehabilitating injured and orphaned wild birds in his one-room apartment in Nairobi.
Latest
Philanthropy & Funding
SSIR Online, Fall 2026 Issue
What SSIR readers are saying about articles on billionaires and their philanthropy.
Education
Searching for Good Vibes
There's validity to the common explanations for the "vibecession," but articles in this issue go deeper into the longer-term loss of agency, growing disbelief in upward mobility, and instability at the root of many people's lives.
Economic Development
Dismissing Microfinance Won’t Help Solve Global Poverty
Microfinance isn’t a cure-all solution to poverty, but abandoning it would ignore the real evidence that responsible financial services make a positive, lasting impact on people’s lives.
Technology
Our Vanishing Developmental Commons
What human capacities must remain stubbornly human, even in an age of intelligent machines?
Excerpt
Government
Reform as Process, Not Project
An excerpt from Reform as Process on reforming government bureaucracy
browse past issues all issues »
Most Commented
Scaling
Scale Really Matters
The problems are big, the time is short, and the resources are limited.
Philanthropy & Funding
Why Don’t Philanthropists Build Anymore?
The United States is living through a second Gilded Age. But unlike yesterday's magnates, today's billionaires prefer to write checks to existing organizations. They should instead build institutions that last.
Philanthropy & Funding
Scale Is a Myth! Embrace the Long Defeat!
Why the ghost of Paul Farmer wants you scaring the horses at Skoll
Philanthropy & Funding
Does Everything in the Social Sector Need to Scale?
In a world that no longer behaves like a scalable system, success must be something other than growth.
Scaling
Scale Right, Not Cheap and Easy
Social innovation means building a road to the future that doesn't yet exist, without lowering standards.