Small Is Big
An excerpt from The New Builders on balancing scale with innovation and the vital role played by small businesses.
Excerpt
Sectors - Articles
Heroic Accounting
New proposals for monetizing corporate planetary impacts are alluring, impossible, and perilous.
Exit Strategies
It might be a cliché, but it’s rare for international NGOs to “work themselves out of a job.” Doing so requires planning from the start, communicating clearly, setting hard deadlines, and going unconditionally.
The Time Is Right for Organizational Learning
A look at how nonprofits and nonprofit workers in the United States changed during the COVID-19 pandemic—and how to navigate the new changes ahead.
Podcast
Trust-Based Philanthropy and Strategic Giving
Trust-based philanthropy is becoming an increasingly well-defined approach for addressing the power imbalance in the nonprofit sector and closing the gap between funders and grantees. How does a trust-based approach to giving compare to a strategic one? To help us explore the characteristics of both, SSIR publisher Michael Voss speaks with Julia Reed of Schwab Charitable, Philip Li of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and Nadia Roumani, cofounder of the Effective Philanthropy Learning Initiative at PACS. A sponsored podcast developed with the support of DAFgiving360.
Efficacy Before Scale
To invest in and grow promising organizations and programs in a way that promotes efficacy prior to significant scaling and expansion, there are three pathways to follow: piloting, testing, and iterating.
Why Sustainable Investment Means Investing in Advocacy
Combining traditional impact investment approaches with investment in advocacy is the only way businesses and investors can fuel meaningful social and environmental progress.
Podcast
A Fair Deal for Coffee Growers
Vega Coffee lifts up struggling coffee growers in Latin America by enabling them to roast, package, and ship their own beans directly to US customers—and reinvents the supply chain in the process.
Getting Honest About What We’re Willing to Risk for the Planet
Why NGOs and funders need to take bigger leaps toward innovation in environmental conservation, and how a back-of-the-napkin risk assessment tool can help.
How to Take Risks Without Losing Your Donors
The co-founders of She’s the First share what they learned from dropping the “child sponsorship” model that donors love.