(Illustration by Brian Stauffer)
SSIR is an ideas magazine, not a news publication. Our print magazine comes out once every three months, and we send our articles to the printer several weeks before the issue appears in your mailbox. Our website publishes stories regularly during the week, but it does not employ reporters to track down facts. It serves, rather, as a platform for researchers and practitioners to share ideas.
When news does influence our pages, it concerns megatrends that will affect our sector for years. Recent examples include COVID-19 and the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. Such trends demand a response in our pages, where we invite our contributors to help the sector strategize and debate the best ways to move forward.
President Donald Trump’s second term threatens to disrupt the social sector in ways that will be felt for years after he leaves office. So far his targets include social services; foreign aid; environmental protections; the free press; scientific research; higher education; diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; immigration; the free flow of goods and services across borders; and the tax status of philanthropies and nonprofits. We could not claim to cover the sector without addressing what these actions mean for it.
So, we invited John Palfrey, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to share his thoughts in our pages about the “major crisis for our sector,” as he called it in an interview with the Associated Press. We began working together soon after he announced that MacArthur would increase its grantmaking to 6 percent of net assets (above the IRS-mandated 5 percent) to help the sector weather the storm.
The result of our collaboration is our cover package, “Philanthropy’s Response to the Radical New Reality,” where he is joined by seven other leading thinkers who share their own views and strategies on how to confront the crisis. Whatever conclusions you draw from their arguments, we hope you are buoyed by their shared determination to formulate a response and act courageously.
That we are not a news magazine also affords us protection from the sensationalism of these times: We can offer readers a sanctuary to think more deeply about improving our world. We continue to share thoughtful commentary from the field in our two feature stories on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and community-driven outcomes contracts.
Ever since the scientifically minded in the social sector championed RCTs as the gold standard for proving the effectiveness of programs, practitioners have debated whether, and in what circumstances, organizations should incur their hefty expense. In “The Nonprofit Sector Has an RCT Problem,” social organization scholars Nicole Marwell and Jennifer Mosley intervene in the debate to ask an important and overdue question: How might the demand for RCTs affect the nonprofits subject to them?
And in “How to Finance Community-Led Solutions,” Sofia Tomljanovic, Sanjith Gopalakrishnan, Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, and Vanitha Virudachalam examine experiments in outcomes purchasing taking place in Canada’s frozen north that center Indigenous communities in deciding what to fund and how success ought to be measured.
Read more stories by David V. Johnson.