(Illustration by iStock/ajijchan)
Intermediary Funds
ARTICLE | How Movement-Accountable Intermediaries Can Change Philanthropy
“Despite recognition from large, influential funders and institutions, the roles of intermediary organizations are often opaque to those outside of them,” write leaders of the community intermediary funds Color Congress, El/La Para TransLatinas, Liberation Ventures, Common Counsel Foundation, Blue Heart, and the Emergent Fund. They share how they envision their role within the philanthropic landscape, including their approach to expanding philanthropic reach and access, effectively listening and responding to the movement groups they serve and ultimately upending private philanthropy as it exists today.
The Impact of Training
ARTICLE | Measuring the Impact of Training the Trainers
Nonprofits are increasingly using an educational framework designed to turn trainees into expert trainers themselves—to expand their reach and catch up to ever-growing needs. But while many organizations intuitively know that this model has a bigger impact than one-off service delivery, they have so far lacked a way to quantify how much. Now, a first-of-its-kind measurement tool developed by the global health nonprofit ReSurge International allows them to put numbers to needs met and demonstrate to funders that such programs are worth the investment.
Shaping the Future
ARTICLE | Using Strategic Foresight to Create the Future We Want
Compared with corporations, philanthropies and nonprofits are latecomers to using organizational foresight and futures tools to improve outcomes. Yet Marina Gorbis, executive director of Institute for the Future, argues that these tools “can enable social sector organizations to be bolder, aim higher, and reach wider audiences than traditional strategic planning activities.” She then outlines how organizations can use strategic foresight to meet their goals, empower communities, and increase equity.
The Challenge of Impact Investing
ARTICLE | Impact Investing Should Be Hard
On top of considering returns, impact investors must understand social and environmental problems, analyze impact data, and do other work that theoretically makes their task harder than that of traditional investors. So posits Michael Brown, head of research at the Environmental, Social, and Governance Initiative at the Wharton School. Yet his study of more than 200 impact fund managers across the globe seeking different rates of returns revealed a counterintuitive finding: Investors who didn’t need to achieve market returns alongside impact consistently saw impact investing as more difficult than investors pursuing both market returns and social impact. Brown explores this seeming contradiction and questions whether impact investing is truly the vanguard of the responsible investing movement.
Nonprofit Scale
ARTICLE | A New Look at How US Nonprofits Get Really Big
Contributors from Bridgespan discuss a new analysis of nearly 300 US nonprofits whose annual revenue is $50 million or more. The authors also describe three practices that nonprofits looking to raise money to achieve significant scale should adopt.
Read more stories by SSIR Editors.