SSIR Online, Winter 2024 Issue

(Illustration by Aldilla Laras) 

Phoenix or Dragon?

ARTICLE | The Innovator’s Tale of the Phoenix and Dragon

Is your organization a phoenix or a dragon? “The dragon mode is highly effective at problem-solving and delivering results when the parameters of the work are well-defined and resources are available,” write Tomohiro Hamakawa and Keita Yamamoto. Meanwhile, “phoenix mode empowers organizations to rediscover their values and strategic direction when their work becomes overly complicated.” That’s not to say one mode is superior. The most effective nonprofits and social enterprises are able to switch between and balance both approaches according to need.

AI for Funders

ARTICLE | 10 Ways Funders Can Address Generative AI Now

There is a world of work to be done if we are to successfully maximize the benefits and minimize the harms associated with AI. Kelly Born, director of the Packard Foundation’s Democracy, Rights, and Governance Initiative, outlines 10 specific ways in which philanthropic funders can support that work, including developing new policy and legal theories, growing civil society capacity, and building collaborative institutions.

Telling Better Stories

ARTICLE | How to Tell Real Stories About Impact

Nonprofits and philanthropies like to tell stories about their impact. But too many of their stories can feel like social change-y Mad Libs, writes Annie Neimand: “We did X so that helpless and deserving group Y can now live the life they want.” Instead, organizations should tell better stories about their impact by borrowing from social science and using better narrative techniques. A good story includes a problem to be solved, action rising to a climax as characters navigate obstacles, and, finally, a resolution and a moral. Great stories keep us on the edge of our seats because they create tension and uncertainty and because they frame the struggles and challenges of the characters within much larger systems.

AI for Nonprofits

ARTICLE | 8 Steps Nonprofits Can Take to Adopt AI Responsibly

AI has the potential to save people thousands of hours of rote, time-consuming work, freeing them up to do the kinds of things only people can do: solve problems, deepen relationships, and build communities. However, organizations eager to collect on that dividend may dive into the technology without enough consideration of the human or ethical ramifications. To prepare, senior nonprofit leaders should begin to create robust ethical and responsible use policies right now.

Advancing Reparations

ARTICLE | A Reparations Roadmap for Philanthropy

Philanthropy’s role in reparations is not to replace the federal government in providing the scale of redress and healing the nation needs, argue a group of authors from Liberation Ventures and The Bridgespan Group. However, philanthropy can advance the work of reparations by building cultures of repair in organizations, by abundantly resourcing the reparations and repair ecosystem, and by shifting endowments to mission-related investments managed by Black asset managers and Black-owned investment funds.

Read more stories by SSIR Editors.