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Full-Text Articles in Business
Balancing The Competing Demands Of Strategic Philanthropy: The Case Of The Delaware River Watershed Initiative, Edward W. Wilson, Carol Bromer, David Laroche
Balancing The Competing Demands Of Strategic Philanthropy: The Case Of The Delaware River Watershed Initiative, Edward W. Wilson, Carol Bromer, David Laroche
The Foundation Review
Strategic philanthropy requires striking a balance between two extremes. On one side is unilateral agenda-setting by the foundation and excessive reliance on its own intellectual frameworks and methods. On the other side is too much deference to competing voices from the field, with the risk that funding will be haphazard and incoherent. This article describes how the Delaware River Watershed Initiative, supported by the William Penn Foundation, has struggled to position itself between these two extremes.
Based on an evaluation conducted during the first four years of the initiative, the article examines four interrelated tensions: upfront planning versus emergent strategy, …
Below The Waterline: Developing A Transformational Learning Collaborative For Foundation Program Officers, Annie Martinie, Jaime Love, Michael Kelly, Kirsten Dueck, Sarah Strunk
Below The Waterline: Developing A Transformational Learning Collaborative For Foundation Program Officers, Annie Martinie, Jaime Love, Michael Kelly, Kirsten Dueck, Sarah Strunk
The Foundation Review
Learning from fellow grantmakers is imperative in today’s ever-changing world. In late 2016, four health legacy foundations partnered to launch the Health Legacy Collaborative Learning Circle, creating an opportunity to understand not just the participating foundations’ visible investments and programs, but also the underlying behaviors, structures, and mindsets that ultimately explain why certain results were or were not achieved.
This article describes the yearlong process of creating the collaborative, and presents a new learning framework — based on the iceberg metaphor — that can be used to create learning environments that test and expand assumptions about promising approaches to common …
Through The Looking Glass: Foundation Evaluation And Learning And The Quest For Strategic Learning, Suzanne Kennedy Leahy, Sandra Wegmann, Lexi Nolen
Through The Looking Glass: Foundation Evaluation And Learning And The Quest For Strategic Learning, Suzanne Kennedy Leahy, Sandra Wegmann, Lexi Nolen
The Foundation Review
Strategic learning, a critical if relatively new lens for philanthropy, is neither simple nor efficient to institutionalize or practice yet — foundations are still figuring out how to do it well. In 2015, the Episcopal Health Foundation launched a project to distill lessons about how leading foundations configure evaluation and learning, and how they allocate related responsibilities in support of strategic learning.
This article addresses different models that foundations use to establish and staff evaluation and learning functions, what other organizational considerations they should take into account in order to prioritize strategic-learning work, and what tools and approaches can be …