Business Commons^™

Making Health Equity Real: Implementing A Commitment To Engage The Community Through Fellowships, Saphira M. Baker, Mark D. Constantine

The Foundation Review

Between 2016 and 2019, Richmond Memorial Health Foundation jumpstarted its transformation from a health legacy foundation committed to increasing access to health care to one promoting regional health equity through a racial and ethnic lens. A central component of this new focus was the trustees’ decision to invite community members to inform and advance the health equity strategy through two distinct community fellowship programs — the Equity + Health Fellowships. These programs ultimately provided the foundation with a new language, benchmarks, and structure for welcoming broader community engagement.

This article highlights the outcomes of both programs, how the experience with …

Giving Back: Helping The Next Generation Of Tax Professionals Thrive In Chicago And Beyond: John Mann (Mst '83, Mba '01)

Business Exchange

Profile of donor John Mann (MST '83, MBA '01), who targets his philanthropy to help MST students with the John and Sharon Mann Scholarship Fund.

Growth Of Community-Based Giving Days In The United States: The Landscape And Effects, Catherine Humphries Brown, Abhishek Bhati

The Foundation Review

Over the past decade, local and regional community foundations across the United States have adopted “giving days” as a means to build awareness, bolster community pride, and raise money for local nonprofit organizations. Despite the increasing prevalence of giving days, little scholarly research has empirically examined this phenomenon and its impact, particularly at the local and regional levels.

To address these gaps, this article shares the findings of a study that examined similarities and differences across communities’ giving days and sought to evaluate the extent to which those days led to more giving at the community level.

While the study …

Leveraging Effective Consulting To Advance Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In Philanthropy, Stephanie Clohesy, Jara Dean-Coffey, Lisa Mcgill

The Foundation Review

In 2018, the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers launched an initiative to sharpen the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work in grantmaking by increasing the capacity of consultants and grantmakers engaged in these efforts. Network researchers used a systematic protocol to interview consultant members about their most effective partnerships with grantmakers. Case studies drawn from those interviews yielded valuable lessons for advancing DEI in philanthropy.

In sharing some of these lessons, this article advises consultants to be prepared to help grantmakers define or refine the meaning of DEI and understand where equity fits into their values and …

Strengthening Support For Grantees: Four Lessons For Foundations, Anna J. Bettis, Susan Pepin

The Foundation Review

As society becomes more interconnected, the problems nonprofits are tasked with addressing require systems work. It is imperative for funders to adapt not only to the challenges faced by the organizations they fund, but also to the dynamic social systems within which they aim to effect change. This requires new approaches that are responsive to community needs and address the known challenges in grantor-grantee relationships.

This article offers a new perspective on the role of private foundations and four key lessons for strengthening funder support. These learnings build upon existing research and were gleaned from a qualitative analysis of data …

Publicness And The Identity Of Public Foundations, Alexandra Williamson, Belinda Luke

The Foundation Review

This article investigates understandings of publicness in the context of public foundations in Australia by examining how perceptions of publicness inform and influence the practice and conduct of those grantmaking foundations. As part of a broader study on perceptions of accountability and identity in Australian foundations, the article provides empirical evidence from interviews with managers and trustees from a diverse group of public foundations suggesting that understandings and applications of two dimensions of publicness were significant: donations, or public money; and grantmaking, or public benefit. Further elements of publicness were expressed around foundations’ visibility and the transparency of their operations. …

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 …

Evaluators As Conduits And Supports For Foundation Learning, Clare Nolan, Meg Long, Debra Joy Perez

The Foundation Review

Evaluators play a critical role in supporting philanthropic learning, programming, and strategy, but evaluation and learning in philanthropy is often limited in ways that impede deeper resonance and impact.

Most philanthropic evaluation is focused on the needs of individual foundations, knowledge sharing with the broader field is limited, and foundations struggle to integrate evaluation and learning as a management tool. This article makes the case that evaluators and funders can do more to build the collective capacity of evaluators working in philanthropy in order to enhance their contributions to community change.

This article also examines the ways that evaluation in …