Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

For the past two years, the Center has been documenting the process of spend-down at two major foundations. Joel Fleishman has been following events at AVI CHAI and Tony Proscio those at The Atlantic Philanthropies.

The Foundation Center’s 2009 report Perpetuity or Limited Lifespan found that, of the 1,074 family foundations responding to a survey of the 20,000 top foundations, approximately 12 percent plan to spend down while another 25 percent are undecided. If those number hold roughly true for all of the approximately 70,000 family foundations in the United States, we’re talking about there being potentially more than 8,000 foundations that have positively decided to spend down.

This is Part II of a speech delivered by Gara LaMarche before participants at the second annual Conference on Scaling Impact, hosted by the Social Impact Exchange. You can read Part I here.

On June 15, 2011, Gara LaMarche, President and CEO of the Atlantic Philanthropies, delivered a speech before the participants of the second annual Conference on Scaling Impact, hosted by the Social Impact Exchange in New York City. Over the next three days, the Intrepid Philanthropist will run the text of Gara's speech. Here is Part I.

About two years ago CSPCS, along with the Fuqua School's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) and the Bridgespan Group, hosted a conference at Duke titled "Scaling Social Impact: What We Know and What We Need to Know." (Session summaries of the conference can be found here.) Out of that conference came a book edited by CASE's Paul Bloom and our own Edward Skloot, Scaling Social Impact: New Thinking (Palgrave Macmillan).

I wrote last week about how new tools like the Strategy Landscape data visualizations can help promote the adoption of new behaviors and practices in philanthropy by making it easier for people to work in new ways.

But new data and tools can only take us part of the way. In What’s Next for Philanthropy, my co-authors and I also explore two other critical ingredients for change in the coming decade: new incentives and new leadership.

Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector, by Lucy Bernholz with Edward Skloot and Barry Varela, is now available on the Center's website, at

On Monday, March 1, the Center hosted a group of 19 representatives from foundations, tech companies, and nonprofits at the Pew DC Conference Center to discuss issues raised by

It is a pleasure and honor to join the conversation on this new blog.

We've just posted a draft of a paper, titled "Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of

I appreciate the responses to my blogs on the Intrepid Philanthropist site last week. I think my favorite line was this, from Laura