Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

In today's Chronicle of Philanthropy, Thomas Tierney and the Center's Faculty Chair, Joel Fleishman, discuss the recent announcement that 40 very wealthy individuals and families, at the encouragement of Bill and Melinda Gates, have taken the Giving Pledge, promising to donate half their wealth to good causes.

And over at the Center for Effective Philanthropy's blog, Phil Buchanan has written a heartfelt and moving thank-you to Joel Orosz, who recently announced his retirement from Grand Valley State University.

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.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Strategy Landscape, an innovation that the Monitor Institute has been developing to help funders better “understand their context”—one of the 10 next practice areas we discuss in our new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy. The next practices represent principles and behaviors that are particularly well suited to the more networked, dynamic, and interdependent landscape of public problem solving that is now emerging. They’re approaches that we believe have the potential to become the widely accepted best practices of tomorrow.

I want to thank my friends at Duke University for letting me serve as guest blogger on the Intrepid Philanthropist this past week. Offering unsolicited advice to the Friends of Buffett and Gates (FOBGs) as they consider how to make a splash with their philanthropy has been more fun than I'd imagined. And it’s reminded me of all the great things that are happening in this field, and of all the smart thinking grantmakers are doing about how best to put their philanthropic resources to work.

The Manchester Bidwell Corporation uses arts, education, and job training to transform communities and improve people’s lives. Based on its success in its hometown of Pittsburgh, the organization has opened new arts and technology training centers in Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, and San Francisco—and it is actively looking for other replication sites.

The same is true in philanthropy as in life: when we want answers, we tend to go to people we believe are the experts on a given topic. The more money we have at our disposal, the more likely

Ask a group of nonprofit leaders what bugs them most in their dealings with foundations, and I’ll bet you dollars-to-donuts someo

It’s great news that Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates are asking

Forbes magazine has released its list of the world's wealthiest individuals, and the a

As I explored yesterday, there’s a dark side to the Transparency Revolution and the Web 2.0 tools that are powering it.