Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

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.

Before I dive into some of the different “next practices” highlighted yesterday that we think may become important parts of philanthropy’s future, I wanted to first say a few words about one of the key pieces of what I think it’ll actually take for funders to start acting bigger and adapting better over the next decade.

Given the rise of neoliberalism over the last twenty years—the extension of the market into every sphere of life—it’s no surprise that civil society has begun to receive the same

Today, in my final post, I want to offer specific suggestions for Intrepid Philanthropists who want to maximize the upsides of transparency.

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

Do social entrepreneurs and their ventures fail? You bet! Do philanthropists? Of course!

Where are the spokespeople for the nonprofit sector’s distinctive value?

In subtle ways, those of us in the nonprofit sector contribute to the lack of appreciation for its strength when we act as though every good idea came from outside it and simply import the language

Yesterday, I argued that the nonprofit sector is under attack and discussed the critiques of those on the outside who promise that “business” and “market” thinking is the se