Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

I focused last week on a couple of the ways that funders can begin to “act bigger” in today’s more networked and interconnected landscape for public problem solving. But I want to also give a quick preview of the other major way in which we believe funders will need to improve over the coming decade: “adapting better.”

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.

When the Monitor Institute first started its exploration of the evolving “future of philanthropy” ten years ago, I was one of its funders, a program officer at the Packard Foundation. A big part of what we were trying to do was to create an urgency and an awareness that the world around philanthropy was changing, and that if philanthropy was going to remain relevant and achieve its potential in the coming years,

Yesterday Lucy Bernholz, philanthropy maven and lead author of the just-published monograph Disruptin

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

The ever-growing complexity of our social sector, together with the power of the Internet and the disengagement of government, has created a decentralized model of social change. As a result,

This is the first in a series of explorations into the shifting paradigm that shapes our understanding of philanthropy.

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