Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

This is Part III 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 and Part II here. A PDF of the full speech is available here.

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).

The shift away from a philanthropic paradigm based on demonstration projects and government-sponsored replication has also fundamentally altered the role of evaluation in philanthropy.

Multiple elements of a new paradigm have emerged, although they have not yet gelled into a coherent alternative to the old paradigm and, therefore, have not yet replaced it.