Past Events
Inaugural Conference on Scaling Social Impact
On June 17-18, 2010, the Social Impact Exchange presented the Inaugural Conference on Scaling Social Impact, where more than 400 funders, investors, high net-worth individuals, philanthropy advisors, academics and nonprofit leaders convened in New York City. Attendees witnessed the selection of the award winners of the Business Plan Competition, participated in a first-ever Scaling Social Impact Investment Fair. Attendees also participated in numerous sessions on planning, evaluating, and financing the scaling of high-impact, top-performing nonprofit organizations in education, poverty alleviation, and health.
Highlights of the conference included keynote addresses from Robert Steel, former president and CEO of Wachovia Corporation; Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation; Nancy Roob, president and CEO of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation; and David Gergen, senior political analyst at CNN and Professor of Public Service at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Investment Fair presenters, selected for their demonstrated impact and readiness to scale, included Communities in Schools, Experience Corps, Jumpstart, Root Capital, Uncommon Schools, Ways to Work, and YouthBuild USA.
The Conference on Scaling was presented by Growth Philanthropy Network, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Duke University’s Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society (at the Sanford School of Public Policy) and Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) (at the Fuqua School of Business).
Conference sponsors included Bank of America, The Whelan Group, Public/Private Ventures, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, American Express, HSBC Private Bank, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), Beyond the Bottom Line, and Louder Than Words.
"Problem Smashing" Short Course: Strategic Philanthropy in Early Childhood Development
Hosted by CSPCS; the Association of Small Foundations; and the Center for Child and Family Policy, Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University.
From May 12 to 14, 2009, representatives from twelve small foundations representing more than $150 million in endowment met on the campus of Duke University to participate in an intensive problem-smashing seminar that put a premium on critical thinking, dialogue, and peer-to-peer teaching and learning around an important issue facing foundations.
Duke Nonprofit Media Conference
Sponsored by CSPCS; the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Sanford Institute of Public Policy; and the Duke Center for the Study of Philanthropy and Voluntarism
A group of leaders from nonprofit and commercial media, foundations, and academia gathered May 4-5, 2009, at Duke University’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy for a series of working sessions to explore new models for nonprofit ownership of media. The conference moved beyond current calls for increased nonprofit media support to the next stage: examining barriers to greater nonprofit and foundation ownership of media outlets, as well as barriers to nonprofit-sector subsidies for the creation of information. The conference report, titled The Road Ahead for Media Hybrids: Report of the Duke Nonprofit Media Conference, includes a summary by Prof. James Hamilton of the working-group discussions. The report also includes the six background papers prepared for the sessions. It can be found here (PDF).
Scaling Social Impact—What We Know and What We Need to Know
Sponsored by CSPCS; the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE), Fuqua School of Business, Duke University; and the Bridgespan Group. On November 12 and 13, 2008, approximately 80 leaders in the field of social entrepreneurship—scholars, foundation and nonprofit executives, consultants, and others—met on Duke’s campus for the purpose of generating new, rigorous, action-oriented research on the topic of scaling social impact. Session summaries can be found here (PDF