philanthropyOz Blog

Philanthropy Blogs: Community Foundations and Council on Foundations Conference

Some interesting posts have come up on philanthropy-related blogs lately.

Lucy Bernholz of Philanthropy 2173 has some comments to make about community foundations and their leadership role, in “Community Foundations… Are We There Yet?” and summarises the changes she observed in this week’s Council On Foundations annual conference from the point of view of someone who has attended a dozen of their conferences in the past - in ‘Mistakes were made’ she talks about the presence of bloggers, for example.

Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy also has some interesting comments on some of the sessions from the conference, and in particular on the session post on the session Demonstrating Impact: Philanthropy’s Urgent Call to Action. Sean has drilled down to some of the key questions which reflect those we’ve been grappling with as a sector here in Australia:

The discussion was nominally about how foundations can do a better job letting influential Americans and the general public know about the good work they do. But at the root of this is a discussion about identifying and measuring the impact of foundation grantmaking. And at the root of that is a discussion about transparency and the sharing of information about what works AND what doesn’t work.

(More on this kind of issue and possible solutions, from an Australian perspective, will be here in coming months… stay tuned!)

The Stanford Social Innovation Review blog has some interesting commentary on several CoF sessions, including one on Program-Related Investments.