76 results found
Trust-Based Philanthropy Explained
February 1, 2024Trust-Based Philanthropy (TBP): What is it and how can collective giving groups bestpractice it?At its roots TBP is about advancing equity, shifting power, and building mutually accountable relationships. It seeks to demonstrate humility and collaboration in all aspects of the giving process.TBP is most often associated with grantmaking practices; however, committing meaningfully to TBP means going deeper than how we give. This resource will equip giving circle leaders with tools to go beyond grantmaking and infuse trust and the values of trust-based philanthropy into your culture, structures, practices, and leadership.
Emerging Practices in Funding Nonprofit Technology
July 28, 2023As the nonprofit sector continues to embrace the transformative power of technology, the landscape of funding opportunities is evolving to meet the unique needs and challenges faced by organizations in this digital age. This whitepaper aims to shed light on the emerging practices in funding nonprofit technology, providing valuable insights and guidance to grantmakers, philanthropic organizations, and stakeholders invested in the nonprofit sector.Since 2020, the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG) has been at the forefront of fostering discussions and facilitating knowledge sharing on the evolving practices in funding nonprofit technology. Through a series of meetings, webinars, and publications, TAG members have identified the pressing need for effective funding strategies in this digital era. These ongoing conversations have created a vibrant forum for industry professionals to exchange ideas, experiences, and innovative approaches. Leveraging the insights gained from these interactions, this whitepaper identifies and explores the leading practices that have emerged as innovative approaches to funding nonprofit technology.
Data Ethics Guidebook: Cultivating an ethical mindset in research & evaluation
July 27, 2023In 2022, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation invited Informing Change to reimagine the Guidebook on data ethics we produced for the Foundation in 2010. In doing so, we considered the evolving ecosystem of values, players, and circumstances in which evaluation is now happening in philanthropy.While appreciating the insights evaluation work can yield, we acknowledge the ways evaluation can do harm. First, this Guidebook establishes baseline practices for reducing the risk of causing harm through unethical approaches. It also offers more equity-oriented, participatory approaches beyond this baseline to add care or increase the value of participation to communities sharing their data.This Data Ethics Guidebook is a planning tool and go-to resource for evaluators, Foundation staff, and other social sector commissioners of evaluation. It is concerned with 'data ethics'* —the potential ways in which data-related activities can adversely impact people and society. It offers practical guidance to assess and respond to ethical issues that show up in applied research and evaluation activities. Throughout the Guidebook, Stories from the Field capture the real-world experiences of practitioners grappling with how to do evaluation more ethically.
Ensuring Access to Food Resources for Students Experiencing Homelessness
June 30, 2023According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 10.2% (or 13.5 million) of households were food insecure at some point during 2021. These households were uncertain of having or were unable to acquire enough food for all members of the household due to financial hardship or lack of food resources. Families experiencing homelessness often face additional barriers to accessing food due to high mobility or lack of transportation. Homeless liaisons play an important role in ensuring that students have access to free school meals and referrals are made to provide the family access to food resources in the community.
A Guidebook for Religious Literacy Evaluation: Resources for Planning and Design
June 27, 2023At present, many scholars and programs make large claims about the impacts of religious literacy education, but do not have empirical evidence or clear models to demonstrate those impacts to funders, school administrators, educators, students, or other practitioners in this field. This guidebook is intended to support religious literacy educational initiatives. It is not a complete primer on evaluation and does not dictate a particular methodology or approach to evaluation. Rather, with guiding questions at each step, it provides an introductory evaluation framework to help educators and researchers engaged in religious literacy educational initiatives.The companion report, The Imperative for Religious Literacy Evaluation: Context, Key Insights, and Recommendations, provides more detail and background about the need for evaluation in religious literacy education and a review of current practices and literature.
How Nonprofits and NGOs Can Get Real Value from Strategic Planning
June 1, 2023Strategy is all about getting critical resource decisions right. The strategic planning process is a rare chance for a nonprofit's leaders to step back and look at their organization and its activities as a whole—to understand what success looks like and to allocate time, talent, and dollars to the activities that can help achieve it.When strategic planning is done well, it not only clarifies the path forward for teams and stakeholders, but also informs resourcing decisions and sets in motion key organizational changes. To be sure, it doesn't always go well; we expect some readers may have had negative experiences with strategic planning. The practical advice we offer in this article will help leaders avoid the pitfalls and get real value from the process.
Framework to Decolonize Child & Youth Philanthropy
June 1, 2023In 2022, ECFG commissioned Degan Ali and her team to lead us through a decolonizing grantmaking journey that included learning webinars, collective learning and reflection, the identification of promising practices, and the development of a framework that funders could use to elevate equitable grantmaking. After developing an understanding of our network's needs and goals, our decolonizing philanthropy working group engaged in deep partnership design with DA Global to create The Decolonizing Child and Youth Philanthropy Framework. This framework recognizes that our members and partners are at different stages of their journey in tackling colonialism within their organizations and grantmaking. While there are universally relevant lessons gained from existing decolonization efforts in the philanthropic and charity sectors, this framework is designed to support the different types, sizes and needs of the funders who belong to this group. This is not a magic solution, but a tool in our decolonizing child and youth philanthropy toolbox. This tool is intentionally focused on supporting those who have embarked on a change process within their organizations, those who want to make additional adjustments, and those who are grappling with how to get started.
Communicating with Multilingual Populations: New Language Access Toolkit for Nonprofits
May 24, 2023This Toolkit was created to help organizations working to serve, engage, organize, ormobilize linguistically diverse populations by considering ways to establish or improve itslanguage accessibility practices. The Toolkit includes practical information and tools intended to support nonprofit organizations in fostering organizational fluency around language accessibility, including tools to help operationalize language access at the project, program, or organizational level.
Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit
May 19, 2023Solidarity, dignity, power, and abundance. These are just some of the benefits that can accrue to the people and communities most impacted by philanthropy's decisions when they have a role in the decision making. That's according to Ciciley Moore, senior program officer at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, who represented Fund for Shared Insight in a participatory grantmaking program. Shared Insight ran this one-time program (which focused on involving people affected by climate change in funding decisions around the issue) so we could learn together with other funders committed to listening, participation, and more effective and equitable grantmaking.Based on the experiences of the participants, consultants, and funders involved, we created this toolkit to inform and inspire philanthropy's journey toward more participatory practices.Participatory Philanthropy is a term that can include a wide spectrum of participatory practices within philanthropy, and includes Participatory Grantmaking as one approach. This initiative went beyond sharing decision making about grants and centered participation in the design phase of the work. Participants worked on design and grantmaking teams, defining the program's purpose, parameters, and, through a participatory decision-making approach, where and how $2 million in grant money was disbursed. Participants were also involved with communicating grant decisions, developing knowledge products, and gathering in learning communities to deepen their connections and understand and share the impact of the initiative.
Youth Voice In Community Schools: A Practical Guide to Advance Community School Strategies for Youth Voice, Engagement, and Leadership
May 16, 2023Examine the voice, engagement, and leadership of youth in Community Schools! This guide serves to support Community School practitioners to better understand and create opportunities for youth leadership in their schools and communities. Working with participating Community Schools and students, this resource captures youth stories and insight to help illustrate how to build more inclusive decision-making and activate the next generation of leaders in our communities.
Make the Invisible Visible: Method Guide - How to engage with hard-to-reach citizens for policy development?
March 30, 2023Climate change, energy crisis, digital divide, rising inequality, global pandemics – these are only some challenges and transition processes our societies are currently facing. A communality of all these challenges: economically and socially disadvantaged citizens (e.g., unemployed people, low-income workers, migrants, single parents, young people, or elderly citizens, as well as people threatened with the loss of their jobs due to these transitions) are most affected, not only by their impacts but also by policies adopted to meet them. Also, they are often not sufficiently represented or heard in political debates and in policymaking. Their voices are not present in the transition debates: they are "invisible".At the same time, it is increasingly difficult to get in contact with structurally disadvantaged groups yet involve them in policy dialogues. If not part of any representative organization, these hard-to-reach citizens do not have a say in the debates. This increases the representation gap. For this reason, it is important to find new strategies, instruments, and methodologies for reaching out to these specific target groups, to listen to their needs and ideas, and to involve them in decision- and policymaking processes. New ways of recruiting, engaging, and communicating must be discussed to bridge the representation gap and to establish a truly inclusivedeliberation.
A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World
September 14, 2022A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World is a curated collection of over 160 thematic works that serve as pathways to explore the presence of artificial intelligence and technology in the geographic regions that are home to the majority of the human population. Instead of assuming that knowledge and innovations move out of the so-called centers of Europe and the United States to the rest of the world, thinking from the "majority world" (a term coined by Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam) means tracing emerging forms of knowledge, innovation, and labor in former and still-colonized spaces. "Majority world" defines a community in terms of what it has, rather than what it lacks.
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