Newsmaker: Fred Blackwell, CEO, The San Francisco Foundation

Fred Blackwell joined The San Francisco Foundation, one of the largest community foundations in the United States, as CEO in 2014. An Oakland native, he previously had served as interim administrator and assistant administrator for the city, led the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Community Development and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency; and directed the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Making Connections Initiative in Oakland.

In June 2016, TSFF announced a new commitment to racial and economic equity in the Bay Area. PND spoke with Blackwell about the foundation's racial equity lens, movement building in the wake of the 2016 elections and Charlottesville, and what it means for philanthropic organizations to speak out, step up, and actually try to achieve racial equity.

Philanthropy News Digest: How do you define "racial equity"?

Fred Blackwell: I define it as just and fair inclusion in a society where everyone can participate, prosper, and thrive, regardless of their race or where they live or their family's economic status or any other defining characteristic. Obviously, the way we think about equity is colored by our particular focus on the Bay Area — a place where there is tremendous opportunity and prosperity being generated, but also where access to those opportunities is limited for many people. So from an institutional point of view, we need to answer the question: How do we make sure that the region prospers in a way that the rising tide lifts all boats?

PND: When you stepped into the top job at TSFF in 2014, the foundation already had a lengthy history of social justice work. How did the decision to focus the foundation's grantmaking on racial and economic equity come about?

FB: Shortly after I came to the foundation, we conducted a listening tour of the Bay Area. As part of that listening tour, we held what we called our VOICE: Bay Area sessions — a series of large public meetings in seven diverse low-income communities across the region. In addition, we held consultative sessions, half-day meetings with practitioners, policy people, and thought leaders to talk about trends, both positive and negative, they were seeing in the region and how those trends were affecting people. We did a lot of data collection and analysis. And the data all pointed in the same direction: the need for greater levels of inclusion here in the Bay Area. The fact that race and economic status and geography had predictive power over where people were headed and what they could accomplish concerned us, and it was important to try to respond to that.

There are two pieces of the foundation's history that we wanted to build on: one is the social justice orientation of our work, and the other is our regional footprint. We serve Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, and San Mateo counties. So in focusing on the equity issue, we're also thinking about it from a regional point of view. What makes the Bay Area unique is its diversity and prosperity, and yet we are a prime real-time example of the kinds of inequalities and inequities that you see on multiple levels across the country. It's important to us as a unit of analysis because equity and the issues that emanate from it — whether it's economic opportunity or housing or education or criminal justice or civic participation — none of those issues conform neatly to the boundaries of the various jurisdictions in the region. People may live in Oakland or San Francisco or Berkeley or Richmond, but they experience the Bay Area as a region.

What I think I brought to the foundation is a laser-like focus on the dimensions of social justice work with respect to racial and economic inclusion and equity — making sure that that "North Star" is something that is modeled at the top and cascades down through all levels of the organization. I would say that we are more explicit than we've been in the past about making equity the focus — not just in our grantmaking but also in how we work with donors, how we provide civic leadership in the region, and how we bring our voice to the table and those of our partners in order to make a difference. We view that North Star as guiding not only our programmatic work but everything we do here at the foundation.

Weekend Link Roundup (Jan. 27-28, 2018)

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Animal Welfare

Following recent allegations of workplace misconduct leveled at Human Society of the U.S. chief executive Wayne Pacelle, Nonprofit Chronicles blogger Marc Gunther takes a closer look at charges of widespread sexual harassment and gender bias in the animal welfare movement. 

Arts and Culture

Be sure to check out the Q&A on Barry's Blog, a service of the Western States Arts Federation, with John E. McGuirk, the recently retired director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Performing Arts Program.

Fundraising

On the Inside Philanthropy site, IP contributor Mike Scutari asks: When should nonprofit institutions keep a gift that has been tainted by the bad actions of the giver?

Grantseeking

You've been awarded a grant and now the deadline for reporting your program's outcomes is looming. Should you invest as much time and effort into writing the final project report as you did in writing the grant proposal? On the Philanthropy Front and Center-Cleveland blog, Jenna Gonzales, a program associate at the San Antonio Area Foundation, shares six things you can do to "articulate your impact and demonstrate you are a credible partner to consider for future grant opportunities."

Higher Education

At a time when postsecondary educational attainment in the United States remains below 50 percent for the 25-34 year-old age group, "the vast, affordable, and extraordinarily diverse community college system is central to the national debate about access and quality in postsecondary education, and about work life readiness for the next generation of Americans." The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Mariët Westermann explains. 

[Review] Putting Wealth to Work: Philanthropy for Today or Investing for Tomorrow?

At some point in their lives, high-net-worth individuals with philanthropic inclinations must answer an age-old question: Do I commit all (or most of) my resources to charitable causes in my lifetime, or should I create a giving vehicle that exists in perpetuity?

In Putting Wealth to Work: Philanthropy for Today or Investing for Tomorrow?, social sector veteran Joel L. Fleishman, director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at Duke University, examines the two sides of the question, finding strengths — and weaknesses — in both approaches and ultimately concluding that the correct answer is not either/or but both/and. In arriving at that conclusion, he also provides readers with an overview of modern American philanthropy, including the fairly recent advent of the Giving Pledge and the growing popularity of funder collaboratives; a brief history of limited-life foundations (i.e., foundations that have decided to "spend down" their corpus by a specific date); and a framework for critically evaluating this ever-green conundrum.

In the book (a follow-up to his well-received The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth Is Changing the World), Fleishman carefully deconstructs the arguments commonly made by "anti-perpetuity" critics and in the process does his best to separate fact from fiction. For example, anti-perpetuity critics often cite Henry Ford II's resignation from the board of the Ford Foundation in 1976 as evidence that foundations created to exist in perpetuity inevitably depart from their founding donor's intent. Fleishman, however, debunks the "myth" that Ford "should be regarded as the poster child for departure from donor intent," arguing that "no donor intent had been embodied in the legal instrument that created the…[f]oundation." He goes on to attribute the persistence of the myth to the conservative-leaning Philanthropy Roundtable, which has "kept alive a questionable interpretation of Henry Ford II's role in, [and] resignation from, the Ford Foundation," as well as other similarly inclined think tanks for "imputing departure from donor intent specifically to liberal foundations." The reality, writes Fleishman, is that "thousands of foundations that were founded by now-deceased donors do not appear to have wavered to any significant degree in trying to fulfill the intention of their founders."

ICYMI: What’s New at Foundation Center (January)

There's a lot happening in the philanthropy world, and we’re doing a lot here at Foundation Center to keep up. This year, we're going to do a better job keeping you posted on what we're learning, where we're speaking, what data we're collecting, and how you can contribute to that story. Each month, I'll be posting a roundup; no better time to start than now with what we were up to at the end of 2017.

Projects Launched

• A new version of the Global Philanthropy Data Charter, in collaboration with the Worldwide Initiative for Grantmaker Support (WINGS) and 40+ organizations in 20+ countries. The charter is a global framework designed to leverage data to help strengthen civil society and tell the story of philanthropy's impact worldwide. Help us spread the word with a tweet!
• A new 2017 edition of the report Quantifying Hope: Philanthropic Support for Black Men and Boys, an analysis of U.S. foundation funding trends for black men and boys. Help us spread the word with a tweet!
• An infographic illustrating what we know about how foundations use and share evaluations as part of a broader campaign. Help us spread the word with a tweet!
• A new report on the outcomes of a scoping meeting in Ghana to develop a dedicated platform and framework for collecting, sharing, and analyzing data on philanthropy in the region. (If you're curious, you can learn more about our global work here.) Help us spread the word with a tweet!
• A new guide and a new infographic about using data in the youth giving movement from YouthGiving.org. Both of these resources show the value of using data to build capacity and drive decisions in an accessible way, and we're hoping to use these as templates to create similar resources for other projects and encourage our broader audiences to more proactively use and share data. Help us spread the word with a tweet about the infographic and/or the guide!
• A new Solutions Bank featuring proposals submitted for 100&Change, the recently concluded MacArthur Foundation prize competition that awarded a $100 million grant to a single proposal with the potential to make measurable progress in solving a significant problem. While the competition itself had only one winner, the Solutions Bank site allows users to explore all of the proposed solutions submitted to the competition, with the goal of bringing greater visibility to these ideas and sparking more collaboration and learning among organizations tackling the same problems. Help us spread the word with a tweet!
• A campaign to recruit more on-the-ground organizations to partner with us to share Foundation Center resources in communities around the world.

Content Published

• A new blog post published in partnership with the Human Rights Funders Network that gives a sneak-peek at our first-ever trends analysis of human rights funding.
• A new blog post detailing insights from a 2017 survey of our audience.
• New blog posts here on PhilanTopic that explore the role of philanthropy in conflict prevention, the impact of tax reform on the nonprofit sector, and next-generation leadership in global development.
• New Glasspockets blog posts on topics like the MacArthur #100andChange competition, philanthropy in India, and our ongoing #OpenForGood series, which explores how and what foundations are doing to share their knowledge for the benefit of the philanthropic sector.
• New blog posts on GrantCraft about the relationships between funders and activists and, in partnership with the Open Road Alliance, an ongoing series on risk management in philanthropy.
• New WASHFunders blog posts on innovations in WASH emergency settings and efforts to combat the spread of cholera in cities.

A Few Projects in the Pipeline

• A GrantCraft guide on participatory grantmaking
• A research project on facilitating financial sustainability in partnership with LINC

For more on these projects or how to work with us, send us an email.

What We're Excited About

• Five of our conference session proposals were accepted for the PEAK Grantmaking annual conference in March! Topics include mapping changemaking campaigns, participatory grantmaking, opening up grants data, and how the SDGs facilitate foundation transparency. We hope you'll look for us there!
• A spotlight on Foundation Center in the Carnegie Reporter. The article is especially meaningful to us given that Foundation Center was founded in 1956 with support from the Carnegie Corporation to bring the work of philanthropic organizations to light.
• Our Cleveland and San Francisco offices turning 40!
• This story from the Johnson City Library Foundation, one of our Funding Information Network (FIN) partners.

Upcoming Conferences and Events

Our staff will be speaking at these upcoming events — reach out to learn more!

• Webinar: Sharing Data Made Easy: eReporting with Foundant, January 24
• Special Program: Cybersecurity for Non-Techies: What Nonprofits Need to Know, January 24, New York, NY
• Webinar: Reach New Audiences and Get Donors to Come to You, February 1
• Mapping the Money: A Changing Landscape of Human Rights Funding, February 14, San Francisco, CA, in partnership with the Human Rights Funders Network
• Webinar: Funding Arts Programs: How to Articulate Your Impact, February 15
• PEAK Grantmaking Conference, March 19-21, Orlando, FL

Data Spotlight

• 1,011,471 new grants added to Foundation Maps since November 1, of which 6,608 grants were made to 4,579 organizations outside of the U.S.
• New data sharing partners: The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Gobioff Foundation, Jasper Foundation, Inc. & Newton County Community Foundation, St. Louis Mental Health Board, Smithville Charitable Foundation and Greenville Health System.

Tell your story through data so we can communicate philanthropy's contribution to making a better world - learn more about our eReporting program.

If you found this update helpful, feel free to share it or shoot us an email! I’ll be back next month with another update.

Jen Bokoff is director of stakeholder engagement at Foundation Center.

Creating the Highest Performing Teams Through Community-Focused Initiatives

Diversity in the workplace has become a widely discussed topic, and while every company has its own approach and initiatives designed to promote diversity, most of us agree that diverse teams — not just across race, gender, and nationality but also background, knowledge, and skill-set — perform better. This has been proven by a great deal of research, but it is up to companies to bring this data to life in the workplace. At EY, we believe that our ability to execute on our purpose of "building a better working world" is best achieved by building a culture of the highest-performing teams, and a significant component of that has to do with encouraging a deeper understanding among our employees of working alongside people from other backgrounds and cultures, as well as promoting opportunities to learn new skills in new environments.

It's for this reason we invest in programs that promote high-performing teams by encouraging our people to "think outside the box." One program in particular — the EY-Earthwatch Ambassadors program — empowers our people to help overcome challenges that most corporations actively look to resolve: thinking and operating in silos.

The EY-Earthwatch Ambassadors program sends high-performing, early-career professionals from the Americas and Israel on a week-long expedition with the Earthwatch Institute to Mexico or Peru. Organized in four groups of ten, Ambassadors provide skills-based services to a local business and also engage in dynamic scientific field research (at no cost to the organization).

This past year in Mexico, two teams of ten Ambassadors helped improve the marketing and sales strategies of a local farming cooperative that is working to improve the health of the region's ecosystem. They also collected water-quality data in the Xochimilco wetlands outside of Mexico City as part of a study on the health of global freshwater ecosystems. In Peru, EY professionals provided operational recommendations to AmazonEco, a research expedition business that provides sustainable financial strategies for holistic conservation efforts in western Amazonia. Ambassadors also supported research staff by surveying a variety of wildlife species to better understand how climate change is impacting the region. Findings from the project are being used to develop conservation strategies in partnership with local indigenous communities.

At What Cost 'Mission'?

When an exempt nonprofit organization's single-minded pursuit of funding for its mission threatens to damage the broader common good, many in the larger community will question the tax advantages that enable that organization to thrive while others suffer. And so they should.

Recently, this tension was underscored by a situation in our nation's capital, where tax-exempt American University's activities as a commercial real estate developer have led to the loss of local businesses much valued in (and beyond) adjacent neighborhoods — and raised additional concerns about the sometimes-harmful practices of "charitable" entities. While local residents around the country have been doing what they can to maintain the increasingly fragile business mix that reflects the often-historic and unique character of their neighborhoods, too many exempt organizations ignore such concerns and go about their business with a blatant disregard for the consequences of their actions on others.

We've all become familiar with the egregious practices of commercial real estate owners who double, triple, or quadruple a small business owner's rent when a lease expires, forcing the business to vacate the space and leaving it empty for years in hopes that, at some point down the road, it can be combined with adjacent properties to create an attractive parcel for luxury development or perhaps a national chain tenant, even as the surrounding neighborhood retail ecosystem withers and dies.

And when ostensibly nonprofit organizations get into the game, it adds more than insult to injury. Indeed, in the recent case involving American University, which is taking steps to force out a popular family-owned garden center from one of the commercial properties it owns, it heightens the scrutiny on all exempt organizations.

Our current tax code allows exempt nonprofit organizations and institutions to maximize the revenue they generate by mimicking the often-rapacious behavior of commercial real estate developers. While some defenders of exempt organizations’ commercial real estate ventures believe that income from such activities are subject to Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT), they are wrong.

Weekend Link Roundup (January 13-14, 2018)

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Climate Change

On the Barr Foundation blog, the foundation's Climate Program co-directors, Mariella Puerto and Mary Skelton Roberts, outline "the rationale, priorities, and early steps of the foundation's newly-expanded focus on [climate] resilience."

New York Magazine's Reeves Wiedeman checks in with a fresh take on the climate advocacy of the Rockefeller family and its campaign against Exxon, one of the legacy companies of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil.

Education

A consensus has developed over the last decade around the importance of pre-K education. So why do so many preschool teachers live on the edge of financial ruin? Jeneen Interlandi reports for the New York Times.

To kick off the new year, the editors of Education Week share ten ideas that they believe have the potential to change K-12 education in 2018.

Fundraising

Why are we so bad at predicting the future, and what can we learn from our collective obtuseness? When it comes to fundraising, writes digital marketer and self-styled charity nerd Brady Josephson, "the question shouldn't be 'What will be different in the future?' but rather 'What will be the same?'"

International Affairs/Development

It may not have seemed like it, but 2017 was the best year in human history. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof explains. And Kristof's Times colleague Tina Rosenberg reminds us that it was a pretty good year for social innovation as well.

5 Questions for...Laura Kalick, Tax Consulting Director, BDO

The GOP tax reform bill agreed to by the U.S. Senate and House in December and signed into law by the president on December 22 is over a thousand pages long. The bill is so long, in fact, that many members of Congress haven’t read — and are unlikely to ever read — it in its entirety. Its impact on nonprofits and the charitable sector could be significant, however, which is why earlier this month we spoke with Laura Kalick, national non-profit tax consulting director for the nonprofit and nonprofit healthcare industry at BDO in Washington, D.C., about provisions in the new law most likely to affect nonprofits in 2018, and beyond.

Philanthropy News Digest: There are lots of provisions in the tax reform bill that are going to affect nonprofits and charities. In your view, what is the one provision likely to have the greatest impact on the sector?

Laura Kalick: Well, the one that’s going to have the most impact is the doubling of the standard deduction and the limitation on deducting state and local taxes. These two provisions will likely result in a huge number of American taxpayers not itemizing their deductions and therefore not being able to deduct charitable gifts, which, as you know, is an important incentive for charitable giving. It's hard to know, of course, what people will do, but estimates from the likes of Independent Sector and the Council on Foundations suggest that charitable giving in the U.S. may take a hit of as much as a $20 billion, which is pretty substantial.

PND: The bill includes two provisions likely to be popular among individuals who do itemize their returns. One is an increase in the charitable contribution deduction limit, and the other is repeal of the so-called Pease limitation. How are those changes likely to affect charitable giving?

LK: The Pease limitation was more of a concern for high-income taxpayers, in that it reduced the value of a taxpayer's itemized deductions by 3 percent for every dollar of taxable income above a certain threshold — something like $250,00 for an individual and $300,000 for a married couple. With its repeal, people whose total income exceeds those levels will now get the full benefit of their contributions, so in that sense it could be an incentive for higher income taxpayers to give more.

The other provision is of little help to anyone, in my opinion. Previously, you could deduct charitable gifts totaling up to 50 percent of your contribution base — essentially, your adjusted gross income (AGI). That's a pretty large number, and although I don't have the stats for you, it's a lot more than most people actually allocate to charity. A provision in the new tax bill raises the maximum to 60 percent of one's contribution base, which is an even bigger number and not something that is likely to apply to too many people in any given year. I would also note that in addition to being able to deduct contributions up to 50 percent of one's contribution base, if there are contributions in excess of that amount, they could have, under the old code, and still can be carried forward under special rules. So I believe that increasing the limit to 60 percent is likely to have little impact.

[Review] What Matters: Investing in Results to Build Strong, Vibrant Communities

For public- and private-sector leaders working to develop and implement solutions to the challenges — inequality, racism, gaps in educational outcomes and health status — that have vexed American society since the country's founding, the last few decades have been especially frustrating. As Antony Bugg-Levine, CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund and one of the editors of this volume, notes in his Introduction, despite collective investments in the trillions, "over 45 million Americans still live in poverty, more than half a million remain homeless...unemployment among young African American men stubbornly persists around 30 percent in many cities, an opioid abuse epidemic [rages] across [the] country," and the United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, "hold[s] 25 percent of the world's prisoners in a system that tends to warehouse rather than rehabilitate."

In the latest addition to the What Matters series, Bugg-Levine and more than seventy-five contributors — including Peter Long, president and CEO of the Blue Shield of California Foundation; David J. Erickson, director of community development at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; Zia Khan, vice president for initiatives and strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation; Jacob Harold, president and CEO of GuideStar; and Andrea Levere, president of Prosperity Now — make the case that progress on these and other fronts will only be achieved by shifting the collective mindset of community leaders from a short-term focus on outputs (e.g., the number of beds in a shelter occupied every night) to longer-term investments in outcomes (e.g., the number of people successfully transitioned to permanent housing).

In the area of health care, for example, Long argues that nothing short of a fundamental rethink of the nation's approach to health outcome management is needed. But despite ongoing efforts by stakeholders in both the public and private sectors to adopt electronic health records, develop health exchanges, and focus on interoperability, Long worries that "we are building a measurement system that resembles the Winchester Mystery House…[one] that contains hundreds of rooms, designed individually without relation to one another, and many staircases that lead to dead ends." What is needed instead is a clear vision for the U.S. healthcare system and a national infrastructure that supports a better, more coherent outcome measurement system. Unfortunately, Long writes, "in the current political environment, it [is] incredibly challenging to have a candid conversation about our national health values and priorities."

While that assessment might be overly bleak for those who see outcomes-oriented social impact investments as the key to "affordably address our most vexing social challenges," it is impossible to read this volume without recognizing how difficult bringing about such a fundamental shift is likely to be.

Of course, none of the book's contributors argues that such a change will come easily. Indeed, in essay after essay, the chief rationale for adopting an outcomes-oriented approach is the positive effect it can have on people living on the margins. "Across the country, extraordinary leaders are overcoming the status quo, making change happen in their communities, and pushing through the challenges," writes Bugg-Levine. Isn't that enough? Or as Bugg-Levine puts it in one of two essays he's written for the book: "Don't we already provide funding to hospitals to keep people healthy, to homeless shelters to end homelessness, to childcare centers to prepare children for a fruitful life, and to job training programs to find people permanent employment?"

Catalytic Philanthropic Capital Can Supercharge Affordable Housing Nonprofits

The housing crisis in the United States is getting worse. What was already a challenging situation has been compounded by the increasing frequency of severe weather events like hurricanes Harvey and Irma, as well as by proposed federal budget cuts for fiscal 2018 that would slash HUD programs by $6.2 billion. These and other factors are putting great strain on the insufficient resources set aside to help low-income people maintain an adequate standard of living.

This crisis cannot be solved by the public, private, or government sectors alone. A problem of this scale requires innovative, multisector solutions designed to preserve affordable housing, drive system change, and create economic opportunity for those who need it most.

Rising real estate prices and job growth are not signs of housing stability

Rising real estate prices aren't a solution to the problem; if anything, they're exacerbating it. According to a 2017 report by the Urban Institute, the market provides only twenty-one adequate, affordable, and available (AAA) units for every hundred renter households with income at or below 30 percent of the area median income.

Even in places where job opportunities are improving, the housing crisis is worsening. One-third of all U.S. households are paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing, yet between 2005 and 2015 the number of rental units costing less than $800 per month declined by 2 percent, while the number of units costing more than $2,000 increased 97 percent. Cities like Boston have witnessed a booming job market, leading to a population spike, followed by a development boom. Investors are buying land and sitting on it, waiting for values to rise even higher and leaving little to no property for affordable housing. Naturally occurring affordable housing — housing that is affordable without public subsidy — is at risk for acquisition and flipping, resulting in higher risk of eviction for people already living on the edge.

This scenario is playing out all across the country. Naturally occurring affordable housing is being lost at an alarming rate to developers with deep pockets who acquire the properties with plans to raise rents.

5 Questions for...Lateefah Simon, President, Akonadi Foundation

At 40, Lateefah Simon has spent more than half her life as a civil rights advocate and racial justice leader. She was a 17-year-old mother when she went to work for the Center for Young Women's Development and was just 19 when she became the organization's executive director. In the years that followed, she helped position the center as a national leader in the movement to empower young women of color — an achievement for which she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. She later led the creation of San Francisco's first reentry services division, headed the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and served as a program director at the Rosenberg Foundation, where she helped launch the Leading Edge Fund in support of the next generation of progressive movement leaders in California.

In 2016, Simon became the second president of Akonadi Foundation, whose mission is "to eliminate structural racism that leads to inequity in the United States." PND spoke with her about the work required to build a movement focused on racial equity — and philanthropy's role in that effort.

Philanthropy News Digest: The Akonadi Foundation, which is headquartered in Oakland, is focused on "building a localized racial justice movement." Why is it important for the racial justice movement to act locally?

Lateefah Simon: What those of us in philanthropy and those working on the ground doing movement-building work know is that many of the racialized policies that have divided communities, from juvenile justice to local policing to school policies, have taken place on the municipal level. We also know that our efforts have to be extremely strategic to undo these policies — for example, the disproportionate overuse of school suspensions and expulsions against black and brown students that has been standard policy for many, many years.

To create racial justice in our communities, we have to go deep — to the source, where the policies come from, and also to the culture. Our work is not just about going after and disrupting racist policy but also about ensuring that all communities of color are working together, understanding that one group's organizing, movement-building, and advocacy work will benefit other groups. If we're fighting for anti-gentrification policies in Chinatown, African-American and Latino communities are going to be able to use those efforts to inform their own organizing, and so on.

PND: The foundation takes an "ecosystem" approach to its grantmaking. What do you mean by ecosystem grantmaking, and why do you believe it's the right approach for your movement at this time?

LS: Five years ago, the Akonadi Foundation set out to envision what Oakland could look like in ten years. Oakland has been a cradle of social movements — and is best known, of course, as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. There's a historical narrative here around race and the interconnectedness of people of color coming together to defeat horrific racist policies; it's our legacy. In our ambition to create a ten-year period of change, our thought was, even as a small foundation, we need to make grants that address the ecosystem in which "justice" is created and delivered. We know that here in Oakland, for example, we have a responsibility to fund base-building groups that are enlisting people willing to fight back, to fund groups that are going to craft policy prescriptions, and groups that will — when those campaigns have succeeded — ensure implementation of those prescriptions as well as follow-up advocacy and legal oversight of the policies.

And just as importantly, we know that if we are pushing communities to organize and fight campaigns, culture has to be at the center of this work; much of our cultural work as people of color is about staking claim to a city we helped build. So thinking about how change happens, about how the people of Oakland move toward justice — it's broad, and must be led by an "ecosystem" of grant partners who are in movement together.

In 2018, we're going to be engaging our grantees and having them give us a better idea of where we are. The world has completely changed in the last year. And because the world has changed, and the conditions of our city have changed, it's important for us to go back and look at our theory of change and redefine and reexamine how ecosystem grantmaking needs to work.

Most Popular PhilanTopic Posts 2017

It's no surprise, perhaps, that the most popular item on the blog in 2017 was a post, by Michael Edwards, from 2012. Back then, the country was clawing its way back from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the future, if not exactly bright, was looking better. Two thousand-seventeen, in contrast, was...well, let's just say it was a year many would like to forget. Edwards, a former program officer at the Ford Foundation and the editor of the Transformation blog on the openDemocracy site, had agreed to write a four-part series (check out parts one, two, and four) on the Bellagio Initiative, an effort funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce a new framework for philanthropic and international development, and his third post had much to say about how and when, in development work, we measure, how we use and interpret the results, and who decides these things — concerns as relevant today as they were in the final year of Barack Obama's first term in office.

Of course, smart thinking and useful advice never go out of fashion — as the posts gathered below amply demonstrate. Indeed, with an administration and majorities in both chambers of Congress seemingly determined to roll back many of the progressive gains achieved over the last half-century, nonprofits and social entrepreneurs working to protect the rights of marginalized and vulnerable populations, undo the vast harm caused by a systemically biased criminal justice system, combat the corrosive effects of money on our politics, and address the existential threat posed by climate change will need all the smart thinking and useful advice they can lay their hands on. So, sit back, buckle your seat belt, and get ready for 2018. It's going to be an...interesting year.

• Valuing What We Can Measure or Measuring What We Value? (Michael Edwards)
• A Marriage of Commerce and Cause: How Rotary Is Staying Relevant in the 21st Century (John Hewko)
• Four Key Indicators of Nonprofit Success (Richard Brewster)
• Six Ways to Connect People to Your Cause Through Social Media (Angela Hearn)
• President's Budget Proposal Targets Foundations (Tim Delaney)
• Groundwork for Good Fortune: The Real Power of Strategic Planning (David Allyn)
• [Review] 'In Defense of a Liberal Education' (Michael Weston-Murphy)
• The Diversity Gap in the Nonprofit Sector (Susan Medina)
• The Future of African-American Philanthropy (Gasby Brown)
• [Infographic] The Current and Future State of Nonprofit Philanthropy (MPA program, University of San Francisco)

What have you read/watched/heard lately that got your attention, made you think, or charged you up? Feel free to share in the comments section below.

Interested in writing for PND or PhilanTopic? We'd love to hear from you. Send a few lines about your idea/article/post to mfn@foundationcenter.org.