America’s public schools were founded with a clear mission: to prepare each generation anew for the responsibilities of citizenship. Over the last year, YouthTruth, an initiative of the Center for […]
The post Catalyzing Civic Change: It’s Time for Philanthropy to Elevate Youth Voices appeared first on The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Category Archives: Feeds
How and Why Do Diaspora Give? A Conceptual Model to Understanding Diaspora Philanthropy
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article intends to contribute to further research on cross-border phenomenon in nonprofit and philanthropic studies by developing a conceptual model for diaspora philanthropy, the transfer of resources such as money, time, labor, and knowledge to countries of origin for the public good. The interdisciplinary opportunities for the topic of diaspora philanthropy can be considered a strength, but at times, they result in disparate studies and minimal consideration for larger questions and theory development. In this article, we hope to aggregate relevant research in order to remedy some of these challenges. An interdisciplinary approach allows us to chart macro, meso, and micro theories and empirical work that help to explain diaspora philanthropy. We ask: What are the (global) drivers that influence diaspora philanthropy (macro level)? What are the channels that allow for, or challenge, diaspora philanthropy (meso level)? And what are the individual motives of diaspora philanthropists (micro level)?
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssUnlocking the Transformative Potential of Intermediary Funds
One of the fastest growing philanthropic practices in recent years is the use of collaborative, or pooled, funds — one form of intermediary funding, the subject of a recent CEP […]
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Building the Intermediary Ecosystem: Three Core Tenets
Philanthropy has experienced an explosion in intermediaries in the past decade and I was privileged to have a front-row seat to that growth during my tenure at Arabella Advisors, a […]
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What Do Grantees Think of Intermediary Funders?
Over the past decade, there has been a significant rise in both the interest in and number of intermediary organizations — those that primarily regrant funds from institutional sources on […]
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The Giving Done Right Podcast is Back for Season Four
Listen to the trailer here. I’m thrilled to announce that the Giving Done Right podcast is returning for another season! This summer, CEP’s president Phil Buchanan and I have been busy in […]
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September 2024 Open Thread
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post September 2024 Open Thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Navigating the Equity Journey at Lean Foundations
In the evolving landscape of philanthropy, lean funders — those operating with few or no staff — are playing a crucial role in advancing racial equity. The latest edition of […]
The post Navigating the Equity Journey at Lean Foundations appeared first on The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
August 2024 Updates
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
Why are GiveWell employees sampling ORS in our office?
Last week, GiveWell employees Erin, Katie, and Karthik sampled oral rehydration solution (ORS) in our Oakland office.
ORS is a type of fluid replacement (similar to Pedialyte) that saves lives by preventing diarrhea deaths. Diarrhea is a leading cause of death for children under five, but when ORS is given with zinc tablets, we estimate that diarrhea-related mortality is reduced by 60%.
We spend 50,000 hours each year researching cost-effective global health and poverty alleviation interventions. Much of this time is “desk work”—analyzing models in a spreadsheet, evaluating evidence from studies, or talking with partners and subject-matter experts over Zoom. But the closer we can get to an intervention, the better we can understand it. Whether that’s sampling ORS in our office or taking site visit trips to witness a seasonal malaria chemoprevention campaign, we are committed to “heads-up work” that takes us beyond the spreadsheets to deepen our knowledge of the programs we support.
Read about our recent grant to CHAI to distribute ORS in Nigeria here.
July Quiz Question + Answer
Last month’s quiz question: What is the approximate number of conversations with donors our outreach team had in 2023?
We define donor conversations as phone calls, meetings, or major donor events (emails are not included in our estimate). These conversations allow us to build meaningful relationships with donors, understand why they give, and connect them to the work their gifts support.
We estimate that our Outreach team had approximately 830 conversations with donors in 2023. Out of the 68 responses we received—with answers ranging from 7 to 10,000,000 conversations—the closest guess was 800! Congratulations to our winner, Victor Matta, who will receive a GiveWell hat as a prize!
Sign up for our newsletter and answer our monthly quiz question for your chance to win!
Research and Partner Roundup
GiveWell publishes new research pages on a grant of up to $4.8 million to the London School of
As the Planet Heats Up, New Trends Drive Climate Giving
After the hottest year on record, 2024 has continued to bring unprecedented heat and extreme weather events. Today, 80 percent of people globally want their country to do more on […]
The post As the Planet Heats Up, New Trends Drive Climate Giving appeared first on The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Democracy and Management: Organizational Practices and Nonprofits’ Contributions to Society
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Nonprofit organizations contribute to society through service provision, advocacy, and community building. As they face the challenge of pursuing a social mission while operating in a market economy, many adopt businesslike practices in response. Nonprofits’ tendency to adopt such practices has become a contested scholarly topic, with, however, limited empirical evidence. Using survey data from nearly 600 nonprofits in the Vienna region, we examine how organizational practices—specifically businesslike managerial and democratic ones—relate to nonprofits’ emphasis on service provision, advocacy, and community building. Democratic and managerial practices follow institutional logics that may activate interpretation frame effects that influence organizational goals. Contrary to concerns in previous literature, we find that implementing managerial practices is harmonious not only with service delivery but also advocacy and, to some extent, community building. Democratic organizing, conversely, supports community building while reducing service delivery focus. Combining these practices can support a balanced societal role profile.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssBook Review: Organizing Logics, Nonprofit Management and Change
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssInsights from Grantees: A CEP Blog Series
Funders have used CEP’s Grantee Perception Report to gather candid, comparative feedback from their grantees for more than two decades. In addition to sharing confidential reports with individual funders to […]
The post Insights from Grantees: A CEP Blog Series appeared first on The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Raffles, Deworming, and Statistics
Sometimes statistics can help when it’s hard to decide what to do.
You’re at a local art fair, and they’re raffling off a car worth $10,000. Five hundred tickets are being sold, each for $10. Does it make financial sense to buy a ticket? (For the moment, let’s set aside other questions about raffles and just focus on the benefit for you, the potential ticket-buyer.)
You can use a statistical concept called “expected value” to help you decide. Expected value is calculated by multiplying the probability of each potential outcome by its value, then adding these results together to get the average result of an action.
Let’s figure this out—a car is on the line. First, we multiply the probability of each potential outcome by its value.
We might win the car. Assuming all tickets are sold, the probability of winning the car is 1 in 500, and the value of winning the car is $10,000.
1/500 x $10,000 = $20
We probably won’t win the car. The probability of not winning the car is 499 in 500.
499/500 x $0 = $0
Then, we add the results together to get the average result of an action.
$20 + $0 = $20
Thus, the expected value of purchasing a raffle ticket under the conditions specified above is $20. That $20 represents the average result of buying a raffle ticket. It’s twice the ticket’s cost, making the raffle ticket a pretty good bet. In any one instance, you probably won’t win, but if you repeatedly make these kinds of bets, over time you’re likely to come out ahead.
(One important note that we’ll come back to later: Because it’s an average, the expected value doesn’t indicate what we think will actually happen in any specific instance. In fact, in this case our action of buying a raffle ticket cannot generate the expected value. We cannot win $20. We can win the $10,000 car or nothing.)
You might be saying to yourself: I’m still not that convinced about buying a raffle ticket, but I’m even less sure how this relates to GiveWell’s funding decisions.
GiveWell sorts through hundreds of funding opportunities, looking for the ones that are most cost-effective. We decide among multiple programs that differ from one another, not just in terms of the conditions they treat, the interventions themselves, or the locations they
A Framework for Democracy Philanthropy
This post originally appeared on The Art of Association blog. It is challenging for philanthropic funders to get started and stay focused when it comes to strengthening democracy. The vagaries […]
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Burnout and Well-Being in Grantee Organizations: A CEP Blog Series
Among the findings of Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know, was a striking statistic: 95 percent of nonprofit leaders who responded to CEP’s survey […]
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Bringing the Economic Benefits of Reading Glasses into Focus
It started in my early forties, and it’s only gotten worse since then. At first, it was a mild annoyance, but now it affects my quality of life and makes it harder to get things done. I’m definitely not alone—almost every middle-aged person I know has the same problem—and maybe you do too: a condition called presbyopia, a type of age-related vision loss that makes it difficult to see things clearly at close distances.
Luckily, the condition is easily and inexpensively treated with reading glasses, widely available at nearly every corner drug store in the United States. Reading glasses work well, and they’re cheap enough that I have them stashed around my house so a pair is always in reach. But an estimated 510 to 826 million people around the world have presbyopia but do not have corrective glasses.1See Bastawrous, Kassalow, and Watts 2024. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_15147_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15147_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });
What we know and what we don’t know
We think that providing reading glasses to people who need them is a promising way to improve their employment opportunities and increase their economic well-being. It makes intuitive sense that being able to see better would improve people’s ability to work, particularly for vision-intensive jobs such as crop cultivation and inspection, manufacturing, or retail work.
We’ve looked at two studies of programs that distribute reading glasses—one of tea pickers in India and one of workers in a variety of vision-intensive occupations in Bangladesh, such as tailors and carpenters—and they both suggest that distributing reading glasses has a positive economic effect for the people who receive glasses.2Reddy et al. 2018, Sehrin et al. 2024. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_15147_1_2’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15147_1_2’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Based on those studies, we think it’s likely that providing workers with reading glasses would be a cost-effective use of funding. However, we’re uncertain about how cost-effective it would be, as the studies don’t provide all the information we need.
For example, the study in India was only 11 weeks long, so it wasn’t able to assess the effect of having reading glasses over a longer time frame. It focused on productivity,
What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Nonprofit World
It’s not easy being a corporate CEO these days. Just look at the recent travails of leaders at high profile companies like Boeing or Disney or Starbucks. They, and many […]
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Navigating Local: Emergent Roles of Navigators in Community-Driven Care Systems
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. As disparities in access to social services continue, nonprofit practitioners are reimagining mechanisms to support service provision through systems of care. Systems of care are interorganizational referral networks that assemble a cross-section of nonprofits to coordinate care. Care systems use human navigators to support clients connecting to services. Through semi-structured interviews with a community-driven care system in Chicago and a grounded approach, this work posits that human navigators embody two novel roles distinct from other care contexts: community resource advocate and consensus builder. Based on ecological systems theory, these roles emphasize connectivity and advocacy to increase access and use of services created through interpersonal and interorganizational relationships. This work highlights the transformative influence of human navigators in care systems, demonstrating how community resource advocates and consensus builders enhance care access and interorganizational response, creating more equitable service delivery. This work offers a typology for role design for local service delivery.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rssThe Decline of Volunteering in the United States: Is it the Economy?
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article investigates the complex interactions between local and national economic contexts and volunteering behavior. We examine three dimensions of local economic context—economic disadvantage (e.g., the percentage of families living in poverty), income inequality, and economic growth (e.g., the change in median household income)—and the impact of a national/global economic jolt—the Great Recession. Analysis of data from the Current Population Survey’s (CPS) Volunteering Supplement (2002–2015) reveals that individuals who live in places characterized by economic disadvantage and economic inequality are less likely to volunteer than individuals in more advantaged, equitable communities. The recession had a dampening effect on volunteering overall, but it had the largest dampening effect on individual volunteering in communities with above-average rates of income equality and higher rates of economic growth. While individuals living in rural communities were more likely to volunteer than their urban counterparts before the recession, rural/urban differences disappeared after the recession.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly | https://journals.sagepub.com/action/showFeed?ui=0&mi=ehikzz&ai=2b4&jc=nvsb&type=etoc&feed=rss