Skip to content
PEAK Grantmaking

Weekly Reader – July 15, 2019

What we’re reading and recommending this week. Your comments and suggestions are welcomed.

How Philanthropic Collaborations Succeed, and Why They Fail (Alison Powell, Susan Wolf Ditkoff, and Fay Twersky, SSIR) Funders need to push past politeness and hammer out expectations for how their collective action will create value—for beneficiaries, grantees, and themselves—beyond what they could do alone.

Listening, Learning, Reassessing: Translating Potential to Effectiveness (Anthony Richardson, CEP Blog) Successful organizations and people have at least one thing in common: they are honest with themselves about their strengths and limitations.

Never Again Is Now: On Immigrant Justice, the Question for Funders Is Not What to Do, But Will You Do It (Timi Gerson, NCRP Blog) Grantmakers and donors need to support frontline immigrant and refugee justice efforts now because lives are at stake.

Moving Beyond Feedback: The Promise of Participatory Grantmaking (Cynthia M. Gibson, Nonprofit Quarterly) Several years ago, a group of nonprofit and philanthropic executives met to explore ways to strengthen civic participation.

Ensuring that Charitable Giving is Accessible to All Americans (Susan N. Dreyfus and Brian Gallagher, Philanthropy Journal) The report finds that charitable donations from individuals declined by 3.4 percent from 2017 to 2018 after adjusting for inflation, the largest drop since the financial crisis.