Category: Blog

In the last few years conflict, climate crisis, social unrest, and pandemics have all impacted and shifted philanthropic funding flows. While funding trends may come and go, many organizations routinely review their strategy, shifting their focus and their dollars to suit. Funders, understandably, want to contribute to issues that are seen as important and urgent…

None of that feels like it’s letting up, with an increasingly complex horizon facing philanthropists and their partners. Among them: The war in Ukraine will continue to displace a large amount of official development assistance as well as private giving. Both common sense and emerging data from donors suggests the shift in philanthropic capital to…

A year ago, most of us here at Geneva Global were in the “jury is still out” camp. With the passage of time, I’m now leaning towards a more nuanced answer: program officers are still an important piece of the private foundation puzzle moving forward. But they need to be reimagined to fit the times…

About the Alliance The Alliance for Advancing Health Online comprises actors from the technology, health, global development, and academic sectors that have joined forces to advance public understanding of how social media can best be utilized to better understand and increase the health and resiliency of communities around the world. Alliance members currently include the CDC Foundation, Vaccine Confidence Project at…

What does trust-based philanthropy mean to you—and what does it mean for you? Here is a reading list to get you up to speed quickly. Dive deep and read them all, or read one article from each category. Either way, you’ll deepen your knowledge of this approach and some of the organizations that are leading…

Ashoka, Chandler Foundation, and Geneva Global hosted a series of global conversations with philanthropists and social entrepreneurs aimed at answering this question. During an action-focused discussion on February 3 led by Sadaf Cameron (Kindle Project), Aidan Eyakuze (Twaweza Ni’ Sisi), Tim Hanstad (Chandler Foundation), and Pia Infante (Trust-Based Philanthropy Project), participants wrestled with the cultural as well…

As Program Director at Geneva Global, I began to work with Gardiner Lapham at the BAND Foundation to solve this problem, a continuation of ongoing support in this area. We quickly learned that the scope of the problem is dramatic and isn’t all about drug procurement. Over ten million people with epilepsy live in Africa…

They offer immediate tax benefits to donors, avoid some of the more onerous compliance requirements associated with operating private foundations, and provide anonymity in a way that private foundations often cannot. Those advantages are precisely the same issues around which an emerging chorus of DAF critique has emerged. Critics accuse DAFs of facilitating tax write-offs…

Of the many things we at Geneva Global find interesting about the news: it all happened without a staff of program officers to identify and vet the grantees. Scott’s news followed in the footsteps of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey similarly deploying hundreds of millions in philanthropic capital in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, using a publicly accessible Google…

When I started work on this blog series about how some of the world’s biggest development problems will only be solved through the demanding process of co-creation, I didn’t anticipate it would coincide with a sobering real-time example of what I was talking about. Yet here we are, caught in a global pandemic that is…

If co-creation is one of the best ways to effect significant, long-lasting change in areas of systemic need, as many of us in the development world are starting to believe, why don’t we see more of it happening? Because it’s hard work. Most business mergers and acquisitions are announced with fanfare and lots of talk…

It takes a special effort to achieve something out of this world—like, say, putting a man on the moon. The remarkable lunar landing whose 50th anniversary we marked last year (2019) was an embryonic example of the kind of whole new level of partnership we believe is required to really move the needle on some…

Oftentimes, we start to approach our work in new ways without having a name for it. That’s what happened when we realized we were systems entrepreneurs—a person or organization that facilitates a change to an entire ecosystem by addressing and incorporating all the components and actors required to move the needle on a particular social…

As a philanthropy consultant, I have the opportunity to work with foundations and individual philanthropists to shape their giving strategy and research issues they’d like to learn more about. One of my favorite parts of my job is when I get to reach out to nonprofits on behalf of clients to learn about their programs…

Recently, I attended the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference in Chicago. The event is the largest gathering of HR professionals in the world, drawing famed speakers such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz, among others, to discuss everything from diversity to change management. While Munoz and Sandberg represented…

After years of working in various capacities in the refugee sector, Sasha Chanoff, RefugePoint Founder & Executive Director, branched off on his own in 2005, joined in 2008 by Amy Slaughter, Chief Strategy Officer, with an idea and a mission: they were going to reshape refugee humanitarian response, particularly by expanding the solutions available to…

Sustainability in development projects is as prominent a goal as it has been a rare accomplishment over the past half-century. As explained in a chapter I contributed to the recently published book, The Practice of International Development, this endemically disappointing result traces equally to how we design and implement development projects and programs and to…