Winter 2018 – Digital Issue

Multiyear and Unrestricted: Seeding a Better Philanthropic Practice...

Winter 2018: Volume 25, Issue 4

Introduction

• Welcome
  
  
• The Nonprofit Whisperer
  What is the best way to manage a transparent executive transition so that positive organizational change can shine through? The Nonprofit Whisperer outlines the challenge and rewards.

Features

• Multiyear and Unrestricted: The Grants of Nonprofit Dreams Come to Life
  
  
• Democracy in Practice: How the Ford Foundation and Its BUILD Grantees Are Changing Philanthropy
  This article highlights the Ford Foundation’s transformative approach to grantmaking that “responds to the urgency to advance democracy inside and among our institutions and across societies.” As the authors explain, the scale of Ford’s investment is remarkable, but it is its BUILD program’s “ethos, structure, and accompanying practices that deserve study and replication.” by Jeanne Bell and Ruth McCambridge
  
  
• The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation’s Bigger and Better Capital Flow Creates Its Own Course
  The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has become distinguished for its exploration of a new form of grantmaking: megagrants, designed around nonprofitdirected working capital, funding for rigorous evaluation, and capacity building. This article describes some of the foundation’s learning along the way as it gears up for the spend-down of its assets eight years from now. by Ruth McCambridge
  
  
• When Someone Steals Your Soul: Repatriating Narratives in the Nonprofit Sector
  
  
• Reframing Narratives, Resetting Reality: A Conversation with Mackenzie Price of the FrameWorks Institute
  In this conversation with the Nonprofit Quarterly, Mackenzie Price, an applied sociolinguist and senior associate in the research interpretation and application unit at the FrameWorks Institute, talks about how narratives emerge, how they get used in the world, and how to recognize, interrupt, and reorient them.
  
  
• Changing Our Narrative about Narrative: The Infrastructure Required for Building Narrative Power
  In this essay, originally written for the Haas Institute’s Blueprint for Belonging project, Rashad Robinson, president of Color Of Change, asks, “Are we happy? Are we happy with how we’re doing narrative right now and the results we’re getting, and are we willing to keep on doing the same?” The question is, of course, rhetorical. “Narrative builds power for people,” he reminds us, “or it is not useful at all.” by Rashad Robinson
  
  
• Money as Medicine: Leveraging Philanthropy to Decolonize Wealth
  “In the Indigenous worldview, many things can be medicine: a place, a word, a stone, an animal, a natural phenomenon, a dream, a life event like a coffee date with a friend, or even something that seems bad in the moment, like the loss of a job. . . . You don’t choose the medicine, the elders say—it chooses you.” by Edgar Villanueva
  
  
• Museums: Nonprofits in the Eye of the Perfect Narrative Storm
  The daily online newswire, produced by NPQ’s collaborative journalism program, traces developments in fields, practices, and the operating environments of nonprofits. This compilation of NPQ reportage highlights the realms of activities and issues involved in decolonizing the museum, acknowledging the role of museums in anchoring narratives about the world we live in.

Departments

• You First: Leadership for a New World “Carpe Fortuna—Reddere in Ante”
  In terms of successfully running an organization, does luck matter? Nonprofit leaders have tended to fall into a “Yes, luck matters” or “No, luck doesn’t matter” argument based on good fortune versus skill. Here, Mark Light highlights the more-often-than-not ignored relationship between so-called “luck” and privilege. by Mark Light, MBA, PhD
  
  
• Cultures of Nonprofit Trusteeship: What Lies Beneath?
  Nonprofit boards are, as this article explains, “deeply influenced by any number of ‘silent’ factors beyond whether they happen to adhere to commonly agreed-upon standards of governance”—otherwise known as cultures of trusteeship. by Rikki Abzug and Jeffrey S. Simonoff
  
  
• How Nonprofits Solve Social Enterprise’s Three Big Problems: Money, Trust, and Information
  Social enterprise more often than not describes itself as the answer to vexing problems that neither nonprofits nor government are equipped to solve. But, as this article contends, “scratching below the surface of social enterprise businesses reveals that they depend significantly on the nonprofit sector for their effectiveness and survival.” by Curtis Child
  
  
• Counting What Counts: Why Social Accounting MATTERS
  In nonprofits, we know that the value we create is not merely a matter of dollars and cents. Isn’t it about time that we aligned our reporting with our values? This article outlines a promising approach to the emerging field of social accounting: Integrated Reporting. by Elizabeth A. Castillo
  
  
• SPECIAL REPORT The Ailing CFC: One More Canary in the Workplace Giving Coal Mine?
  The rapid plummeting of the Combined Federal Campaign’s workplace fundraising has continued unabated, despite many attempts at reform. But is that because it is irrevocably fated by the times, or is it because the program has failed to listen even in reform mode? by Marshall Strauss