Open For Good - Voices from the Field
We are featuring the voices of "knowledge sharing champions" from across the field, exploring new tools, practices, and examples showing how foundations are opening up about what they are learning and sharing that knowledge for the benefit of the philanthropic sector, and for the greater good.
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Foundation Center has launched our new #OpenForGood campaign, designed to encourage better knowledge sharing practices among foundations.Three Foundation Center services—Glasspockets, IssueLab, and GrantCraft are leveraging their platforms to advance the idea that philanthropy can best live up to its promise of serving the public good by openly and consistently sharing what it’s learning from its work.
Janet Camarena
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Overwhelmed by information? So is Tom Kelly, Vice President of Knowledge, Evaluation & Learning at the Hawai'i Community Foundation. Here are Tom's insider tips on how to communicate about data, information, and ideas in your reports, blogs and email - and how to make sure others find what you are sharing really useful.
Tom Kelly
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A visit to an old meat packing plant in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood inspired Gabriela Fitz, Foundation Center's director of knowledge management initiatives, to reflect on what it will take for philanthropy to build and maintain a circular knowledge economy so that people begin to see (and taste) the benefits.
Gabriela Fitz
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Philanthropy is a complex, demanding field, and many foundations are limited in the amount of resources they can dedicate to obtaining and sharing knowledge about their practices. Center for Effective Philanthropy's Jen Glickman takes a look at where foundations should focus their learning and sharing efforts to be #OpenForGood.
Jen Glickman
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Shifting from a massive antiquated file-storage machine to online grantee reports symbolized the Bush Foundation’s opportunity to become more transparent – moving from record preservation to sharing learning logs as relevant tools for current audiences.
Mandy Ellerton
Molly Matheson Gruen
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Foundations are uniquely poised to support higher-risk projects, and as a result, failures can happen. Kenneth Rainin Foundation's senior communications officer, Mandy Flores-Witte, describes how the foundation, to evaluate lessons learned and accelerate change, has embraced openness in its communications.
Mandy Flores-Witte
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Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
Bringing Knowledge Full Circle: Giving Circles Shape Accessible and Meaningful Philanthropy
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation’s Giving Circles Fund initiative allows individuals to pool their resources, knowledge and ideas to develop their philanthropic strategy and scale their impact. Founder of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Arrillaga-Andreessen argues philanthropists have an imperative to share what they've learned for the greater good. -
Robert R. McCormick Foundation’s evaluation initiatives changed the way that the foundation understands and does its work. Rebekah Levin, McCormick's director of evaluation and learning, shows how effective evaluations can inform, guide, and assess programs, strategies, initiatives, organizations and movements.
Rebekah Levin
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Aaron Lester
The Real World Is Messy. How Do You Know Your Foundation Is Making an Impact?
In a perfect world, foundations could learn from every mistake, build on every new piece of knowledge, and know with certainty what impact every effort has made. As Aaron Lester, content marketing manager at Fluxx, tells us, it turns out knowledge sharing is a tough nut to crack. -
In this first post in our Open For Good blog series, Janet Camarena, Foundation Center's director of transparency initiatives makes the case for how philanthropy can be improved through greater knowledge sharing. Each year foundations make $5 billion in grants towards knowledge production. Yet only a small fraction share what they learn, and far fewer do so using open licenses or open repositories. This is our campaign to change all that.
Janet Camarena
This blog series and Open For Good campaign are funded by
through its Increasing Foundation Openness program.
