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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C&A Foundation won an #OpenForGood award for their commitment to transparency and openness in sharing evaluations. Here, they share advice on the evaluation process as they worked towards effective philanthropy.
Lee Alexander Risby
Savi Mull
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The Ian Potter Foundation won an #OpenForGood award for supporting learning and open knowledge while working to promote excellence and innovation in Australia.
Craig Connelly
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Congratulations to the winners of the first ever #OpenForGood awards, chosen for their work to openly share what they are learning to advance the field of philanthropy: C&A Foundation (Zug, Switzerland), The Ian Potter Foundation (Melbourne, Australia), and the Rockefeller Foundation (New York, USA).
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Janet Camarena
Opening Up Emerging Knowledge:
There is helpful data filed away in grantee reports and our #OpenForGood campaign has been working to encourage this data to be shared. We're highlighting 7 examples, all found on IssueLab.
New Shared Learning from IssueLab -
Foundations are expanding capacity for evaluation and learning. In this interview with the director of evaluation and learning at the Barr Foundation, we find out what it means to focus on this type of work full-time.
Yvonne Belanger
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The James Irvine Foundation advocates for better philanthropy by sharing knowlege beyond its four walls and usual circles.
Kim Ammann Howard
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Knowledge is a resource philanthropy can’t afford to keep for itself, and as a result of a new guide, funders will now have a road map for opening up that knowledge.
Melissa Moy
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Daniela Pineda of First 5 LA shares how the public entity is uniquely positioned to share knowledge with the field. As part of Foundation Center’s #OpenForGood movement, First 5 LA’s insights are featured in the new GrantCraft guide Open for Good: Knowledge Sharing to Strengthen Grantmaking which provides tips and resources, including strategies for knowledge sharing.
Daniela Pineda
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Knowledge has the power to spark change, but only if it is shared. Clare Nolan, co-founder of Engage R+D, explains how sharing knowledge can deepen internal reflection and learning, lead to new connections and ideas, and promote institutional credibility and influence.
Clare Nolan
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As foundations increasingly share key lessons from their grantees' work, Edward Pauly, the Wallace Foundation's director of research and evaluation, addresses how foundations can balance the value of openness with concerns about potential risks.
Chantell Johnson
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The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has pledged its commitment to the #OpenForGood campaign, backed by their belief that in opening up what the foundation is learning, it is honoring the public’s trust in its activities as a private foundation.
Hope Lyons
Ari Klickstein
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The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation shares how its Open Licensing Toolkit for Staff is an extension of its support for transparency and openness by requiring open licensing on works created with grant funds.
Kristy Tsadick
Heath Wickline
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As the #OpenForGood campaign builds momentum, and we continue to add to our IssueLab Results repository of more than 400 documents of lessons learned and evaluations data, we're shining a spotlight on noteworthy examples. Here, IssueLab's Gabriela Fitz explores Conrad N. Hilton Foundation's evaluation of its Chronic Homelessness Initiative as an effective strategy.
Gabriela Fitz
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IssueLab's Gabriela Fitz explores Native Arts & Cultures Foundation's evaluation of its Community Inspiration Program, measuring the social impact of native arts and their effect on social change efforts.
Gabriela Fitz
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While knowledge sharing is uneven across the social sector, Foundation Center's Lisa Brooks and Lacey Althouse report that more foundations are using their websites and open repositories to share what they are learning, and adopting practices that encourage grantees to openly share knowledge produced with grant dollars.
Lisa Brooks
Lacey Althouse
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As foundations increasingly share key lessons from their grantees' work, Edward Pauly, the Wallace Foundation's director of research and evaluation, addresses how foundations can balance the value of openness with concerns about potential risks.
Edward Pauly
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Hanh Cao Yu
Opening Up the Good and Bad Leads to Stronger Communities and Better Grantmaking
Hanh Cao Yu, the California Endowment's chief learning officer, reflects on the opportunities and challenges - and lessons learned - of implementing Building Healthy Communities, the Foundation's complex 10-year policy/systems change initiative. -
Veronica Olazabal
Shawna Hoffman
Championing Transparency: Rockefeller Foundation Is #OpenForGood
The Rockefeller Foundation is proactively making all of its evaluation reports publicly available on IssueLab's Results platform. Learn what it takes internally to promote transparency and openness, and what it means for the Foundation and the sector. -
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.
