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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Janet Camarena
What Will You #OpenForGood?
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.
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Lee Alexander Risby

Savi Mull
Meet #OpenForGood Award Winner:
C&A Foundation
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.
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Craig Connelly
Meet #OpenForGood Award Winner:
The Ian Potter Foundation
The Ian Potter Foundation won an #OpenForGood award for supporting learning and open knowledge while working to promote excellence and innovation in Australia.
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Inaugural #OpenForGood Award Winners
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:
New Shared Learning from IssueLab
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.
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Yvonne Belanger
Barr Foundation: Creating a Culture of Learning
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.
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Kim Ammann Howard
Building Our Knowledge Sharing Muscle at Irvine
The James Irvine Foundation advocates for better philanthropy by sharing knowlege beyond its four walls and usual circles.
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Learn, Share, and We All Win!
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.
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Daniela Pineda
To Serve Better, Share
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.
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Clare Nolan
Knowledge Sharing to Strengthen Grantmaking
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.
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Chantell Johnson
The MacArthur Foundation Is #OpenForGood
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.
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Hope Lyons

Ari Klickstein
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund Is #OpenForGood
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.
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Kristy Tsadick

Heath Wickline
Getting Practical About Open Licensing
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.
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Gabriela Fitz
#OpenForGood Staff Pick
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
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.
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Gabriela Fitz
#OpenForGood Staff Pick
Native Arts & Cultures Foundation
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.
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Lisa Brooks

Lacey Althouse
Open Access to Foundation Knowledge
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.
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Edward Pauly
How "Going Public" Improves Evaluations
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.
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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.
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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.
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Tom Kelly
How to Keep Me Scrolling Through what You Are Sharing
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.
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Gabriela Fitz
Crafting a Better Tap of Knowledge
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.
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Jen Glickman
How Improved Evaluation Sharing Strengthens Foundation Work
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.
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Mandy Ellerton

Molly Matheson Gruen
How to Make Grantee Reports #OpenForGood
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.
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Mandy Flores-Witte
Transparency and the Art of Storytelling
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.
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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.
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Rebekah Levin
Why Evaluations Are Worth Reading – Or Not
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.
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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.
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Janet Camarena
Because What You Know Shouldn’t Just Be About Who You Know
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.
This blog series and Open For Good campaign are funded by
through its Increasing Foundation Openness program.