Every philanthropic effort to promote social benefit takes place in a new ecology—a context deeply different from that in which many of today’s institutions, assumptions, and habits were formed. The pressures of this new ecology, and the need to respond to it, will shape both how philanthropy is practiced for the next generation and what philanthropy is called upon to do.
- The first section of Looking Out for the Future, The New Ecology of Social Benefit, describes seven major forces changing philanthropy and the world around it—privatization, connection, acceleration, multiplication, diversification, observation, and reflection—and the ways these forces are combining to create a changed environment for every gift and every giver. This short chapter brings these forces to life by making them visually striking and by supplementing the prose explanations with concrete data.
- The New Ecology: What Does it Mean to You? provides a two-page worksheet to help users sort through the themes to find the ones that affect their priorities the most. It also reflects further on how the themes may combine in the future to create new responsibilities, new opportunities, new resources, and new challenges.
- The world outside philanthropy will also generate new challenges and needs that will require philanthropic responses. What Will Philanthropy Be Called Upon to Do? provides a brief overview of a few of those challenges.
- More than Bit Players: How Information Technology Will Change the Ways Nonprofits and Foundations Work and Thrive in the Information Age was not produced for this project, but provides key insights into one of the main forces driving change. This essay, created for the Surdna Foundation in 2001 by Andrew Blau (a core team member of this initiative), provides a comprehensive look at how information technologies shift costs, extend markets, expand information flows, change the borders of organizations, and enable new levels of customization and responsiveness. As they do, they initiate significant structural changes, not just in the organizations that use them, but throughout the fields in which they are adopted. This is precisely what is happening to philanthropy today.
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