The new context—and the experiments today in response to it—could evolve in many different ways in the years ahead. What happens will depend on how individual choices add up over time as they respond to some of the most important uncertainties facing donors and the field in general.
- The third section of Looking Out for the Future, Imagining the Future of Philanthropy: Looking Back from 2025, examines the possibilities, first in broad strokes that imagine the field overall (either improving or declining), then more deeply in nine short sketches of the future. Each scenario offers a plausible account of how a piece of philanthropy’s future might unfold in the next generation, and each is followed by questions to help you think through what it might mean to you.
- The scenarios are clustered around three key themes (with three scenarios provided for each theme). You may be particularly interested in one of the themes, so we provide each separately for download:
- The world outside philanthropy will also generate new challenges and needs that will require philanthropic responses in the future. What Will Philanthropy Be Called Upon to Do? provides a brief overview of a few of those challenges.
- If you are interested in learning more about scenario thinking itself—so that you might practice it with the issues you care most about—the best starting place is What If? The Art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits, which you can download as a whole or in parts. This guide was created as a result of a project we ran at the same time as this one; its purpose was to experiment with using futures thinking to help foundations and nonprofits think through their toughest challenges and learn to anticipate better.
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