Global Business Network, a member of the Monitor Group, has a long tradition of taking executives on physical learning journeys to see the companies, people, and places on the forefront of change—scenes they would not typically encounter in their day-to-day work. These experiences inevitably provoke new thinking about—and energy for—what is possible. We hope this online learning journey on innovation in philanthropy will do the same for you.
As Looking Out for the Future documented, the new ecology both inside and outside philanthropy creates a changed environment for every gift and every giver. This new reality hasn’t just increased the likelihood of greater oversight, it has also opened up a wide range of opportunities to reinvent and improve the way that philanthropy operates. Many donors are experimenting in response, working hard to adapt. They are planting the seeds of change for philanthropy all around us, but many of these experiments remain hidden from view.
This learning journey aims to begin uncovering many of these practices for you, and to compile in one place a sample of the array of innovation now occurring in U.S. philanthropy. The result is a guided tour through the main patterns emerging among the alternatives to traditional notions of philanthropy in the U.S.
Many of the innovations described here focus on the way private foundations operate, while others are changing how individual donors, corporate givers, and community foundations conduct their business. Although the examples appear as “alternatives," they are not necessarily rare or marginal. Many are practiced quite widely, while other innovations are just emerging. At the same time, few of the approaches are entirely new. Several are modern twists on old ideas (see the timeline "A Legacy of Innovation") and some have been in the repertoire of donors for years, but are attracting new interest and wider attention.
Not all of the alternatives will become part of philanthropy’s future. Some will spread and “tip" over into widespread acceptance and use, but others will die for lack of support or because they don’t work. Nor will all of them turn out to be good; indeed, in a few cases, there may be serious unintended consequences if the ideas spread.
Of course, the tour is by no means comprehensive. It is a selective snapshot of what is now going on in the field. For some of the categories of experimentation, we identified only a few representative examples, and could use your help in discovering additional efforts. In other areas, there were so many alternatives that we had to be ruthlessly selective, with very few good criteria for what to include and what to leave out. But collectively, the learning journey gives a sense of the range of activity and the breadth of innovation that is emerging in philanthropy from the bottom up.
We hope you will contribute to making our efforts to compile and share the many innovations in philanthropy even more robust. If you know of interesting experiments that are not covered here, please write us at feedback@futureofphilanthropy.org.
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