News and Events: Links to what we’re reading this week
In case you missed it…
Philanthropy as R&D in Urban Women’s Health – both in the U.S. and abroad from Carol McLaughlin, our research director. We experienced a hiccup with our email subscription service.
Announcement
For the past two years, our executive director, Kat Rosqueta, has served as a judge for the Purpose Prize, a $100,000 prize awarded to each of 5 winners, all entrepreneurs and community leaders over 60 recognized for their contributions to social good. Nominations for the 2012 Purpose Prize are now being accepted.
Education Notes from Kate Hovde, Senior Analyst
Kate Hovde, Senior Analyst
Recently released education studies:
As we wrote in our report High Impact Philanthropy to Improve Teaching Quality, many high school reform designs (both charter and non-charter) either favor smaller schools or attempt to reorganize the average high school so that it feels smaller and more personal to students and staff. Although there is not good evidence that size alone is the driving factor (there are many large high schools that are very good), a recent MDRC randomized control study of public, non-selective small schools started over the last decade in New York City found clear evidence that these schools had increased grade progression, graduation rates, and test scores of students, including those from minority and poor backgrounds. The study suggests that under the right circumstances, the same elements that characterize many successful charter schools can be replicated within the regular public system.
In the latest installation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Measures of Teaching Effectiveness Study (METS) results, researchers have found that two popular teacher observation and evaluation tools do a good job at identifying effective teachers, but only if the observer is well-trained in the use of the observation tool. These findings should be a help to Race to the Top winners and other states, districts , and schools trying to come up with reliable teacher evaluation systems that are not tied exclusively to student test scores.
Mixed news on teacher residencies:
A recent study on the Boston Teacher Residency program found that teachers trained through the program were more likely to stay in teaching than peers who did not go through the program, and that after 5 years, Residency program teachers were more effective teachers than their peers, based on student test results. In the short term, however, Boston Residency program graduates were less effective than their non-residency trained peers. The caveat: this was an evaluation of a single residency program (there are others with some differences nationwide) and the training offered residents has in fact changed over time (so evaluation results date from the early years of the program training). Conclusion: the evidence base in favor of teacher residencies is still not as strong as we would like, but it remains a promising model.
More Education News from the New York Times
- The True Cost of High School Dropouts: One of our research heros, Henry Levin, and his colleague Cecilia Rouse on why it is not only a sound but an imperative economic strategy to invest in education.
- Sharing a Screen, if Not a Classroom: While the evidence on the positive effects tutoring can have on mastering early literacy is well established, this program presents a new, interesting, although as yet unproven twist.
- How Mrs. Grady Transformed Olly Neal: Nick Kristof’s story on how a teacher transformed the life of a student and implications for teacher pay and quality.
International News
- Oxfam to Launch Mission-Minded Investment Fund: Another sign of the growing interest in the role that for-profit firms play in doing good, the nonprofit Oxfam has partnered to create an impact investing fund to support small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa and Asia.
- A Boost for the World’s Poorest Schools: This is exactly what we talked about in the “Community Schools” Model in Practice, featuring Save the Children, on pgs.32-34 of Haiti: How Can I Help? in Opportunity 3: Addressing the Education Needs of Haiti’s Children. It addresses the very real issue of “now that we have more children in school, what happens there?”
Carol McLaughlin, Research Director
We are often asked, “What is the sweet spot of philanthropy?” Donors can always fund proven approaches (e.g., nurse visitation programs, women’s groups for health education). However, our chapter in the recently released Women’s Health and the World’s Cities highlights the additional critical role philanthropy can play. Given its smaller size in relation to government financing, particularly in the global arena, philanthropy’s ability to be nimble and to take greater risks makes it a critical partner for testing and refining new approaches addressing challenges in urban women’s health.
Women's Health and the World's Cities, Penn Press
In our chapter “Philanthropy and Its Impact on Urban Women’s Health,” we discuss how philanthropy was instrumental in funding the initial pilots and demonstration of two program models: Manoshi, in Dhaka Bangladesh and Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) in the U.S., both of which can now be scaled up through public financing. The chapter ends with a checklist of questions that donors and their advisors can use to understand if they are on the path to impact, using the work of Manoshi and NFP to illustrate how donors and nonprofits are successfully answering those questions.
With more than half of the global population now living in cities (a percentage projected to grow), this is a critical time to examine the impact of urbanization on women and to break down silos in order to unlock solutions that can improve wellbeing of women and their communities. Ours is just one of a dozen perspectives on this important issue, and we are thrilled that our perspective—and the role of philanthropists—can sit alongside the thinking of scholars like Julio Frenk and policy analysts like Ruth Levine. Given the critical role that women play in households, the workplace, and societies around the world, more effective philanthropy in this arena promises not only to improve the lives of these women and their families, but also of the broader global community.
See highlighted tweets, tagged #healthyurbanwomen, from our recent book event, co-hosted by the Penn Nursing School and Penn Institute for Urban Research, to continue the discussion.
News and Events: Links to what we’re reading this week
Announcement
The Center for High Impact Philanthropy joins 100Kin10: The Center is delighted to announce that we have been selected as a partner in the 100Kin10 coalition. 100Kin10 is a multi-sector,non-partisan mobilization that responds to the national imperative to prepare, deploy, and support 100,000 excellent STEM teachers over the coming 10 years. The mission of 100Kin10 is to reverse our country’s decades-long decline in STEM subjects, to ensure that all children have the basic STEM literacy to be full participants in our economy and democracy, and to enable our country’s students to address the most pressing national and global challenges.
Partners, including but not limited to corporations, school districts, museums, institutes of higher education, foundations, federal agencies, professional associations, states, and nonprofit organizations, apply their particular assets to creatively and strategically address the challenges of increasing the supply of excellent STEM teachers, developing and retaining excellent STEM teachers, and building the 100Kin10 movement.
At the Center, we see this partnership as a natural extension of our work on teaching quality and indeed several current partners are NGOs that have been profiled in the Center’s “models in practice.” A unique feature of the partnership is the sharing of promising ideas and experience of what works among the participants, and we are excited to be able to pass this learning and related philanthropic opportunities on to donors over the next three years. Stay tuned for more!
Education News
- Canada Musters Resources to Serve Diverse Student Needs: Part of the Quality Counts report released by Edweek last week and is particularly interesting given Canada’s proximity, mix of similarities and differences in population, as well as structure and approach to education provision and financing, and dramatically different results (Canada performs much better on international tests than does the US).
- Inching Closer to Agreement on Evaluations for Teachers: We thought it would be interesting to see if/how all these developments are influencing the grantmaking of the Helmsley Trust, since they have a city-wide and place-based (S. Bronx) education strategy.
Health News
- In the Fight Against Poverty, It’s Time for a Revolution: Article in the NY Times Fixes Column deals with LIFT, an anti-poverty NGO, which has an office in Philadelphia, PA. Interesting, although no hard evaluation to date.
- Philabundance: Spread the Love with PB&J, Valentine’s Day Campaign: Did you know that the food industry rarely donates peanut butter or jelly?
Other News
- Self interest, without morals, leads to capitalism’s self destruction: A Financial Times article by Noble-prize winning economist and founder of the nonprofit Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs, that reminded our team of the critical role that the philanthropic and nonprofit sector play in addressing the market failures and externalities he discusses.
- An Alternative to .org? Say Hello to .ngo: Interesting article on the Chronicle of Philanthropy reporting the push to link internet regulation and nonprofit accountability. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and Public Interest Registry are trying to crack down on fraud but at a hefty cost to nonprofits with application fees starting at $185,000.
Heart, Head . . . and Legwork
“So much of philanthropy is about the ‘heart’. You’ve talked a lot about [metrics that satisfy] ‘the head.’ Can you talk about metrics that get to satisfying the ‘heart,’ or how you think about integrating the heart and the head?”
Katherina Rosqueta, Executive Director
That was the last question of the Q&A session following my keynote remarks at a Philadelphia Estate Planning Council luncheon on Tuesday, sponsored by The Philadelphia Foundation. Two hundred and forty estate-planning professionals—lawyers, private bankers, accountants—filled the wood-paneled Lincoln Memorial Room of the Union League, surrounded by the oil-painted portraits of the club’s previous presidents. It was heartening that so many had come to learn about high impact philanthropy. According to the organizers, previous programs on “charity” had drawn no more than 50 or so attendees.
For me, though, what was most exciting was the extended question and answer period. I love Q&A. It offers our team an opportunity to gauge engagement, identify what’s really on people’s minds, and challenge our own thinking. Such sessions are invaluable for ensuring that our work is actionable.
Many of the questions were ones we’ve received before that regard the Center’s role in the space (see answer below), whether high impact philanthropy requires lots of money (answer: no) and what metrics are indicative of success (part of the answer: not overhead ratios).
However, what has stuck with me—and what clearly got the most nods in the room—was that very last question.
I suspect that every important decision that any of us makes involves both our hearts and our heads.
In philanthropy, the “heart” part has never been the problem. One look at fundraising appeals and donor testimonials, and you’ll see the heart part of philanthropy is strong.
But the “head” part has always been harder. Because it takes time, training, and work. For individual donors who aren’t engaged in philanthropy full-time, the head part can also sometimes have a funny way of making people feel distanced from the very people they hope to help.
Also, as one of the donor respondents in our I’m Not Rockefeller study remarked, “I don’t want this to be a job“.
That’s exactly why our center was started—to do more of the “head” work of philanthropy. We access the information, analyze it, synthesize it, and translate it so that donors can move more easily from generosity and good intentions to impact. To extend this odd body-part metaphor I’ve fallen into, we do the needed legwork for donors and their advisors, so that more money can flow more quickly—and confidently—to doing good.
High impact philanthropy is about making a positive difference in people’s lives. There are many reasons to give, but for those donors who care about this kind of change, we’d argue that few things warm the heart more than knowing—with confidence—that you are making the kind of impact you intended.
News and Events: Links to what we’re reading this week
Crowdsourcing-for-Good: CrowdFlower’s 2011 Retrospective focuses on crowd sourcing as creating unexpected but exciting social impact, especially regarding data collection for international health and disaster recovery. It also discusses some of the challenges and implications of using this new technology to collect data from vulnerable populations.
Teacher Quality Counts: EdWeek just launched their 2012 “Quality Counts” report this week, looking at US Education through a global lens. The report, titled The Global Challenge: Education in a Competitive World, includes lots of great food for thought, including a section on getting the mix right between content and pedagogy in teacher training. Another section focuses on teaching quality in top-performing nations (and part of the equation appears to be status and respect, not just salary).
The Changing Face of High-Level Gifts: An interesting piece that gets into the intricacies of the changing world of financial advising. Donors are turning to non-cash assets such as real estate/property, soybeans, wine & art, interest in an NFL team, etc. as donations. Fidelity and Schwab have reported notable increases in their donor advised funds and endowments with these types of gifts.
A Poverty Solution That Starts With a Hug: A Nick Kristoff piece on early childhood interventions which talks about Nurse-Family Partnership (a model in practice in our Downturn guide and one featured in our 2011 High Impact Holiday Giving).
Don’t Forget Haiti
Image Provided by Friends of HAS
Two years ago today, Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake. The damage done and suffering inflicted was extraordinary, but so too was the response it inspired: In the wake of the earthquake, approximately half of U.S. households donated to earthquake relief. This wave of generosity funded critical short-term relief efforts as well as the efforts of many NGOs to address longer-term development issues.
As is common after disasters, Haiti has largely faded from the news and funding flows have greatly diminished: the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported last week that many nonprofits active in Haiti have now spent most of the earthquake relief-related funds. Meantime, Haiti continues to struggle with issues that both preceded and stemmed from conditions subsequent to the earthquake, including the world’s worst cholera epidemic.
Although frustratingly slow at times, there has been progress. In health, for example, although the numbers of cholera cases remain high (nearly half a million in 2011), the number of cholera deaths has declined substantially due largely to earlier diagnosis and treatment. Many NGOs (including CARE, Save the Children, SOIL, International Relief and Development, Oxfam, Partners In Health, and others) have also been working on access to clean water and sanitation, which are critical to avoiding cholera in the first place. The long-term development efforts and models profiled in our Center’s guide: Haiti: How Can I Help? remain relevant and effective means of offering ongoing and needed support to Haiti.
As discussed in an article in this month’s Foundation Review, one of the interesting findings of our “I’m not Rockefeller” study of individual high net worth donors was that quite a few donors were very “sticky” to particular issues and organizations: once they had a made a commitment, they were willing and able to be patient and to invest for the long term. On this second anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, we celebrate this trait, and urge all donors, individual and institutional, to stay the course: don’t forget Haiti.
News and Events: Links to what we’re reading this week
Global Public Health
Will You Join Our Conversation on Women’s and Children’s Health?: Melinda Gates is headed to Bangladesh in the New Year to investigate maternal and fetal health interventions, and will be answering questions with Nicholas Kristof on his blog. You can send your questions here.
Effectiveness of an integrated approach to reduce perinatal mortality: recent experiences from Matlab, Bangladesh: An integrated approach to delivering evidence based interventions to pregnant mothers and newborns can lead to decreased perinatal death rates.
U.S. Education
Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain: Long term effects of teacher quality (as measured by value added test scores) are even bigger than previously thought.
The Central Falls Success: Uplifting story about a collaboration between a charter school and small Rhode Island district leading to “dramatic improvements in the reading scores of the public schoolchildren from kindergarten to grade 2.”
Out-of-School Time Drawing Girls Into STEM: Several programs are encouraging girls’ interest in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—subjects. Several of the foundations mentioned in the article are also involved 100Kin10, a new multi-partner campaign to improve the recruitment, training, and retention of STEM teachers. Partners in 100Kin10 include several organizations profiled by CHIP.
Hunger Issues
Food Banks See Drop In Donations: From Tell Me More, a piece on the drop in donations to food banks and the challenges that presents as the banks continue with their missions of getting food to people who need it.
The Best Way to Fight Hunger: In a Philadelphia Inquirer Letter to the Editor, Bill Clark, Executive Director of Philabundance, writes about the continued need for both monetary donations and food donations to food banks to offset the increase in people seeking food assistance.
Our Re-Commitments in 2012
As we start 2012 excited for new ventures and challenges, we look back on what we’ve learned and think about how the philanthropy sector is shaping up. Lucy Bernholz gives us a great jumping off point with her Philanthropy Buzzwords of 2011, detailing some of the most talked about and used (sometimes over-used) terms that bubbled up last year. Here are three concepts – and our definitions – that our team is recommitting to in 2012:
Evidence-based practice
Since our center was launched 5 years ago, we’ve watched the “bubbling up” of this term recently with much interest. As with many philanthropic terms, ‘evidence-based’ seems to mean different things to different people. For us, it has always meant accessing the best available information from three sources: rigorous research, informed opinion, and field experience. Where all three sources point to the same practice or model, we see a high impact philanthropic opportunity. As Lucy points out “The spread of evidence-based practices seems to be in direct proportion to the growth of program-related investments, impact investing, and social-impact bonds, all tools that need external standards for success.” We would add that it is also central to practicing high impact philanthropy.
Social Impact Bonds (and their cousins)
The vision of our center is a world where capital flows to where it can do the most good. While charitable grants are one vehicle, social impact bonds and what we think of as their close relations – PRI’s, impact investments, etc. – represent alternative ways for individuals and institutions to deploy money for good. A few months ago, we began working even more closely with our partners at Wharton’s Program for Social Impact to understand this space and the opportunities and challenges it presents, so stay tuned in 2012 for guidance growing out of this collaboration. Speaking of collaboration . . .
Collective Impact
In John Kania & Mark Kramer’s 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, aptly named “Collective Impact,” the authors describe how “broad cross sector coordination” is essential to overcoming the scale and complexity of some of the most intractable social problems plaguing society. We couldn’t agree more. While individual donors can make a tremendous difference, the greatest and most lasting impact has always come from the collective action of multiple players. Our guidance for donors provides 2 examples of ways to think about collective impact. Our Pathways guide offers a comprehensive framework that identifies the key in-school and out-of-school factors that affect a student’s life at every stage along their development, including the health and environmental factors that contribute to student success. In our Teaching Quality report, we explicitly examine how the policy environment can support, impede or sustain the impact of donors’ philanthropic investments.
Here’s to an even more impactful 2012. Happy New Year!
The Year in Review: 2011 Philanthrocapitalist Predictions
As 2011 comes to a close, many people around the world are exchanging gifts, donating time or money to a cause, and also reflecting on lessons learned. On the Philanthrocapitalism blog, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green have reflected on their ten predictions, from January of this year, of emerging issues which proved to be quite accurate.
- Difficult relationship between profit and philanthropy
- Trend towards the privatisation of aid
- Quality of giving vs Quantity of giving
- Hot topics: School reform in the U.S. and Maternal and child health around the world
- Britain: Most interesting country to watch in 2011
- Focus on the relationship between taxation and philanthropy
- Call for philanthropy to help tackle the deprivation and injustice that feeds extremism in the Muslim world
- Celebrity philanthropy on the rise
- Mass philanthrocapitalism in politics (Occupy Wall Street)
- Social enterprise “jumps the shark”
Regarding number four—Hot topics: School reform in the U.S. and Maternal and child health around the world—they had this to say:
Our American prediction was spot on…On the global front we have to admit that, although there has been some progress, there has not been as big a push as we had hoped on maternal and child health, which is a tough problem linked to health systems and, crucially, the political will of developing countries’ own leaders.
At the Center, we’ve had our focus on U.S. school reform—it’s highlighted as one of ten ways to make a high impact holiday gift by “Redesigning schools for better learning“—and was featured in Part II of High Impact Philanthropy to Improve Teaching Quality (pgs. 31-60), released earlier this year.
We’ve also started preparatory work and background research on global economic empowerment, education, and health of girls, mothers, and children. A few initiatives on our radar are: 10×10 and Girl Effect, as well as organizations such as the Women’s Funding Network, White Ribbon Alliance, and Sustainable Health Enterprises. You can read some of our early thinking on our blogs related to child mortality and maternal health. Stay tuned in 2012 for more about these issues.
As a final note, the Center for High Impact Philanthropy will be closed for the holidays starting Friday, December 23. We will reopen on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012. In the meantime, Have a High Impact Holiday!
News and Events: Links to what we’re reading
Every week we share emails with our team members about news and events. Instead of keeping this to ourselves, we’re sharing them with you, too.
Papers and Reports
- White Paper: New York Times Schools for Tomorrow: Less of a typical white paper than a summary of session themes, this is nonetheless useful as such. Like the conference itself, attended by Kat Rosqueta and Kate Hovde, it is good on high-level observations and themes, but the overall guidance is unlikely to offer much specific help to the typical donor, principal or school district in making technology-related investment decisions. In some cases, individual speakers probably could offer much more specific guidance than the conference format allowed for, so for donors interested in this area, a scan of session speakers and remarks may provide good ideas for followup.
- Guidestar/Hope Consulting—Money for Good II: A continuation of the Money for Good project with findings on the influence of research and shifts in charitable donations among individual donors. Kat Rosqueta served on the advisory council for this project. Several findings from the report confirmed findings from our earlier I’m Not Rockefeller analysis, such as latent philanthropic capital and links to donor confidence, highly sought but hard to find information related to impact/nonprofit effectiveness, and donor “stickiness” to the nonprofits they already support.
- Bellwether report—Encouraging Social Innovation Through Capital: Using Technology to Address Barriers: This paper is a great companion piece to the Money for Good II study, and echoes many of the same themes: the potential to unleash more philanthropic capital if donors were more confident about the impact they were achieving, the limitations of current technologically-based platforms for giving, and the need to make content and impact information more accessible. The paper is also thought-provoking in reflecting on the relative roles of philanthropic and private sector investment in education. Look for a couple of nice cites to the Center on pgs. 9, 10, and 21!
- WHO: World Malaria Report 2011: The World Health Organization has released the latest figures on decreasing malaria mortality rates. If you are a donor wishing to make an impact in this area, check out our guidance on entry points and strategies, highlighted in Lifting the Burden of Malaria.
Video
- Hungry Kate: The Girl With A Belly Ache: This video, developed by the food bank in Akron-Canton, Ohio, came to us from John Arnold, former executive director of Feeding America West Michigan and co-author of the “Let’s Can the Food Drives” op-ed in the LA Times. He noted, “It is a very sweet, crisp, clear, and compelling portrayal of what food banking is and does, and why what it does is so important to so many people.”
If you haven’t already, read all the buzz about “Canning” Food Drives.
