Mar 25, 2009

Boldness and Social Return

Mar 24, 2009

More Insight On the Financial Lives of the Poor

Our conception of the problem with financial services for the poor remains stubbornly wrong. The problem is not a lack of access to financial services, but a lack of access to high-quality (from the client’s perspective), low cost financial services. Data is a helpful tonic, helping us understand the real context the poor live in and hopefully design programs accordingly.

Mar 23, 2009

Informal Economies and What they Can (and Can’t) Do for the Poor

Mar 20, 2009

AIDS Prevention Doesn’t Increase High-Risk Behavior

Mar 18, 2009

Should donations to foreign charities be tax deductible?

Gary Becker and Richard Posner extend the debate about tax deductions enjoyed by donors to the funds given to international charities.

Mar 12, 2009

Education Focus Blurs Lines for Philanthropy

The promise of significant public investment for education from the Obama administration should stimulate discussion and consideration of where philanthropic dollars can best be leveraged to complement, or reduce the damage from, government investments.

Mar 06, 2009

Stimulus Funding for Effectiveness Research Worth Following

One part of the Obama administration’s proposed budget provides an example worth following for private philanthropy—investing in effectiveness research. Questions abound in nearly every social area, from education to health to economic development. Behavioral economics is also at work on donors and funders as they make choices about what to invest in. The impulse—as with that cookie—is to earmark money directly for recipients, because the gain seems immediate. But absent any evidence that programs work, it is a false gain. Instead, we should remember to support the research projects that can tell us for sure whether the gain is sustaining or not, and be willing to act on the evidence, even if we don’t like it.

Mar 04, 2009

An Era of Either/Or Choices

One of the results of the global recession will be a new era in philanthropy. The last decade has been marked by philanthropic abundance. The number of foundations and foundation endowments grew rapidly. Flush with cash, many donors were able to avoid difficult choices—they had the means to fund lots of organizations and lots of different approaches to the issues they cared about.
Clearly, the era of abundance is over. With diminished resources donors will have to choose what causes matter most to them and what approaches and organizations they truly believe in. Put another way, donors are now faced with either/or choices rather than both/and options.