Friday Rewind

The Friday Rewind offers a snapshot of PhilanthroNews —  that means news stories, articles, events of note, or information updates — from around our network and throughout the broad world of philanthropy. Whether you take a quick skim of the material or a deep dive through each item we hope to help inform your work and inspire your thinking.

1.  This report from Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy examines how entry and mid-level foundation staff see their futures, institutions, and field. This insight into experiences at work, and how staff view the alignment of their foundation’s mission and practices can give a better understanding of the health of the philanthropic sector and support important conversations. Read the report here
2. The Center for Effective Philanthropy examines how successful social change, due to its inability to be consistently and successfully replicated in models across the world, could technically be considered more complex than rocket science. This realization means that funders need to realize the inherent experimentation involved with achieving social outcomes, as they focus on the crucial issue, “how do we make the lives of our grantees easier so that we spend more time achieving the things that matter?”
3. Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) recently released a “Culture Resource Guide,” which seeks to assist grantmakers in identifying, discussing, and improving organizational culture. This guide gives an overview of the importance for strong organizational culture and its necessity in order to support effective philanthropy, and also supplies resources to foster this type of culture.
4. Impact investing has been shown to be increasingly popular among millennials, as a recent report from American Century Investments has found. Although return on investment still remains a much higher incentive than community impact, the increasing tendency to search for meaningful investment opportunities is an encouraging trend.
5. The Johnson Center podcast, Field Notes in Philanthropy, discusses how the rollback of regulations that secured Net Neturality can affect nonprofits. “These changes could pave the way for a new, highly manipulated user experience: movements, media reports, resources, and more that ISPs — or their investors — don’t like, or that don’t make them any money, could end up on the other side of a slow connection. What could this mean for nonprofits — and for the communities they serve?”

Friday Rewind is published each Friday by NY Funders Alliance staff. To submit a story for the Friday Rewind, please email programs@nyfunders.org.