Last year’s Council on Foundations Annual Meeting was held before the Occupy Wall Street movement highlighted the role and power of corporate America in this nation’s wealth divide. Even then, according to Chris Pinney of the Aspen Institute, one of the researchers behind the new Council report on…

Each one of us has 86,400 seconds per day to live, work, love, play and/or fritter away. Indeed time is the nonrenewable resource. Threaded through the last weeks, I have reached out to colleagues in the foundation sector to be sure that my time at the Council of Foundations Annual Conference is…

The Council on Foundations Annual Conference brings together grantmakers from all over the world to learn from each other and discuss best practices and critical issues in philanthropy. There is something for everyone at this conference, and the energy of all of us together is powerful and…

Especially in our current funding climate, partnership and authentic engagement with those we seek to serve is critical to ensuring that limited philanthropic resources are invested wisely and deliver the greatest possible impact for those most in need. The success of Foundation for Louisiana’s…

For the past two decades, the James A. Joseph Lecture has been one of the intellectual high points of the Council on Foundations Annual Conference. The list of past lecturers at this Association of Black Foundation Executives event helps make the case, not just Ambassador Joseph delivering the…

During the second panel I attended, I really liked the New Field Foundation’s approach to grantmaking and their utilization of local advisers. It is very sensitive to every aspect of their work and the impact it has on all stakeholders. Bravo.  Interestingly, one of the other grantmakers on…

I attended a great panel this morning. It was called “The Future of Philanthropy and Development in the Pursuit of the Human Well-Being: An Update on the Bellagio Initiative.” The presenters were Asif Saleh, director of the BRAC Centre; Fabrice Serfati, managing director and CFO of IGNIA;…

Conferences were a way of life in a previous career. The land of higher education was a vast and strange continent, but as a seasoned and wise elder I could pass seamlessly among the inhabitants. Academics who would barely speak to colleagues in their ivy-covered ivory towers turned into animated…

Don’t get me wrong: I love Madonna. Really, I do. But for a while there, anytime I searched the topic of global philanthropy, the only news that surfaced focused on Madonna and her effort to build a number of schools in Malawi. I’m not saying it’s not important or that she’s not doing great work,…

Co-Author: Jesse Wrenn In mid-March, following the news that Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a warlord from the DRC, had been convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC), activists lauded the long-awaited verdict, calling on the ICC and the Congolese government to implement the…

There’s an African proverb that says “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” That’s true in life and true in philanthropy. Grantmakers are dedicated to working with nonprofits and community organizations to address the toughest challenges. There’s no doubt that the…

Wayne Gretzky famously said that a great hockey player skates to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. These are instructive words for philanthropic foundations and other groups confronting fundamental and rapid shifts in the communication landscape. Two disruptive forces are…

“What’s past is prologue.” –Shakespeare “History is more or less bunk.” –Henry Ford Sunday’s Opening Plenary Session at the Council on Foundations Annual Conference in Los Angeles explores the “realization, rethinking, and reinvention” of: (1) the 20th anniversary of the L.A. riots, (2) Hurricane…

Did you know illnesses resulting from water contamination are the leading cause of human sickness and death worldwide? In just the past decade, more children have died due to a lack of access to safe drinking water than all the people who have died in battle since World War II. Even when safe…

Recently I was sitting in Manhattan with four extraordinary women. Down the table from me was Jennifer Buffet, president and cochair of the NoVo Foundation; Catherine B. Reynolds, chair and CEO of the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation; Josefina Vázquez, executive director of the…

The Council on Foundations (COF) recently released the 2011 Grantmakers Salary and Benefits Report. The sample includes 910 total foundations of which 544 are COF members. As Rick Cohen notes on his piece about the survey, the survey suffers from the limitations of self-reporting, as do most all of…