Author Archive:
David Bonbright
Who counts?
The interplay between the articles in the March issue was particularly interesting. I think, for example, that Matthew Bishop genuinely misunderstands Bruce Sievers’ main point. I strongly suspect that Sievers did not mean to imply …
Center for Effective Philanthropy Conference
As one would expect from an event organized by a relatively young and high-impact initiative to enhance foundation effectiveness, the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s biennial conference in Chicago in early March was a case study …
The Foundation: A Great American Secret: How private wealth is changing the world – Joel L Fleishman
Once in a rare while a book comes along that captures its place and time. I believe that Joel Fleishman has given us such a book. The time is of course now and the ‘place’ …
Paradigm Found: Leading and managing for positive change – Anne Firth Murray
I take away three things from Anne Firth Murray’s personal history of the Global Fund for Women that I suspect will last the test of years. The first is a specific set of principles and …
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good – William Easterly
In this extraordinary book, former World Bank senior research economist Bill Easterly goes to the heart of aid and finds it deeply flawed. Building his case systematically from hundreds of empirical studies and painstaking analysis …
Creating the perfect store: first international meeting of social change markets
Imagine this future: you want to donate a small amount of money to an organization that is making a real difference in a poor community, which might be anywhere in the world. Through a simple …
Not learning from beneficiaries
At the risk of being contradicted by other articles on this issue’s theme, I want to highlight one critically important way that donors are not learning – from the intended beneficiaries of the work that …
Measuring social justice philanthropy – The metrics are the method
I want to look at a technique for measuring social justice philanthropy, not attempt a definition of it. Nevertheless, I would like to set down two reference points: St Augustine’s ‘Justice is that virtue that …
Will government step up?
Many thanks for Caroline Hartnell’s concise and issue-oriented thumbnail sketch of the Philippine Council for NGO Certification (PCNC) in the December issue of Alliance. I share her (implicit) sense of the wider significance of the …
What we take for granted – a sorry tale
It could be a New Yorker cartoon. Three colleagues at the water cooler, two with glazed stares while the speaker asks, animatedly, ‘So what do you think about the state of civil society infrastructure?’ I …
