Author Archive:
Lucy Bernholz
The business of the business of good
Michael Porter, the Harvard business school guru, defined how industries work in his book on competitive strategy. He drew out the relationships between competitive enterprises and their supply chains, infrastructure, distribution channels, and advocacy organizations. …
Philanthropy as infrastructure?
This is a bad idea. As a society, we should not encourage the replacement of public responsibilities by private philanthropy. Philanthropy is fickle, it’s too small and fragmented, and it’s under the control of a …
Almost everything you ever wanted to know about Impact Investing
The best teachers are those who understand their subjects so thoroughly they can focus on the learners, not on the material. When it comes to the topics of impact investing and blended value, Antony Bugg-Levine …
Stories and data in our times
Lately I’ve been thinking about how massive databases might change how we think about ‘anecdotal’ evidence. You know the old trope, ‘The plural of anecdote is not data’. But maybe it could become so. With …
Failing forward
Thomas Edison is supposed to have said ‘I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 things that don’t work’. Failure of this form is a popular topic of conversation among philanthropists these days. It fits in with their interests …
Advisers’ perspectives – Missing – the power of peer networks
Alliance’s September 2010 issue on philanthropy advisers lays out the case for the formalization and growth of the services they offer. Articles by Melissa Berman, Felicitas von Peter and Olga Alexeeva tell of new structures …
Disrupting philanthropy
Data are the new platform for change. Sharing information – publicly, online and structured in such a way that outsiders can access what they want and use it how they need – is proving to …
Reporting from the Global Philanthropy Forum: Considering assumptions
I had a chance to meet some of the folks from Sana, one of the award winners of the Vodafone Wireless Innovation Challenge that were announced yesterday at the Global Philanthropy Forum. Sana, formerly known …
Reporting from the Global Philanthropy Forum: Considering assumptions
I had a chance to meet some of the folks from Sana, one of the award winners of the Vodafone Wireless Innovation Challenge that were announced yesterday at the Global Philanthropy Forum. Sana, formerly known …
Back to the future
One of the best (and worst) parts of making educated guesses about the future is being called to answer for your predictions. In December 2007, I made five predictions for philanthropy in 2008. How did …
