What an eight-page treatise in a 1967 academic journal can teach us community engagement — We spoke a few months ago with a grantmaking consultant who wished to remain anonymous. We’ll call him Joshua. After graduating with honors from an Ivy League college, he joined a major consulting firm that followed the model of market-based philanthropy popularized by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter in…

Three models for shifting decision-making to communities and entrepreneurs — Reprinted from the Beeck Center • By Ben Wrobel and Meg Massey Getting to a 100% mission-aligned portfolio is the holy grail for most impact investors. The Heron Foundation set that ambitious goal in 1996, and spent twenty years getting there. …

Americans don’t like kings. So why are we OK with this? — The first few seconds of Drake’s music video for “God’s Plan” tell you that they originally had a budget of nearly a million dollars, but they decided to give it all away. Over the next few minutes, Drake and his friends do a bunch of good deeds: they pay for…

Nathan J. Robinson is a gift to our country — Every time I read an article in the leftist/socialist/independent magazine Current Affairs by Nathan J. Robinson, I want to jump with joy and scream to the world that this man is the truth. He is the real deal. I just read another piece by him, “A Bit More Magic Disappears…

The ability to turn a great idea into a business should not be tied to your zip code. — The story goes like this: an investor and an entrepreneur, both natives of St. Louis, meet on the same plane headed to Silicon Valley. The investor is on his way to meet with companies who can fill his portfolio; the entrepreneur has set up exploratory meetings with venture capitalists in…

And the SUPER BAFFLING problem of how to promote smart journalism on social media — On Friday night the online magazine Slate posted the following status on its Facebook page: This is what a 4.4 million snow leopard ancestor, the oldest big cat on record, looked like: http://slate.me/1eVaLgc The teaser linked to a short video about an unearthed fossil that gives us some idea of…