With a new year comes change, whether you like it or not. And 2018 starts with a tremendous change: Gabriela Fitz will no longer be the Director of Knowledge Management Initiatives at Foundation Center. I know: what?

It’s a change that hits me, the Director of Knowledge Management Systems, particularly hard. Gabi and I have been on this journey we call IssueLab for 12 years. …

Foundations have a lot of reasons to share knowledge. They produce knowledge themselves. They hire others to research and author works that help with internal strategy development and evaluation of internal strategies, programs, and projects. And they make grants that assist others in gaining insight into social issues — be it through original research, evaluation work, or other work aimed at creating a better understanding of issues so that we can all pursue better solutions to social problems. In almost all aspects of foundation work, knowledge is an outcome.

While openly sharing this knowledge is uneven across the social sector…

The nonprofit sector has a long history of partnering with researchers and academic institutions to uncover evidence about social issues through research and reporting. In addition, evaluators measure the success of the sector’s programs and initiatives and record outcomes and lessons learned. All of this thoughtful work is meant to inspire innovation in the social space, informing the sector’s strategies and moving forward with evidence.

IssueLab is an open access repository with close to 23,000 resources produced by nonprofits, foundations, and academic research centers. Everything IssueLab collects is freely and openly available. …

For the 10th anniversary of International Open Access Week, the event organizers have challenged all of us open access cheerleaders to complete this sentence: “Open in order to….”

No problem! How much time do you have?

I know… Extra time doesn’t exist anymore. And that’s why we are going to fill in the blank with pictures (and a modicum of words) so you get why IssueLab, one of the largest repositories for social sector research is open, at a glance .

IssueLab is open in order to enable free access to the full text of the social sector research we…

One of the key roles the nonprofit sector plays in civil society is providing evidence about social problems and their solutions. Given recent changes to policies regarding the sharing of knowledge and evidence by federal agencies, that function is more critical than ever.

Nonprofits deliver more than direct services such as running food banks or providing shelter to people who are homeless. They also collect and share data, evidence, and lessons learned so as to help us understand complex and difficult problems.

Those efforts not only serve to illuminate and benchmark our most pressing social problems, they also inform the…

Again and again the data show that people of color in the U.S. are being disproportionately, and systematically, stopped, frisked, arrested, and exposed to the use of force by police.

Across the country, police departments and communities are struggling with these realities and with what has become a glaring divide in how Americans experience and relate to policing.

This new collection from IssueLab includes research from nonprofits, foundations, and university based research centers across the U.S., who are taking a closer look at evidence about racial bias in stop and frisk policies, traffic stops, and the use of force, as…

I have lived in a number of US cities including Chicago, where I’ve lived and worked for close to 20 years now. But my home is San Francisco, the city where I was born and raised. As a latch-key kid in the 70s, growing up at the intersection of Grove and Clayton streets meant USF, The Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, and all the streets in between and around those landmarks were my neighborhood haunts.

I get back to The City at least once a year, and I am always thrilled as the plane makes its way over the foothills on…

Freshwater is one of our most precious and valuable resources. And yet, across the globe, water supplies are often not dependable or simply insufficient to meet human and ecosystem needs, water quality is often poor, and climate change threatens to exacerbate existing challenges. One approach to reducing pressure on water resources is the use of incentive-based instruments, which employ financial means or regulatory relief to motivate people to better manage both the quantity and quality of freshwater.

But what do we know about how these instruments have performed to date?

A recently released synthesis report, interactive tool, and digital collection…