Nonprofit Literature Blog

Blueprint 2015: Annual Forecast for Philanthropy

What buzzwords will take off in the social sector in 2015? What exactly is an Artivist? Lucy Bernholz answers these and other questions in Philanthropy and the Social Sector: Blueprint 2015 which was recently released on Foundation Center's GrantCraft site.

In this year's edition, Bernholz looks at the "structure of the social economy in the context of pervasive digitization." Here are just a few things that caught my eye.

Nonprofits vs. Individuals

One interesting development she traces in "Big Ideas That Matter for 2015" is how nonprofits are being challenged by individuals in regards to fundraising for causes, especially via social networks. Fundraising campaigns are now being driven by individuals (e.g. the immensely popular Ice Bucket Challenge) and no longer completely dominated by charities. Even a virtual "land grab" attempt by the ALS Association to trademark the phrase "Ice Bucket Challenge" ended up being widely disparaged by the digital community, which seems to indicate an overall trend that "online supporters may well be more allied with a cause than with an organization."

Predictions & Wildcards

It's fun trying to predict the future, and Bernholz uses her extensive knowledge of the sector to peer ahead. Here are some foundation-related predictions that could impact grantseekers in 2015 and beyond:

• The fossil fuel divestment movement among foundations will get a lot of attention but not a lot of members.
• Large U.S. foundations will develop a suite of intellectual property options for their grantees and program-related investments.
• Foundations will be asked to bail out another city facing bankruptcy. They will refuse.
• Foundations and nonprofits will start hiring data scientists.
• Impact investing as a practice will gain regular coverage in mainstream business and finance media.

She also throws in a few wildcards. For example, she feels that the U.S. Congress will place new requirements on donor-advised funds, and that amounts raised via crowdfunding platforms will finally be included in global measures of charitable giving.

Buzzwords & The Future

Giving Days are finally getting their due, in large part because of the huge success of #GivingTuesday. So are Artivists, who are using art for protest and to get things done.  There's even a book of artivist case studies! Take a look the Buzzword Watch section to read up wearables, Internet of Things, and smart cities, among others.

Looking to the future, Bernholz sheds light on other important developments, including the intersection of political funding and charitable giving, noting that contributions to politically active nonprofits (where donor disclosure is not required) have now passed the amount of funding flowing through PACs, where donors are disclosed.  This could have major consequences on charitable giving as a whole, and could conceivably end the era of anonymous giving. She also discusses three potential big-picture scenarios for civil society (cohabitation, cross-fertilization, and antagonism) and how they may play out over the coming decades.

--Rob Bruno
Foundation Center-New York

Leveraging the New Philanthropy

Lester Salamon is a pioneer of the study of the nonprofit sector in the U.S., and his book America's Nonprofit Sector: A Primer (Foundation Center, 2012) is standard reading in many college classes. In Leverage for Good: An Introduction to the New Frontiers of Philanthropy and Social Investment (Oxford University Press, 2014) his goal is to "provide a clear and accessible road map to the full range of important new developments taking place on the frontiers of philanthropy and social investment ... and make it possible to maximize the benefits they can generate." Knowing the map can help social/environmental groups leverage these new philanthropic resources, beyond the limited flow of charitable income from foundations and individuals.

He divides this frontier into two major regions: new actors and new tools. These include social impact investment institutions, new grantmaker types, and for-profit financial instruments that are being adapted to social investments.

New Actors

Salamon divides up the primary actors into three categories: investment institutions, investor supporters, and new types of grantmakers. One type of investment institution is the social impact capital aggregator, a crucial and fast growing type of organization that "assembles capital for ultimate investment in social-purpose organizations." 

The Acumen Fund is an example of a nonprofit capital aggregator that supports social entrepreneurs who "provide critical resources at affordable prices to people earning less than four dollars a day." This fund appeals to investors with a low-risk, impact-first orientation. You can identify these types of funders using the descriptor phrase "venture philanthropy fund" in Foundation Directory Online Professional.

Helping these aggregators are investor supporters, or middlemen. For example, enterprise brokers assist capital aggregators in identifying promising social ventures that meet a desired combination of financial and social returns.

New types of grantmakers discussed include conversion foundations, which are formed out of the process of privatizing public assets (see my older post on Health Conversion Foundations), and funding collaboratives such as giving circles.

New Tools

Chapter Three discusses the tools used to make such philanthropic investments possible. These are not necessarily new to the world, but are new in that they are being used for philanthropy and social investment, in addition to their conventional use in business finance. Loans, fixed-income securities, equity, and bonds are typical examples. Since these are common instruments I will not go into detail about each, but perhaps the key takeaway from this section is that the social sector now has access to funding generated by new, powerful financial mechanisms that were previously limited to the for-profit sector.

Why is This Happening Now?

There are a variety of factors that have created a "perfect storm" that is pushing philanthropy in this new direction. Population growth, income inequality, water shortages, climate change, terrorism, failed states, and other related social/environmental problems have reached a point where they cannot be ignored. Couple this with tapped out charitable/governmental resources, and a rise in social entrepreneurs seeking capital to help solve these issues, and you have created a new space for the inventive, unconventional philanthropy as outlined in this volume.

A New Frontier

The book's final sections include cautionary words about potential obstacles to growth (measuring social impact is one sticking point, "hype" surrounding social impact investing another), as well as recommendations to encourage this type of philanthropy well into the future.

Salamon ends with a quote from Caritas in Veritate, the last encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI, which acknowledged that "the traditionally valid distinction between profit-based companies and non-profit organizations can no longer do full justice to reality, or offer practical direction for the future." Leverage for Good provides a much-needed introduction to the intersection of profit and social good within a new, exciting frontier of philanthropy.

--Rob Bruno
Catalog/Reference Librarian
Foundation Center--New York

Philanthropy, Big Data, and Politics

The Summer 2014 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review features three informative and engaging articles of importance to the social sector. The first examines a new model of philanthropy that stresses "emergent strategy" to address large scale social problems, the second asks why the social sector lags behind business in its use of big data (and how to fix that), and the third describes philanthropy in the context of modern partisan politics.

Below are the Catalog of Nonprofit Literature's abstracts for each, with a link to full-text. You can read current and back issues of the Stanford Social Innovation Review at any of our libraries.

"Strategic philanthropy for a complex world" by John V. Kania, Mark Kramer, and Patty Russell. p. 26-37. The authors discuss why foundations need to shift from the outcome-based model of philanthropy to an emergent model that focuses on social change. This emergent strategy gives rise to constantly evolving solutions to real-time problems. Also includes ways foundations can adapt their organizational framework, leadership, and culture to this new model, and includes responses from five leaders in the field of philanthropy in an "Up for Debate" feature.

"Big data for social innovation" by Kevin C. Desouza and Kendra L. Smith. p. 39-43. This article discusses how big data is used effectively by scientific and business communities, and the nonprofit sector's lag in using data to tackle social problems. It outlines major barriers to creating and using big data, as well as the four steps the social sector needs to take in order to increase the use of data in social change projects and platforms.

"Philanthropy in a time of polarization" by Steven Teles, Heather Hurlburt, and Mark Schmitt.
p. 44-9 Discusses the high degree of partisanship in American politics, and approaches that foundations and nonprofits can use to rise above it. The authors feel that the philanthropic sector needs to accept and adapt to this political environment by leveraging as much cultural and political capital as it can, and forging new coalitions within shared issue areas.

--Rob Bruno
Foundation Center, New York

Philanthropy's Impact on Scaling Social Solutions

How do grantmakers support scaling solutions to urgent social issues? What are the latest conversations about scale and impact in the social sector?

"Smarter Philanthropy For Greater Impact: Rethinking How Grantmakers Support Scale", a special supplement to the Spring 2014 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, helps answer these questions. Created for Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) this 23 page document takes a look back GEO's Scaling What Works initiative, and seeks to capture the latest thinking about how nonprofits, foundations, public funders, and social entrepreneurs can increase the impact of solutions to social challenges.

The report is made up of 11 articles written by thought leaders in the field. Below I've summarized each paper, and provided a key takeaway if available. Note that you can also read the print version of the report at any of the five main Foundation Center libraries.

• "What Would It Take?" by Kathleen P. Enright, president and CEO of GEO. Enright provides an overview of the findings from the Scaling What Works initiative. She outlines four fundamental grantmaker practices needed to foster impact: providing flexible funding over the long term,  funding data and performance management abilities, investing in leadership and capacity building, and supporting movements as well as organizations.
  
  
• "Emerging Pathways to Transformative Scale" by Jeffrey Bradach and Abe Grindle of the Bridgespan Group. By reviewing the efforts of YearUp, a nonprofit that offers job training to disadvantaged urban youth, the authors identify nine approaches that can be utilized by emerging nonprofits tackling major social problems.  Among these are unbundling and scaling up programs that have the greatest impact, using technology to reach larger audiences, and implementing effective for-profit models.
  
  
• "Pathways to Scale for a Place-Based Funder" by Katie Merrow, vice president of programs at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. Merrow discusses the importance for funders to provide long-term investments to strengthen grantees, especially in rural areas. Long-term support allows grantees to put in place the needed infrastructure to scale up impact.
  
  
• "The Road to Scale Runs Through Public Systems" by Patrick T. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Using the example of his foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, McCarthy tells us that in order to reach a scalable solution that provides a "meaningful, measurable result for a specific population" program replication is not enough; scaling has a better chance to succeed (and last) if it takes advantage of existing public systems.
  
  
• "From Innovation to Results" a conversation with Michael Smith, director of the Social Innovation Fund. Smith discusses how his government-led program strikes a proper balance between focusing on proven concepts, and finding "hidden-gem" solutions that may not get the attention they deserve.
  
  
• "Perspectives on the Social Innovation Fund" a conversation with Carla Javits, president and CEO of REDF. REDF is a grantmaking intermediary with the Social Innovation Fund and focuses on job creation in California. One nice takeaway is Javits' discussion on what it takes to build a good relationship between a private grantmaker and the government (public-private partnerships).
  
  
• "Partners in Impact" by Daniel Cardinali, president of Communities In Schools. Cardinali focuses on the importance of good relationships with funders, stating that it was vital to the success of his nonprofit, which started as a small entrepreneurial organization seeking to solve the drop out crisis and grew to a national group serving 1.25 million young people a year.
  
  
• "We Need More Scale, Not More Innovation" by Dr. Robert K. Ross, president and CEO of the California Endowment. Ross argues that foundations committed to social change need to focus on funding advocacy and organizing, and less on the search for new ideas. "The greatest impediment to solving urgent social problems is not lack of innovation" he states "but the inability to scale up solutions that we know work."
  
  
• "More Resources, More Co-Investors, More Impact" by Nancy Roob, president and CEO of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. Roob explains how her foundation's "growth capital aggregation" strategy is used to work with co-investors to provide capital and resources to organizations that have demonstrated strong evidence of success.
  
  
• "In Collaboration, Actions Speak Louder Than Words" by Jane Wei-Skillern, lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Wei-Skillern argues that in order to foster strong collaborations, foundations and nonprofits need to "change the way they work ... by putting the interests of a collaborative or network ... ahead of their individual organizations." Network leaders need to do three things: advance the overall mission, build relationships based on trust, and let go of control.
  
  
• "Leveraging a Movement Moment" by Lori Bartczak, vice president of programs at GEO.
  The concluding article outlines the five different roles of a grantmaker in supporting movements for advancing social change. Bartczak also tells us that foundations need to have patience, since these things take time. She quotes Linda Wood of the Haas, Jr. Fund who states "progress ...involves exhilarating highs and crushing setbacks. As funders, we have to have the fortitude to hang in there, because the end goal of a more just and sustainable society is so important."

 --Rob Bruno
Catalog/Reference Librarian
Foundation Center, New York

Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2014

Released last week, Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2014 is the latest annual forecast of the philanthropy industry. Philanthropy wonk Lucy Bernholz (@p2173), writes on a wide range of topics, including European vs. American philanthropy, digital civil society, key buzzwords of 2013, and predictions for next year. 

Europe vs. America

In "Expanding My Horizons" Bernholz examines the social economy of Europe and what distinguishes it from the U.S. One thing she points out is that the European social economy puts more of an "emphasis on values and governance practices, not on sectors." She also tells us that the category of social welfare organizations ("political nonprofits", or 501(c)(4s)) most clearly differentiate the two economies, and she even boldly predicts in her 2014 Wildcards that these will be split out of the 501(c) tax code and be subject solely to Federal Elections Commission regulation.

How Will the Social Economy Evolve to Meet the Needs of the Digital Civil Society?

Bernholz argues that the frame of the social economy more effectively "captures the full set of options for both donors and doers (entrepreneurs and organization execs)" than our traditional lens of nonprofits and philanthropy. A key part of this economy is the adoption of digital practices that "has the potential to change its root structures." 

She points out some independent efforts of digital evolution within the sector, including the Foundation Center's own new Foundation Directory Online Free search tool which provides full-text searching of IRS Form 990-PFs for nearly 90,000 foundations, as well as its partnership with Guidestar.  In the end, though, she tells us that we are all involved: "each time [we] take civil action with digital tools — texting donations, sharing videos, snapping and sharing photos of protests or movements — we invent digital civil society."

"Privacy" is This Year's Top Social Economy Buzzword

Privacy. Bernholz tell us that "Edward Snowden put it on the front pages...and our pervasive reliance on digital communications makes us all vulnerable." Other top buzzwords of 2013 include "Peer-to-Peer Services", another word for the sharing economy, "Makers" or the newfound interest in old-fashioned handmade goods, and "Bitcoin" the virtual currency popular with financial speculators and some nonprofits.

Could a Major Crowdfunding Scandal in 2014 Make Us Rethink Online Fundraising Platforms?

What will next year bring? Here are some of her predictions and wildcards for 2014:

• At least one major nonprofit/foundation infrastructure organization will close up.
• We will experience a major scandal in the crowdfunding marketplace.
• One winner of the Gates Foundation's Data Interoperability Grand Challenge will launch a widely used new product or service for social sector data by December 2014.
• New mobile money tools will make informal networks of people even more visible, viable, and important.
• Github will become a widely used, meaningful sharing platform for nonprofits.
• Americans and Europeans will make greater use of "personal privacy" protection services on the Internet, allowing them to control/own their own data.
• U.S. foundations will launch several new initiatives rooted in concerns about the polarized and paralyzed state of American democracy.

Wildcards (or, "Predictable Unpredictables")

• The American system will split social welfare organizations out of the nonprofit, 501(c) tax code.
• Proposals for moving oversight of American nonprofits out of the IRS and creating a new charities regulatory authority will come to pass.
• Benefit corporations and nonprofits will be on opposite sides of policy battles about tax privileges.
• A major natural disaster will set new fundraising records, begging the question "as these disasters become more predictable, will philanthropic responses change?"

Bernholz also examines her previous forecasts, acknowledging some that were right (the mainstreaming of crowdfunding) and some wrong (that the Affordable Care Act will lead to new community solutions). Finally, in "Glimpses of the Future" she examines the growth of "civic tech" movement where citizen techies are volunteering to improve city functions, and the "emerging ethics of data" that includes hypothetical scenarios which force us to think of the implications of data used for good that could possibly hurt or compromise the privacy of the very individuals it helps.

You may also want to read Bernholz's own highlight reel of Blueprint 2014 that was recently published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

--Rob Bruno
Foundation Center
New York, NY

Ten Books in 2013 You May Have Missed

Below is a selection of books published this year available at all five Foundation Center Libraries, listed by subject.  

To generate your own list (including reports, articles, and other items) use the Advanced Search feature in the Catalog of Nonprofit Literature, and put "2013" in the date range, along with any keywords or subjects that interest you. 

For a feed of recent items, you may want to bookmark our new acquisitions page.

Fundraising

The Charity Event Planning Guide: Having Fun While Raising Funds by David Mirisch and Godfrey Harris.
This practical guide for planning fundraising events is intended for nonprofits of any size. It includes a listing of event activities, planning calendars, sponsorship advice, sample budgets, event checklists, contingency considerations. The authors also discusses special event goals and evaluation. Call number: 760 MIR

Winning Grants Step By Step: The Complete Workbook for Planning, Developing, and Writing Successful Proposals, 4th ed. by Tori O'Neal-McElrath.
This book contains instructions to help with proposal development for foundation and corporate funding. It covers idea development, writing problem statements, defining goals and objectives, preparing the evaluation component, budgeting, writing the summary, and sustaining funder relationships. The author also provides a number of sample proposal documents and worksheets. Call number: 770 CAR 2013

Marketing/Communications

Content Marketing for Nonprofits: a Communications Map for Engaging Your Community, Becoming a Favorite Cause, and Raising More Money by Kivi Leroux Miller.
The author explains how to design and implement a content marketing strategy. The final section covers multichannel marketing and describes how to use websites, blogs, email, newsletters, social media, and mobile devices to attract and retain supporters. Call number:  680 LER CON

Social Change Anytime, Everywhere: How to Implement Online Multichannel Strategies to Spark Advocacy, Raise Money, and Engage Your Community by Allyson Kapin and Amy Sample Ward.
This guidebook is intended for nonprofit communications, marketing, fundraising, and social media staff who would like to integrate mobile and social media into their efforts. It provides an overview of multichannel technology, explains how to plan and implement strategies and campaign ideas, and offers three case studies to illustrate concepts. Call number: 676 KAP

Nonprofit Management

Do Good Well: Your Guide to Leadership, Action, and Social Innovation by Nina Vasan and Jennifer Przybylo.
The authors provide a practical methodology on turning socially innovative visions into reality. They discuss how to create, fund, and market social action programs; explain how to develop meaningful relationships with like-minded endeavors; and outline what is required to sustain success. Call number: 604 VAS

Non-Profit Turnaround: How to Rescue a Failing Organization by Craig Copland.
This book explains how to turnaround a struggling nonprofit, and making it successful and effective once again by following these five steps: changing thinking, figuring out what went wrong, cutting costs, generating immediate cash, and fixing things to start growing again. Also describes various fundraising techniques. Call Number: 604 COP

Practical Project Management for Agile Nonprofits: Approaches and Templates to Help You Manage With Limited Resources by Karen R. J. White.
This book provides project management tactics for nonprofits that have been proven effective in the for-profit sector, especially in achieving key business objectives. Sections cover best practices, using technology, managing volunteers, and the board's role. Call number: 604 WHI

Philanthropy

Global Fundraising: How the World is Changing the Rules of Philanthropy by Penelope Cagney and Bernard Ross.
This book examines recent developments, trends, and histories of institutional and individual giving in China, Japan, Latin America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It also looks at major donors, the impact of social media on global fundraising, and "charity giants" that have large international operations. Call number: 340 CAG (I also discussed this book in a previous post)

Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What It Means for Our Economic Well-Being by Zoltán J. Ács.
This book takes an in-depth look at American philanthropy as a force in capitalism, looks at its influence on the free-market system, and shows how it could serve as a model for the reinvestment of wealth in other countries. The author also argues that philanthropy achieves three critical outcomes: it deals with the question of what to do with wealth, complements government in creating public goods, and has a positive effect on economic growth and productivity.  Call number: 400 ACS

Social Enterprise

The Solution Revolution: How Business, Government, and Social Enterprises are Teaming Up to Solve Society’s Toughest Problems by William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan.
The authors outline the new "solution economy," which is being fueled by socially-conscious business models, disruptive technologies, and "wavemakers" that are changing conventional practices. They explain how all these pieces come together through problem-solving ecosystems, and offer six strategies that can be used to join this movement. Call number: 733 EGG

--Rob Bruno
Catalog/Reference Librarian
Foundation Center
New York, NY

Philanthropy Blueprint for 2013

Spring is right around the corner, but it's not too late to share Lucy Bernholz's look back at 2012 and her predictions for 2013 in Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2013 which is now published by GrantCraft. This year, she uses the term "social economy" to call more attention to the landscape shift she introduced a few years ago. In this post I'll highlight her takes on developments in data sharing last year (where the Foundation Center played a key role) and list a few of her predictions for the coming year.

A Look Back at Big Data

In the section Foundations Go Big on Data Bernholz tells us that more than a dozen meaningful efforts at sharing philanthropic data took flight in 2012. Three of them involved the Foundation Center. The first was the Reporting Commitment, which is a commitment by 15 of the nation's largest foundations to open up, or share, their commonly-coded grants. She calls this a "breakthrough in gathering grants data."

The second is the Center's relaunch of IssueLab, which uses Creative Commons licensing to organize and share research funded and conducted by foundations and nonprofits.

Lastly, she notes that the Foundation Center is among many other major data providers (including GuideStar, MicroEdge, TechSoupGlobal, and the World Bank Institute) that are collaborating to link and connect their data so donors and doers can make better sense of philanthropic opportunities.

Predictions for 2013

What will this year bring? Here are five predictions (from a total of 12) for 2013. In particular, Bernholz thinks that 2013 will see state legislatures and courts play key roles on nonprofit disclosure, social businesses and taxes. 

• Congress will change the rules on tax deductions: this will happen in the first half of the year, with Congress setting lower limits for charitable deductions for the wealthiest donors.
• Crowdfunding will go mainstream: she points out that Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the power of crowdfunding, as neighbors applied it as well as "crowdfinding" tools to assist hard hit neighborhoods.
• Technology-enabled civic engagement will grow: she says the aim of organizations like CodeForAmerica is to make "public service sexy again."
• Charitable organizations will fail in greater numbers, and we might have accurate data on this (two predictions in one): financial pressures of the last four years will take their toll on nonprofits. She states that charities providing "lifeline" services are facing increased demand, but more than half of them had fewer than three months cash on hand.
• Asian philanthropists will grow in prominence and visibility in 2013: Wealthy Asians will continue to become global players in philanthropy, but in their own ways, mostly staying outside the bounds of the Giving Pledge and other western efforts.

Other sections in Blueprint 2013 include her Buzzword Watch (MOOCs, anyone?) and Wildcards, or "predictable unpredictables." Bernholz also examines her previous forecasts, and examines the future of the social economy, where alternative corporate forms and pro-social investments are creating a "fundamentally different set of systems for using private resources for public good."

You can download Blueprint 2013 free charge here, or visit a Foundation Center library to view a print copy. You may also want to follow Lucy Bernholz on Twitter.

--Rob Bruno
Catalog/Reference Librarian
Foundation Center--New York

The Philanthropy Hall of Fame

The Winter 2013 issue of Philanthropy magazine features the article "American History's Greatest Philanthropists" where the editors announced the inaugural class of the  Philanthropy Hall of Fame.  While inclusion into the Baseball Hall of Fame can be determined by statistical analysis, like the number of home runs or strikeouts, it's much harder to define greatness in philanthropy. What is more important, the size of the gift, its percentage of net worth, or the return on charitable dollar?  Also, is effectiveness determined by the number of people served, or the years of lasting influence?

To make their task easier, the editors only took into account accomplishments attained within the individuals own lifetime, thus excluding living donors as their work is not yet finished. They also focused on philathropy conducted with one's own money rather than institutional giving. The end result is a list of close to sixty great American philanthropists, from founding funders like Benjamin Franklin through recent figures like John T. Walton. To give you an idea of what's included I've linked to five HOF profiles below, with a snippet from each biography.  Online entries also includes bibliographies for further reading.

Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
Throughout his life, but most notably while living in Philadelphia, Franklin led a number of private, voluntary initiatives to enhance civil society. “It is prodigious the quantity of good that may be done by one man, if he will make a business of it,” he once observed. Historian Edmund Morgan suggested he “was behind virtually every scheme that made [Philadelphia] an attractive place to live.”

Andrew Carnegie (1835 - 1919)
Carnegie may be the most influential philanthropist in American history. The scale of his giving is almost without peer: adjusted for inflation, his donations exceed those of virtually everyone else in the nation’s history. He built some 2,800 lending libraries around the globe, founded what became one of the world’s great research universities, endowed one of the nation’s most significant grantmakers, and established charitable organizations that are still active nearly a century after his death.

John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839 – 1937)
After starting life in humble circumstances, Rockefeller came to dominate the burgeoning petroleum industry by the time he was 40 years old. He became the richest man of his time, and indeed has a good claim to perhaps being the richest self-made man who ever lived.

He was equally distinguished as a philanthropist. Within his lifetime, Rockefeller helped launch the field of biomedical research and revolutionized medical training in the United States, championed the cause of public sanitation, vigorously promoted the cause of education nationwide, without distinction of sex, race, or creed, and created the University of Chicago, virtually from scratch, and within a decade turned it into one of the world’s leading universities.

Mary Elizabeth Garrett (1853 - 1915)
Garrett ranks among the nation’s most significant benefactors of higher education for women. Born in 1853 to wealth and privilege, Garrett was the third child (and only daughter) of railroad tycoon John Work Garrett, the president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Mary Garrett’s inheritance would make her one of the wealthiest women in the United States, but it was her business savvy and shrewd philanthropy that helped her to achieve some of the greatest social improvements of her generation.

Oseola McCarty (1908 - 1999)
When she retired in 1995, her hands painfully swollen with arthritis, this washerwoman who had been paid in little piles of coins and dollar bills her entire life had $280,000 in the bank.

Even more startling: she decided to give most of it away—not as a bequest, but immediately.

Setting aside just enough to live on, McCarty donated $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to fund scholarships for worthy but needy students seeking the education she never had. When they found out what she had done, over 600 men and women in Hattiesburg and beyond made donations that more than tripled her original endowment. Today, the university presents several full-tuition McCarty scholarships every year.

You may also be interested in reading my previous post from March 2012 on The History of Philanthropy in the U.S.

 --Rob Bruno
Catalog/Reference Librarian
The Foundation Center--New York