By Alison Hemberger In a talk on March 23, 2012 hosted by the Hauser Center, the newly appointed CEO of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), Carolyn Woo, discussed her strategic vision for the NGO in the coming years. New partnerships, including corporate partnerships, were among the six strategic “buckets” she outlined to help the NGO achieve [...]

by Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation The 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held December 2011 in Busan, South Korea, was a landmark event where civil society participated in negotiations on the new direction for international development cooperation on an equal basis with governments and donors, [...]

By Steven Lawry and Elisa Peter The trial of 43 people including 16 Americans on criminal charges of working in nonregistered nonprofit organizations and receiving foreign funding began on February 26 in Cairo. The charges against the NGO workers, including 16 Americans, has ignited a deep crisis in US-Egyptian relations, including threats from members of [...]

By Sara Nadel This post was originally published on the Harvard Business School’s Managing Innovation Blog Several years ago, I saw a presentation by Yale School of Management Economics Professor Mushfiq Mobarak about encouraging poor populations in Bangladesh to adopt clean stoves. Traditional stoves pollute air inside the home, causing respiratory illnesses and increasing cancer [...]

By Myra Batchelder The revolution will not be foundation-funded, advocates sometimes joke, representing their frustration with the current funding structures for social justice efforts. However, the young women that spoke last Thursday at Harvard’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations highlighted an innovative new model of participatory grant making with the FRIDA – Young Feminist Fund, [...]

By Steven Lawry Paul Farmer’s compelling new book, “Haiti: After the Earthquake,” suggests that international aid to Haiti, while providing relief from suffering during the worst of times, including in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010, earthquake, has for the most part failed to help Haiti build capacity in its own public institutions, including [...]

By Rahul Daswani The reason there are 9 “Major Groups” of stakeholders as part of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development is because these groups are the ones who are pushy and vocal. Felix Dodds (Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum), shared his tips during a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School on November 10 2011: [...]

By Alexios Mantzarlis. The 17th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP17) is coming up, and no one harbors great hopes that the South African hosts will manage to cajole all major polluters into signing a legally-binding agreement to cut emissions. Civil society is rightly flummoxed at the [...]

By Abby Bellows In April 2011, the Indian middle class started to wake up. Development activist Dr. R. Balasubramaniam (Balu) (HKS Mason Fellow, 2009-10) shared the story in a talk at the Hauser Center on October 31, 2011. India’s “dying democracy,” he explained, was revived by a convergence of factors – the Arab Spring uprisings [...]

By Elisa Peter International NGOs are the verge of facing irrelevance, if not extinction. This is one of the main messages of CIVICUS’ latest report, which warns that many well-established non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become disconnected from people’s aspirations and concerns.  The report argues that citizens are increasingly coming together in new and informal forms [...]