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 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, [...]

The next session of the NGOs & Development study group, organized by the Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center, will be held on Thursday, April 8th from 4:00-5:00pm in Weil Town Hall (Belfer L1) at the Harvard Kennedy School.  The session will be lead by Shalaka Joshi, Vice President of Global Strategies, CSO Partners, and Salimah Samji, who was [...]

by Sherine Jayawickrama   Steven Lawry’s five-part series on U.S. Philanthropy’s Shrinking Amibition has provided a lot of interesting food for thought.  His analysis and arguments have caused me to reflect on how this set of issues intersects with the experience of international NGOs fighting poverty and social injustice.  Three main reflections emerge.   First, [...]

By Steven Lawry In Part IV of this series I argued that large, conventional foundations, staffed by highly-qualified and increasingly specialized professional staff, are over-specifying the solutions to poverty in-house and, in the process, are increasing the possibility that potentially breakthrough ideas coming from outside of foundations get over-looked and go unfunded. New philanthropies, founded [...]

by Steven Lawry I argued in Part II of this series that foundations as private organizations are freer than public funders to get behind new and untested ideas for reducing poverty that show promise. Foundations are less subject to the political, economic and bureaucratic orthodoxies that channel public funds and for-profit investments to tried and [...]

by Steven Lawry One of the principal criticisms proponents of so-called new philanthropy direct toward old, or traditional large philanthropies is that old philanthropies, in assessing the merits of grant proposals, don’t require prospective grantees to provide sufficiently rigorous estimates of the likely impact of their proposed work.  For instance, Paul Brest, Hal Harvey and [...]

By Steven Lawry I am arguing in this four-part series that US foundations working internationally are not making full use of their freedom to support innovation and help people claim new rights—and that progress toward reducing poverty and extending essential rights and liberties may be casualties.  In my post of March 25, I offered three [...]

by Steven Lawry Independent US foundations working internationally have advantages that other kinds of donors, such as the World Bank and USAID, generally don’t. As private funders, foundations are better able to bear risk on behalf of innovative approaches to social change and poverty reduction than are public sector funders. Where foundation-funded work yields promising [...]

The blog has been silent for a while as we’ve undergone a transition at the Hauser Center.  I’m delighted to announce that Sherine Jayawickrama, who’s served in a variety of leadership positions with CARE USA over the past ten years, is taking over responsibility for the Center’s work with humanitarian NGOs, which includes writing this [...]