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 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 [...]