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Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2016 is an annual industry forecast about the ways we use private resources for public benefit.

Foundation Center is pleased to again partner with Lucy Bernholz to offer the Blueprint as a GrantCraft guide. The Blueprint provides an overview of the current landscape, points to major trends, and directs your attention to horizons where you can expect some important breakthroughs in the coming year.

This weekly conference call series welcomed New Jersey-based grantmakers along with national funders and provided an opportunity for grantmakers to hear from a wide range of experts in the field of disaster philanthropy. This series started on September 9, 2013 and concluded on November 4, 2013. The written summaries of each recording are listed below.

Funding Indigenous Peoples: Strategies for Support, looks at how funders collaborate with and bring support to indigenous communities around the world. Through examples from a diverse range of foundations, this guide explores how grantmakers work with indigenous peoples, the approaches they take, and the practices they find effective.

This guide was developed in collaboration with International Funders for Indigenous Peoples (IFIP).

The Silicon Valley Out-of-School-Time Collaborative invested in a cohort of regional nonprofit organizations to sustain and strengthen their ability to serve more students with stronger academic and social-emotional programming. Partners in the collaborative included three family foundations that together made an initial $1.6 million pooled investment over three years, and eight nonprofits that collectively served more than 7,000 low-income middle and high school students outside normal school hours. From the start of the partnership, funders and grantees held regular meetings focused on shared learning, trust building and dialogue. A midcourse evaluation of the collaborative showed that grantees were stronger, programs were better and are reaching more students, and funders had adopted new, collaborative grantmaking practices. The funders invested another $900,000 into a second phase of the work and committed to more flexibility –– letting grantees drive the group’s planning and learning efforts, and manage consultants, budgeting and group communications. Grantees also opted to redirect the focus of the collaborative from capacity building to program development and evaluation, with the added goal of sharing effective afterschool and summer program models with others, both inside and outside the region.

Recommendations for Capital Grantmakers, is written for arts funders who are looking to make smart and impactful investments. It includes tips for planning a grantmaking strategy, making the grant match the need, and ensuring that the grant is implemented successfully. This summary highlights findings from Nonprofit Finance Fund's study of 36 capital grants made by the Kresge Foundation to arts organizations between 2010 and 2012.

On October 5, 2015, Building Public-Private Partnerships to Enhance Disaster Resilience: A Listening Session was convened by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Division for At-Risk Individuals, Behavioral Health, and Community Resilience (ABC)and  co-hosted with Grantmakers In Health (GIH).  This is a summary of the final meeting report.

Seeking to increase their philanthropic impact, many engaged foundations are turning to impact investing. The reason is clear: The field and practice of impact investing have matured—structures are in place, best practices have emerged, and opportunities have multiplied—enabling more foundations to use this powerful tool. Yet entering unfamiliar terrain can be intimidating, and foundations with few or no staff face unique challenges even as they enjoy unique opportunities.

Essentials of Impact Investing: A Guide for Small-Staffed Foundations addresses those challenges and highlights those opportunities. The guide demystifies the process of designing and implementing an effective impact investing strategy, offering advice, tools, and real-world examples of impact investing by foundations with few or no staff.

There is widespread and growing recognition in the nonprofit sector about the importance of evaluation — not only for measuring impact, but also for improving programs and better serving communities. While grantmakers generally see evaluation as necessary, most are not yet investing enough resources in this area.

This guide discusses six principles for successful evaluation capacity building. By applying these principles, grantmakers can make the most of our evaluation investments and help our grantees become more effective and sustainable organizations.

Building Healthy Communities (BHC) is a 10 year, $1 billion comprehensive community initiative launched by The California Endowment in 2010 to advance statewide policy, change the narrative, and transform 14 of California’s communities most devastated by health inequities into places where all people have an opportunity to thrive.