Posts in 'PHILANTHROPY'
Compliance: A Baseline, Not A Goal
by Chris McGivern, Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout, Shannon Dosemagen and Delphine Halgand-Mishra, 7 April 2022
Discussing compliance will not make you a popular guest at parties, but perhaps it’s a subject more deserving of an audience. It is a vital part of the plumbing of functioning societies, impacting and influencing everyone. Organisations must comply with industry and government regulations to avoid censure and investigation. Employees must comply with codes of conduct to keep their jobs. Social compliance keeps us all in line with the behavioural expectations of our peers, neighbours,...
20 Years On: Reflections From the Frontier of Philanthropy
by Chris McGivern, 24 March 2022
Our experiment to re-imagine philanthropy has made the Foundation a very different organisation from the one it resembled in 2001. It’s been a long, sometimes bumpy, but mostly positive journey into maturity. As individuals, we have - hopefully - gained a little wisdom to accompany our wrinkles and wanted to collect our thoughts to pause and reflect on our story so far. We hope you will find something useful in Field Notes From the Frontier...
Prison Philanthropy Sucks: A Reality Check For Funders
by Helen Turvey & Chris McGivern, 20 June 2021
The discussion chimed with much of our thinking about the imbalanced power dynamics at the centre of traditional funding models. We invited them to join our CEO Helen Turvey and Dan Meredith of Reset.tech to discuss our Flash Grant programme and share ideas about how philanthropy can do more for its grantees. In both sessions, Kelsey, Michelle and Christina illustrated the reality of prison philanthropy for the many people it claims to serve. It does...
by SF Team, 10 July 2020
Many have criticised him for producing what has become a handbook to those most keen on being or becoming more powerful in the world. Whether the laws he outlines should be seen as an instruction manual is a valid question. However, even his critics can’t say that these rules don’t apply and are not in active use. In what Greene describes as somewhat of a counter measure, he has written Mastery, an exploration of how...
by Chris McGivern & SF Team, 7 July 2020
Money is an element of the relationship between the funder and those who it funds (in our case, the Foundation and the Fellows), but we’ve moved away from being simply a funder and towards being a holistic support system. “Money is power” is a cliché because of the truth it holds. It’s also wildly incorrect. Traditional philanthropic models use money as a proxy for knowledge or wisdom, wielding the exchange of money as pay-to-play. This...
The system is rigged, 2020 has shown us how much
by SF Team, 2 July 2020
Unprecedented losses in livelihoods along with previously unimaginable restrictions placed on the movement of goods and people have drastically increased food insecurity, among much other suffering, around the world. We imagined it would be a matter of weeks until things got “back to normal”. We were completely wrong. Things may never go back to the way they were, and that might not be a bad thing. In the wake of the effects of the pandemic,...
