Social Justice Partners

The future of philanthropy: The evolution from charitable giving to charitable living,

"As technology, culture, and societal norms evolve, how donors perceive and approach philanthropy also changes."

The power of ‘lean philanthropy": If you’ve spent much time in Silicon Valley, you’re likely familiar with the phrase “lean startup.”

It’s the idea of producing less waste and focusing more on innovation to meet a need. Driven by a desire to more directly impact the lives of those in need, donors are creating a new model of giving in the form of lean philanthropy by doing away with the bureaucracy and detailed application process of giving.

Want to have a highly productive week and accomplish all or most of what you set out to do? Then start Monday morning with any of three quick micro-challenges that will set you up to reach your goals. Or, if you want, you can do them all--which will take ten minutes or less…

A few years ago, a young colleague invited me to a party to meet his boss, executive director of a global nonprofit and a former scion of Wall Street. Some cursory research beforehand revealed that we had a mutual acquaintance who served on a board with the nonprofit leader. When introduced, I brought up the connection, but he displayed no interest. Instead he talked about his volunteer work and tossed around household names like confetti. As he spoke, he scanned the room without so much as a sideways word of inquiry…

The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done.  It is not  a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.  

By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential,…

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to make drastic changes in order to notice an improvement in the quality of your life. At the same time, you don’t need to wait a long time in order to see the measurable results that come from taking positive action. All you have to do is take small steps, and take them consistently, for a period of 100 days…

Simplicity isn’t just a design principle at Apple—it’s a value that permeates every level of the organization. It’s what helped Apple recover from near death in 1997 to become the most valuable company on earth in 2012.

As ad agency creative director, Ken Segall played a key role in Apple’s resurrection, helping to create such critical marketing campaigns as “Think Different” and naming the iMac.

A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.

The ONE Thing has made more than 350 appearances on national bestseller lists, including #1 Wall Street Journal, NewYork Times, and USA Today. It won 12 book awards, has been translated into 27 languages, chosen as one of the Top 5 Business Books of 2013 by Hudson's Booksellers and one of Top 30 Business Books of 2013 by Executive Book Summaries. Voted one of Top 100 Business Books of All Time on Goodreads. People are using this simple, powerful concept to focus on what matters most in their personal and work lives. Companies are helping…

The good news for gay men? A new analysis of U.K. data shows they are more likely to be supervisors and managers than their straight counterparts.

The bad news? Gay men are far more likely (7.9 percentage points, to be exact) to be stuck in low-level management jobs at the bottom of the organization chart or at smaller, less prestigious organizations — the shift manager at a retail store, for example. They’re significantly less likely (2.2 percentage points) than straight men to be high-level managers — the people who run trading floors and manage entire regions…

The strategy is to build multiple streams of income that don't require you to work 8 to 5 in a company where you have little control of your time and compensation.

The core money parts ― Keep More Money, Make More Money, and Grow More Money ― focus on ways to tighten your finances, increase your income, and develop passive investment strategies. The goal is to build regular, independent cash flow until…

You might pity the fundraising bosses at America’s largest nonprofits. Their pay has inched up only about 2.7 percent over the past five years, according to GuideStar data on groups with annual revenue of $50 million or more.

Yet averages can be deceiving. Plenty of top fundraisers are getting big raises. To gauge how many, The Chronicle analyzed the pay of 260 top development officers at nonprofits that raise $35 million or more from private sources; these are individuals for whom at least three years of compensation figures are available from tax filings by their organizations…

Are you a high net worth individual? Then the wealth management rules are different for you.

Mark Tepper rightly assures us that we should all consider ourselves wealthy if we have the resources to live the lives we want to live without compromise. However, if you fall into one of his higher-net-worth categories, you will find that Exceptional Wealth is speaking directly to you.

Tepper, author of the acclaimed Walk Away Wealthy, stresses that if you are someone…

After interviewing dozens of candidates over the years, there is one thing that still surprises me. It is the lack of thought put into the questions that candidates ask of interviewers. And those lacking preparation are not just at the entry level. Even executives treat this part of the interview with indifference. It's baffling that a candidate would respond to “what questions do you have for me” with “none” or “why did you join the company” (i.e., an obvious and somewhat pandering question)…

In the bestselling tradition of Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly and Nick Vujicic’s Life Without Limits comes a rousing 7-step plan for living a life on fire, filled with hope and possibility—from an inspirational speaker who survived a near-fatal fire at the age of nine and now runs a successful business inspiring people all around the world.

When John O’Leary was nine years old, he was almost killed in a devastating house fire. With burns on one hundred percent of his body, O’Leary mustered an…

Donors are a big source of the sexual harassment that fundraisers face on the job, according to polling results released today by the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Two-thirds of people who reported sexual harassment on the job blamed donors, while the rest said misconduct came from colleagues, mostly those in senior positions.

You never dreamed being the boss would be so hard. You're caught in a web of conflicting expectations from subordinates, your supervisor, peers, and customers.

You're not alone. As Linda Hill and Kent Lineback reveal in Being the Boss, becoming an effective manager is a painful, difficult journey. It's trial and error, endless effort, and slowly acquired…

New technology brings great promise, and as many problems. Smartphones put access to infinite knowledge in our pockets, but led to the rise of tech addiction. The social media platforms that connected billions of people were turned against democracy.

And so it is with artificial intelligence, which could fundamentally change the world while contributing to greater racial bias and exclusion…

In Donor-Centered Leadership Penelope Burk tackles one of our most frustrating and costly problems - the high turnover rate of staff and the financial toll it takes on not-for-profits. In plain language, backed by compelling research with over 6,000 fundraisers, Board members, CEOs, and donors, Penelope reveals how not-for-profits can raise much more money by bringing staff attrition under control…

Every day we wake up believing we have the best jobs in the world. Really.

We get to see people at their best, when they are thinking about helping others, solving societal problems, saving and changing lives. We also meet amazing heroes, the people our organizations serve. We are in the philanthropy business and proud to be.

"Bruce Tulgan is the new Tom Peters."―Howard Jenkins, chairman and CEO, Publix Super Markets, Inc.

Battered by waves of downsizing since the 1980s, talented men and women no longer seek job security from one company. This is the true hallmark of the new economy―not fleeting dot-coms and IPOs, but a fast-moving, free-agent workforce with the flexibility…

The oil industry holds relatively few surprises for strategists. Things change, of course, sometimes dramatically, but in relatively predictable ways. Planners know, for instance, that global supply will rise and fall as geopolitical forces play out and new resources are discovered and exploited. They know that demand will rise and fall with incomes, GDPs, weather conditions…

Discover how the superwealthy made it to the top (and you can too!)

From the richest Romans to the robber barons to today's bankers and tech billionaires, Sam Wilkin offers Freakonomics-esque insights into what it really takes to make a fortune. These stories of larger-than-life characters, strategies, and sacrifices reveal how the wealthiest did it, usually by a passion for finding loopholes, working around bureaucratic systems, and creating obstacles to competitors…

The biggest wealth transfer in history is about to happen — and it's now expected to be more than double what many thought it was. It's estimated that 45 million U.S. households will transfer $68 trillion in wealth over the next 25 years, according to Asher Cheses, a research analyst and lead author of a new report from financial services research firm Cerulli Associates…

Society is broken. We can design our way to a better one.

In our interconnected world, self-interest and social-interest are rapidly becoming indistinguishable. If current negative trajectories remain, including growing climate destabilization, biodiversity loss, and economic inequality, an impending future of ecological collapse and societal…

The study UnderDeveloped: A National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising reveals that many nonprofits are stuck in a vicious cycle that threatens their ability to raise the resources they need to succeed. A joint project of CompassPoint and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund…

Shaped by his twenty-five years traveling the world, and enlivened by encounters with villagers from Rio to Beijing, tycoons, and presidents, Ruchir Sharma’s The Rise and Fall of Nations rethinks the "dismal science" of economics as a practical art. Narrowing the thousands of factors that can shape a country’s fortunes to ten clear rules, Sharma explains how to spot…

Sometimes, to become successful, and get closer to the person we can become, we don’t need to add more things, we need to give up on some of them.

There are certain things that are universal, which, if you give up on them, you will be successful, even though each one of us could have a different definition of success…

Noel Tichy has been the trusted adviser on management succession to companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Nokia, Intel, Ford, and Mercedes Benz. Succession distills his decades of experience and provides a practical framework for building effective transition pipelines - for multi-billion dollar conglomerates, family businesses or anything in between…

This groundbreaking report focuses on human services community-based organizations, their economic and social impact, and the need to preserve and strengthen their critical role in building foundational supports that contribute to the health and well-being of individuals, families and communities…