Introducing Building Impact’s New Name & Website: Delivering Bold Solutions to Big Challenges
Over the last eleven years, we’ve had the privilege at Building Impact to partner with incredible donors and other changemakers who are tackling our most complex challenges and building momentum to advance change; we’ve co-designed innovative grantmaking processes, facilitated coalition-building efforts to advance policy objectives, and developed new programs with donors to advance equity and […]
4 Encouraging Trends That We Hope Endure Beyond the Pandemic?
The endless, destabilizing uncertainty of 2020 that has put all of our lives in turmoil has also brought a gift for forward-thinking philanthropists: We have the opportunity to look at all of our challenges in a different light. 2020 has forced us to question all of our assumptions, and it has shown us again and again […]
Bringing the “how” of social change back into balance with the “how many”
In the face of so much inequality and suffering in our world, many funders wrestle with the magnitude of their impact. They search for ways to maximize the impact of every dollar contributed in an effort to reach as many people as possible. But that push to scale up solutions quickly can become an unhealthy […]
Black Lives Matter
George Floyd murdered.Ahmaud Arbery murdered.Breonna Taylor murdered.Christian Cooper threatened.Countless others. Named and unnamed, known and unknown. These are not acts that can be understood as anomalies or as the products of bad actors or poor judgment. These are predictable outcomes born of a system delivering that which it was designed to produce. Inequitable access to […]
Are We Doing Any Good?
Consider the spectrum of philanthropic giving you or others in your social circle made over the last five years: You may be thinking of gifts to alma maters. Or, you’re thinking of a GoFundMe campaign for someone you knew who had an accident, those soccer team fundraising drives, or an end-of-year large donation to a […]
To Drive Systemic Change, Find the Root Cause
Treat the cause, not the symptoms If your phone turns off and you plug it into a charger, most likely, it turns back on. If it doesn’t, you now have to consider other potential issues in order to get it to work again. As human beings, we use linear, event-focused, cause-and-effect thinking as our go-to […]
Putting the “Social” in Social Change
You may sometimes feel like you’re one of the few – if not the only – advocates for the issue you care about. You’ve shown all your friends (and random acquaintances too) the data about the disparities in public education. You’ve met with elected officials and made public comments at school board meetings. No one […]
An Ecosystem Approach to Social Change
Recently, we’ve seen a growing weariness among those working on longstanding efforts to transform public education. But we don’t think it’s because those pushing for better schools have lost faith in the potential of children. Rather, the exasperation felt is around the question of how to achieve transformative change when a deep-rooted status quo seems […]
What is Forward-Thinking Philanthropy?
We sometimes find it helpful to think about philanthropy as a tool for social change in terms similar to how Winston Churchill famously described democracy: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried” There are (and always have been) valid critiques of philanthropy as a means for promoting social change […]
