Posts by Cheryl Collins

In 2019, the Leap Ambassadors Community began planning a May 2021 in-person conference for its nearly 300 social-sector doers, thinkers, and funders. When that became impossible, they pivoted to a virtual convening and discovered that rich, personal interaction is feasible at a distance. In this post, we’ll share what the community learned about making the…

We have a term for foundation professionals who previously ran nonprofits: WINS leaders. WINS stands for “Walked In Nonprofit Shoes.” We believe WINS leaders have a big and important role to play in helping peer funders understand how they can better set their grantees up for success. As a case in point, please take a…

It’s rare that a single piece of writing can profoundly alter your mindset. It happened to us in 2013 when the Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article “Slow Ideas,” gave us a novel way of thinking about the unsexy cause we had been struggling to advance for decades: encouraging grantmakers to dispense with conventional…

Joe Biden is no Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, so we were genuinely surprised that we felt so inspired by his Inaugural Address. At several moments, Biden set aside lofty oratory and stopped trying to emulate the muscular delivery of previous Presidents. In those quieter moments, we felt the true empathy and compassion Biden brings…

An increasing number of healthcare leaders are intent on getting out ahead of the policy changes and figuring out how they can deliver better care, to more people, at lower cost.

For several months, we’ve included at the bottom of these updates a too-brief reference to a conference we and our friends at PerformWell have been working hard to develop and launch. We’re now ready to roll out all the details. “After the Leap: Building a Performance Culture” will not be just another “same old, same…

The Atlantic Monthly‘s annual July/August “Ideas Issue,” which hit newsstands this week, features an article that could help the nascent performance movement go mainstream.

“Can Government Play Moneyball?” was written by the high-powered bipartisan duo of Peter Orszag (former budget director under Obama) and John Bridgeland (former director of the Domestic Policy Council under G.W. Bush). It’s a provocative article that is sparking debate—and even some anger—about how little the federal government pays attention to performance and results when it allocates precious taxpayer dollars.