Posts by Beth Owens

In our continuing series of mini essays unpacking each of the “Five Habits of Highly Effective Funders,” we’re going to drill down on the number-one success factor for foundations that aspire to help grantees become high-performance organizations: having talented, empathetic leaders at the trustee and executive levels. Lowell just got an inspiring dose of…

Over the coming months, we’ll unpack “Five Habits of Highly Effective Funders.” Last month, we offered greater specificity about how highly effective funders manage to build bonds of trust with their grantees, despite the inevitable power differential. This month, we’re going to look at another one of the habits: “Effective foundations exemplify a ‘growth mindset.’” Our timing for this post isn’t…

This month we’re going to share some of the key lessons we’ve learned about how highly effective funders have successfully built trust with their grantees. We’ve drawn them from Edelsberg, Bonbright, and other experts in the…

Lowell recently started advising a Seattle-based technology entrepreneur who’s right at the beginning of his philanthropic journey. This new donor posed a question we wish all new donors would ask: “What do I need to do if I want to be effective at this?”

To kick off the new year, we want to spark a conversation that clearly demands our attention this year: how our sector can make smart use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the latter a form of AI that can learn…

Our post last month on gratitude struck a resonant chord with many of you. So we want to end this year by talking about a related virtue: courage. The kind of courage we often read and talk about is physical—like Lowell’s father-in-law’s heroic combat on the frozen slopes of Monte Belvedere to liberate Italy from…

Fair warning: We’re gonna get personal in this post. That’s because we’re feeling extra reflective this holiday season. We both had milestone birthdays this year (50 for Lowell, 75 for Mario), and we’ve both experienced personal loss. In the past month alone, Mario lost…

Last month, we wrestled with the implications of the new book ‘Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World’, which has earned more buzz in our sector than we’ve seen in a long time. This month, we’re turning our focus to ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, a book that…

During the Jewish High Holidays, Lowell’s rabbi implored his congregation to spend less time with eyes fixed on our algorithmically narrowed news feeds and more time looking for new perspectives. In response, Lowell picked up Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, a book that was likely to challenge key assumptions that he and Mario hold about social change.

Last week, Lowell made a presentation to new board members of a family foundation interested in raising its game. It was a great opportunity to synthesize several years’ worth of learning about how positive-outlier foundations find good organizations and help them become great.