LEAP UPDATES

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 can’t help but start with a few words about the Chauvin case. The jury’s verdict doesn’t indicate we have true justice in America. As our colleague Janeen Comenote remarked, “True justice would include George Floyd still being alive.” It doesn’t even mean that we can feel true relief. As another colleague confided and then…

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…