Virtual Works

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…

Read More

Momentum

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…

Read More

The Wisdom of WINS Leaders

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…

Read More

What Funders and Surgeons Have in Common

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…

Read More

Ask Not

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…

Read More

The Reads That Rocked Our World

In an effort to close out this hellish year on a high note, we put our heads together (virtually, of course) to create a list of the six books that sparked the most insights for us. Not all of these wonderful works came out in 2020; in some cases, we were embarrassingly late to the…

Read More

Half Empty is OK, But Full Disdain is Not

If we were to assemble America’s red and blue bubbles into a national Venn diagram, we wouldn’t see a lot of intersection on issues like pandemic response, but we would see big overlap in the realm of emotions. Disbelief. Suspicion. Anger. Fear. Exhaustion. Following this bitter election season, we all have some or all of…

Read More

What We Can Do for Our Country

Given how close we are to November 3, we must start with this pitch: Please vote, and please get others in your life to do the same. And now we must acknowledge that it’s easy for the two of us to get caught up in legitimate fears about post-election chaos and violence. But we have…

Read More

A Tribute to a Giant

Last week, the world lost two intellectual and moral giants, one who was 6’ 7” (Bill Gates Sr.) and one who was only 5’ 1” (Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Both deaths hit us hard. While we never had the honor of meeting RBG, Bill Sr. was a mentor to Lowell. In the essay below, Lowell shares a few personal reflections on Bill Sr. and his towering legacy.

Read More

The Big Reset

America has never needed more from civil society. That’s because our country is being rocked by a health pandemic, an age-old racism pandemic, economic upheaval, sweeping cuts in safety-net programs, and the increasing political vitriol that’s killing efforts to address these daunting challenges. We feel like we’re in the midst of the 1918 flu pandemic, the Civil Rights/Vietnam era, and the Great Recession all at the same time! If the virus continues to surge and the restart of the economy sputters…

Read More