Leap of Reason Updates Archive

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.

On July 4th, Lowell and his family participated in one of their favorite annual rituals: attending a naturalization ceremony at the foot of the Space Needle and welcoming America’s newest citizens. The ceremony featured more than 500 new Americans and roughly three times as many cheering onlookers, many of them wearing red, white, and blue …

As readers of this update know, we’re big believers in the power of data for learning and improvement. But we also recognize people can—and often do—use data in ways that create harm. The latest example comes from this New York Times podcast, which aired on June 5. It’s the sobering story of how then-Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley‘s good intentions for data use led to severe unintended consequences, especially…

When reading the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s May 1 feature story on the Leap Ambassadors Community, we got a kick out of a quotation by our friend Brad Dudding, the brilliant COO of the Center for Employment Opportunities. Perhaps channeling Mario, Dudding pulled off a rare triple mixed metaphor when explaining one of the community’s key aims: “Right now there’s a big push … to hammer away at funders and get them on the bus.”

Three years ago, when the Leap Ambassadors Community released the first version of the Performance Imperative (PI), the ambassadors made it clear that they would practice what they preach about learning and improvement by collecting feedback and eventually producing a version 2.0. The ambassadors have followed through on that commitment. At the beginning of this month, they released…

The day after Christmas in 2013, a young boy named Emile in the small West African nation of Guinea came down with a high fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. He died two days later. Within a few weeks, Emile’s sister and mother had died as well. By the end of March 2014, scientists at France’s Institut Pasteur determined that the cause was the Zaire species of Ebola, the most lethal virus in the Ebola family. Emile’s illness sparked the largest Ebola outbreak in history, provoking panic all over the world. “Ebola is ‘devouring everything in its path,'” reads a typical headline in The Washington Post. On the frontlines of the fight against Ebola was the nonprofit Last Mile Health. In 2007, co-founders Dr. Raj Panjabi and Dr. Amisha Raja took…

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco-based Mulago Foundation, which supports mostly early-stage organizations on the frontlines of poverty alleviation. We suspect the foundation will let the milestone pass with little or no fanfare. While we admire the foundation’s desire to avoid patting itself on the back, we believe it deserves widespread …

On February 8, the Winter Olympics will begin with the delivery of the first stone in a curling competition. During the 18 days of competition, many Olympic records are likely to fall, because the science and technology of sports performance continue to advance rapidly. Yes, even in curling. How cool would it be if we …

We and our Morino Institute colleagues just received an uplifting gift at the end of what has been a very difficult year for us and the country as whole: Leap of Reason just passed the 100,000-copy threshold, which is about 95,000 more than we imagined when we released the book. Granted, Leap of Reason is …

Last month, we shared reflections from a great summer visit in Los Angeles with the Weingart Foundation staff. Here we’ll offer more detail about the empathetic leaders who have guided the foundation’s transformation from risk-averse check-writer to national leader in effective philanthropic practice. Fred Ali, the foundation’s CEO, joined the Jesuit Service Corps in 1972 …