Strategic Philanthropy: Creating Opportunity, Building Wealth, and Driving Community Change

For decades, foundations have invested in a range of approaches that enable families to move forward -- to live in safe homes and communities, start their own businesses, pursue education, secure jobs and advance careers, access health care, and save for the future.Despite these investments, the gap continues to widen between the haves and have-nots, driven by barriers that are increasingly complex, intertwined, and exacerbated by dwindling public and private resources.In this context, new and more collaborative solutions are needed for advancing and sustaining greater economic security, opportunities for growth, and upward mobility. A mounting body of evidence demonstrates that when sector-based investments in education, housing, microenterprise, job training, health care, or community development are connected through a framework of asset building, the impacts are stronger and more sustainable.Through this strategic approach, foundations increase the scale and scope of their work, and more effectively shift the trajectory from vulnerability to opportunity for many of the nation's families. Whether new to the asset building conversation or a proven pioneer, funders will find in this paper compelling evidence about the increased importance and relevance of connecting asset building to existing grant making strategies. This paper illuminates why assets matter and how foundations across sectors are investing in asset building for greater collective impact. It also provides guidance for foundations looking for ways to leverage the asset building framework to advance the impact of their work

Strategic Philanthropy Integrating Investments In Asset Building: A Framework for Impact

Despite philanthropy's commitments to improve family economic security, stability, and growth, a lack of cross-sector collaboration limits the impacts including constrained public resources and siloed programmatic services. A new approach to address these challenges is the development of a framework that can more effectively tie together and shape the disparate policies, investment structures, practices, and stakeholders to leverage resources and impacts. The strategic framework of asset development helps to create an effective, integrated, and sustainable system, enabling families to move through safety nets into financial security and opportunity. Asset building integration shifts investment goals from remedying deficiencies to building on strengths by increasing capability, access, and opportunity. It enables foundations to integrate and expand the scope, scale, and long-term impact of their work, shifting the focus from families' vulnerabilities to their opportunities for success. This paper provides compelling evidence about how funders are applying this strategic approach to effect greater social and economic impact

Hard Choices: Navigating the Economic Shock of Unemployment

During the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, millions of Americans faced severe economic hardship, forcing difficult decisions about how to stabilize their families' financial well-being and prevent downward economic mobility. Americans with savings were forced to weigh immediate needs against long-term investments, choosing whether to deplete personal assets in order to stay afloat. Those without wealth to fall back on were in an even more precarious position, leading them to turn to family assistance, debt, and other public and private supports when available.This study examines how families weather economic shocks through a close focus on one particular event -- the experience of unemployment, with specific attention to differences by race and family income. The analysis used a nationally representative sample of working-age families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics or PSID, following the same households from 1999 to 2009. To provide greater insight into the challenges and choices families faced, the report also drew on a unique longitudinal data set of in-depth interviews with 51 families that endured one month or more of unemployment between 1998 and 2012

Part of the Solution: Leveraging Business and Markets for Low-Income People

Presents lessons learned from Ford's Corporate Involvement Initiative, offering frameworks to help nonprofits understand how to collaborate with businesses. Describes the context, design, and achievements of the initiative and discusses future challenges

Job training as business and community development: reframing theory and practice

Job training, as traditionally conceptualized, is intended to improve the employment and earnings of disadvantaged individuals. Both theory and practice have approached the problem by segmenting the roles and responsibilities of the key stakeholders: the individual, the employer, and civil society. Such segmentation is problematic because it removes stakeholders from their contexts, and ignores the holistic and complex nature of the underlying problems and their remedies. Reframed as a form of business and community development, job training can focus on capacity building, stakeholder involvement, and expanded notions of skill achievement and geographic scope, thereby addressing stakeholder interests in context. The three cases presented in this chapter describe such reframing: from increasing human capital to building human capacity; from a partnership or individual business focus to a multi-stakeholder approach; and from job and employer-specific skill development to that which is multi-phased and geographically dispersed. Complexity theory will be used to explain these developments. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Investments at the base of the pyramid: Reducing poverty through sustainable asset development

This chapter focuses on prior research that examines the expressed needs and interests of the poor, as well as scholarly literature on effective poverty reduction. It suggest that business investments at the base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) to be designed in such a way that they contribute to reducing poverty in a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable manner. Corporations must be intentional about building sustainable assets through their BoP investments if they truly want their involvement to result in poverty reduction. At the BoP, there are numerous social conditions that might warrant company investment, though it is more difficult to argue that such investments directly improve profit, as do those in the value chain. BoP researchers have suggested three different sets of guidelines for companies to use in determining whether their BoP efforts are good for the poor. Efforts to promote these BoP business principles are modelled through some companies participating in the fair-trade movement

Effects of once-weekly exenatide on cardiovascular outcomes in type 2 diabetes

BACKGROUND: The cardiovascular effects of adding once-weekly treatment with exenatide to usual care in patients with type 2 diabetes are unknown. METHODS: We randomly assigned patients with type 2 diabetes, with or without previous cardiovascular disease, to receive subcutaneous injections of extended-release exenatide at a dose of 2 mg or matching placebo once weekly. The primary composite outcome was the first occurrence of death from cardiovascular causes, nonfatal myocardial infarction, or nonfatal stroke. The coprimary hypotheses were that exenatide, administered once weekly, would be noninferior to placebo with respect to safety and superior to placebo with respect to efficacy. RESULTS: In all, 14,752 patients (of whom 10,782 [73.1%] had previous cardiovascular disease) were followed for a median of 3.2 years (interquartile range, 2.2 to 4.4). A primary composite outcome event occurred in 839 of 7356 patients (11.4%; 3.7 events per 100 person-years) in the exenatide group and in 905 of 7396 patients (12.2%; 4.0 events per 100 person-years) in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 0.91; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.83 to 1.00), with the intention-to-treat analysis indicating that exenatide, administered once weekly, was noninferior to placebo with respect to safety (P<0.001 for noninferiority) but was not superior to placebo with respect to efficacy (P=0.06 for superiority). The rates of death from cardiovascular causes, fatal or nonfatal myocardial infarction, fatal or nonfatal stroke, hospitalization for heart failure, and hospitalization for acute coronary syndrome, and the incidence of acute pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer, medullary thyroid carcinoma, and serious adverse events did not differ significantly between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Among patients with type 2 diabetes with or without previous cardiovascular disease, the incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events did not differ significantly between patients who received exenatide and those who received placebo