White, an advisor to nonprofit organizations and philanthropists, examines actress Lori Loughlin's and her husband's claim that the payments they allegedly made to get their daughters into the University of Southern California weren't bribes but rather charitable gifts....

The executive vice president of mission strategy at the ALS Association explains how funds raised by the Ice Bucket Challenge have been used to advance research on the disease....

Smart, a national spokesperson and advocate for rural philanthropy, explains why tactics and cultural context are critical to effective rural philanthropic practice....

McCarthy, who retired in December as president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, explains why the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund represents a commitment to the that city's most important resource: its young people....

Erickson-Kulas, a program officer at the Michelson 20MM Foundation, explains how the consolidation of publishers could drive up textbook prices and calls on philanthropic funders to invest in open educational resources (OER) — freely licensed materials such as textbooks, tests, and software that reside in the public domain....

Gopal, vice president of strategy and program at the Democracy Fund, outlines three things philanthropy needs to do to more fully embrace a complexity-friendly approach to designing and evaluating social change....

For many organizations, write Sykes and Edwards, participating in a collaboration opens up opportunities that put them in a stronger position to fulfill their missions, scale their work, and help more families achieve their dreams....

Because it focuses on the individual woman or girl and not on the advocacy efforts of feminist groups, most funding for women's empowerment is not only ineffective but actually harmful, argues Françoise Girard, president of the International Women's Health Coalition....

Jessica Almy, director of policy for the Good Food Institute, argues that by funding initiatives that accelerate open-access research in making meat from plants and cells, strategic philanthropists can help transform Big Ag into Better Ag and ensure that the change benefits the people who need it most....

The funders of the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship, an initiative to promote more equitable and sustainable pathways to economic mobility, explain their collaboration with educators and employers to build more scalable long-term solutions that have been proven to help youth acquire the skills they need to navigate the rapidly changing world of work....

Holt International Phillip Littleton is president and CEO calls on international adoption agencies to champion efforts to strengthen, preserve, and reunite birth families; advocate for in-country adoption; and remove barriers to international adoption....

The most recent Benchmarking Survey from Grantmakers In Education highlights an important and difficult question, writes Lopez: How will we navigate the challenge of sharing power with those who have historically had little, especially on occasions when their ideas differ from our own?...

It has been ten years since NCRP released Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best, and as Dorfman, the organization's president, reflects on the response to the report, he's struck by how far the sector has come — and by how little has changed....

Securing and promoting a "name brand" CEO may be an accepted business strategy in our celebrity-obsessed culture, write Lopez and David, but the benefit to a philanthropic foundation is difficult to gauge....