The Philea Virtual Library

The Philea Virtual Library includes over 1,000 free-to-download publications from a range of organisations and publishers on the topics of philanthropy, the management of foundations and the areas they are involved in and support. As a Philea member you can send us your publications for inclusion in the library which will also be added to the global IssueLab network where they will be made available to an extended audience, including users of Worldcat, the global catalogue used by tens of thousands of libraries. For questions or assistance, please contact the Philea Virtual Library.
Clear all

227 results found

reorder grid_view
Featured

Climate philanthropy networks : Shaping and supporting the philanthropy ecosystem in the field of climate

May 2, 2022

This mapping shows the growing diversity and number of networks that have embraced the mission to support and grow the development of the philanthropy ecosystem in the field of climate. The twenty-one organisations presented range from those that are solely dedicated to climate issues to more general networks that work in a range of areas. Each profile gives a flavor of the organisation or platform's activities and goals. This mapping exercise is part of the activities of the Philanthropy Coalition for Climate (https://philea.eu/how-we-can-help/initiatives/philanthropy-coalition-for-climate/), a group of foundations, philanthropy infrastructure organisations and other partners gathered around the aim to empower philanthropy to drive bold climate action and transformational change in Europe and beyond.

Collaborative Philanthropy and Partnerships; Environment and Sustainable Development; Foundation Sector, History and Analysis
Featured

Insights on how the work of EFC members changed in 2020 : March 2021

September 1, 2021

At the beginning of 2021, following a challenging year of transformation seen across the globe, the EFC surveyed the steering committee members of its Thematic Networks to get an understanding of how their work and organisations changed in 2020.In this follow up to the 2020 publication "EFC Members' Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic : Results from EFC Survey March-June 2020", the EFC regroups their answers and reflections in a compilation of interesting initiatives.

Foundation Sector, History and Analysis; Grantmaking and Programme Management; International Affairs, Global Challenges

Shifting Power to Shift Systems: Insights and Tools for Funders

December 8, 2022

This report summarizes insights relating to power dynamics from leaders and experts on driving systems change.Over the course of three months in early 2022, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors' Shifting Systems Initiative hosted a series of eight workshops focused on power and equity in philanthropy. During these workshops, an invited group of funders and other partners discussed the role of power dynamics in effectuating the systems change needed to address increasingly complex global challenges.The honest and rich conversations during those workshops surfaced several important themes and insights on how to balance power in a way that drives rather than inhibits change. This report distills some of the practical actions that funders can take in order to reduce that power imbalance, including:Shifting internal vision and practices to embrace a vision of society based on global solidarity and distributed leadership.Fostering a culture of learning, growing, and experimenting through exploring new tools and resources, sourcing fresh and emergent perspectives, and funding grantees without restrictions.Embracing equitable evaluation and impact assessment practices by recruiting evaluation teams and consultants who are culturally competent and possess lived experience, and by working with grantees to create relevant metrics of success that define impact on their terms.The report also contains conceptual frameworks and actionable resources that can enable funders to create equitable processes and practices, and to embed equity as a core principle and building block of systems change. We hope this publication will be a meaningful contribution towards moving the practice of philanthropy away from its inequitable origins and practices, and towards more equitable practices that will ultimately enable it to shift power and systems.

Ethical issues and Good Practices; Grantmaking and Programme Management

Landscape Study of Women’s Funds and Foundations – Part 1

October 21, 2022

The central aim of this study is to add necessary insight into what we know about who, what, and how women's funds and foundations - within the WFN alliance - approach their work. This subgroup is important because WFN member funds not only share values, but they also share the ability to create the local enabling partnerships and resources that scale successful prototype projects and catalyze short, and long-term success. Further, WFN's operating premise is that large scale social change comes from collective impact and catalytic leadership versus the isolated efforts of individual organizations. WFN creates a deliberate space for learning, reflection, and dissemination of the most promising practices. Specifically, at this moment of global change, it's necessary to examine this subset of women's funds and their activities at the intersections of racial and gender justice.This report is the first a series of three reports. Part I focuses on the people and organizations in our alliance; Part II will examine programming strategy including advocacy and grantmaking priorities; Part III will discuss how women's funds shift power through equitable community-based grantmaking.

Foundation Sector, History and Analysis; Gender and Women

Giving in Numbers 2022 Edition

October 20, 2022

CECP's Giving in Numbers is the premier industry survey and research, providing standard-setting criteria in a go-to guide that has defined the field and advanced the movement. Over 21 years, CECP has created the largest and most historical data set on trends in the industry, shared by more than 617 multi-billion-dollar companies, representing more than $388 billion in corporate social investments over that time span. The report is embraced by professionals across all sectors globally to understand how corporations invest in society, with topics ranging from cash and in-kind/product, employee volunteerism and giving, and impact measurement. From quick questions, to presentations to company teams, boards, and CEOs, CECP is a trusted advisor to companies, analyzing Giving in Numbers data to provide customized insights to advance strategy and measure the business value.

Corporate Philanthropy

A Year of Learning: Educating the Philanthropic Community About Racialized and Stigmatized Nonprofits

October 1, 2022

The Muslim nonprofit sector is diverse and young, with many organizations established in the post-9/11 era. The Muslim nonprofit sector has been under scrutiny and faces discrimination in the form of Islamophobia. The racialized and stigmatized identity of Muslims has further increased the disconnect between the Muslim nonprofit sector and the philanthropic community. This report paper examines the work of the Year of Learning and its attempts to educate philanthropic leaders about the importance of engaging with racialized minorities including US Muslims. It raised the following questions: Why is there a lack of interaction between the racialized nonprofit sector and the foundation world? What are the challenges? This research suggests that the most powerful way to overcome these challenges is by engaging and educating both sides.

Grantmaking and Programme Management; Minorities, Social Inclusion, Multiculturalism

The State of Global Giving by U.S. Foundations: 2022 Edition

September 20, 2022

For 25 years, the Council on Foundations and Candid have partnered on studies of globally focused giving by U.S. foundations. The new edition of The State of Global Giving by U.S. Foundations dives into 2016-2019 data to provide the latest perspective on how the nation's foundations are supporting critical efforts to improve health outcomes, address climate change, offer access to education, ensure human rights, and engage with a wide array of other global priorities. Through interviews with a selection of global funders, Global Giving also offers insights on how foundations are addressing the critical challenges of our time and where they see signs of optimism and opportunity going forward.Key Report FindingsU.S. private and community foundations included in Candid's Foundation 1000 dataset awarded globally focused grants totaling $8 billion in 2019—close to four times the approximately $2.2 billion awarded in 2002.Health accounted for 49 percent of global grant dollars.The largest shares of funding focused on the Sub-Saharan Africa (25.1%) and Asia & Pacific (17.7%) regions.Among the many issue areas supported by foundations, human rights has realized the fastest growth in global support in recent years. In the 2016-2019 period, human rights reached 11 percent of global foundation grant dollars, up from less than 7 percent in the 2011-2015 period.Roughly 13 percent of U.S. foundations' global grant dollars went directly to organizations based in the country where programs were implemented in the 2016-2019 period, up marginally from approximately 12 percent in the 2011-2015 period.Funding by Foundation 1000 foundations for efforts to counter or mitigate the impact of climate change in the United States and globally totaled nearly $1.8 billion in the 2016-2019 period, up from $1.3 billion in the 2011-2015 period.The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation accounted for 44% of global giving by U.S. foundations from 2016 to 2019.

Foundation Sector, History and Analysis

Rules and Incentives: Mapping the Legal Framework for Non-profit Organisations and Philanthropy in Latin America and the Caribbean

April 19, 2022

For the past two years, WINGS, the Centro de Filantropía e Inversiones Sociales de la Escuela de Gobierno de la Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (CEFIS UAI) and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy of Indiana University, have worked together to develop a comparative study on the legal frameworks in Latin America and the Caribbean that regulate donations and the life cycle of non-profit organisations.  In this report, you will find detailed information from 19 countries that reveals what regulations hinder and which ones help philanthropy in the region.

Legislation and Taxation

Mission-Aligned Investing: How We Assess Our Progress

April 4, 2022

This report focuses on impact and ESG investing to share how our investment team thinks about the non-financial returns from our portfolio. Impact and ESG investment metrics remain a work in progress across the industry. Over time, Agility and the RBF have adopted an increasingly more comprehensive lens to assess the non-financial outcomes of our mission-aligned investments. The report details the RBF's 2021 transition to a multi-pronged approach to impact and ESG metrics, including:Considering both qualitative and quantitative data, recognizing that impacts can be positive or negative.Using the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) IRIS+ catalog of generally accepted impact performance metrics to measure social, environmental, and financial success.Adopting the United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which many have seen as an industry standard, as a method for categorizing ESG and impact goals.Actively engaging with industry coalitions and efforts to further standardize ESG and impact metrics.Aligning our endowment with our mission extends beyond the investments in the portfolio to other steps we, as investors, can take to influence corporations, fund managers, and other asset owners. The report also details our focus areas for intended impact, areas of growth, and shareholder engagement activities. The RBF developed and implemented revised proxy voting guidelines in 2017 and partners with Agility and Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc., in the implementation and subsequent reporting phases of shareholder engagement and proxy voting. The RBF exercised its proxy votes on a range of issues in 2021, including human rights, workplace and board diversity, sustainability and climate change, and others. The report shows how RBF proxy voting reflects and builds on larger trends in shareholder engagement over the last several years.

Finance and Investment; Grantmaking and Programme Management

Forgotten by Funders

December 1, 2021

This report highlights the underfunding of work with and for imprisoned and formerly imprisoned women and girls,  alongside a worrying increase in the global female prison population. The report draws from the survey responses of 34 organisations, most of which are based in the Global South and have women with lived experience of the justice system involved with or leading their work. Calling to donors that fund human rights, women's rights and/or access to justice, the report concludes that this heavily gendered area of human rights tends to fall through the cracks of donor strategies, including recent Gender Equality Forum pledges. 

Gender and Women; Grantmaking and Programme Management; Human Rights, Citizenship, Democracy

1.5-Degree Lifestyles: Towards A Fair Consumption Space for All

October 1, 2021

This report uses a science-based approach to link concrete changes in lifestyles to measurable impacts on climate change in order to achieve the 1.5-degree aspirational target of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The report also fills the knowledge gap arising from most prevailing climate scenarios that underplay the potential contributions of lifestyle changes to climate change mitigation and focus on developing new technologies as well as on changes in production.A summary for policy makers and individual sections of the report can be dowloaded here: https://hotorcool.org/1-5-degree-lifestyles-report/A recording of the report launch is available here:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLncecPWTUt9l_I0hQzg3BpGkkTz-h2uhG

Environment and Sustainable Development; International Affairs, Global Challenges; Socio-economic Development, Poverty

Learning Through Play: Increasing impact, Reducing inequality

January 1, 2021

What is the potential of children's play to promote equality in outcomes and address learning gaps between children from more advantaged and less advantaged backgrounds? Drawing evidence from early childhood learning programmes across 18 countries, as well as from interviews with the authors of various contributing studies, this report aims to understand whether and how the evidence about play and learning relates to tackling the learning crisis, especially in terms of inequality in learning outcomes around the globe.This report published by the LEGO Foundation shows that play not only helps children learn, it also supports inclusion, and reduces inequality, therefore demonstrating that policymakers and international organisations need to pay close attention to play. Building on their findings, the authors suggest four areas for future investment, innovation and investigation.

Education; Evaluation and Learning; Socio-economic Development, Poverty

Showing 12 of 227 results

arrow_upward