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Letters
Limited liking for community empowerment?
A few thoughts on what my good friends Joel Fleishman and Bill Schambra have to say about the role of American foundations (Alliance, April 2008). Joel is correct that foundations have at times played key …
Measuring impact or performance? – Evaluation – no ‘right’ answer
As captured in the December issue of Alliance, many foundations are adapting their evaluation practice in order to understand how to improve their work rather than to isolate the impact of their investments. The aim …
Measuring the effect of a single rain cloud
I was delighted to see the reference to Mango’s ‘Who Counts?’ in Alliance‘s special feature on measuring impact last December – though I would have liked to see more space given to some interesting initiatives …
From ‘why’ to ‘how’
It is good to see that the debate is shifting away from ‘performance measurement is impossible’ (Alliance special feature on Measuring impact, December 2007) and that there is now wide acceptance of the value of …
Unravelling the P word
Steven Burkeman’s article Beyond verbal confusions (September 2007) got me thinking about what ‘philanthropy’ means in New Zealand. In our mainstream institutions, philanthropy is largely about giving to people you don’t know very well, and …
A concerted effort on flying
I do think we need to think seriously about the amount of travel we undertake in this sector (see ?Flying in the face of disaster?, Alliance Online, September 2007). I have been struck by the …
Sceptical about terminology
Recent issues of Alliance have hosted quite a debate about the terminology we use to describe the sector we work in. As an organization that deals with requests for data on this sector every day, …
Who’s for shiny new impact?
I hope that Barry Gaberman is wrong in his assertion that the philanthropic community has bumped ‘transparency and accountability’ back into the last century in favour of shiny new ‘assessment, effectiveness and impact’. It reads …
Let’s use ‘citizen’ for greater clarity
I heartily agree with Bill Drayton’s suggestion to use the word ‘citizen’ in lieu of terms like ‘non-profit’ and ‘non-governmental’ to better define the sector, organizations and movements that encompass the activities of citizens. To …
What about ‘social profit’?
Non-profit should be non-existent – the term, not the type of organization. The time is right to insist on a term that focuses on the investment, risk taking, and entrepreneurial imagination that have always been …
