Area: Social investment models and approaches

Insights for impact: 2022 edition

Insights for impact: 2022 edition

This year-end report synthesizes the key learnings from each of NationSwell’s 2022 research publications and highlights several Studio projects with widely-relevant research deliverables. They cover a range of evergreen and emergent topic areas, including ESG, DEIB, community-centered philanthropy, corporate civic engagement, the future of work, catalytic cross-sector partnerships, and more. By focusing on solutions over exposition, and elevating the most urgent ideas, NationSwell’s insights reports showcase our deep commitment to valuing your time and delivering what you need to lead at your best.

Share this report
Recommended Features

Bringing community engagement into physical retail

Bringing community engagement into physical retail

NATIONSWELL PRIMER
Posted on
Download

A growing number of retail-based companies are piloting and scaling in-store models for connecting more deeply and authentically with their local communities. Those efforts are motivated by the desire to drive economic growth in underserved neighborhoods, create space for community engagement and artistic expression, and modernize stores for evolving consumer expectations. While individual approaches to community-based store models vary, there are several themes and patterns that stand out. 

This one-page primer names five common approaches to creating community in retail stores, with examples of each model. 

Share this report
Recommended Features

The state of play: U.S. philanthropy

The state of play: U.S. philanthropy

Philanthropy provides risk-tolerant capital in a way that government and business cannot. It is a necessary ingredient to solving the world’s social and environmental problems. A new wave of giving that can propel projects forward with equity and justice at the fore is increasingly contingent on funders not only donating their financial resources but also embedding the values of trust-based approaches into their overall strategy. This trend report describes five key trends for U.S. philanthropy in 2022:

The trends: 

  • Funders have increased their giving over the last two years, sometimes significantly, but growth in nominal giving hides the fact that funders are donating less of what they earn
  • Trust-based philanthropy found its foothold in the midst of crisis; today, funders are sustaining and evolving those principles
  • Funders are doing more to prioritize racial and social justice in their giving, yet BIPOC voices remain too marginalized in decision-making 
  • Funders are realizing philanthropy’s potential to support climate interventions, but their actual investments are incommensurate to the challenge
  • Collaborative approaches are gaining momentum and proving their impact, even among institutional funders; collective investing models adopt a power sharing approach, taking learnings from individual giving as well as trust- and place-based initiatives
Share this report
Recommended Features

How the Bush Foundation’s $100 million community trust funds are decolonizing philanthropy

How the Bush Foundation’s $100 million community trust funds are decolonizing philanthropy

Spurred by the global resurgence of the movement to demand bolder action against structural racism, the Bush Foundation designed an innovative approach to redistribute wealth to Black and Native American communities. Called community trust funds, the model disburses $100 million dollars through two steward organizations from these communities. Those steward organizations will use the trust funds to support educational attainment, home ownership, and entrepreneurial opportunities for individuals. The full report describes the Bush Foundation’s Community Trust Fund approach in five steps:

  • Issue a social impact bond to dramatically increase funding capacity.

By relying on debt financing to fund new grants, the foundation was able to urgently increase its support to the Native American and Black communities while still investing in other projects using their endowed assets.

  • Engage directly with community members to design a funding strategy.

The Bush Foundation structured a deep engagement process with 28 community members including leaders, elders, and experts on reparations and philanthropy. Their guidance helped the organization arrive at a community trust fund model for investing the $100M bond proceeds in Native American and Black individuals.

  • Invite expressions of interest from potential steward organizations.

The Bush Foundation cast a wide and inclusive net to invite interest from potential steward organizations. Their request for proposals focused on organizations’ capacity to credibly steward the funds and their demonstrated ability to engage deeply with community members in informing their work.

  • Select two steward organizations with guidance from community members.

The Bush Foundation recruited a representative community panel with understanding of the lived experiences and needs of the Black and Native American community to advise their selection process by interviewing finalist organizations. They helped identify NDN Collective and Nexus Community Partners as the two steward organizations for $50M community trust funds.

  • Provide initial funding and guidelines to steward organizations for their program design phase.

The Bush Foundation provided an up front $500,000 to each steward organization to support their work designing a grantmaking program for each community trust fund, as well as support around grant management, evaluation, and legal issues. The design phase funding is in addition to the $50M each steward organization will receive to seed their community trust fund.

Share this report
Recommended Features

Four imperatives for centering communities in philanthropy

Four imperatives for centering communities in philanthropy

EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
Posted on
Download

Traditional approaches to philanthropy are rooted in power imbalances that reinforce closed networks of social and financial capital. These networks make equity elusive and instead perpetuate behaviors that systemically constrain access to resources for historically underrepresented communities. 

Spurred by stakeholders’ newly impassioned demand for equity, justice, and change, we now find ourselves at the precipice of a new era of philanthropy. But to fully harness the potential and possibility of this moment in our evolution, the philanthropic sector must acknowledge that the inequities of its past are inextricable from the inefficiencies of its systems — systems that, by and large, eschewed voices from the communities that philanthropy purports to serve. 

Philanthropies achieve their biggest impact when they act as the intermediary that can help empower local communities toward their own self-determination. In order to make good on the promise of this new era, leaders behind philanthropic efforts and at the top of philanthropic organizations must place the communities they serve at the very center of every aspect of their work. This briefing provides strategic guidance to funders — anchored around four imperatives — for shifting philanthropic power toward communities. 

The Four Imperatives: 

  • Show up intellectually, physically, and emotionally in the community 
  • Radically alter the way funding decisions are made
  • Invest holistically in grantees’ financial and social well-being
  • Empower communities to own their data, metrics, and reporting
Share this report
Recommended Features