Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Community Foundation’S Experience Implementing And Evaluating General Operating Support, Annemarie Riemer, Erika Frank, Hedda Rublin, Susan Merrow-Kehoe

The Foundation Review

In 2013, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving began to offer unrestricted general operating support grants in response to grantees’ expressed need. The foundation hired Technical Development Corp., a Boston consulting firm, to evaluate the process and implementation.

This article shares early indicators of the impact of the new grantmaking approach on both grantees and the foundation. Grantee outcomes include enhanced infrastructure and financial health, continued progress on strategic plan goals, and more creative thinking about programs. Beyond the adoption of a new funding option, the decision led the foundation to modify its overall grantmaking process.

The greatest challenge – …

The Philanthropy As One Big Impact Investment: A Framework For Evaluating A Foundation’S Blended Performance, Rohit T. Aggarwala, Claudine A. Frasch

The Foundation Review

While some foundations have put their entire focus on impact investing, philanthropy still lacks the tools that enable such investments to be made with the same rigor as the best financial investments and philanthropic grants. This reveals a more fundamental problem: We do not currently manage foundations as the integrated portfolios that they are.

This article proposes a framework for evaluating a foundation’s blended performance that enables both grantmaking and endowment investing to be evaluated jointly, and thus also allows a complete evaluation of how impact investments could improve — or fail to improve — overall performance.

The article demonstrates …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Insights From Deploying A Collaborative Process For Funding Systems Change, Alison Mccarthy, Jacob Bornstein, Tiffany Perrin, Jennifer James, Bill Fulton

The Foundation Review

Many foundations are seeking to impact root causes of social issues through funding initiatives that are both technically and socially complicated and where past experience is no guarantee of success. These situations exhibit the growing need for more adaptive funding approaches, such as emergent philanthropy.

This article looks at an application of emergent strategy at the Colorado Health Foundation. It shares tools used to design the funding approach for the foundation’s Creating Healthy Schools initiative, including support for grantees in refining their grant-proposal budgets and activities, decreasing duplication, and leveraging resources more effectively.

This article will look at lessons learned, …

The Missing Link For Maximizing Impact: Foundations Assessing Their Capacity, Melinda Fine, Jared Raynor, Jessica Mowles, Deepti Sood

The Foundation Review

A rapidly changing, global sociopolitical environment requires foundations to be nimble in maximizing opportunities to advance their agendas. At the same time, grantmakers are establishing ever more ambitious goals that often require grantees to function at peak capacity. Why, then, have more foundations not assessed their own institutional capacity?

This article discusses an assessment of 54 foundations that participated in taking a new tool, developed for funders by TCC Group, to explore five core capacity areas shown to be central to organizational effectiveness. The Foundation Core Capacity Assessment Tool’s findings should not be seen as a report card, but rather …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Foundations Don’T Know What They’Re Risking, Maya Winkelstein, Shelley Whelpton

The Foundation Review

Critical gaps exist in philanthropy’s definitions of and approach to risk management. This article describes the scope of the problem and a framework for philanthropists to adopt risk-management practices that better equip the sector to address the challenges of our time.

In 2015, the Open Road Alliance surveyed hundreds of funders and grantees to explore questions about risk and contingency funding. The next year, Open Road partnered with Arabella Advisors for a qualitative analysis of existing foundation policies and procedures related to risk. The combined results suggest a need for contingency funding – and a lack among most funders and …

Staying The Course: How A Long-Term Strategic Donor Initiative To Conserve The Amazon Has Yielded Outcomes Of Global Significance, Jared Hardner, R.E. Gullison, Elizabeth O’Neill

The Foundation Review

This article examines how the design principles of a major philanthropic initiative have influenced its performance, and provides a practical example of strategic philanthropy that can contribute to the current debate over the merits and flaws of this approach.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s $369 million Andes Amazon Initiative, one of the largest private environmental conservation initiatives ever, reflects the values of the Moore family by focusing on conserving important biodiversity and wilderness areas such as the Amazon. “Making a difference” in the context of the Andes-Amazon has required adherence to the foundation’s founders’ principles of investing at sufficient …

Foundations As Network Strategists, Weavers, And Managers: Learning From One Foundation’S Journey And Results, Clare Nolan, Brian Souza, Michael Monopoli, Marianne Hughes

The Foundation Review

This article shares insights from a five-year evaluation of the Oral Health 2020 network, an effort by the DentaQuest Foundation to align and strengthen efforts in service of a national movement to improve oral health. The evaluation helped to place the foundation’s journey in the context of a broader field seeking new approaches to achieve deep and sustainable social change.

The foundation’s approach was informed by several ideas that have gained momentum in the social sector, including collective impact, networks, systems change, and equity – all of which challenged the foundation to take a nontraditional approach that combined the roles …

Marguerite Casey Foundation: Reflecting On 15 Years Of Philanthropic Leadership Through A Summative Evaluation, Mavis Sanders, Claudia Galindo, Luz Vega-Marquis, Cheryl Milloy

The Foundation Review

This article presents the findings of a summative evaluation of the Marguerite Casey Foundation that was conducted on the occasion of its 15th anniversary. The evaluation was designed to gauge stakeholders’ perceptions of the foundation’s operations to facilitate organizational learning. In sharing these results, the authors seek to elucidate the role of evaluation as a learning practice within the field of philanthropy.

The article describes the foundation’s organizational elements and evolution and discusses key themes that emerged from qualitative data collected from foundation leaders and staff, as well as findings from a survey of current grantees.

The article presents a …

A Neighborhood-Based Family Center Redesign Process: Taking A Systems Perspective, Patricia Bowie, Richard Sussman

The Foundation Review

This article describes how the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, with a subset of its grantees and their program recipients, teamed with the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities to redesign its evaluation process.

The foundation’s shift from traditional program evaluation to a more participatory, learning-focused approach resulted in new tools to assess variables that had been previously unexamined but were critical to program success.

This article examines the redesign process and those new tools – the data from which are being used to improve employee engagement and front-line practice as part of a cross-agency learning network – …

Why Some Perpetual Foundations Aren’T (Perpetual): Observations On The Importance Of Inflation Effects On The Economics Of Foundations, John Riche Ettinger

The Foundation Review

This article demonstrates the relevance of correctly accounting for inflation to foundation structure and programs – including, for example, in analyzing perpetual versus spend-down strategies and in comparing the cost-effectiveness of programs over different time periods. Investment teams must also be provided with return targets, which are highly sensitive to inflation and which in turn determine a risk estimate that must be considered by foundation fiduciaries.

Seemingly small differences in inflation estimates will become material over time. But at many foundations, systematic biases are frequently built into inflation estimates. These biases are often attributable to a failure to consider the …

Our Cruise In The Baltic, Delivered On June 15, 2017, Arend D. Lubbers

Presidential Speeches

Our Cruise in the Baltic, delivered on June 15, 2017 by Arend D. Lubbers, who served as President of Grand Valley from 1969-2001.

Recently Released Women’S Time Spent With Mentors And Achieving Reentry Goals, Rebecca R. Stoddard

Masters Theses

Within the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, the local Women’s Resource Center (WRC) fosters a mentoring program, New Beginnings (NB), with the goal to assist recently released jailed women to successfully reintegrate by achieving reentry goals. The following study examines how gender-responsive offender mentoring influences the success of women achieving reentry goals and reentering society. This study uses data from WRC that shows how many hours 78 mentees spent with their mentors before and after they were released from the Kent County jail and if reentry goals were met. It is hypothesized that total, pre-, and post-release hours mentors and …

Allen And Helen Hunting Introduction, Delivered At The Gvsu Enrichment Dinner On June 6, 2017, Arend D. Lubbers

Presidential Speeches

Allen and Helen Hunting Introduction, delivered at the GVSU Enrichment Dinner on June 6, 2017 by Arend D. Lubbers, who served as President of Grand Valley from 1969-2001.

Lanthorn, Vol. 51, No. 62, June 5, 2017, Grand Valley State University

Volume 51, July 11, 2016 - June 5, 2017

Lanthorn is Grand Valley State's student newspaper, published from 1968 to the present.

Keynote1: Ethical Ux, Matthew Reidsma

Books and Contributions to Books

When the social critic Paul Goodman wrote that "technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science,” he meant that shaping the world through technology involved moral choices, concerned with how we ought to live. Our library UX work is no different. Our user research methods are moral choices that affect our users; The data we collect not only helps us, it is likely being stockpiled by vendors and advertisers to better understand our users. Our design decisions have ethical implications, too; By working to change our users' behavior, we prioritize our own version of what is 'right.' But …

If You Build It, They Will Crash Into It: Data Visualization Of A 4-Year Study Of Bird-Building Collisions, Barbara Harvey

Presentations

The purpose of this study was two-fold: •To determine if there is a discernable pattern in the bird-building collisions which could inform a solution. •To strengthen liaison relationships with the Biology Department by providing museum study skins.

Editorial, Teri Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Are We Dreaming Or Doing? How Health Science Graduates Access Information In Their Professional Lives, Valeria Long, Betsy Williams, Barbara C. Harvey, Christopher A. Kierkus

Presentations

No abstract provided.

A Good Scam For Building Connections: Scholarly Communications Activity Mapping, Barbara C. Harvey, Ashley Rosener, Matt Ruen

Presentations

Are you looking for new ways to connect with faculty? Do you know how to best support faculty publishing? Grand Valley State University Libraries has developed a scholarly activity mapping template to document current scholarly and creative practices of faculty. The data gathered can be used to identify unmet faculty scholarly needs and reveal new opportunities to build relationships with faculty.

Over the last several years, our liaison librarians have worked to closely integrate library instruction services into the curriculum of their liaison areas through the use of instruction plans. At the same time our research and publishing support expanded, …

A Survey Of Positive Behavioral Supports In Juvenile Residential Facilities, Erin R. Veltman

Honors Projects

The central focus of this project is a survey of programs and organizations serving youth labelled at-risk. This program study is to see how positive behavioral intervention and support (PBIS) systems versus consequence based behavioral management systems are used in programs for youth labelled at risk. It also surveys if PBIS systems are beneficial for working with this population. The methods used in this study were to generate a survey asking questions about the behavioral management systems used in the facilities and the effectiveness of the systems used. Results indicated that of the facilities surveyed, all of them worked with …

Exploring The Relationship Between Athletic Identity And Career Maturity Among High Profile Student Athletes In Revenue Producing Sports Attending A Division Ii Institution, Renida S. Clark

Masters Theses

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the relationship between athletic identity and career maturity of high profile male athletes at a Division II institution in the Midwest. The study was guided by Donald E. Super’s (1957) career development theory. Participants were high profile male student athletes, who were currently enrolled at the institution and played a revenue producing sport (narrowly defined as men’s football and basketball). Semi-structured interviews were conducted that prompted participants to describe their experiences as high profile student athletes and how those experiences contributed to their athletic identity and career maturity. Findings suggest that …

Patterns Of A Sustainable Grand Valley State University, Cullin Flynn

Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

“The Cracked Pots Of Humanity”: Post-World War Ii American Literary Perspectives On Psychiatric Treatment/Containment Of Mental Disorders, Jennifer Chichester

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which characters in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Bird’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces grapple with the concept of “madness” on individual and societal levels. Each of these Post-World War II novels question whether “madness” is a social construct. Is the person mad, or is society? These three novels, written in an era when inpatient psychiatric care was losing its prominence as a method for treating those deemed insane, reflect the growing trend of deinstitutionalization in the 1950s …

Sermon Introduction, Delivered At Fountain Street Church On May 9, 2017, Arend D. Lubbers

Presidential Speeches

Sermon Introduction, delivered at Fountain Street Church on May 9, 2017 by Arend D. Lubbers, who served as President of Grand Valley from 1969-2001.

Racial Ideology And Black Students’ Leadership Experiences At A Historically White Institution, Rechard Peel

Masters Theses

The purpose of the present study is to understand the relationship between racial ideology and leadership experiences of Black student leaders at a historically White institution (HWI). Using a phenomenological approach, the study seeks to delineate the experiences of Black students as it relates to their leadership and racial identity. Using the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI); (Sellers et al., 1997) and one-on-one semi-structured interviews, data was collected from Black undergraduate students at a midsized HWI who were classified as juniors or above and who participated in one or more student organizations or campus activities in a leadership capacity. …

Lanthorn, Vol. 51, No. 61, May 8, 2017, Grand Valley State University

Volume 51, July 11, 2016 - June 5, 2017

Lanthorn is Grand Valley State's student newspaper, published from 1968 to the present.