Grantcraft, in cooperation with EFC and the Foundation Center, has published "Philantrophy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2013".


What does it mean to use private resources for the public good? Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2013, a GrantCraft publication written by leading philanthropy scholar Lucy Bernholz, captures this changing landscape.

No longer the purview of foundations and non-profits alone, philanthropy is now defined by an array of increasingly diverse activities, such as impact investing, social businesses, peer networks, and crowd funding. The Blueprint outlines how these and other innovations are transforming the “social economy.”

The fourth edition of the Blueprint has joined the suite of materials in GrantCraft—a joint project of the New York-based Foundation Center and Brussels-based European Foundation Centre—which taps the collective knowledge of funders to share insights to help them hone their craft. The analysis and forecasting showcased in the Blueprint provides the GrantCraft community with keen observations about the current landscape, emerging trends, and important breakthroughs likely in the year ahead.

Bernholz notes that the big shifts that matter for donors and “doers” are data-related, and she provides more than a dozen examples of foundations embracing data. Looking into the future, she sees data as transformative for philanthropy, in terms of both practice and policy. Indeed, Bernholz asserts that the use, ownership, and access rules of data will be as definitional for the social economy in the 21st century as the charitable tax deduction was for non-profits in the 20th century.

“I’m hopeful the Blueprint can contribute to a global discussion about philanthropy, non-profits, and how we use our private resources for public benefit,” said Lucy Bernholz, visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and author of Blueprint 2013. “There are big changes ahead, and the Blueprint gives readers a heads-up on the most meaningful trends.”

In this year’s report, Bernholz includes a scorecard for the previous year’s predictions and a list of 2013 forecasts covering crowd funding, social impact bonds, and political advocacy. She also points out the catchiest philanthropy-related buzzwords of the year and lists possible “wildcard” world events—legislation, scandals, or disasters—that have the potential to mitigate or accelerate the timing of big shifts in the social economy.

“The Blueprint serves as a finger on the pulse of the social economy,” said Lisa Philp, vice president for strategic philanthropy at the Foundation Center. “Lucy’s insights about the changing nature of philanthropy have become required reading for funders and anyone concerned with aligning resources toward the greater good.”

Throughout 2013, Bernholz will explore the ideas in the Blueprint, as well as trends in Europe and other regions of the world, in an on-going conversation at Field Notes, the GrantCraft blog, as well as on her own blog, Philanthropy2173.