As I mentioned in the last blog post about our research, we’re sharing our thoughts about each social cause as we begin new research. The purpose of sharing this additional information is to explain why we think these are interesting or relevant areas to research, what we learned about the nuances of the cause, and the difficulties we faced in narrowing the scope of the research, so you, the reader, can understand what we considered as we refined our thinking about the research.

If you are an expert on any of these topics, you should be receiving an email from us soon and we hope you will be compelled to participate! If for some reason we have missed you and you think you have a valuable perspective to offer, please contact me at erinn.andrews@myphilanthropedia.org.

Additionally, I’m sure I haven’t been able to capture every nuance in these sectors, so I invite your feedback and thoughts about how you might think about this work. For those readers less familiar with this topic, I hope you will learn something new and tune in again when we have the results of this research. Thank you all for your participation!

–

Because we recently ran research on arts and culture in the Bay Area, I’m not going to repeat much of what we said in that blog post which you can find here. We had a similar thought process for how to narrow the scope of our research. However, I feel it’s worthwhile repeating one very important point from our local arts research: how to define the impact of arts and culture nonprofits.

High-Impact Arts and Culture Nonprofits

Impact in the nonprofit sector is always hard to define, yet I have found that it’s even more difficult to define in arts and culture. How might we measure impact in the arts world? First, from a more objective standpoint, donors or funders might look at the “staying power” of an organization which could be evaluated by measuring the growth of support over time. One could look for evidence that someone cares about this work: attendance numbers, subscription numbers, percentage of the house that’s full, and/or donor support. Second, one might look for more subjective measures: what do organizations achieve with what they have or how much programming can they produce on a given budget; what’s the scope of this activity and what’s the quality of this activity? And then there’s the dimension of whether the performance, exhibit, reading, etc. was enjoyable, interesting, or thought-provoking to an audience member.

With the help of a few experts, I’ve come to this definition for what a high-impact arts and culture nonprofit might look like: A high-impact arts and culture nonprofit is one which is successful at creating or producing something of value to those who care about the arts and culture. A high-impact arts and culture nonprofit is able to contribute to the field by creating meaningful work and/or helping others develop an appreciation for the arts and culture.

Scope of the Research

Given all of this information and context, we are interested in learning more about arts and culture nonprofits that serve a national or multi-state audience or influence the arts at the national level. These arts organizations could be developing or producing new work, be focused on performance, work to preserve and promote a traditional culture , advocacy, have an educational component, serve any age or type of audience, have any budget size, and/or represent any genre or discipline of art. We are interested in arts nonprofits that have had real impact and do outstanding work, NOT nonprofits that have simply been around for many years or most need additional funding. This research will be focused on organizations, not individual artists.

What else might you add to this post? What have I missed? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

If you are a major donor, philanthropy advisor, foundation, or expert interested in the Expertise on Demand beta, please check the bottom of this post or http://www.myphilanthropedia.org/eod for information on how to sign up.

I am very excited to announce a new Philanthropedia initiative called Expertise on Demand. This new service will act as a trusted intermediary and connect major donors, philanthropy advisors, and foundations with cause experts who can help fill knowledge gaps quickly and efficiently and channel more money to high-impact nonprofits and projects.

Expertise on Demand is very much a natural extension of Philanthropedia’s existing concept of building expert networks to identify high-impact nonprofits in different social causes. While Philanthropedia currently focuses on providing Expert Funds of recommended nonprofits, we recognize that our 1000-strong expert network may be of value to major donors who wish to dig deeper into an issue area and make a larger financial contribution. That is why we decided to create Expertise on Demand which further promotes Philanthropedia’s mission of knowledge sharing and strategic giving.

To make Expertise on Demand a reality, we are collaborating with Tactical Philanthropy Advisors, a philanthropy advisory firm. Tactical Philanthropy’s CEO Sean Stannard-Stockton is a well-known thought leader in philanthropy who envisioned the Expertise on Demand concept last year when he announced his intention to launch a similar project under the name “Tactical Philanthropy Knowledge Network.” At the time, Philanthropedia was just getting started, but as our organization has developed, Sean and I decided that Philanthropedia was the best home for this initiative because we had already built networks of more than 1000 experts through our own research.

We asked Sean to weigh in on why he thinks Expertise on Demand is so important:

“I think a key problem to solve in philanthropy is how to allow sharing of knowledge while protecting access to individuals and respecting their time and privacy. After the Haitian Earthquake, 45% of Americans made donations to support the country. Yet despite numerous foundation professionals, academic researchers and nonprofit senior staff who have deep knowledge about who is doing the best work in Haiti, few if any donors were able to capitalize on this knowledge. Philanthropedia has quickly established itself as a leading creator of expert networks in the social sector. My hope is that the Expertise on Demand platform can build the trust necessary to facilitate open knowledge sharing while protecting individual experts.”

Sean has agreed to join Expertise on Demand as chair of the steering committee tasked with designing the service. Other members of the committee are:

• Gary Galaich, Director, Philanthropy Workshop West
• Katherina Rosqueta, Executive Director, Center for High Impact Philanthropy at University of Pennsylvania
• Lisa Rose, Donor Relations Officer, San Francisco Foundation
• Nick Hodges, COO, Schwab Charitable
• Robert Egger, Founder and President, DC Central Kitchen

The goal of the steering committee will be to help design Expertise on Demand over the next few months, before the official beta launch of the service to coincide with the Social Capital Markets conference in October.

If you are a major donor, philanthropic advisor, or foundation that wants to tap into the Expertise on Demand expert network, please send us an email at eod@myphilanthropedia.org indicating the issue area that you are interested in.

If you are an expert who wants to join the 1000+ strong Philanthropedia expert network, please send us an email at eod@myphilanthropedia.org with your name, areas of expertise, contact details, bio, and photo.

You can find more information, including answers to frequently asked questions, at http://www.myphilanthropedia.org/eod or by emailing us at eod@myphilanthropedia.org.

We are excited to launch research on a number of new social causes at the national level! There are 5 causes at the national level we plan to pursue and we’ll spread out the start of each survey by a week or two. At the start of each survey launch, we’ll share a blog post about the cause we’ll be studying. The purpose of sharing this additional information is to explain why we think these are interesting or relevant areas to research, what we learned about the nuances of the cause, and the difficulties we faced in narrowing the scope of the research, so you, the reader, can understand what we considered as we refined our thinking about the research.

If you are an expert on any of these topics, you should be receiving an email from us soon and we hope you will be compelled to participate! If for some reason we have missed you and you think you have a valuable perspective to offer, please contact me at erinn.andrews@myphilanthropedia.org.

Additionally, I’m sure I haven’t been able to capture every nuance in these sectors, so I invite your feedback and thoughts about how you might think about this work. For those readers less familiar with this topic, I hope you will learn something new and tune in again when we have the results of this research. Thank you all for your participation!

Background on Women’s Health

We started by thinking about women’s health topics because there is significant donor and foundation support for this topic. As we’ve said before, these are two key considerations when deciding what causes to research: (1) Do donors care about this topic? (2) Are there foundations that support nonprofits in that sector? Usually, foundations will have established evaluation criteria for a sector and they generally employ folks whose main purpose is to think about nonprofit effectiveness.

As you might imagine, women’s health topics can be divided in many different ways!

I discovered that some experts believe women’s health topics can be divided into four major buckets:

(1) Research (universities or research institutes that study things like dementia, menopause), (2) Health disparities (advocacy groups focused on access to knowledge, clinics, resources, and screenings), (3) Empowerment sciences (providing microloans which impact a woman’s health, education, and legal issues), and (4) Policy intervention.

Others experts divided women’s health into (1) mental, (2) physical, and (3) reproductive health, where reproductive health might include teen pregnancy prevention, research and programming, education, affordability, access, and unplanned pregnancy.

Or, women’s health could be divided into conditions or diseases specific to women, conditions experienced differently by women, gender constructs, and inequities. One could also divide it according to reproductive years, middle aged, and elder care (long term care).

Wow—I hadn’t thought there were so many sub-issues within women’s health! As I talked to more and more experts, I found that women’s health as a topic can be frustrating for those working within the sector because the focus can seem too broad. Further, the types of problems women’s health professionals are trying to solve don’t necessarily seem like women’s health problems. For example, women’s transportation may not seem like an obvious problem for a women’s health nonprofit to solve, but it is relevant when a woman does not have access to transportation to get to a clinic.

Reproductive Health, Rights, & Justice:

In an effort to narrow down the possible options within women’s health and to help focus our research, I decided that reproductive health was broad enough to allow for a large number of potential experts and nonprofits, but not so broad as to include every aspect of women’s health.

As I spoke with experts, I learned that within the last few years, “reproductive health” has come to include three sub-categories: reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice.

• Reproductive health might include service providers, clinical care, and possibly some advocacy and policy work. A section of this could be sexual health focused on prevention, cancer screenings, contraception, abortion, and a subset of sexual health too: LGBTQ health concerns.
• Reproductive rights is more broad and could include research, advocacy, litigation, and policy.
• Reproductive justice is the most recent addition to this trio and generally has to do with empowering the formerly powerless or individuals without a majority voice in this sector, such as younger women, women of color, etc.

Who cares? Problem Statements

The experts with whom I spoke identified a number of problems that nonprofits might be trying to address around women’s health and specifically reproductive health, rights, & justice. Here are a few examples that range from general to specific:

• Politicizing women’s health issues is a symptom of not understanding the complexity of the problem.
• Women are not in seats of power to drive the agenda as much as they should be. This power disparity has been a long term battle.
• In order to improve women’s health conditions, nonprofits must also focus their attention on economic empowerment, violence prevention, and making policy changes.
• We need to expand the definition of reproductive health beyond just maintaining Roe v. Wade.

How to measure impact?

Because we have not researched any causes in the medical field, we wanted to learn more about how nonprofit leaders and their peers measure nonprofit impact in this sector. In no particular order here’s what a few of the experts said they look for and ask when evaluating reproductive health, rights, & justice nonprofits (not that they must do all these things!):

• Do they deliver high quality reproductive health services to a large number of people? How many people do they reach?
• Do they perform advocacy work and what effect has that had on the field?
• Is there leadership training within the organization?
• Does the organization inform policy and opinion leaders? Do they achieve their policy goals?
• What is the quality and strength of their relationship with decision makers?
• Do they have a breadth and depth of supporters/members?
• How do their peer organizations view them?
• How much federal funding have they secured?

Scope of the Research

In summary, after all of these considerations, we narrowed the scope of the research to focusing on reproductive health, rights, & justice nonprofits operating on a national or multi-state level. Reproductive health might include service providers and clinical care (focused on prevention, cancer screenings, contraception, abortion, etc.), as well as advocacy and policy organizations. A sub-section of reproductive health could be sexual health with a particular look at LGBTQ health concerns. Reproductive rights might include research, advocacy, litigation, and policy. Reproductive justice would include empowering the formerly powerless or individuals without a majority voice in this sector, such as younger women, women of color, and so on.

To the reproductive health, rights, & justice experts out there, I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface with these observations. I invite you to contribute your thoughts as well. In your opinion, what are the main problems that reproductive health, rights, & justice nonprofits are trying to address at the national level? Why is this topic important? What additional context is necessary to understand the complexity of this issue?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Earth Day reminds many people to do something for the planet which is why we’re excited to announce the results of our Bay Area climate change research in time for this important event.

We surveyed 97 Bay Area climate change experts who identified 14 top nonprofits working in the San Francisco Bay Area to address climate change. You will find a few familiar names from our national climate change Expert Fund. All of these nonprofits have a local presence and some even have a global reach.

These organizations include associations, advocacy groups focused on transportation, research organizations, grassroots organizers, policy focused organizations, open space advocates, organizations promoting clean energy solutions, environmental health justice organizations, and more.

Here are the results:

Visit our site to learn more about each of these outstanding climate change nonprofits. You can read about the impact these nonprofits have had, see what their other organizational strengths are, and find out what areas for improvement the experts think even the top nonprofits could have. To get a sense of who contributed to this research, please visit our experts here.

We urge you to take action this Earth Day and make a donation through our Bay Area Climate Change Expert Fund to support these outstanding nonprofits. You can also revisit our research on climate change nonprofits working at the national level here to contribute to those organizations, as well.

And finally, let us know what you think! How do you interpret these results?

We are wrapping up research on new local, Bay Area causes. Thank you to the hundreds of experts who participated in this research. As we analyze those results and prepare to add new information to our website, we are starting to look ahead at what new causes to study. We will turn our attention back to the national level and over the course of the next few weeks and months, we will expand into a number of new causes. Here’s what we’re thinking about:

National:

• Women’s Reproductive Health, Rights, & Justice
• Education (re-run our research there)
• Workforce/Economic Development
• Childhood Nutrition
• Arts & Culture

As we did this winter, just before we launch our research in each new cause, we will release a blog post explaining more about our thought process and reasoning behind each choice. Additionally, we will explain the scope of the research so if you have any experts to recommend who are knowledgeable about one of these topics, you can put us in touch.

As always, please share your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions! If you or someone you know is an expert in one of these fields, please reach out to me at erinn.andrews@myphilanthropedia.org — I’d love to talk to you! And of course, stay tuned for announcements over the next few weeks about the results of our Bay Area research.

Philanthropedia is made possible by a dedicated team that I am very proud to have the privilege to work with. However, we never have time to explore all promising ideas and are always looking to add more talent to help us change philanthropy for the better.

That’s why I am excited to announce that we are very lucky to have recruited 7 students, who are volunteering their time to help us pursue some of the most promising ideas. You can find a bit about each of them below.

Welcome aboard Lisa, Sin Lee, Derrick, Tristana, Julie, Jared, and Jacob!

Lisa Calfas
Lisa is a senior at Stanford studying psychology and physics. She spent last summer working with a stealth internet start-up, has served as a tour guide at Stanford, and has poured over countless data sets as a research assistant on campus. She’s been active in local non-profits, from leading a summer program for youth in Oakland to working closely with an East Palo Alto-based non-profit that serves local youth and their families. She’s interested in applying tools from the for-profit sector to increase the impact of non-profit organizations, helping them successfully address complex social issues.

Sin Lee Loh
Sin Lee is a Research Assistant at Philanthropedia. She is an avid technophile and is fascinated by the prospect of using technology to increase the impact of social causes. Although she is originally from Malaysia, she considers herself a globe-trotting citizen of the world.

Derrick Davis
Derrick Davis is a Stanford senior majoring in Public Policy. While he originally hails from beautiful Colorado, he has loved his time in the Bay and hopes to stay in the area as he pursues a degree in law. He originally became interested in Philanthropedia when he had the opportunity to work with the organization through his senior practicum course. He has found that philanthropy plays a critical role in addressing social issues when government provisions fail and he believes Philanthropedia has the potential to revolutionize the nonprofit sector.

Tristana Pirkl
Tristana Pirkl is a graduating senior at Stanford University, majoring in Human Biology, and originally from Alexandria, VA. She is focusing her studies on Global Women and Children’s Health and Human Rights and hopes to one day be a part of an effective international non-profit. She was originally interested in Philanthropedia in order to gain more insight on effective non-profits and is so excited to work with them this Spring Quarter!

Julie Martin
Julie is ABD “All But Dissertation” with her PhD in Political Science at Stanford University. Her dissertation is on legislative organization and the European Parliament, but her interests vary from technology, policy, government, and philanthropy. Julie believes in serving the community she lives in, and is always looking for opportunities to learn and utilize her skills through philanthropic endeavors.

Jared Brewer
Jared Brewer is Junior at Stanford studying Ocean Science and Policy through the Earth Systems program. A native of Boulder, Colorado, he grew up skiing and backpacking, and loves complicated music and the great outdoors. Jared first heard about Philanthropedia a month ago, and thought that the opportunity to meet interesting people, work on causes that matter, and potentially change the paradigm of philanthropy was too good to pass up.

Jacob Kovacs-Goodman
Jacob Kovacs-Goodman is a freshman at Stanford University whose interests include political philosophy, Latin, and ancient history. He is the Community Development Director of Stanford in Government, a Levison Leadership Development Fellow, and a participant in various other campus organizations involving service. His interest in Philanthropedia stems from his own prior work in public service, an acknowledgment of the many cultural and socioeconomic barriers one faces during service work, and an interest in what constitutes the best form of charitable aid.

I am incredibly excited to announce that Philanthropedia is the proud recipient of another grant from the Hewlett Foundation’s philanthropy program, headed by Paul Brest and Jacob Harold. This follow-up grant will allow Philanthropedia to continue improving its research to identify high-impact nonprofits and inspire donors to give strategically. In addition, we believe this new round of funding is another testament to the Hewlett Foundation’s firm commitment to improving the effectiveness of the nonprofit sector.

What is particularly noteworthy here is that the Hewlett Foundation has continued its philanthropy program as other major foundations have either discontinued funding the philanthropy sector or at least shifted their focus to supporting only their past grantees. We congratulate Paul and Jacob for their persistence and commitment  and believe their efforts have already proven fruitful, not just because of the progress we have made, but also because groundbreaking initiatives such as TakeAction@GuideStar are now becoming a reality.

For us, the Hewlett Foundation’s support has been more than just financial. Philanthropedia has had the privilege of being incubated for the past several months in the foundation’s offices in Menlo Park, CA. Sharing a physical space with so many outstanding program officers has helped the Philanthropedia team learn about different social causes, jumpstart the process of recruiting experts, and ultimately carry out our research successfully. In addition, we have benefited tremendously from the advice of the entire foundation staff– colleagues in facilities, legal, communications, and so on – whose support has been crucial as we have been building Philanthropedia as an organization for the past 9 months.

Most importantly, I want to personally thank both Paul Brest and Jacob Harold for generously offering their time and advice. Without their help, Philanthropedia would certainly not exist. In particular, Jacob has spent countless hours with us on a wide range of issues, from the very tactical (e.g. how to phrase questions in our survey) to the very strategic (e.g. what is a compelling vision for philanthropy?). We have also benefitted tremendously from Paul’s advice, who has the gift of being incredibly rigorous in thinking about methodologies and theories of change while at the same time being very pragmatic and understanding of the need for incremental improvement and the risks associated with innovation. This is a remarkable and very rare combination that I have hardly ever encountered.

For all of the above, as well as for the other countless cases of support, the entire Philanthropedia team would like to thank the Hewlett Foundation and in particular the philanthropy program headed by Paul and Jacob. We aspire to realize Philanthropedia’s potential and do our part to contribute to the philanthropy sector as a whole.

Today we are incredibly excited to announce our partnership with GuideStar and to announce the beta launch of TakeAction@GuideStar, which will bring Philanthropedia’s expert reviewed high-impact nonprofits to GuideStar’s millions of users.

TakeAction is a new resource for donors that combines recommendations from charity evaluators Philanthropedia, GiveWell, and Root Cause and augments them with GreatNonprofits nonprofit reviews. Currently, TakeAction features our first 4 social causes – climate change, education, microfinance, and Bay Area homelessness. As we complete our research on additional Bay Area and national social causes, you can expect to see more of our experts’ recommendations featured on TakeAction as well. All of this information is presented in an easy-to-use format on GuideStar’s webpage, sorted by different social causes and focused on helping educate and guide individual donors as they make their decision about where to give.

We believe that TakeAction has the potential to make Philanthropedia’s motto “choose causes with your heart and organizations with your mind” a reality. We salute GuideStar for taking the brave step of introducing such a tool, which represents a decisive move away from offering simple, basic information to donors in favor of offering donors useful and actionable information that can guide giving decisions. We also congratulate GiveWell, Root Cause, and GreatNonprofits for partnering to create a resource that can aggregate useful data and focus donor attention on high-impact nonprofits.

Of course, as with any other innovation, we know that TakeAction will go through many iterations before we figure out the best way to provide a useful service to all donors. So please submit feedback to GuideStar to help us improve!

P.S. This is not an April’s Fools joke! Seriously, check out this link: TakeAction.

We recently released the results of a mini-research effort trying to identify great Haiti nonprofits for donors to support in the disaster relief efforts. While we couldn’t conduct our usual methodology for this work, we think it is a great example of the value that experts can bring to donors and the public generally. There are many well-informed professionals doing great work who have in-depth knowledge and understanding about the most important issues in their field, as well as which nonprofits are most effective at addressing those issues.

To further highlight the value of experts, we would like to introduce, Ann Hancock, Executive Director of the Climate Protection Campaign, and Philanthropedia Bay Area climate change expert. While not specifically recommending a nonprofit through her guest blog, Ann does have a valuable perspective to offer on a timely and urgent issue facing the colleagues in her sector and the individual citizens who would be affected by these changes.

What do you think? Please share your reactions and what you’ve been learning about this Proposition. We invite your feedback and comments.

Help Stop PG&E’s Power Grab!

–Ann Hancock, Climate Protection Campaign

“There are two models for customer retention. The first model is to maintain customers by offering them the best service with the lowest prices and good customer care. That’s the preferred method. The other method is customer retention through captivity by locking in higher rates and buying a constitutional amendment. That’s PG&E’s method.”

— Mark Toney, The Utility Reform Network

Proposition 16, funded entirely by PG&E, will be on the June 2010 ballot. It is the worst special kind of special interest ballot initiative, paid for by a single corporation to benefit a single corporation.  Prop 16 would lock PG&E’s high rates into the California Constitution by locking out community choice and public power. Prop 16 replaces the current process that allows communities to choose non-profit utilities with a process that would require a super-majority for any choice other than PG&E.

The passage of Prop 16 would effectively eliminate localgovernments from establishing nonprofit Community Choice Aggregations, one of the most powerful options for financing community-scale renewable energy, reducing GHG emissions, and moving towards local energy independence. For example, Marin County awarded their CCA contract to Shell Energy North America, which agreed to double the amount of renewable energy while meeting or beating PG&E’s rates. Meanwhile, PG&E has proposed $5 billion in rate hikes.

Rather than keep their customers by providing excellent service at reasonable rates, PG&E has pledged to spend at least $35 million to protect their monopoly.

Proposition 16 “is a dagger aimed directly at a movement to enable municipalities to offer renewable green power to their residents in competition with private utilities.”

— Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times

Though opponents of the measure will never match this level of funding, there are several indicators of a growing opposition, including the following:

• Nine state Senators, including the Pro Tem, have sent a letter to PG&E expressing their strong opposition.
• Most media coverage to date has reflected poorly on PG&E.
• Official opposition is growing among many California cities, counties and organizations such as the California Municipal Utilities Association, the California League of Cities, the California Realtors Association, the League of Women Voters, and the Sierra Club.

“To use the initiative process to pursue PG&E’s self-interests calls into question your company’s integrity.”

— Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and eight other state Senators, in a letter to PG&E’s CEO Peter Darbee

A campaign has been established, coordinated by Kaufman Consulting in Sacramento. In addition, a strong core of volunteer activists from the Bay Area are conducting grassroots outreach and education. A PAC (Political Action Committee) has been set up, Taxpayers Against the PG&E Powergrab (FPPC# 1321957).

Defeating this initiative will require only modest funding. Contributions can be made to either the PAC (not tax deductable) or to various non-profit 501(c)3 organizations involved in the campaign.

To help defeat this Proposition by making a contribution, please contact Renata Brillinger, Climate Protection Campaign:

(707) 823-8278

renata@climateprotectioncampaign.org

Thank you for your support and we hope you will take action to defeat this initiative.

–Ann Hancock

For additional information about Prop 16 and other perspectives, you can check out: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14693796?nclick_check=1

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/18/MNPC1CHDK7.DTL&type=newsbayarea

You can read more about Philanthropedia’s national climate change experts here and see which nonprofits they recommended here. The Bay Area climate change research results will be available in a few weeks.

In these recent blog posts, we’re sharing our thoughts about each social cause as we begin new research. The purpose of sharing this additional information is to explain why we think these are interesting or relevant areas to research, what we learned about the nuances of the cause, and the difficulties we faced in narrowing the scope of the research, so you, the reader, can understand what we considered as we refined our thinking about the research.

If you are an expert on any of these topics, you should be receiving an email from us soon and we hope you will be compelled to participate! If for some reason we have missed you and you think you have a valuable perspective to offer, please contact me at erinn.andrews@myphilanthropedia.org.

Additionally, I’m sure I haven’t been able to capture every nuance in these sectors, so I invite your feedback and thoughts about how you might think about this work. For those readers less familiar with this topic, I hope you will learn something new and tune in again when we have the results of this research. Thank you all for your participation!

Background

Proposition 49 (2002) in California led to the creation of 4,000 new after-school programs. These programs were meant to tie academic standards to after school activities, were run by the district or community based organizations, included elements of youth development, and were mostly for students K-8 from 3-6pm. As awareness of the summer learning loss among disadvantaged students increased, new programming was created for students in the summer in the hopes of closing the achievement gap.

The San Francisco Bay Area is notable for the enormous number of nonprofits working in the education space. And while efforts have been made to collaborate among these groups, the coordination mechanisms to link the nonprofit are just not there. This problem may also be exacerbated by the regional divisions: Alameda County (Oakland), South Bay, San Francisco, West Contra Costa where nonprofits often work but only in their region.

The Education Landscape

After-school or out-of-school programming is not the only relevant distinction in education, however. As I interviewed education experts, I discovered there are many different ways to look at the “pieces” of education. One could divide up education via school levels: preK-K, grades 1-5, grades 6-12, and higher education. One could conduct research based on content expertise: literacy, math, science, etc. One could consider the distinction in-school versus out-of-school education. One could look at the level of involvement: school level, district level, or policy at the state level. Or, one could look topically across “problems” in education and try to identify nonprofits addressing those problems: human capital, turnarounds of low-performing schools, data, standards, and assessments, instructional improvement, etc.

In fact, the more I thought about these many divisions, the more I realized how large of a social cause education really is. Therefore, we decided it was best to conduct two “causes” around education in order to capture as much of the sector as possible. I tried to think about the two topics among the many from which to choose that would allow us to reach as many education nonprofits as possible, but also keep two distinct groups of experts for the survey purposes.

I first considered the in-school versus out-of-school distinction. I thought these two buckets would be distinct enough because in-school nonprofits would focus on things like school reform, the achievement gap, human capital, instructional improvement, curricular content development, low-performing schools turnarounds, and data, standards and assessments. While out-of-school nonprofits would focus on youth development, summer programming, and after school programming. However, as I talked to more experts, I learned that while this division was “real” so-to-speak, it was becoming more and more blurred as the K-12 system and out-of-school programs made a more concerted effort to work together. Traditionally these entities operated without much coordination. Therefore, I felt that if we also conducted research along these lines we would be exacerbating these long-standing divisions which the sector is trying so hard to eliminate.

When thinking about the other possible divisions that could capture experts in two distinct buckets, I decided that early childhood education and middle/secondary education could work. Those who specialize on early childhood education primarily focus on things like school readiness, literacy, math, and other early developmental processes. Further, elementary school teachers mostly teach all subjects to their students rather than specialize. However, once students arrive at the middle and secondary levels, this focus shifts both for the student and the teacher. Of course, after school programs don’t necessarily organize around the preK-5^th grade and 6-12^th grade divisions, however, I felt there was enough specialization along these dimensions to justify two separate research groups.

Who cares? Problem Statements

To learn more, I asked the experts what the main problems related to education are in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• There are a larger and larger number of students leaving the K-12 school system unprepared for what happens next. Connected to this problem is that among these large numbers of unprepared students, there are a disproportionate number of low income, African American, Latino, English Language Learners, and special needs students. The outcome is problematic: inequitable distribution of success.
• Public schools are failing 50% of students and students are falling off-track earlier and earlier. There must be more of an effort focused on middle school students to catch students where they fall off.
• We need more and better prepared teachers.  Our teachers are not prepared to serve the needs of low-income, underrepresented students. We must build the capacity of our teachers.
• Districts need the capacity to build and develop their core workforce.
• Equity. We need to increase access and have higher performance and higher quality learning experiences for all students, in particular, underserved and underperforming students. There is an achievement gap and an opportunity gap.
• The biggest challenge in education: how to measure teacher impact.

Scope of the Research (x2)

Education Bay Area – Early Childhood Education: Public pre-K-5^th grade

We are interested in learning more about education nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area that are having an impact on early childhood education: public pre-K-5^th grade, in- or out-of-school education. This could be nonprofits working on literacy, school readiness, school reform, the achievement gap, human capital, instructional improvement, curricular content development, low-performing schools turnarounds, data, standards and assessments, after school programming (ie. youth development kind of work), summer programming, parental involvement, etc. Types of nonprofits could include research, policy, advocacy, training, traditional nonprofits or community based organizations, the traditional after-school kind of nonprofits/CBOs, or even the public schools themselves.

Education Bay Area – Middle-Secondary Education: Public 6-12^th grade

We are interested in learning more about education nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area that are having an impact on public 6-12^th grade, in- or out-of-school education. This could be nonprofits working on school reform, the achievement gap, human capital, instructional improvement, curricular content development, low-performing schools turnarounds, data, standards and assessments, after school programming (ie. youth development kind of work), summer programming, parental involvement, etc. Types of nonprofits could include research, policy, advocacy, training, traditional nonprofits or community based organizations, the traditional after-school kind of nonprofits/CBOs, or even the public schools themselves.

We’re excited to see the results of this research and share it with donors to help direct more funding to some of the highest impact education nonprofits in the Bay Area. As we begin this process, I’d love to hear what you think about these ideas. How might you have divided this social cause? What other major problems are facing education in the Bay Area? I invite you to share your thoughts and look forward to hearing from you.