Tag: Nonprofit

2018’s Most Inspiring Companies: The NewCo Honors Award Recipients

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Donorschoose.org, Patagonia, Salesforce, and Brandless take NewCo Honors

NewCo Honors Awards

We’ve just announced award winners for NewCo Honors from the stage at our NewCo Shift Forum conference at The St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco. It was an exciting moment for all the winners! Nominees from three categories (all listed here) represent the “company acting like a citizen” spirit central to our hypothesis: business must lead in this era of unprecedented change in our society. NewCo Honors winners took the ethos of doing well by doing good up a significant notch in the past year.

And the winners of the 2018 NewCo Honors are…

The Best Non-ProfitCo of the Year

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A Lab for The Moonshot of Our Time

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Launching at Shift Forum, JFF Labs partners with innovators to scale economic advancement solutions for the 99 percent

As many of you know, this year’s Shift Forum is the second annual gathering of leaders convening to address big issues we won’t have a second chance to solve. If last year’s event symbolized a collective recognition of the problems we face, this year marks a shared commitment to move the needle in addressing them. Key pillars include business transformation, politics and policy, and the future of work. All of us are concerned with how we will pull off the moonshot of our time — establishing social contracts for the 99 percent. Specifically, how will we sustain families and opportunity for dignified work in the face of automation and rapid change?

To that end, I’m heartened to spotlight a unique effort — the launch of JFFLabs — and I am equally thrilled to say it was created as a result of last year’s Shift Forum.

I caught up recently with Maria Flynn, CEO of JFF, a leading national nonprofit that drives transformational change in the American labor and training markets. Maria was a powerful star at the Department of Labor before spending 10 years leading JFF’s Workforce team. Last year she became CEO at JFF and is casting a vision for a future in which economic mobility, dignified work, and automation are equal partners in the American dream.

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The NonProfit Sector Must Move From Transaction to Collaboration

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We’re Measuring Ourselves To Death When We Should Be Working to Understand How to Get Better Together


This summer I spent three days at The Collaborative, an event that brings together the best and brightest from the nonprofit world (a video is at end of this story). Across all of the panels I attended and the conversations I had, one theme stuck out: Too often it feels like funders and nonprofits are sitting on opposite sides of the table. Without a shared view of success, the grant-making relationship has become transactional rather than collaborative.

Modern philanthropy has created a problematic culture of KPIs. It’s something we don’t like talking about, but it’s harmful for both foundations and the nonprofits they support. Success has become equated with charts and reports that look nice and validate metric-driven theories. But are we really learning anything? Behind the scenes, I hear the term “necessary evil” far too often.

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A Total Rethink of Philanthropy

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NewCo Shift Forum

Daniel Lurie, founder of Tipping Point, upends the traditional model with investments in R&D, new management approaches

Daniel Lurie at Shift Forum

Daniel Lurie was the chairman of the Bay area’s host committee for Superbowl 50, so he knows how to get things done in complicated, messy, and political environments. His day job requires that skill in spades: He’s literally reinventing how philanthropy is done. Watch or read below — and get to know Daniel and Tipping Point. It’s well worth the time invested.

Daniel Lurie: I love the Bay Area. I grew up about a mile from here. I went to really good schools, I had loving parents, great siblings, I had it really good. I do remember when I was 12 or 13 years old and I was lying in bed and I was upset, I was upset that I wasn’t doing more with my life.

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Here’s What Happens When You Give $1,000 to Someone in Extreme Poverty

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Margaret Osuma Oshien from Siaya, Kenya — A person who received just under $1,000 cash unconditionally from GiveDirectly.org

My wife, Adrienne, and I are long-time supporters of unconditional cash giving. From handing $5 to a homeless person on the street in Manhattan to raising $450 to give to a working father of one in rural South Africa — we believe in the virtues of sharing abundance in an empowering fashion that enables people to decide how best to allocate their resources themselves. When we found GiveDirectly in November 2015, an org that gives $1,000, unconditionally, to people who are in extreme poverty, as a solution to get them out of extreme poverty, we fell in love. Unconditional — they can do anything they want with it — which is incredibly empowering to recipients, but many people in ‘the west’ think it’s risky…or even foolish.

We’ve told countless friends and family about GiveDirectly, and the concept of transferring cash is met with much skepticism; soliciting responses such as “eh, I only give people food,” and others such as;

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