JANIS RICHARDSON

Maximizing Returns: Investing in Nontraditional Leaders. This is a report that is worth reading and here are four reasons why. First, its authors are Mohamma...

Hey funders. This one's for you. For more than fifteen years, we’ve been talking about the power of people “grouping up” and the possibilities that you can s...

My original title for this post was "Dumbing Down". I backtracked on that because no one in the stories that I'm about to tell are anything near dumb. Rememb...

I'm not interested in sustainable. I'm interesting in things that last. To me, sustainable means that something needs to keep going, pretty much as it is wit...

I've fiddled with the focus of this post for a while in my head, knowing that there's something there that I really want to write about but finding it so har...

As I talk to people who are at the innovative edge of philanthropy and resident-centered investing, here's a question I often ask: What pulls you off course?...

Imagine that you're being interviewed for a job with an innovative national funder and are asked what you would bring to the job. You would want to impress, ...

I am so envious of people who can easily speak many languages. I continued taking Spanish all through college in hopes that some day I would be comfortably b...

Recently I've been doing some sleuthing in the philanthropic wetlands. I'm seeking out people who are challenging conventional ideas about philanthropy in wa...

I remember a conversation with David Mathews, President of The Kettering Foundation. In his quiet, dignified, and very wise way, Dr. Mathews reminded me that...

How much time do we need to give an idea before we decide it's the wrong idea and try something else? How much time needs to pass before innovation catches o...

Over the past year, I've been making my way to a new space. This new space is the home to my new blog, transitioning from my Big Thinking on Small Grants blo...