Philanthropy in Troubled Times - Blogging at the 2018 GEO Conference

This year, GEO welcomes back Nell Edgington, president of Social Velocity, to blog about the 2018 GEO National Conference. Next week, we will cross-post Nell’s daily conference recap blogs, so if you can’t join us in person at the conference, you can still stay in touch with what’s going on. In the meantime, please find Nell’s thoughts on the upcoming conference below.

Next week, as part of the 2018 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) Conference, I’m excited to host some exceptional guest bloggers here on the blog. GEO’s biennial conference is where the most engaged philanthropists gather to talk about how they can more effectively support nonprofit leaders. GEO has asked me to host a blog series about the conference this year (as I did at the 2016 GEO Conference), and I was more than happy to oblige.

I’m particularly interested this year to see how the GEO Conference plays out amid these troubling times. Certainly the world is a very different place than it was at GEO’s last conference, and this gathering of the most engaged and thoughtful philanthropists could be, I hope, an opportunity for philanthropy to find a way to lead in a time that is arguably dismantling the progressive causes many of these philanthropists have been championing for decades. Indeed, leading philanthropic leaders like Grant Oliphant of the Heinz Endowments has argued that philanthropy “can’t win the battle of ideas by hiding,” and Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation has described his hope that philanthropy will “realize the urgency of now.”

The GEO Conference, held this year from Monday, April 30 to Wednesday, May 2 in San Francisco, is a first-in-class display of philanthropists thinking long and hard about their role in social change. Particularly now, when there is a real opportunity for philanthropy to stand up and have a stronger voice about where our country is headed, this conference provides a real opportunity. I’m looking forward to some open, honest and challenging conversations about how philanthropy can and should do more to lead in these challenging times.

I am particularly excited about several of the planned sessions, including “Supporting Advocacy during Turbulent Times,” “Strengthening Nonprofits as a Social Justice Strategy,” “Philanthropy’s Role in Closing the Nonprofit Racial Leadership Gap,” and “Power and the Future of Philanthropy.”

And starting next Tuesday, May 1st you’ll be hearing from this great group of guest bloggers:

Kathy Reich, Director of BUILD at the Ford Foundation. Kathy guides Ford’s efforts to implement sector-leading approaches to support the vitality and effectiveness of institutions and networks that serve as pillars of broader social movements. Before joining Ford, Kathy worked for 15 years at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, most recently as organizational effectiveness and philanthropy director. Prior to that, she was policy director at the Social Policy Action Network, served as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill, and worked for state and local elected officials in California. Kathy currently serves on the boards of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the Peninsula Jewish Community Center, and co-chairs the Fund for Shared Insight. She was named a Schusterman Fellow in 2016. She has also been featured on the Social Velocity blog several times in the past, as an interviewee twice (here and here) and a guest blogger.

Sean Thomas-Breitfeld, Co-Director of the Building Movement Project. Prior to joining BMP, Sean spent a decade working in various roles at the Center for Community Change, developing training programs for grassroots leaders, coordinating online and grassroots advocacy efforts, and lobbying on a range of issues, including immigration reform, transportation equity and anti-poverty programs. Before joining the Center, Sean worked as a Policy Analyst at UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), where he focused on employment and income security issues. Sean received a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from NYU’s Wagner School, where he now serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Service. You can read my past interview with Sean here.

Pia Infante, Trustee and Co-Executive Director of The Whitman Institute. Pia speaks and teaches on radically embodied leadership and trust based practice in many settings including Harvard Kennedy School: Center for Public Leadership, Ashoka Future Forum, Opportunity Collaboration, Net Impact, Council on Foundations, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, International Human Rights Funders Group, and the Skoll World Forum. She also proudly serves as the Board Chair for the Center for Media Justice and is on faculty for the M.A. in Leadership Sustainability at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources as well as Thousand Currents Academy. She is an I.C.F. certified executive leadership coach and holds an M.A. in Education from the New School for Social Research.

After the conference is over I’ll do a wrap-up post that will bring the blog series to a close. If you plan to be at the GEO Conference, please let me know, I’d love to see you there!

This post originally appeared on Social Velocity. Stay tuned next week for daily recaps of the GEO conference.