Issue No. 1 | December 2025

Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Giving Report and Happy Hanukkah to those who celebrate.

Drawing on 13+ years managing my family’s EJF Philanthropies (which I continue to lead separately), I created TGR to help donors learn from their peers and explore what solutions actually work. My intention is to provide information useful to a broad spectrum of the philanthropic world: family foundation trustees, individual donors, family office and foundation professionals, corporate giving managers, DAF holders, and nonprofit board members.

TGR’s perspective is pro-hope, pro-innovation, and fundamentally supportive of the power of capitalism to create wealth and benefit society. A core part of this is promoting an inclusive ownership economy where everyone has a stake in the American Dream.

I am aware that TGR’s perspective is not popular within the professional philanthropic community, and that the prevailing view is that donors should be criticized unless they explicitly aim to dismantle current systems. If you are sympathetic to this view, I hope you will still give us a chance even though you may not agree with our pro-donor approach.

My goal with TGR is to cover a range of topics so that every reader gains at least one practical insight from each issue. If you have a comment, tip, story idea, or guest submission, email us at [email protected]. We want your input!

If someone forwarded this to you and you are not yet a subscriber, please click here. TGR is free and a new issue will arrive in your inbox once per month.

Before you write your next check, ask yourself: What type of problem am I trying to solve?

This isn't a semantic question. The answer could fundamentally shape your funding strategy and how you evaluate results.

In their 2014 Stanford Social Innovation Review paper “Strategic Philanthropy for a Complex World”,  John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Patty Russell introduced a framework that has profoundly influenced my own philanthropy over the past decade. They differentiated between three types of problems:

Simple problems have straightforward solutions with predictable outcomes. Building a hospital is simple: you need land, materials, construction expertise, and funding.

Complicated problems require specialized expertise and coordination among multiple actors, but solutions are knowable. Developing a vaccine is complicated because it requires advanced scientific knowledge, clinical trials, and regulatory approval, but the path is clear.

Complex problems are dynamic and "subject to interplay between multiple independent factors that influence each other in ever-changing ways." Shifting health outcomes for an entire population is complex because it involves healthcare access, education, nutrition, housing, employment, culture, policy, and countless other interconnected factors.

Most of the hardest problems donors care about are complex. For these types of problems, Kania, Kramer, and Russell propose three strategies funders can employ:

I've applied this framework in my own philanthropy by funding collaborations among my grantees while also supporting them individually, reducing the scarcity mindset that inhibits trust-building.

I've also funded convenings that strengthen connections among people working on shared problems.

And most importantly, I've supported impact campaigns for films and books. Media and entertainment are powerful forces that can catalyze change on complex issues.

Understanding whether your problem is simple, complicated, or complex isn't just important for determining strategy. It's critical for evaluation. It's far easier to measure outcomes and determine additionality (whether your donation made a marginal difference) when solving simple or complicated problems than when solving complex ones. Expecting the same certainty of impact from a complex systems intervention as from building a hospital sets you up for frustration and potentially drives you away from the problems that matter most. We'll explore all of this in greater depth in future issues of The Giving Report.

Next June and July, FIFA World Cup 26™ is expected to generate substantial economic impact across 11 U.S. host regions. Projections include $3.3 billion for New Jersey-New York, $2 billion for Dallas-Fort Worth, and $594 million for Los Angeles. Now foundations can help local small businesses capitalize on this, without traditional grant payouts via an innovative tool developed by Chris White at the National Bankers Association Foundation (NBAF). 

The new tool is a program-related investment (PRI) structured as a credit enhancement that guarantees bonds issued by a Special Purpose Entity (SPE) organized as a 501(c)(3) public charity. The SPE partners with Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) and Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) to provide capital to small businesses that might otherwise lack access.

White is currently structuring a transaction for Kansas City, one of the 11 World Cup host regions. Working with Citi, he's establishing a nonprofit SPE to issue a $150 million Host City Economic Mobility Bond. The structure works as follows:

Foundations can guarantee any portion of the bond's principal or interest, providing credit enhancement that de-risks the investment and potentially lowers the bond's interest rate. While foundations may need to record a liability on their balance sheets, they may not need to set aside loan loss reserves, freeing up the capital for other investment (it is best to consult a tax advisor or attorney familiar with private foundation accounting).

This credit enhancement counts toward a foundation's 5% distribution requirement despite requiring no outlay unless loans default. PRIs are investments made to advance mission rather than maximize returns, accepting below-market returns on a risk-adjusted basis. (For more information about PRIs, Exponent Philanthropy is a good resource.)

The key innovation with this World Cup opportunity: because the counterparty is a 501(c)(3) public charity SPE rather than a for-profit business, foundations avoid the expenditure responsibility requirement. This eliminates the need for foundation managers to engage in a potentially onerous oversight process.

White is also developing credit enhancement PRI opportunities for bonds tied to 15 mission-aligned themes, including sustainable water management and affordable housing. Unlike the Host City Mobility Bonds tied to specific cities, these would bundle loans from MDIs and CDFIs across multiple geographies. He recently hosted a convening on this topic in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

As White notes: "Normalizing the use of PRIs as credit enhancement tools for bond transactions is something that absolutely needs to occur."

Fast Forward, the tech nonprofit accelerator founded by Kevin Barenblat and Shannon Farley, offers several valuable resources for those interested in deploying AI for good: a Playbook on AI for Humanity, a white paper co-published with Google.org titled How Philanthropy Can Lead in the Age of AI, and a directory of AI-powered nonprofits working across sectors including arts and culture, education, health, economic empowerment, and workforce development. These are great resources if you are looking for a practical starting point to understand AI’s potential in philanthropy.

Since 2014, under the Coefficient Giving (formerly called Open Philanthropy) umbrella, Cari Tuna and Dustin Moscovitz have used a rigorous, metrics-based approach to give away more than $4 billion in grants to nonprofit organizations. Under the direction of Lewis Bollard, Farm Animal Welfare Managing Director, a portion of these grants have helped to measurably reduce the suffering of millions of animals on factory farms.  Now, in a new initiative expected to launch early next year, other donors can partner in these animal welfare efforts and piggyback on Bollard’s deep expertise.

Called HATCH (Humane AgTech for Compassionate Hatching), the new initiative aims to significantly reduce the practice of killing 700 million male baby chicks in the US, UK, and Europe each year within the egg industry. Since male chicks cannot lay eggs, they are currently killed shortly after hatching.

With only 15 major hatcheries in the United States, new technologies that can identify male chicks before hatching, a bipartisan policy proposal for tax credits for technology implementation, consumer demand for cruelty-free eggs, and industry interest in ending the practice if economically feasible, this is a problem uniquely suited for philanthropy to solve.

After watching Lewis Bollard’s excellent TED talk on how to end factory farming (now with more than 300K views), I spoke to him about the new HATCH initiative.

Simone:  Why is now the time to launch HATCH?

Lewis: About five years ago, in-ovo sexing (identifying the sex of the chick while still in the egg) technology was still just an idea – it hadn’t been adopted anywhere. But it now has been widely adopted in Europe as an alternative to killing male chicks. That’s been driven by basically the entire French and German markets transitioning over… We feel like if we can drive mass adoption in the US market and across the rest of Europe, it could potentially drive the economies of scale that this gets adopted globally.  It was very expensive at first when it was a small niche technology.  But the bigger it gets, the more costs go down. It's basically all infrastructure cost [to implement]. When it reaches a tipping point, economic forces can spread it on its own.

Simone: Why is that?

Lewis: Ultimately, in-ovo sexing will be cheaper than the current practice of chick killing because you can get rid of the eggs much earlier in the process. Right now, hatcheries are using giant incubators to raise the males and the females the whole way through. They take up a ton of energy, they take up a ton of space. And if on day one, or day 5 in the incubation, or even day 10, you can take out the males and remove them, that frees up a lot of space in those incubators. And that just reduces your energy use, reduces the need for space. And there’s less labor needed for determining the sex [which a laborer currently does manually after the chick has hatched]. So, there's a clear path to why the economics would get there. The main problem is that the technology is just expensive. It's expensive to put in a big machine. Sometimes the hatcheries need to make renovations to accommodate the process.

Simone: So this is an example where philanthropy can fill a gap where there is friction in the private market.

Lewis: Philanthropy can come in, subsidize the uptake of some of the innovation, and get it to a point where it's being de-risked, and these very risk-averse large animal agriculture enterprises will say, okay, it's clear to me that this will actually save me money. Philanthropy can help get this to a point where it can just fit into normal bottom line calculus.

Simone: How does in-ovo sexing technology work? I know that there are multiple existing approaches and that you are funding an EggTech prize in collaboration with the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research [a public-private partnership funded by the USDA and authorized under the Farm Bill].

Lewis:  One approach is the equivalent of scanning the egg - there are some markers that they can work out from that. There’s another approach where they take a tiny sample of the egg, and they're able to do this in a way that just is a tiny hole in the top of the egg and doesn't affect its hatchability, and they can analyze that fluid sample… And with the FFAR prize, we are about to award the final prize any day now. The hatching companies are interested in having a variety of technological partners, not just going all in on one.

Simone: What is your strategy for deploying funds as part of HATCH?

Lewis: A big part will be working with strategic partners to do advocacy and technical assistance work [helping hatcheries implement the technology] and coordinating across the value chain with hatcheries and retailers.

Simone:  What is the size of the HATCH initiative in terms of dollar amount needed?

Lewis: The initiative is $5M total, and Coefficient will provide 1:1 matching up to $2.5M. 

Simone: What is the minimum level to participate?

Lewis: We are looking for a partners who are able to commit a minimum of $100,000.

Simone: Do you have an estimate of the number of baby male chicks’ lives saved per $1 donated?

Lewis: We don’t have an exact estimate yet, but I can confidently say it will be in the thousands per dollar. 

Simone: Wow. What I like about this is that this is a solvable problem. It’s complicated, not complex. And there's really an opportunity for philanthropy to play a catalytic role. If philanthropy doesn’t get involved, the counterfactual would be that this wouldn’t happen. 

Lewis: That’s right.

Simone: How would someone contact you if they want more information? 

Lewis: Send an email to [email protected].

Simone: Great, thank you.

— This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

In October, Joel Holsinger of Ares Management, publicly announced the launch of Promote Giving, a network of asset managers who pledge to donate at least 5% of the "promote,” the performance fee charged to investors, to charities supporting healthcare, education, or human well-being. Founding members include Ascend Partners, Coller Capital, Derby Lane, Makarora, Pantheon, Pretium, Related Fund Management, and Silver Point Capital.

What makes this notable: While asset management leaders rank among our most generous philanthropists through personal donations and family foundations, Promote Giving represents the first collective effort to demonstrate industry-wide commitment to charitable giving.

Not all donations are made in support of strategic philanthropic goals. After distributing millions of dollars in grants from my family’s foundations, including a portion which were in response to asks from our friends, I've learned what makes relationship-based fundraising work. 

Here are five recommendations for those seeking to raise money from their networks on behalf of organizations with which they are involved:

Relationship donations are a vital revenue stream for nonprofits. Following these tips can help you be more successful in your efforts to build support.

Cause: ShalomLearning

Using cutting edge educational technology, ShalomLearning makes Hebrew School engaging, accessible, and relevant for 11,000 students a year and equips 200+ synagogues with the tools, training, and support they need to make a lasting impact. Focused on grades K-7, ShalomLearning delivers its programs in Jewish Values, Jewish Pride & Unity, and Hebrew in varied settings, from large congregations to homeschool environments where parents and grandparents are teachers.