Over the past 22 years, I have worked with individual donors and foundations across K-12, postsecondary, and workforce development to:
I spent seven years at New Profit, a venture philanthropy fund where I funded and advised a range of social initiatives. I launched a fund – Reimagine School Systems – focused on systems change and parent power. In addition to grantmaking, this fund involved bringing institutional funders together to collaborate and convening a community of practice of 18 practitioners for a year to explore parent power and measurement.
For two years, I was embedded part-time as a designer and selection reviewer for a $350 million grantmaking initiative at a global foundation. I have worked with individual donors and foundations of all sizes to develop their philanthropic strategies. This has included work on an Early College High School strategy, a statewide charter growth strategy, a strategy for how foundations can engage with stakeholders as advisers, a rural school leader development initiative, and a foundation’s approach to measurement, learning, and evaluation.
Philanthropy can be catalytic in driving change, but it is challenging to decide what that change is and who has what role in that decision.
Philanthropy is also an act of power. I have worked extensively with philanthropies to reflect on the role power plays in their strategy and the relationships they want to have with the communities they serve. As part of this work, I have explored what it takes for philanthropy to earn a community’s trust, where they need to support a community in exercising its innate power, and what that means for where philanthropy needs to cede power. For more of my work in this area, please see Systems Change and Parent Power as well as The “Three Ds” of Education Philanthropy.
Philanthropy is a choice. I don’t think anyone is obligated to be a philanthropist. There is also no right answer in philanthropy, though there can be bad decisions depending on what an individual or institution is seeking to achieve, which is why it is important to be clear on the objectives (Intended Impact – see below) that a philanthropy is pursuing.
Philanthropy is informed not just by data and dialogue, but also by values. Those values usually trace back to something specific a donor cares about (these are not mutually exclusive):
Like other nonprofits, philanthropy should develop a clear strategy articulating an Intended Impact, Theory of Action, Theory of Change, and Ultimate Vision. For more details on these concepts, please visit the Intended Impact page. For full details on the approach and deliverables of a strong strategic plan, please see the strategic planning page.
A philanthropy has many more actions at its disposal than just grantmaking (and it has a range of grantmaking options). People tend to think of philanthropy as just being about money, but philanthropies (whether individuals or institutions) have a range of actions to choose from:
An additional complexity for philanthropy is that its Theory of Action involves funding other organizations whose Theories of Action align with its own. This can involve a range of potential grantees:
Program providers considering growth via:
Intermediaries (which can overlap with other types of organizations):
Philanthropic strategies can evolve over time as philanthropies and their grantees learn what does and doesn’t work, and as conditions change.
A philanthropy may decide to focus its Theory of Action on Algebra 1 tutoring for these reasons.
A philanthropy’s Theory of Action may be simple in the beginning.
Over time, as evidence accumulates, a philanthropy may narrow (and then ideally deepen) its focus on one particular type of model.
A philanthropy may broaden its Theory of Action when it discovers an obstacle to growth.
Over time, a philanthropy may decide to fund a broader set of organizations and strategies to achieve its Theory of Action.
It may also discover that the only way for this work to scale to an entire population and be sustainable is to invest in Systemic Impact.
Systemic Impact: shifting mindsets, relationships, and power to influence policies, practices, and resource flows
Depending on its level of ambition, philanthropy needs to think about Systemic Impact.* As I have written elsewhere, I worry that philanthropy and social entrepreneurs in education (and beyond) frequently follow what I call a Field of Dreams as a Theory of Change, paraphrasing the 1989 movie’s iconic line “If you build it, they will come.”
This theory presumes that if education reformers and philanthropists are righteous in their intent about addressing inequity and they are getting promising results, then that’s all it takes for others to broadly follow them into the field and transform systems.
Unfortunately, this theory keeps falling short of creating systems-level change because it has two flaws:
Education systems are not wholly rational; they are also political. Education systems are a complex web of money, power, interests, and values. If an education innovation requires disrupting the status quo of money, power, interests, and values to get to scale, it can expect the system to push back. Systems are very good at organizing to preserve their status quo.
Efforts to change education systems often fail to be representative of and responsive to the communities they are trying to serve. The agendas for these efforts are often set by and reflect the values of people with privilege in positions of power. They often marginalize and alienate the very communities that these efforts are intended to benefit by imposing an agenda on them, essentially disenfranchising them in the same way that existing underperforming education systems often do.
Philanthropy cannot by itself scale or sustain population-level change. In the 2022–23 school year, K-12 education philanthropy spent an estimated $9.5 billion, which is a prodigious sum (though the actual figure may be lower). By comparison, the U.S. spent $982 billion on public K-12 education that same year from federal, state, and local sources (and this does not include private spending on education).
However, the vast majority of philanthropic spending is focused on innovation and not systems. As John King, now the Chancellor of SUNY, noted to me a decade ago, “We are investing something like 98% of our national philanthropy in supply, and at best 2% in demand, and we’re not seeing equity-focused systems change happen quickly enough.”
Unless there is a consumer solution, social problems must be addressed at scale through social systems because these systems have the ability to enact policy, direct funding, and hold stakeholders accountable for implementing changes in practice.
Ultimately, Systemic Impact is “philanthropy’s only exit strategy.”
Adapted from Cortez, Wade, and Beals, “Systemic Impact: The Only Path to Scale, Success, and Sustainability,” Bellwether, December 2025; and Cortez, “Systems Change and Parent Power,” New Profit, December 2020.
Adapted from Cortez, Wade, and Beals, “Systemic Impact: Systems, Markets, and Infrastructure,” Bellwether, December 2025.
One approach to Systemic Impact starts by considering systems within the context of markets.
A Market is a place where various stakeholders come together to compete and exchange value. Competition is what makes a market a market. Markets can grow as this exchange of value creates demand for more of a product or service, and those supplying it grow to meet that demand. The concept of markets can make some nonprofit leaders uncomfortable. However, as one nonprofit leader noted, “We don’t necessarily like the idea of capitalism, but we all jump to compete when an RFP comes out.”
A System is a group of stakeholders and relationships with a common set of processes and beliefs about how they interact. Systems have a formal structure of governance that guides how power flows to influence those interactions.
In this framing, a system is a governing body that determines the rules of competition in a market through four types of policies:
Nonprofits therefore compete in systems to shape the rules that govern a market so it works to their advantage and functions as they believe it should.
Philanthropy can also play in both markets and systems: