Philanthropic evaluation is essentially a historical enterprise: to understand the impact of a particular program or grant requires an analysis of change over time. It is striking, however, how infrequently historical scholarship has directly engaged questions of philanthropic impact. Our understanding of notable philanthropic initiatives hasn’t fully benefited from the sense of multicausal complexity, deep context, and contingency that rigorous historical inquiry conveys.
In 2013, the charity evaluator Givewell addressed that gap in scholarship by commissioning robust case studies of philanthropic initiatives. Subsequently, a spin-off called the Open Philanthropy Project took on the project. These case studies gauge the evidence base for claims of philanthropic impact, rooting the analysis within a rich historical context.
Now, under the direction of senior research associate Benjamin Soskis, and with the financial support of Open Philanthropy, the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy continues that work, developing a deeper base of historical case studies and literature reviews of significant philanthropic initiatives. The case studies will be written by Soskis and a team of outside scholars and consultants with subject-area expertise.
These case studies will help the field develop a more nuanced understanding of philanthropic impact that appreciates the complexities of social change and the limits of what we can say definitively about causal agency. They will help inform the philanthropic sector as a whole and will be of particular interest to the subfields in which they are grounded.
- Philanthropy and US Student Movements: Four Cases
- Pugwash Literature Review
- Literature Review: Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education
- Philanthropy, Nuclear Nonproliferation, and Threat Reduction
- Global Scaleup of Insecticide-Treated Nets in the 2000s
For the 20th anniversary of the Center for Global Development in 2022, Open Philanthropy commissioned five case studies of notable initiatives from CGD’s first two decades. Benjamin Soskis oversaw the production of the case studies, which utilized the methodology that he developed through the Open Philanthropy history of philanthropy program. Two of the five case studies were written by Urban Institute researchers (Soskis and James Ladi Williams), and three by outside consultants. Those case studies are available at https://www.cgdev.org/case-studies.