Years of wrangling over taxing and spending policies, and repeated crises over the debt ceiling and annual appropriations may make Congress’s power over taxing and spending seem more like a curse than real clout. Yet the Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative and the dozens of nonprofit organizations we are privileged to support believe there are real…
This post originally appeared on Lawfare. The state of cybersecurity imagery is, in a word, abysmal. A simple Google Image search for the term proves the point: It’s all white men in hoodies hovering menacingly over keyboards, green Matrix-style 1s and 0s, glowing locks and server racks, or some random combination of those elements—sometimes the…
I remember being the most hated person in the room. It was 2014—before I joined the Hewlett Foundation as a program officer for the Performing Arts Program—and I was an arts education advocate working on San Francisco’s Proposition C, the reauthorization of both the Public Education Enrichment Fund (PEEF) and the Children’s Fund. Both set-asides…
In March of 2014, when we recommended an initial three-year, $50 million phase of exploratory grantmaking for the Madison Initiative to the Hewlett Foundation board, we noted in our proposal memo that “the democratic system we want to change is more accurately described as a system of systems (and subsystems) on a national scale. These …
To inform the Education program’s Open Educational Resources (OER) strategy refresh in 2019, the foundation worked with Redstone Strategy Group on an analysis of the global landscape for OER. The project aimed to understand the existing evidence base outside the U.S. context, including priority research and potential gaps to be filled; identify current and prospective …
Evaluation is, and has long been, an important tool to help us learn and improve our strategies at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It is a part of our fabric and is referenced in our Guiding Principles. In 2012, we harmonized our approach to evaluation across our programs, with input from staff and external …
Evaluation is an explicit element of our strategy lifecycle (described in Outcome-Focused Philanthropy), and is meant to be practiced with frequency, intensity, and skill across all of our programs. In 2012, we harmonized our approach to evaluation across our programs, with input from staff and external advisors. This resulted in our first commonly defined set …
Last year, the Hewlett Foundation began collecting information about the demographic makeup of our grantees—the latest chapter in an ongoing, institution-wide effort we began in 2013 to improve our practices regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Having started with internal operations and workplace culture, we had already begun tracking and publicly sharing our board and…
Since 2003, the Hewlett Foundation has regularly commissioned a “Grantee Perception Report” (GPR) to get feedback from grantees on our performance and our relationship with their organizations. It’s a critical part of our commitment to learning, and a method for ensuring that we’re building strong partnerships with the organizations we work with to make a…
Since 2003, the Hewlett Foundation has regularly commissioned a “Grantee Perception Report” to get feedback from grantees on our performance and our relationship with their organizations. The survey is conducted by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), and contains a mix of quantitative and qualitative responses, benchmarked against our own past performances as well as …