The Hewlett Foundation’s Effective Philanthropy Group (EPG) seeks to strengthen the capacity of the foundation’s staff, its grantees and philanthropy, in general, to achieve their goals and benefit the common good. The team has staff whose roles are externally focused – making grants to strengthen nonprofits and the philanthropic sector – as well as staff…
In recent years, the collection of open educational resources (OER) has expanded rapidly in K-12 and higher education. Philanthropy has invested heavily in OER because of its exciting potential to meet the needs of diverse learners, accelerate pedagogical innovation, engage the community, and lower costs. As the collection of available OER – the OER commons …
Hovland Consulting completed a retrospective analysis of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s 2013-2018 Western Conservation grantmaking program. More than 220 people provided input from the late fall of 2017 through the spring of 2018 via a detailed online grantee survey, conference calls, and in-person convenings about individual campaigns, one-on-one interviews, and detailed outcome tracking, …
After two years of wrangling, Maine just became the first state in the country to pass and uphold ranked choice voting, which lets voters rank the candidates in order of preference rather than casting a vote for just one. This change to Maine’s electoral system could create more civil campaigns that better represent the preferences…
Can a creative teen-centered design process help increase young women’s access to contraception? We thought it might when we funded a new partnership between IDEO.org and Marie Stopes International in Zambia and Kenya in 2013. An independent evaluation that we commissioned from Itad provides new insights about the human-centered design approach to adolescent reproductive health.…
The nine countries that comprise Francophone West Africa have some of the highest maternal fertility rates, lowest contraceptive rates, and highest number of maternal deaths of any region in the world. Yet they receive less investment from international donors—particularly for family planning—than other regions in sub-Saharan Africa. The Hewlett Foundation gave an initial grant to …
The nine countries that comprise Francophone West Africa have some of the highest maternal fertility rates, lowest contraceptive rates, and highest number of maternal deaths of any region in the world. Yet they receive less investment from international donors—particularly for family planning—than other regions in sub-Saharan Africa. The Hewlett Foundation gave an initial grant to …
Since 2013, the Hewlett Foundation has supported IDEO.org and Marie Stopes International to apply human-centered design to improve family planning and reproductive health services for adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa. Human-centered design, as practiced in this program by IDEO.org, is a structured process that starts by asking young women what they like, what they care …
Tracking progress is an important component of the Hewlett Foundation’s practice of outcome-focused philanthropy (OFP), which emphasizes being rigorous, flexible, and adaptive while staying focused on results and actively learning throughout the strategy lifecycle. The outcomes we hope to achieve through our strategies take years to accomplish. Implementation markers represent interim steps toward these outcomes. …
The Hewlett Foundation commissioned a series of interviews, roundtables and focus groups with a number of audiences to discover how different groups talk about teaching and learning, what they think is the purpose of a “good” school or a “strong” education, and to understand how best to approach discussions about deeper learning competencies with them. …