No economic policy is gender-neutral. The first time I heard that, at the London School of Economics, it came as a complete shock to me—the kind of eye-opener you only get when something so obviously true is pointed out to you for the first time. All policies, whether economic or social, have differing impacts on …

Fact-checking is everywhere, but does it have any impact? This was one of my biggest questions coming out of an American Press Institute (API) conference I attended in Washington this past January. The growth of fact-checking is indisputable: The number of fact-checking stories – from groups like Factcheck, FactChecker (home of the “Pinocchios”), and Politifact—increased by more than 50% between 2004 and 2008. From 2008 …

    A woman smiles during a visit from a Marie Stopes International mobile clincial outreach team in Laniar, Senegal. (Photo Credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/ Reportage by Getty Images, licensed under CC BY NC 4.0) We live in an increasingly visual world. A hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Over 20 billion photos …

Think globally, trees locally: one of the oaks at the Hewlett Foundation’s offices in Menlo Park, California (Photo Credit: The Hewlett Foundation) Forty-five years ago this week, the first Earth Day was celebrated, during a time when people were just starting to wake up to the environmental hazards that we, as a society, had created …

In an average week, our Global Development and Population Program receives anywhere from one to a dozen inquiries by phone and email. It’s my job to reply to them, and it’s honestly one of my favorite things to do. Many, of course, are from non-profit organizations hoping to start a conversation about funding. Mixed in …

Who will speak? (Photo Credit: Flickr User comedy_nose, licensed under CC BY 2.0)  Just for the sake of argument, let’s say there are two kinds of people who advocate for social change: people who are directly affected, aggrieved, involved; and people who are working on behalf of those in that first group. Sarah Brady, for example, worked …

There’s a reason predicting the future is so hard: we humans tend to overestimate the extent to which it will look like the present, only with better gadgets. This point was brought home to me at a recent grantee event, when I had a chance to speak with a member of the House of Representatives, …

You are (not) here: something we try not to lose sight of. (Image Credit: Hewlett Foundation, adapted from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY SA 3.0) In the halls of the Hewlett Foundation, you hear people talking about places: how hard it is for artists to find affordable performance space in the Bay Area; the importance of …