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Fund for Shared Insight Announces $5.26 Million in Grants

MFG Archive

Brian Walsh shares an update on the Fund for Shared Insight's first round of grants for improving philanthropy.

Brian Walsh Head of Corporate Impact at Liquidnet and Executive Director at Liquidnet For Good
Markets For Good
Archive 2012-2016
Markets for Good launched in 2012 to help increase social impact through good data practice. The platform was acquired by DCSL at Stanford PACS in 2016.

Several months ago I wrote a blog post for Markets for Good, announcing the Fund For Shared Insight, a multi-year, multi-million dollar effort to improve the practice of philanthropy. Given Markets for Good explores how the social sector can better generate, share, and use data and information to improve decision making, we see the Fund as a very complimentary effort here at Liquidnet.

I am now excited to share that after carefully reviewing nearly 200 proposals, we have selected the Fund’s first round of grantees, to whom we have allocated a total of $5.26 million. Our grants are designed to foster greater feedback loops and increase the openness of foundations in order to amplify the impact and effectiveness of philanthropy as a whole.

Shared Insight will fund 14 one- to three-year grants designed to encourage and incorporate feedback from the people the social sector seeks to help; understand the connection between feedback and better results; foster more openness between and among foundations and grantees; and share lessons learned. I expect to learn many lessons from these grantees and look forward to sharing those insights along the way.

Fund for Shared Insight announces $5.26 Million in grants to improve philanthropy

Each funded project is designed to further at least one Shared Insight goal:

To advance the practice of using feedback loops to hear from the people we seek to help:

 To advance the research base to identify how feedback data may be best collected and whether there may be some perceptual and/or experience data that can serve as leading indicators of change:

To increase foundation openness in service of effectiveness:

Shared Insight is a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and is co-chaired by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Besides Liquidnet, other participating funders include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The JPB Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Other foundations interested in providing supplemental support for these projects or exploring other ways to be involved with Shared Insight are invited to contact Melinda Tuan at melinda@fundforsharedinsight.org.

Many thanks to Brian Walsh for sharing an update on the fund’s progress, we look forward to seeing how it evolves. 

November 24, 2014