INSIGHT

Rethinking Indirect Cost Rates to Support Nonprofit Financial Health

The David and Lucille Packard Foundation’s Linda Gargiulo shares how, through listening to their grantees, the foundation has taken a new, flexible approach to indirect cost rates that’s designed to minimize burden and build resiliency.

“The warmth of her personality, combined with an unwavering commitment to the Southeast and a steadfast belief in the power of philanthropy, made her one of our field’s most impressive and inspiring leaders,” Philanthropy Southeast Board of Trustees Chair Kristen Keely-Dinger wrote in a blog post.

“Philanthropy Southeast’s many accomplishments under Janine’s leadership include the adoption of a groundbreaking Equity Framework, new values and guiding principles, a dedication to courageous leadership and the embrace of an inclusive vision of philanthropy that has allowed us to welcome new organizations and leaders that share a commitment to our region, its communities, and its people. Janine’s vision and strategic thinking have put Philanthropy Southeast in a position of great strength, moving toward an even greater future.”

We at PEAK are deeply grateful for Janine’s leadership and commitment to racial equity in the field of philanthropy, and our deepest sympathies go out to Janine’s family and colleagues at Philanthropy Southeast. To learn more about Janine’s life and career, read her obituary.

Weekly Reads

“[R]eparative philanthropy means reparations to Black people. In partnership with the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), our foundation reparations project studies our endowment and the endowments of seven other funders in the DC region to illuminate the ways in which Black people have been exploited to build philanthropic wealth. We hope that the participating foundations will engage in redress.” [more]
Temi Bennett, if, A Foundation for Radical Possibility, for Nonprofit Quarterly

“The definition of Beyond the Grant work is often a broad one: any support provided to a grantee beyond the financial can fall into this category. ... There is no one-size-fits-all approach and the work will look different from one foundation to the next. However, there is one key factor that informed the success of Beyond the Grant work at RFF: trust. Trusting that our grantees know their needs best, and trusting each other that we all had something valuable to contribute.” [more]
Amy Breshears, Rogers Family Foundation, for The Center for Effective Philanthropy

“Perhaps the most important role of technology in adopting trust-based philanthropy is its ability to capture data about the user experience to identify areas that may perpetuate grantee burden, inequity and power imbalance. For example, there may be certain sections of an application that require a disproportionate amount of time to complete, or sections that are consistently left blank. This can be an opportunity to get curious about why these patterns occur and how they may be streamlined to better support the user experience.” [more]
Sam Caplan, Submittable, for NonProfit PRO

“[The 2024 National Study on Donor Advised Funds (DAFs)] represents the most extensive independent study on DAFs to date. Thanks to the collective efforts of 111 DAF programs that voluntarily provided anonymized data to the research team, the dataset covers nine years of activity from more than 50,000 accounts, with over 600,000 inbound contributions to DAFS and more than 2.25 million outbound grants from DAFs. The DAFRC research team hopes this data will be used to improve best practices, inform relevant regulation, or enhance the field’s use of DAFs as a philanthropic tool for donors, DAF sponsoring organizations, and other sector partners.” [more]
DAF Research Collaborative