Paul Brest
Auteur de Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking: Cases and Materials
A propos de l'auteur
Paul Brest, Professor, Stanford Law School, and President, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood W. St. John Garwood, Jr., Regents Chair in Law, University of Texas Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law, and the First Amendment, Yale Law School afficher plus Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor of Law, Yale Law School Reva B. Siegel, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School afficher moins
Œuvres de Paul Brest
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- male
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 8
- Membres
- 174
- Popularité
- #123,126
- Évaluation
- 3.9
- Critiques
- 7
- ISBN
- 29
The key point of this book is that strategic giving focuses on investing for impact and social return on investment with a strong focus on evaluation. Although the authors make clear that not all initiatives can be evaluated quantitatively and social impact can rarely be perfectly predicted, doing the best you can to define the expected impact and evaluate the result will help grant makers to spend their dollars more effectively.
As former a member of a grant committee, I found the most useful chapters to be those on goal setting and grant application evaluation. Other chapters were interesting but less relevant to me. Some chapters, such as the chapter on using advocacy to meet philanthropic goals, were not at all relevant to my grant making work. And, perhaps not surprisingly, if you are not doing large scale grant making, you will likely find the book uninteresting.
One concept discussed which has applicability beyond philanthropy is the idea of a sound theory of change. A strategy for change should be backed by a well supported theory of change. A theory of change connects what you are doing with what you want to accomplish. Without a well established theory of change, your actions are likely to be ineffective or even harmful.
Defining a theory of change also provides a departure point when examining failure: if a program did not have an intended effect, it could be because the program was not implemented properly or it could be because the theory of change which connected the two was faulty.
Since I learned about this concept, I have been trying to apply it in my evaluation of proposals for things like fixing the economy. Instead of evaluating the idea directly, I first try to assess what the theory of change behind it is. Although I have not had many chances to use this approach, it seems promising for increasing my understanding and encouraging more fruitful discussion.
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