Continue
Share
About C-SocPhil
The Center for Social Philanthropy (C-SocPhil) is a nonprofit social enterprise providing research, resources, tools and consulting services on philanthropic and investment strategies for pursuing long-term, sustainable social and environmental impact. The Center is housed at Tellus Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit research and policy organization pursuing a “Great Transition” to a future of enriched lives, human solidarity, and environmental sustainability.
The Center’s Archimedes Project helps foundations and donors leverage a much fuller range of their philanthropic assets, including frequently untapped endowment capital and “historical assets.”
C-SocPhil educates donors, foundation officers, family offices, trustees and their advisers about existing and emerging opportunities in fully leveraged philanthropy. The Center also gathers data and creates innovative tools to put our research to work. We identify obstacles and use data-driven strategies to tear them down, and the Center is eager to collaborate with others to catalyze experiments in the creative deployment of philanthropic capital.
History
The idea for the Center for Social Philanthropy was developed in 2006 by Joshua Humphreys during his residency at the Rockefeller Archive Center.
The following year, with the support of the Rockefeller Archives, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and an advisory panel of leading experts in mission-related investing, Dr. Humphreys organized a special conference on “The Social Responsiveness of Philanthropic Foundations: The Long View,” at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Pocantico Conference Center, on the historic Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York. The discussions that took place at Pocantico among foundation presidents, CEOs, finance officers, trustees, academics, and philanthropic and investment advisers helped shape the Center’s emerging action agenda.
While teaching at Princeton and Harvard, Dr. Humphreys continued to pursue his plans for the Center, with the help of an expanding group of associates and collaborators. Based on his historical research and mounting data gathered on philanthropy and the capital markets, Humphreys began to develop the concept of “Fully Leveraged Philanthropy” – strategies for multiplying the force of philanthropy for long-term social and environmental impact. The idea of mobilizing a much fuller range of philanthropic assets in order to generate sustainable social impacts became a cornerstone of the Center for Social Philanthropy’s ambitions. The unfolding financial crisis made the imperative for more responsible, long-term approaches to the stewardship of philanthropic wealth all the more urgent.
Since 2009, the Center has been housed at Tellus Institute in Boston.
Founder and Director
Joshua Humphreys founded and directs the Center for Social Philanthropy at Tellus Institute, where he serves as a Senior Associate. He is also a lecturer at Harvard University, an affiliate of Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center, and an active participant in the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organization's philanthropy domain at Harvard's Kennedy School. An historian by training, Dr. Humphreys has taught previously at Princeton University and NYU, where he completed his Ph.D. after studying as a Fulbright Scholar in Paris. He has served as visiting research associate at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, associate fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Archive Center.
In addition to his academic work, Dr. Humphreys has advised numerous organizations on issues in social and environmental finance, including Calvert, Environmental Grantmakers Association, Green Harbor Financial, Proxy Democracy, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Social Investment Forum, Sustainable Endowments Institute, the World Digital Library, and the World Bank Group. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of Dwight Hall's SRI Fund at Yale University. His insights on trends in philanthropy, shareowner advocacy, and social and environmental investing have been widely published and regularly cited in the press, most recently in Barron’s, BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, Financial Advisor, Fund Action, FUNDfire, the Los Angeles Times, and the Seattle Times.
Associates
Nadia Eghbal is a Compton Foundation Mentor Fellow in residency at the Center for Social Philanthropy during the 2009-2010, working on a project devoted to climate change and investment practices by foundations and college endowments. She recently graduated from Tufts University, where she majored in environmental studies and political science and helped co-found Students at Tufts for Investment Responsibility (STIR). During her fellowship, Ms. Eghbal has collaborated with a variety of groups, including Benchmark Asset Managers, the Investor Network on Climate Risk, the Proxy Stewardship Project, and the Responsible Endowments Coalition. She is also a 2010 StartingBloc Fellow.
Yewande Fapohunda is collaborating on Center projects during 2009-2010 while pursuing a Masters in Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. While at Harvard, she has consulted on performance management practices with a major social services organization in Boston. Previously, Ms. Fapohunda worked as a foreign exchange analyst at Goldman Sachs after graduating with a B.Sc. in economics and concentrations in finance and management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. While studying at Penn, she also served as a Research Analyst at Wharton in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and the Department of Management.
Justin Filosa is an Administrative and Research Assistant at Tellus Institute, where he is responsible for IT and office management, research, dataset design and analysis, supervising the Institute’s volunteer office staff, and organizing meetings and workshops, including the C- SocPhil Workshop Series in Fully Leveraged Philanthropy. Before coming to Tellus, Mr. Filosa worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Granite Tele-Communications, and a large hazardous waste management company, where he oversaw the daily Environmental Health and Safety operations at a pharmaceutical firm in Cambridge. Mr. Filosa received a B.S. in Marine Safety Environmental Protection from Massachusetts Maritime Academy in 2001.
James Goldstein is a Senior Fellow at Tellus Institute, where he directs the Sustainable Communities Program. His research centers on the development of analytic methods and stakeholder processes in support of community-based initiatives to integrate environmental protection, economic development, and social well-being. As part of this work, Mr. Goldstein has provided strategic advice on program development and evaluation to numerous funders. He advised the C. S. Mott Foundation on consensus-building efforts to address contentious environmental issues within its Environment Program. He has provided strategic consulting to family foundations, such as the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, on effective pollution prevention in the manufacturing sector and alignment of family business and philanthropic practices. He has also advised corporate foundations, most notably helping to design the Home Depot Foundation’s signature program on Affordable Housing Built Responsibly. For several years he also developed case studies for the Foundation’s green affordable housing and community forestry Awards of Excellence Program. Mr. Goldstein received a B.A. in Geography from Clark University.
Rachel Johnson collaborated on Center projects during the 2008-09 academic year while studying History and Literature at Harvard College. She has worked as an assistant producer of the Tides Foundation’s Momentum 2008 Leadership Conference and as an intern at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Documentary Film Institute. On campus, she is the publicity director for the Global Hunger Initiative, a student collaborative aiming to innovate solutions to the global food crisis and to educate students about issues at home and abroad. She has also interned at Newsweek, where she worked as Editor-in-Chief of Current Magazine, Newsweek's campus publication.
David McAnulty is the Director of Administration and Personnel at Tellus Institute. During the first 15 years of Mr. McAnulty's tenure at Tellus, he was also a member of the Energy Group research team, where he worked primarily on research in electric utility demand forecasting and energy conservation planning and analysis. His resume includes approximately 60 research reports. Prior to coming to Tellus, Mr. McAnulty was a research consultant to the New York State Education Department. He received a M.A. in English literature from the State University of New York at Albany in 1972.
Aubrie Pagano collaborated with the Center for Social Philanthropy while a senior at Harvard College in spring 2008. She has served as a Summer Fellow for New Sector Alliance, providing strategic consulting services to ACCESS, a nonprofit organization providing financial aid advising and scholarships to Boston-area students. At Harvard she was also the Phillips Brooks House Association’s Program Director of EnviroEd, a project of the Harvard Environmental Action Committee that brings environmental education into Boston-area schools. Aubrie graduated from Harvard with honors in History and Literature in 2008 and now works as a Business Analyst at Fidelity Investments.
Allen L. White is Vice President and Senior Fellow at Tellus Institute, where he directs the Program on Corporate Redesign. In 2004 he co-founded Corporation 2020, an initiative he currently directs that focuses on designing future corporations to embed social purpose at their core. Previously, in 1997 he co-founded the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and served as its CEO until 2002. He has advised foundations, corporations, multilaterals, and NGOs on corporate responsibility strategy and policy, and published and spoken widely on the responsibility, accountability and governance of business. Dr. White has held faculty and research positions at the University of Connecticut, Clark University and Battelle Laboratories, and served as a Fulbright Scholar in Peru and Peace Corps worker in Nicaragua. He has also sat on advisory groups and committees for numerous organizations, including the International Corporate Governance Network, Civic Capital, Instituto Ethos (Brazil), the President’s Council of the Presidio School of Management, and the Initiative for Responsible Investment at Harvard University. He served as founding Chair of Global Action Networks/iScale, and since 2005 Dr. White has been Senior Advisor to Business for Social Responsibility. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the Ohio State University.
Advisory Board
Dan Apfel
Executive Director, Responsible Endowments Coalition
Andy Eggers
Founder and President, ProxyDemocracy.org, and Ph.D. candidate in Government, Harvard University
Stephen Hine
Head of Responsible Investment Development, EIRIS Foundation, and Coordinator, Charity SRI, an EIRIS Foundation Initiative.
Dana Lanza
Executive Director, Confluence Philanthropy
Jack McGourty, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Community Engagement, Columbia University, and Chair of Columbia's Advisory Committee on
Socially Responsible Investing
Andrea McGrath
Director, The Center for Applied Philanthropy, The Philanthropic Initiative
Mark Orlowski
Founding Executive Director, Sustainable Endowments Institute
Katherina M. Rosqueta
Executive Director, Center for High Impact Philanthropy, University of Pennsylvania
Darwin Stapleton, Ph.D.
Executive Director Emeritus, Rockefeller Archive Center
Heidi Welsh
Executive Director, Sustainable Investments Institute (si2)
Contact
For more information about the Center for Social Philanthropy and our services, please contact us:
Center for Social Philanthropy
Tellus Institute
11 Arlington Street
Boston, MA 02116-3411
Tel: (617) 710-2853
email: info@socialphilanthropy.org
