A report from Monitor Institute by Deloitte highlights emerging social, economic, and political shifts with the potential to significantly influence philanthropy over the next decade and outlines promising approaches to responding to those shifts.

Based on interviews with more than two hundred philanthropy executives, practitioners, donors, board members, experts, and grantees around the world, the report, What's Next for Philanthropy in the 2020s: Seeing Philanthropy in a New Light (36 pages, PDF), identified seven "big shifts" that could create fundamental change in the philanthropic landscape: economic inequality, which is simultaneously creating greater need and boosting giving; extreme political polarization, which is making it increasingly difficult for philanthropy to remain outside the political sphere; shifting demographics, which are changing the face of communities, donors, and the issues they aim to address; new momentum around racial justice, which is forcing organizations to grapple with systemic racism and bias in both external actions and internal practices and cultures; ubiquitous technology and access to information, which enable people to connect, share data, and organize but also create new challenges; a state of climate and social emergency, which can exacerbate existing problems or trump the planned agendas of a community or grantmaker; and a social compact in flux, which is reshaping how people relate to the private, public, and nonprofit sectors and how the sectors relate to one another.

Funded by Deloitte Tax LLP and the Robert Wood Johnson, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, W.K. Kellogg, and McConnell foundations, the report also outlines four critical "edges" for philanthropy — promising new ideas and strategies to respond to those shifts — and for each "edge," four "edge practices" that could begin to challenge or change some of the core practices of the field. The edges (and their respective edge practices) are: rethinking philanthropy's role (changing systems and cultural narratives, getting out of the way, funding innovation to maximize impact, and increasing agility to respond to crises); balancing power (sharing power, using power, setting goals and evaluating with equity in mind, and directly addressing race and power); catalyzing leverage (unlocking and guiding capital, aligning action, influencing and partnering with businesses, and redirecting government funding flows); and (re)designing the enterprise (rethinking organizational forms, reconfiguring organizational design and talent models, reconceiving governance, and improving grantmaking processes).

"[I]n our experience, change in philanthropy, when it happens, more often starts from the edge," the report's authors write. "New ideas enter the field or organizations, percolate for a while off to the side, and eventually lead to bigger, more sustained changes if they can ride the momentum of larger societal shifts. And organizations that can find and embrace those [e]dges can get on their front foot in responding to a changing world."

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