http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2010/07/house_panel_votes_for_another.html States, start your engines. This month, a House appropriations subcommittee approved a bill financing the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) Race to the Top (RTTT) funding next year to the tune of $800 million. In addition, it looks as though the Investing in Innovation (I3) grant program will be funded for another $400 million in fiscal year 2011. ...

We've all read an annual report that lists each grant made in detail, page after page of painful detail in some cases.  Ok, so they gave $2,000,000 to the Mr. and Mrs. Do-good Foundation.  I wonder what they were able to do with that money.   I wonder why they chose $2,000,000.  If it's such a good cause, why not $3,000,000? ...

Nonprofits fall on difficult financial times. Competition for funding is getting fierce. Foundation endowments decline by 25%. Donors want to understand their return on investment. Organizations are closing their doors.  While these are the current and most pervasive headlines about the nonprofit sector, there is another kind of conversation and groundswell of activity percolating: how to best measure or assess social impact. It is no longer enough for organizations to say that they do good work because their mission statement references the social change that they aim to generate. Today, more and more organizations are looking for, developing and finding meaningful ways to understand and communicate the results of their work.  ...

No longer just an interest, there is now a demand for accountability and a focus on tangible, measurable results that is taking root in the private philanthropic market place. Grantmakers for Education recently published their first ever benchmarking report on education philanthropy in the US. One of the key finding in the report indicates that private funders have adopted a much more focused approach and have become much clearer about the outcomes they aim to accomplish and the tangible results that they desire to see. ...

It’s not a secret that companies want to enter emerging markets and cater to the new and exploding middle class in countries such as India and China. It’s also nothing new to hear about the development of sub-market products to increase access to new technology and ideas. Case in point, the $100 laptop per child (it’s now actually $200). Business and innovation target markets from the top-down and the bottom-up. As a result, the line between business and social value is becoming hazier. ...

Campbell has introduced a new strategy to advance its goal of supporting American agriculture.  They have set a goal of growing over 1 billion tomatoes across the country.  How are they going to do that?  By sending seeds to people who want them. ...

A recent New York Times article highlights an increasingly popular way of reporting academic performance, standards-based report cards.  Rather than the congenital A, B, C, D, and F grades (given by subject in the aggregate), students are assessed on their performance on specific skills against appropriate grade-level expectations. ...

Education.  Math and science.  K-12.  All are common targets of corporate philanthropy.  So, in a world where corporations want to differentiate themselves through social impact, why do so many resort to the same traditional strategies? National Instruments (NI) is bucking the trend.  They have teamed up to deliver the Lego League World Festival, a team competition of student-designed Lego robots.  Each team has an NI mentor (boosting employee engagement) and uses NI products and software (building awareness among future decision-makers). ...

This morning the HBS Club of Chicago hosted Julia Stasch, VP of the MacArthur Foundation, for a speech on the topic of "Philanthropy 2009: Charity or Change?"  Stasch posed the question:  Are foundations better suited to fund direct service ("charity") or systemic policy ("change")? Stasch argued that despite MacArthur's $260M annual giving, the Foundation will never be able to solve the world's problems by responding to individual needs.  Rather, she suggested that broader impact would occur through systemic change "spilling over" into policy. ...

"We're going to reward those states and those districts that are willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better," Education Secratary Arne Duncan said, March 16 at the White House. "Those who keep doing the same old thing, however, won't be eligible for the money," he added. The conversation around improvement has become central to access to stimulus money for schools. The challenge remains: how will we measure this success? How will we measure the impact of this money on Education in the U.S.? Duncan has specifically pointed States to these areas of improvement: ...