Venture Philanthropy
Faculty Advisor: Liv Raddatz
Field site: The GreenLight Fund
Field Supervisor: Garridon Hankins
Course Description:
This course focused on contextualizing venture philanthropy in the broader context of the nonprofit, private, and government sectors. I studied the role of nonprofits, specifically those focused on venture philanthropy, in modern society and the needs they are fit to fulfill and their shortcomings. My goals for the course were to 1) gain a greater understanding of venture philanthropy and the day-to-day operations of a venture philanthropy organization and 2) learn how communities are impacted by nonprofits.
Praxis Presentation:
To view Halena’s narrated presentation, please click here.
What a fascinating organization! I have taken several classes on impact investing and never heard of an organization that does quite what the Greenlight Fund does. The concept behind it–empowering nonprofits with the tools to strengthen their competitiveness and effectiveness of delivering their service–seems very powerful. Thank you for your enjoyable presentation.
Nice work, Halena! I had not heard of Venture Philanthropy before, so I appreciate having the chance to learn about it. So many non profit orgs seek to meet a need through their mission, but then struggle when it comes time to scale-up, whether it’s to reach more/wider population or to expand/grow services to the community they serve. I also appreciated your thoughts on Virtual Community Engagement. We are seeing the equity issues across a lot of sectors in this virtual landscape. Hopefully we will all learn some effective practices for bridging the digital divide through all of this.
Congratulations on your upcoming graduation as well!
Hi Halena, I imagine that the GreenLight Fund will come out of this pandemic with some valuable lessons learned about strategies for soliciting community input and what community engagement can look like across different communication modalities and what it means when we can’t have these kind of conversations in-person. What will that mean for the Discovery Process of the GreenLight Method?
I really like that you narrated your presentation. It was nice to hear your voice and your narration brought the idea and concepts to life!
Hi Halena,
I learned a lot from your very informative presentation. I am involved with a non-profit focused on STEM education and we are starting to look for foundation funding for the group. It would be great if there was a venture philanthropy group focused on that topic 🙂
Halena, nice to learn about the work you did with GreenLight Fund. When I worked at Wharton I helped teach a course on cross-sector collaboration. Looking at how nonprofits, government and the private sector can work together in different ways, especially through organizations focused on that type of collaboration, is important for our society to figure out.