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Open Impact has sunsetted operations after nearly a decade as a trusted guide to more than 70 private donors, foundations, and networks — helping envision, design, and accelerate their philanthropic impact.
Our Closing Reflections
Our final dispatch after nearly ten years as a team doing this important work. This piece relays our key learnings along with our origin story, and a description of our work & unique approach, to serve as a resource for others on similar journeys — whether as donors, or the staff or advisors supporting them.
Our success as a firm was due in large part to deep experience and an intentionally-designed culture centered on our foundational values of impact and openness — we were single-minded in our pursuit of impact for the clients and issues we serve, and open about the many approaches that making an impact can take.
Speaking hard truths, leaning into research, prioritizing process alongside deliverables, taking a holistic approach that includes strategy and governance — these are key ingredients that scaled our small-but-mighty firm’s effectiveness with our clients.
A few months ago, I shared news with our clients that I now want to share with my larger network: I will be sunsetting Open Impact at the end of 2024 to accept an exciting new role with The Sobrato Organization (TSO). I will serve as both its first Chief Impact Officer and the President of Sobrato Philanthropies, which has granted $1.3B to date, largely focused on strengthening local communities.
Open Impact’s collective force of strategists and operators is bringing their expertise to new adventures.
Find our team members’ professional updates and contact information through the links below.
Our industry reports identified trends and challenged conventional thinking to advance effective practices.
Open Impact’s forward-looking industry reports and articles helped reshape how philanthropy thinks about its role based on case studies, mapping of giving trends, and best practices.
Our work garnered expansive coverage in The New York Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Stanford Social Innovation Review, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, and beyond.
Insights
As we begin 2024, our firm is doubling down on supporting founders and families as you explore how to develop governance systems that align to your philanthropic aspirations and increase your impact. “Governance,” the structures and processes for decision making, accountability, and control, may sound like a dull topic for us to be so fired […]
If you missed our workshop at the National Center for Family Philanthropy’s Leadership Retreat in Park City in November, read on for our framework for managing change within philanthropies that will limit friction and build excitement. A worksheet to help you plan for change is available for download. Over the years, we’ve found that leaders […]
As we look ahead to 2023, this digest provides an easy way to bring you up to speed on the ideas, stories, and trends of 2022.
Presents quantitative and qualitative data about growing wealth and philanthropy in Silicon Valley, including groundbreaking insights on what donors in the region give to, and offers frameworks for understanding and bridging the divides with local community-based organizations.
Based on 50+ interviews with UHNW individuals, seeks to understand their barriers and motivations to giving, and ways to accelerate their journey.
Lifts up the voices and transformative practices of those in philanthropy leading the way toward a more caring, connected, and equitable region. The report includes case studies that demonstrate how many leading funders have already moved from addressing symptoms to also shifting systems.
Offers research insights on the struggles of nonprofit leaders in the current political and economic environment and calls on philanthropists to be more adaptive and supportive in their response.
Reports on the groundbreaking efforts of a national network of pooled funding initiatives for sustained collaboration: mergers, joint ventures, partnerships, and other arrangements that permanently change an organization’s business or operating model.
Shares rich lessons learned by a cohort of Bay Area social and racial justice leaders who have scaled their impact by building movements, harnessing social media, and collaborating in networks to change systems over the past decade.
Documenting a groundbreaking five-year effort, Pioneers in Justice shares many rich lessons as Bay Area social justice leaders work to scale their impact, building social movements through social media and networked action.
Shares key lessons for supporting cross-sector collaboration, community capacity-building, and civic innovation in service of systems change, based on our experience running the New Leadership Network (NLN) in the Central Valley of California.
Open Impact in the News
Inside Philanthropy
September 28, 2021
The New York Times
November 6, 2019
Stanford Social Innovation Review
July 13, 2018
San Francisco Chronicle
December 29, 2016
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