Posts in Foundation
Meet Trish Adobea Tchume, our Sterling Network Organizer: Part Two

Psychologically, I think so many of us are still sort of operating in triage mode right now, and rightly so. While in many ways things have calmed down from the height of the pandemic, we still suffered the most deaths due to the virus by far of any state in the nation. People are still holding that trauma and will be for a long time.

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Meet Trish Adobea Tchume, our Sterling Network Organizer: Part One

Elisabeth: Tell me a bit about your professional background, and what led you to the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.

Trish: My career reflects movement back and forth between a focus on deep individual leadership development and developing/supporting broader networks.

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All of Us in Grant Making — Not Just the Financiers — Need to Pay Attention to Investments (Dispatches)

I developed a case of math phobia in eighth grade, moving from the front to the back of the classroom and rushing through my homework in the cafeteria before school.

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Making Things Easy for Grantees Is High Priority for Foundation Officials. But Are We Doing It Right?

I was on the phone with a friend the other day, catching up after a few months on each other’s work, communities, and families.

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Dismantling Racism Might Require Philanthropy to Dismantle Itself (Dispatches)

Who would have thought Americans would be nostalgic for a week ago? Today I woke wishing that all we were managing was a global pandemic, more than 100,000 deaths in the United States, and a deepening economic crisis.

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Why Philanthropy Can’t Keep Hoarding Assets in the Pandemic

Talking in public about toilet paper ranks right up there with jokes about “quarantinis” and Zoom Brady Bunch references on my list of pandemic pet peeves.

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Nonprofit Leaders Respond To COVID-19: Early Lessons From The Field, Part 2

This is Part Two in my series about how organizational leaders are responding to and navigating COVID-19. This article is an attempt to reflect and organize the questions that leaders around the country are grappling with as they consider their organizations’ post-COVID resilience and stability.

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Change Is Too Rapid in Covid-19 Era to Tie Nonprofits’ Hands With Old Rules (Dispatches)

I always thought the saying ”You can’t step in the same river twice” came from the Quaker nature camp of my youth, but apparently it was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who said it (significantly earlier than when I was a camper in the 1980s).

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Nonprofit Leaders Respond to COVID-19: Early Lessons From The Field

We are in a moment of unprecedented tumult and change. Every day, nonprofit leaders are challenged to think and respond in new ways, and in a constantly shifting social, political and economic context that leaves even seasoned leaders reeling and grasping for answers.

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Covid-19 Lesson for a Grant Maker: Listening and Understanding Matters (Dispatches)

At the beginning of the Covid-19 shelter-in-place guidance, I went up and down the staircase of my 13-floor Brooklyn apartment building, slipping notes under people’s doors, assessing need, collecting offers of help, and navigating different levels of technological savvy to create and moderate an online discussion list for building residents to stay in touch with each other.

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A Checklist of To-Dos & A Framework of Questions

This is a moment of great anxiety, and in my work with small and mid-sized nonprofits and social enterprises, everyone is on edge.

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Sterling Network NYC Unveils New Impact Report

About two years ago, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation launched the Sterling Network NYC as an exploration into the power of networks to catalyze system-level change around economic mobility at the intersection of racial equity.

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Philanthropy is in a cultural moment of power-reckoning; The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project offers a clear next step

Today, the Headwaters Foundation, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and The Whitman Institute announce the launch of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, a five-year, peer-to-peer funder initiative with the goal of bringing greater vulnerability, transparency, and humility to philanthropy.

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The Year That Was, and the Year That Will Be

Over the last two years the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation has launched a network, grown our grantmaking, joined several national funding collaboratives, been a founding member of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, created an evaluation system, redecorated our office, brought on new board members, updated our website and started a blog.

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