We've been trying to articulate a tectonic shift happening, but here it is again, as plain as we can possibly state it:

Institutions are no longer seen by everyday people as the most powerful agents for change. Today, the individual is the most powerful changemaker. We see it in every corner of life--from creating and distributing music and video to how corporations are reinventing their marketing departments around crowdsourcing and conversations to how lead foundations are starting to give grants.

The question that we pose to our clients and anyone who will listen is what are we going to do about it?

We've been working on an effort to rethink, based on our beliefs about culture and cultural strategies, how foundations work with their grantees, how they actually call for grants and award grants, and how to measure success. We're in the preliminary phases of this effort, but have to keep mentioning interesting examples that are popping up (see previous entry): The Case Foundation's Make it Your Own Award is enacting a "citizen-centric" grant program. I like that they are looking to fund individuals as well as organizations. As we've mentioned time and time again, change is not isolated to the nonprofit sector. In fact, innovation itself often eludes our sector. (Its hard to be overworked, under-resourced and innovative at the same time!) This is precisely why our company is so excited about collaborations. We'd like to see more foundations support collaborations between creative individuals and activists. More on this in a few months. ;-)

UPDATE: Here is a great article from June 26th on a bunch of these sorts of efforts, and some catch-phrases we will surely hear more about like "philanthropopulism".

We've been having some discussions about storytelling, particularly since learning about the work being done over at SmartMeme. It is vital that causes learn to tell stories through words, images, and sounds. It is most important because it is stories that are RE-told. In other words, to be viral, you have to be viral-able (I may have made up that word). Learning to tell stories does that. Think about the story a friend tells about some crazy or not-so-crazy experience that you have retold to others. This is what we need to do around causes.

American Express launched a new effort called The Members Project that is the most high profile example of changing trends in philanthropy that I've seen. The press releases on the effort claim it "enables American Express Cardmembers to come together as a community to submit project ideas for making a positive impact in the world, rate and discuss their ideas and ultimately vote and choose one idea that American Express will help bring to life with up to $5 million."

"[C]ome together as a community" is an interesting way to frame the effort that is really about giving consumers a role in corporate philanthropy. Their site talks about how the ideas generated are not internally developed, but rather "generated by our Cardmembers." It somehow feels democratic to be a part of this.

Working Assets Long Distance did a similar thing since its inception, although they presented consumers with a "ballot" of 20 or so nonprofits to vote on. Social networking has taken this kind of activity one-step further. A web 2.0 version of this is donorschoose.org, which is amazingly innovative in their efforts to raise money for local schools by twining (to borrow a phase from interfaith & international development work) a real teacher with a real need to donors. The next iteration of this is kiva.org, one of our favorites and the primary beneficiary of our t-shirt line. Their work is around small business development throughout the world.

As a side-note, I found this article about Amex's creative use of celebrity endorsements very interesting. A new kind of philanthropy...and corporate cause marketing