The End of Charity

The transition from charitable giving to intentional social investing has major implications, some of which admittedly are a cause for discomfort and concern to many people and organizations in the nonprofit sector. Perhaps easiest for them to accept is the hope (and for some investors even the expectation, yet to be proven true) that social investing will promote the cultivation and growth of high-performing nonprofit social service organizations.
Less comfortable, doubtless, are the intended corollaries. Social investing, if widely adopted, will help channel funding streams that are directed by measurable performance rather than feel-good stories, habits of giving and rank sentimentality. And social investing has the potential (yet to be realized) to advance a selection process that either forces poor performers to evolve and improve, or weeds them out.

The bottom line is that social investing, if it succeeds, offers the potential to reduce the enormous cost to society of funding and sustaining organizations that are not high-performers and cannot justify their claims that they produce the social value promised in their mission statements.It means that scarce resources will be better spent, and people using social services will more likely benefit and achieve what they have been promised.

David E.K. Hunter, Ph.D. – David consults nationally and internationally with government and private funders and direct service agencies in the social (not-for-profit) and public sectors with a focus on organizational capacity building, developing strategies and theories of change, performance management, and the creation, delivery, and assessment of social value. His practice builds on over three decades of experience using performance management to improve the quality and effectiveness of social services. David served as the Superintendent (CEO) of a State Psychiatric Hospital in Connecticut and through his work placed it in the top five percent of all hospitals in America. As Director of Evaluation and Knowledge Development at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, David participated in the leadership team that redesigned the foundation’s approach to social investing and worked with grantees to develop clear value propositions through capacity-building “theory of change workshops,” and to help them design, implement and use performance management systems to deliver, monitor, learn from, and evaluate high quality, effective, and efficient human services. David is the author of numerous articles and papers about strategic performance management. He is a founding member of the Alliance for Effective Social Investing (www.alleffective.org) and co-author of the Guide to Effective Social Investing published by the Alliance, and of the associated Social Value Assessment Tool for Nonprofits in the Social Sector (for use by external evaluators); he offers tools papers on his website www.dekhconsulting.com, and can be contacted at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .