exponentphilanthropy
56 episodes listed below
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-Creative Funders Explore Their Art and Craft- Each month, meet some of the most creative, resourceful, and risk-taking funders in the country. These individuals are creating a new kind of philanthropy, shifting from the transactional to the transformational.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Andy Carroll makes small-foundation strategy legible through detailed conversations about advocacy, seed funding, community partnerships, and local economic development.
The Catalytic Philanthropy Podcast turns grantmaking into a series of operating decisions. Host Andy Carroll builds conversations around small foundations using money, relationships, and institutional flexibility to pursue change.
A foundation helps make coworking free, and suddenly your grantmaking meeting has a more interesting agenda.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical case for funding advocacy as a route to solving problems, not just treating symptoms.
It makes a useful case for how a small foundation can support issue advocacy without drifting into lobbying, and why that line matters when the goal is to solve problems rather than keep funding symptoms.
A patient look at a childcare incubator, from early relationship-building to the next step of growth.
A small team can still do a lot when it stays with one hard problem, and this conversation keeps its feet on the ground. Kim Russo lays out how the Fund for Greater Hartford worked with the Office of Early Childhood, started small, and kept pushing while the shape of the work…
A grounded case for backing early environmental ideas before others will.
A lean conservation fund is presented as an early backer for environmental ideas that have not yet found support, and Brett Howell and Kirsten Medura argue for reserving part of grants and other resources for new projects.
A small foundation's clearest move is sometimes getting closer to community power, not farther from it.
The episode traces the Rx Foundation, a one-staff foundation in Massachusetts, as it moves from related healthcare work toward building community capacity and power for health justice. Its strongest idea is a practical one: philanthropy is not just about grants.
A grounded look at how childcare philanthropy meets business and policy barriers.
The piece treats the childcare shortage as a real community problem and a real business problem, and it keeps its attention on what helps family child care operators get established.
Listening comes first here, and the episode makes catalytic leadership feel practical rather than abstract.
This episode follows a small foundation as it shifts from grantmaking toward a more responsive, community-led model of philanthropy. The strongest stretch is the practical one: starting with school administrators, pediatricians, and community organizations, then noticing that…
A grounded look at how philanthropy helps build the space, tools, and partnerships behind local business growth.
This episode looks at the Congdon Foundation's role in High Point's revival through a practical question: how do creatives and small businesses get the tools and space to do professional work?
A practical look at how a foundation-backed space helps local ventures get started.
Megan Oglesby and Joe Blosser frame The Commons as more than a shared office. In High Point, the space is set up as a co-working, training, and networking hub for entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and for-profit startups, with the Congdon Foundation holding the buildings as…
Odd questions, followed patiently down to the incentives.
Family grief, public questions, and the responsibilities of care.
The Fund for Greater Hartford looks at Connecticut’s childcare shortage as a problem with effects far beyond early learning.
Kim Russo traces how a lean foundation helped shape a new early-childhood incubator model.
The Catalytic Podcast looks at what a corporate foundation can do with its local business relationships.
On The Catalytic Philanthropy Podcast, Danielle Reyes argues that money alone rarely produces lasting systemic change.
Malcolm McLeod says community engagement helped the Johnson Scholarship Foundation find board members with expertise and lived experience.
Systemic change means shifting the underlying conditions that make a program necessary, like preventing homelessness rather than just serving the homeless.
Riley explains how the Rx Foundation shifted from related healthcare work toward building community capacity and power.
Paul Newman gifted the food company to the foundation, forcing a change in US law with the Philanthropic Enterprise Act.
Danielle Reyes asks how to change institutions where lifelong DC residents have never walked through their wrought iron gates.
The Catalytic Philanthropy Podcast episode “Breaking Down Walls Between Foundation and Community” follows Exponent Philanthropy’s Intro to Catalytic Leadership training through the work of Faith Paikukui at Hauoli Mauloa Foundation in Honolulu and Jennifer Barbarac at Buell Regional Health Foundation in Hermitage, Pennsylvania.
Advocacy can fit inside legal grantmaking.
Megan Oglesby and Joe Blosser explain how the two-staff Earl and Catherine Congdon Foundation supported High Point, North Carolina's post-manufacturing economic revitalization.
Brett Howell and Kirsten Medura describe how a lean funder can make room for new environmental ideas.
Andy Carroll explains how foundations of any size can use all their assets to address long-term systems change prioritized by their communities.
One in ten community college students is a parent with a child under six living in poverty, and Head Start centers are only a mile and a half away on average.
Deborah Jacobs presents the stark choice facing philanthropists: help create more taxpayers or more tax takers by addressing third-grade reading levels.
The Rx Foundation's vision is a future where no one's possibilities are unjustly limited by their identity or circumstances.
We've gotten to a false binary that you either spend 5% or commit to spending down, ignoring the range of options in between.
Danielle Reyes told the Archdiocese that more scholarships alone wouldn't fix Hispanic enrollment, prompting an uncomfortable but crucial shift.
Megan Oglesby and Joe Blosser return to the podcast to talk about the Congdon Foundation's role in High Point's economic revitalization.
Megan Oglesby and Joe Blosser discuss how The Generator came together as part of High Point’s larger revitalization effort.
Richelle Todd-Yamoah describes how the Pascal Sykes Foundation pursued economic development and transportation work in rural South Jersey.