Since Redstone’s founding a dozen years ago, we have relied on the intellectual contributions of philanthropists, practitioners, and academics to help our clients solve urgent social problems. This “commons” serves the field as a wellspring for ideas and solutions. Every opportunity to contribute to the commons helps ensure lasting impact and a richer, healthier, more equitable society.
Contributing to this commons is one of our core values. We have shared:
- Our early thinking about how a simple business idea, return on investment, can help philanthropists do more with every dollar.
- Deal-making approaches developed on Wall Street to secure permanent protection for large ecosystems.
- Insights from political science, psychology, and practice synthesized into a framework to assess advocacy efforts.
But while glossy reports are helpful, there is an ongoing, day-to-day conversation underway on the frontier of practice, on blogs including the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s, the World Bank’s Impact Evaluations, and Robert Wood Johnson’s collection. Long before an article is published, there is an insight, a hallway conversation, or – and this is startling to admit – a tweet that plants the seed for a solution. We hope this blog will contribute meaningfully to this ongoing conversation.
The ideas we publish here will be less polished and tested than the ideas we publish in 20-page papers. We hope the blog engages the community earlier in our thinking process so that we can give back to the commons as our clients benefit from it. We will share our work in progress, notes from the field, conversations with leading thinkers, and news from our practice – all in the hopes that we can generate a few insights that improve the day-to-day work of philanthropy and, eventually, practical solutions to urgent social problems.