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WINGS Annual Report 2024
Full text linkOur 2024 Annual Report captures a year of momentum across advocacy, ecosystem-building, and learning. We advanced the Philanthropy Transformation Initiative, scaled Philanthropy for Climate, and launched the #LiftUpPhilanthropy Fund to back local, community-led action. With new partnerships, regional working spaces, and stronger internal systems, WINGS helped connect knowledge, amplify member voices, and champion enabling environments for philanthropy worldwide
Why Multistakeholder Partnerships Matter for Inclusive Development: Lessons from Africa, Asia, and Latin America
Full text linkToday's biggest challenges—like inequality, climate change, and health crises—are deeply connected and too complex for any one actor to solve alone. Multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) bring sectors together to tackle root causes and share financial and non-financial resources for lasting change. In addition to being critical vehicles for collaboration, MSPs, if done right, center communities' agency and ensure the equitable involvement of local actors. Philanthropy can go further, faster, by joining forces with others. WINGS believes collaboration and cross-sector partnerships are key to tackling today's challenges. As the Philanthropy Transformation Initiative urges us, we must shift our mindsets to enable change, align behind our values, and act with the future in mind. Through the #LiftUpPhilanthropy Fund, WINGS, the global network of actors who grow, strengthen and transform philanthropy, collaborated with Africa Venture Philanthropy Association, Latimpacto and Sattva Consulting on three regional studies to illustrate the state of these multi- stakeholder partnerships in Africa, South and South East Asia, and Latin America. The studies identify common recommendations to create enabling ecosystems and provide philanthropy and policy makers with tools and resources to build and scale partnerships
Forging a Post-Imperial Rural Subject: Strategies of Rural Regeneration in Post-Habsburg Countries between Local State Building and Transnational Philanthropy
Full text linkIn the aftermath of the First World War, several empires in the Eurasian borderlands collapsed, including the Habsburg Empire. In its successor states, various actors pursued what this paper calls "strategies of rural regeneration," aiming to transform not merely the countryside but also the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. Indeed, the primary objective of these biopolitical initiatives, as this paper demonstrates, was to create a new, post-imperial rural subject. Although competing visions of this subject reflected divergent political agendas, they uniformly promised that this transformed individual would shed the undesirable legacies of the Habsburg imperial past. These imperial legacies were thus conceptualized as embodied and medicalized, inviting intervention from interdisciplinary networks of experts, including public health specialists influenced by eugenics, engineers, and sociologists. While these efforts were integral to the local state building in the rural areas, they were significantly enabled by and negotiated with transnational philanthropic initiatives. To substantiate this argument, the paper compares four such biopolitical projects in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. By adopting and adapting specialized rural health demonstration areas, promoted and co-funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, these projects aimed to shape post-imperial subjects in rural settings in several distinct ways. By examining and comparing these divergent biopolitical strategies of rural regeneration, this paper sheds new light on the complex interplay between transnational philanthropy and local state-building actors in shaping the post-imperial world
Holding the Line: Black-Led Nonprofits and Race-Explicit Work Amid Backlash
Full text linkThis research report examines Black-led nonprofits' experiences navigating race-related conversations with funders. The research uses a mixed-methods approach, analyzing survey responses from 1,113 nonprofits (including 246 Black-led nonprofits) in Fall 2024 and interviews with leaders of 24 Black-led nonprofits between November 2024 and January 2025.The report finds that Black-led nonprofits tend to be explicit about naming race in their external-facing messaging. They are also significantly more likely to receive advice not to mention race when describing their work. Black-led nonprofits experience various forms of pressure from funders to modify their race-explicit language. Despite these pressures and amid an increasingly challenging philanthropic environment, most have maintained their race-explicit focus, though they employ different strategies to communicate their work
The Rockefeller Foundation, Mental Health, and Great War British Army Veterans during the 1930s
Full text linkI am working on mental health and British Army veterans of the First World War (1914-1918) during the Great Depression (1929-1939). This history requires an appropriate understanding and analysis of the Rockefeller Foundation's immense role in funding British mental healthcare and Great War veterans during the 1930s. Firstly, this support included providing finances to assist British veterans who served in the British Army's medical services during the Great War and later became mental health practitioners during their post-war medical careers. Secondly, Rockefeller Foundation funding benefited psychiatric institutions and practitioners during this period, which included mentally ill ex-soldiers among their patient clientele. In addition to revealing this transatlantic collaboration, records at the Rockefeller Archive Center provide unique perspectives on British mental healthcare and psychiatric culture during this economically austere period
Mapping the Pan Amazon Philanthropy Support Ecosystem: Overview of Initial Findings
Full text linkThe Amazon region – home to 47 million people, including 2.2 million Indigenous peoples from over 350 ethnic groups – is one of the world's most vital ecological and cultural biomes. Yet it is reaching a critical tipping point, as available climate funding remains insufficient, fragmented, and too often fails to reach local communities. While global philanthropic investment in climate action is increasing, very little of this growth currently flows to Amazon-based or locally led initiatives. A strong Philanthropy Support Ecosystem is therefore needed to bridge this gap—by making local philanthropy actors more visible, identifying barriers to resource flow, and informing a roadmap for collective action. By strengthening this ecosystem, the region can attract and channel international climate philanthropy more effectively, while also unlocking domestic giving, building trust, and mobilising coordinated funding at the scale the Amazon urgently needs
Five Agendas to Drive the Transformation of the Philanthropic Sector in Latin America and the Caribbean
Full text linkAcross Latin America and the Caribbean, philanthropic leaders increasingly recognise five priority agendas to drive transformation. These are not distant aspirations but tangible opportunities within reach, rooted in experience, informed by lessons learned, and illustrated by proven examples of success. Each agenda has the potential to shift philanthropy, but their real strength lies in their interdependence. When pursued together, these agendas reinforce one another, unlocking the possibility of more ambitious and lasting impact across the ecosystem
Promoting Racial Equity through For-profit Commercial Real Estate: The Ford Foundation, Progress Plaza, and the Zion Non-Profit Charitable Trust, 1967-1974
Full text linkThis report describes a Ford Foundation project that sought to fund social and economic programs with the aim of "promot[ing] equality of opportunity for disadvantaged Blacks: grants made to the Zion Non-Profit Charitable Trust (ZNPCT) and later Zion Investment Associates (ZIA) to support construction and financial sustenance of Progress Plaza, a shopping center housing Black-owned businesses in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." I examine the evolution of ZNPCT from a religious-based charity to a non-profit trust to a profit-making entity focused on spurring employment and economic development opportunities for Black residents of a North Philadelphia neighborhood between 1967 and 1974. An examination of how Ford assessed Zion projects and investments as they transitioned to profitable goals reveals how the marriage of financial and social goals was challenging, with the latter ultimately resting on the viability of the former. This structure remains in contemporary social enterprises, impact investments, and program-related investments
Futures Philanthropy : Funding with Trust and Flexibility : How Robert Bosch Foundation is experimenting with funding ideas and actors
Full text linkThe Robert Bosch Foundation is active in the areas of health, education and global issues. The foundation considers how the pressing challenges of today intersect as it strives to overcome silo thinking. This case study is part of Philea's Futures Philanthropy series - a selection of hands-on, practical insights into emerging forward-thinking, long-term, innovative practices in the European philanthropy sector. This material provides a foundation for contributing to building futures thinking in the philanthropic field
The Hanover Conferences and the Emergence of the âPersonality and Cultureâ Perspective
Full text link"Personality and Culture" was an influential movement in interwar American social science that shaped the development of emerging disciplines in the US academy, particularly Boasian ethnology. The movement's origins trace back to a series of interdisciplinary conferences organized by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in Hanover, New Hampshire, between 1926 and 1930. These "Hanover Conferences" were among the SSRC's first major Rockefeller-funded initiatives aimed at establishing an interdisciplinary research agenda in the social sciences, bringing together scholars from social science, psychology, and psychiatry. My archival research at the Rockefeller Archive Center examines the role of these gatherings in shaping social science research agendas. Specifically, I analyze how anthropologists positioned their discipline within these emerging frameworks of interdisciplinary collaboration. This research report focuses on the speeches delivered by three prominent anthropologists—Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), Clark Wissler (1870-1947), and Edward Sapir (1884-1939)—during the 1926 Hanover Conference, along with the ensuing discussions. Wissler, Malinowski, and Sapir were key figures in early 20th-century anthropology and the social sciences, but they came from distinct intellectual traditions, each offering a unique perspective on anthropology's disciplinary contributions to social science and its potential for interdisciplinary collaboration. The perspectives they presented in the 1926 Hanover Conference not only showcased their individual differences as influential anthropologists with distinct visions to shape their field's evolution but also reflected the broader methodological debates within anthropology and the social sciences during the early 20th century