Speaker: Jacob Harold, Program Officer, Philanthropy Program, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Discussion Topic:

An individual willing to spend $300 on a digital camera can find better information than one prepared to give $1 million to fight deforestation.  In 2008, donors in the US made about $300 billion in charitable contributions to a total of around 1.5 million nonprofits. We call this huge flow of philanthropic dollars the "nonprofit marketplace." Unfortunately, the nonprofit marketplace doesn't work very well.
 
The nonprofit marketplace doesn't exhibit the single most essential characteristic of a well-functioning market: open exchange of high-quality information that helps people make good decisions. The current economic crisis gives ample evidence of the consequences of opacity in a marketplace.  The Hewlett Foundation has spent more than $10 million working to address the supply of and demand for this information, as well as an architecture to bring the two together.  During this Issues in Depth call, Jacob will outline the dynamics of the current marketplace, offer a path  forward, and explain Hewlett’s grantmaking strategy on this ever-evolving topic. 

About the Speaker:

Jacob Harold oversees grants in the Hewlett Foundation’s Philanthropy Program.  The Program seeks to improve the practice of philanthropy and to provide resources to support strategic decision-making by donors.  The Program’s grantees provide data about nonprofit performance, operate donor engagement programs, and do research about strategic philanthropy.  
Harold joined the Foundation from The Bridgespan Group--a nonprofit spin-off of Bain and Company--where he advised a variety of nonprofit and foundation clients on programmatic and organizational strategy.  He has worked as a climate change consultant in New Delhi, India for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and as a climate change campaigner for Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace USA. 

Before that, he was the organizing director for Citizen Works, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit focused on corporate governance issues, and spent a year as a grassroots organizer with Green Corps, where he led campaigns on climate change, forest protection and tobacco control in cities across the country.

Harold received a BA summa cum laude from Duke University, where he designed his own major in ethics and intellectual history, and earned an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.  He trained in business strategy with Bain and Company and studied complex systems science in Beijing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  Harold was born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where his parents ran small community-based nonprofit organizations. 

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