Topic: Financial Sustainability
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Legitimizing the Social Sciences: The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in the 1920s
What began as a philanthropic fund to honor its namesake became an early force in the social sciences.
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Success and Failure in Community-Based Healthcare: The East Harlem Health Center
An innovative nursing program gathered crucial data and brought healthcare to needy families, but ultimately lost its way.
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Photo Essay: Radburn, New Jersey – the Town for the Motor Age
Philanthropy helped architects and planners create a new kind of suburban community in the 1920s.
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Early Experiments in Public Broadcasting
The American public broadcast system as it exists today came out of years of work by organized philanthropy.
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Funding a Sexual Revolution: The Kinsey Reports
The inside story of the study that first questioned binary sexuality and spurred outcry and controversy.
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“Investment Philanthropy” Investing for Social Good, a Century Ago
An early twentieth-century foundation tried using its endowment to support for-profit projects that also would achieve a social goal.
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Photo Essay: Supporting Minority Enterprise in the late 1960s
In 1968, the Ford Foundation began to make social investments using a new tool borrowed from the for-profit world, the Program-Related Investment.