Facebook’s IPO Part 2: You are a Philanthropist

The San Francisco Chronicle estimates that the Facebook IPO will create approximately 900 millionaires. Many believe the ongoing tech boom and tentative resurgence of the US economy are likely to create more millionaires across the country in the coming decades. Against this backdrop, The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently reported that as controversy over the yawning income inequality gap in the US persists, the wealthy are digging deeper to support a more just society at home and abroad. We are heartened...

Facebook's IPO: Social Network, Meet Social Innovation

Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO)—and the wealth it will soon produce—has been generating considerable buzz among the diverse individuals, organizations, and investors who helped make the company such an extraordinary success. While the coming IPO will no doubt result in short-lived pursuits, the most compelling and hopeful outcome will also endure: social change powered by a new crop of emerging philanthropists.

While capitalism’s financial underbelly has been on full display in recent years, the tradition...

Why You Need an Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Tides CEO Melissa Bradley participated in a January advisory board meeting of Dell’s recently established Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program. Led by clean energy entrepreneur Ingrid Vanderveldt, the EIR concept has created a corporate innovation shop inside Dell to foster creativity and new ideas. The concept is distinct from traditional R&D as it focuses on vetting new ideas with a panel of serial entrepreneurs. On top of the creative passion Ingrid brings to Dell, the EIR Advisory Board serves as an entrepreneurial...

Building Momentum at Tides

Innovation and impact are words that we hear more and more often these days in the nonprofit world.  The truth is, we need more of both in an era of stagnant foundation endowments and besieged individual donors reeling from recession. Yet innovation and impact are imprecise terms that are hard to both qualify and quantify. What distinguishes innovative from interesting?

At Tides, we keep it simple: innovation is about creative collaboration, that is, catalyzing uncommon alliances for extraordinary results....