Fast Forward

MCF President Trista Harris shares her take-aways from a training at the Institute for the Future and provides a look at where philanthropy is headed. She also talks about what hover boards mean to philanthropy.

Ho Nguyen is a program officer at PFund Foundation. Formerly, she was the grassroots advocacy coordinator with Pro-Choice Resources, and she has been actively engaged in anti-racist work and social justice strategies for over a decade. Her background is in housing, homelessness, poverty, and ensuring that all people and families have access to safe and affordable housing. She is currently on the Board of Directors for the MN Coalition for the Homeless.

Leah Goldstein Moses founded The Improve Group in 2000 with a vision to improve programs and organizations that impact the world. In this conversation, we talk with Moses and The Improve Group's research and evaluation director Jennifer Obinna about how grantmakers can and should be using evaluation in their work. They address best practices in evaluation, the importance of thinking through how evaluation aligns with your identity as a foundation, building evaluation capacity, how to decide when to bring in outside help for evaluation and what to do with evaluation data once you've captured it. They also talk about setting realistic expectation for the outcomes of investing in evaluation and share why they are personally passionate about their work.

This past September, Sarah Eagle Heart became CEO of Native Americans in Philanthropy. Eagle Heart is a 2014 recipient of the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development's "40 under 40 Award," which recognizes emerging Native American leaders who have demonstrated leadership, initiative and dedication and made significant contributions in business or their community. She is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and she has a master's in business administration, a BA in mass communications and a BA in American Indian studies. 

Beth Zemsky is a community organizer, educator, psychotherapist and organizational leader. In this interview, Zemsky talks with Alfonso Wenker, MCF's director of program strategy and racial equity, about her multidisciplinary approach to intercultural organizational development.