Better odds for
the common good
A learning project about philanthropy, nonprofits, and how progress happens.
The New Endowment explores how people, capital, technology, and institutions can be better arranged to solve important public problems.
Through essays, conversations, and practical experiments, we are trying to understand what helps good work begin, grow, and endure—and why so much generosity never becomes lasting capability.
What we’re exploring
A few of the questions guiding the project.
Our mission
To understand what gives people and organizations better odds of solving important public problems.
We are interested in the structures behind meaningful work: who receives trust, how capital is designed, what technology makes possible, and which institutions allow effort to compound.
The goal is not to arrive with a finished doctrine. It is to ask better questions, learn from people doing the work, and eventually test the most promising ideas in practice.
“What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”
John W. Gardner
Institution builder and founder of Common Cause