UF CAIRES has developed a four-stage process for our smart philanthropy program.
First, we meet with you so you can express your values, describe the issues that motivate you, and share your hopes. These in-depth conversations are designed to help us well understand your philanthropic aspirations.
You may know who you want to help—perhaps at-risk youth in Florida; or uneducated mothers in developing nations; or the chronically underemployed in urban centers. Alternatively, you may be focused less on who the key beneficiaries should be, but have a keen sense of what you want to achieve—perhaps curbing climate change by making solar power more widely available; promoting democracy and human rights through education; helping people honor and protect nature through the arts; or ensuring that the juvenile justice system is both humane and effective. You might have a range of aspirations for sustainable economic development at the local level, and you want to learn which ones are most achieveable given current social conditions and technological advances. Whatever your interests and aspirations, our initial conversations will leave you feeling well understood and assured that UF CAIRES will develop an effective instrument for achieving your philanthropic goals.
Following our conversations with you, UF CAIRES drafts a “Goals Framework,” which we submit for your approval.
Stage Two of our four-part program places your philanthropic project on the firm ground of focused research while at the same time building UF’s capacity and reputation for producing top scholarship that has real-world impact.
UF CAIRES forms an interdisciplinary team of expert UF faculty and field-tested practioners from the relevant not-for-profit, business, governmental, and technological arenas. We brief our faculty/practioner working group on your philanthropic aspirations and provide them with the Goals Framework. The working group determines areas of targeted research that would facilitate reaching your goals and outlines opportunities for effective on-the-ground programs. The mandate here is to generate sustainable solutions, not to reinvent wheels. So our working group researches the best practices of those nonprofits and practioners that are operating the most successful programs in your area of interest.
Working with UF CAIRES, the team of expert faculty crafts an entrepreneurial plan grounded in state-of-the-art scholarship, creative thinking, systematic cost-benefit analyses, and detailed logistics. This realistic “theory of change” lays out a business plan for implementing the Goals Framework in a way that best leverages your financial contributions.
Solving complex state, national, and global challenges will require the intellectual resources and skills of generations of scholars and practitioners. UF CAIRES invests in the future by providing its faculty/practitioner working groups with mentored teams of undergraduates who serve as research assistants. In this manner, our working groups benefit from the energy and enthusiasm of youth, while UF undergraduates gain the rare opportunity to work side by side with experienced faculty and the most effective practitioners. These young students will be tomorrow’s change agents, leading the way to health and sustainable prosperity for all.
Third, UF CAIRES presents you with a multi-pronged strategy for philanthropic intervention. You will meet with a working group spokesperson who will outline opportunities, identify deliverables, and specifiy clear metrics to gauge the effectiveness of the proposed program. Our conversations with you at this point spell out a set of clear practical options and the best means of their systematic assessment.
Fourth, once all your questions have been answered and you are eager to take the next step, UF CAIRES spearheads the effort to put the plan into practice. Philanthropic efforts that are worthwhile do not produce results overnight. Truly sustainable solutions have to be built from the bottom up. This takes time. But UF CAIRES will provide you with annual reports that track the on-the-ground effectiveness of your “philanthropreneurship” and identify opportunities for enhancement. You will be able to see your social return on investment (SROI) through measurable outcome indicators, and understand the difference to the world that your hard-earned dollars are making.
