Harvest Time for The Atlantic Philanthropies – 2012-2013: Decline & Rise

This report, the fourth in a series about The Atlantic Philanthropies’s concluding years, details unexpected turns in the foundation’s approach to commit its entire endowment in a limited time frame.

The report covers late 2012 through the end of 2013, some three to four years before Atlantic expects to make its final commitments, and chronicles the:

• Decision to fundamentally change the foundation’s model for ending grant making.
• Creation of a new phase of work called Global Opportunity and Leverage (GOAL) – new way of thinking about the foundation’s ultimate purpose and how it would end.
• Learnings from the 2013 ending of the Foundation’s core grant making in Viet Nam, South Africa, and Bermuda.
• Planning and communications to employees about when their jobs would end, including instituting twice yearly staff reductions.
• Exploration of Atlantic’s impact on and lessons learned from its work in the US on school discipline policies and on dementia care in the Republic of Ireland.