January 2010

Dear Friends,

We wish you all a Happy New Year, in which we celebrate the first ten years of the Institute's work: to mark this milestone, we have published "Strategic Philanthropy: Our First Decade, 2000-2010".

We are delighted to be celebrating a decade of accomplishment and we look forward to another ten years of helping donors achieve impact in their giving. Our first decade has been one of extraordinary growth, thanks in large part both to the donors who support us and those who have joined The Philanthropy Workshop and our other donor education programmes. Our work is now global and we are privileged to work with philanthropic innovators from around the world. We have seen the power of bringing together individuals with a passion to create significant change in the pressing issues of our time, and are energised to continue building that work into our next decade.

We are also proud to have built Think Philanthropy, a programme of research and publications, and pioneered a number of new programmes such as Next Generation Philanthropy (the first next generation philanthropy programme in Europe), Community Foundations Futures (where we are privileged to work with UK community foundations sharing our expertise in developing donor engagement programmes) and Strong Foundations (a programme in strategic philanthropy for the staff of foundations with engaged, entrepreneurial trustees).

The road ahead for us and for the field of philanthropy is highly encouraging. New innovators, both from countries with established philanthropic traditions as well as those who come from places where strategic philanthropy is new, are reinventing our field. We are excited to be working in partnership with many of them and in many of their geographies. The way in which we do our work and seek to create social impact through private giving will also no doubt change, and it is our aspiration to be at the centre of those new ideas and that action.

Thank you for your interest in our work. And please stay tuned - we are confident that our second decade will be even stronger than our first.