Stanford Social Innovation Review

Designing Organizations for Neurodiversity By & Research shows that neurodivergent employees display tendencies that can boost organizational performance—but too many organizations are not designed to incorporate their unique skill sets.

Designing Organizations for Neurodiversity By & Research shows that neurodivergent employees display tendencies that can boost organizational performance—but too many organizations are not designed to incorporate their unique skill sets.

(Illustration by iStock/wildpixel) Many organizations claim to value people who “think differently.” Innovation, independent thinking, and challenging assumptions are celebrated in mission statements and leadership rhetoric. Yet the systems these organizations rely on to hire, evaluate, and promote employees often systematically filter out the very people most likely to think differently. Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in how workplaces treat autistic individuals.

By AI companies are offering nonprofits free services and staff. Is the deal too good to be true?

There’s arguably no group more in need of free AI tools and expert staff embedded to deploy them than the nonprofit sector. While the dissolution of USAID and other funding cuts exacerbate growing global demands to address public health, economic opportunity, and climate-related challenges, NGOs and social impact organizations are underwater, triaging widespread and complex needs against limited capacity.

(Illustration by iStock/Viktoria Kurpas) A few years ago, I argued in this SSIR article that strategic capacity building and trust-based philanthropy are not opposing ideas. Funders do not have to choose between being responsive, relationship-centered partners and offering hands-on support that helps nonprofits strengthen as organizations. But as capacity building has become a more common part of philanthropy, another question has become harder to avoid: How do we know whether it works?

After her Central Texas home flooded in July 2025, Airbnb.org guest Skylyn and her son stayed in a listing. (Photo by Marshall Tidrick) Sarah Sherr woke to the smell of smoke at 3:30 a.m. on January 8, 2025. Pregnant, she was two weeks from her due date. She shook her husband awake, packed up their malamute and border collie, and drove away from their West Altadena home before he even had time to put on a shirt. By 7 a.m., the palm trees lining their street were ablaze.

Stopping the Detention Machine Reviewed By John Washington’s How to Close a Camp explores the contemporary growth of immigrant detainment facilities under the Trump administration but argues that entrenched political failures are what makes them possible and what must be addressed.

The Impact Portfolio That Beat the Market By I had a mandate to create an investment portfolio wholly devoted to impact that would not sacrifice returns. After a decade, it outperformed its benchmarks of traditional market indexes and demonstrated that socially positive investments are long-term value investments.

(Illustration by iStock/Henki Lestio) I joined Inspirit Foundation as its director of finance and impact investment back in 2015. Based in Toronto, Inspirit is a public foundation that advances racial, social, and economic justice in Canada. At the time, Inspirit was dabbling in its first impact investments. A short time after in 2016, we committed to a 100 percent impact portfolio—a pledge to allocate all our assets to investments that generate positive environmental and social outcomes.