Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Vanessa Stevens
What we’re reading, watching, and questioning across the field
Welcome back to What’s Taking Root, a series I’m curating for Proximate Press that highlights emerging ideas and resources to deepen grassroots grantmaking. I’m a philanthropy practitioner and ecosystem weaver who has mapped 100+ resources to reimagine philanthropy and global development. As the global funding landscape changes, who gets to shape what comes next?
Investing in AI means understanding its environmental and social costs
Comment: AI is already contributing to positive sustainability outcomes. In energy systems, it is helping to balance supply and demand and integrate intermittent renewable power such as wind and solar. In climate and environmental analysis, it is improving forecasting and risk modelling, supporting better planning by governments, insurers and infrastructure owners.
What's Taking Root?
What we’re reading, watching, and questioning across the field Vanessa Stevens | July 2026 Supported By : In Partnership With: Welcome to What’s Taking Root, a new series I’m curating for Proximate Press that highlights emerging ideas and resources to deepen grassroots grantmaking. I’m a philanthropy practitioner and ecosystem weaver who has mapped 100+ resources to reimagine philanthropy and global development.
Does your table already exist? This is the moment for collaboration.
At the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) conference in Boston, I was reminded that philanthropy is not a collection of isolated institutions. We are an ecosystem whose effectiveness depends on how we show up collectively for communities in crises. Across the U.S. and beyond, nonprofit leaders are navigating uncertainty, funding instability, political polarization, attacks on civil and human rights, and growing threats to democracy.
WINGSForum 2023: Transformation as the sixth T of philanthropy
One framework for a more expansive meaning of giving is the : Time, Talent, Treasure, Ties, and Testimony. The 2023 WINGSForum in Nairobi brought a sixth T: Transformation. With more than 400 attendees, this global philanthropy gathering called upon philanthropy and its networks to transform at the personal, organizational, and ecosystemic levels. Time: Philanthropy must transform its relationship with time. It treats its requirements and reports as urgent, while many are not even necessary.
Mapping a sector’s global re-imagination: Pathways for change in philanthropy
Every choice we make in philanthropy is an opportunity to move toward trust, equity, and justice. There are many pathways for change and when I became a grantmaker at Global Fund for Children in 2018, I began to map the sector’s many emerging initiatives and resources. Building the map was immensely helpful for my own learning, for finding allies, and for guiding our organizational commitments.
Funders as allies in the movement for migrant rights
‘They won’t even let us buy coffee for meetings, only water,’ shared one grassroots leader as she dialogued with funders and fellow participants at the Gender, Children, and Youth on the Move convening last week. In a conversation about transforming power relations between funders and organisations, she shared this example of a demoralizing restriction that some funders create.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Vanessa
Contact Vanessa, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack