Purpose Prize

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The Latest from CoGenerate

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

For the past year, Ampact, with support from CoGenerate’s Generations Serving Together program, placed cogenerational pairs of AmeriCorps members in elementary schools. The older and younger adults worked side by side to improve students’ reading and math skills. A...

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

We at CoGenerate (formerly Encore.org) are mourning the loss of Chuck Feeney this week. Without Chuck's vision and generosity we likely would not exist as an organization. Twenty-five years ago Atlantic Philanthropies took a chance on our start-up, playing a...

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Peter Karoff

The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc.
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

Helping donors increase the impact of their philanthropy

After a two-year sabbatical studying poetry, Boston business leader and civic activist Peter Karoff founded The Philanthropic Initiative in 1989. His plan, groundbreaking at the time, was to promote philanthropy and to greatly enlarge the pool of donors, encouraging them to give more, and more strategically. Today the Philanthropic Initiative is a nonprofit philanthropic consulting firm that provides strategic planning and programmatic services to individual donors, families, foundations and corporations. The Initiative offers not only advice, but research into areas of need, as well as a commitment to pro bono work. To date, The Philanthropic Initiative has helped to direct more than a billion dollars in philanthropic investment to address a broad range of social issues including: education, health, youth and family needs, hunger and nutrition, housing and homelessness, community and economic development, civic engagement, environmental issues, and the arts. Perhaps more importantly, it has spawned a burgeoning cottage industry of philanthropy advisors and consultants and has influenced the thinking and actions of thousands regarding the critical role new philanthropic capital can play in improving the quality of life in communities around the globe.