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How Foundations Listen : A Qualitative Review by Luisa Bonin

March 23, 2023

This report is the result of a partnership between Philea and Luisa Bonin, a visiting fellow from Brazil at the Maecenata Foundation in Berlin. Luisa`s project on strategic philanthropy was selected for the 2021/2022 cohort of the "German Chancellor Fellowship for Prospective Leaders," a programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The goal of this report is to take a deep and qualitative look into the listening practices of European foundations. Talking about listening can sound subjective, but this report shows how this process can be viewed objectively and how these learnings can be used to start improving listening practices within foundations. An executive summary, as well as further reading and resources, are included.

Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, But U.S. is a Major Outlier

December 6, 2022

As people across the globe have increasingly turned to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms to get their news and express their opinions, the sphere of social media has become a new public space for discussing – and often arguing bitterly – about political and social issues. And in the mind of many analysts, social media is one of the major reasons for the declining health of democracy in nations around the world.However, as a new Pew Research Center survey of 19 advanced economies shows, ordinary citizens see social media as both a constructive and destructive component of political life, and overall most believe it has actually had a positive impact on democracy. Across the countries polled, a median of 57% say social media has been more of a good thing for their democracy, with 35% saying it has been a bad thing.There are substantial cross-national differences on this question, however, and the United States is a clear outlier: Just 34% of U.S. adults think social media has been good for democracy, while 64% say it has had a bad impact. In fact, the U.S. is an outlier on a number of measures, with larger shares of Americans seeing social media as divisive.

“If Human Ears Were Tuned to Bat Frequencies": Inaudible Sound and the Sciences of Bat Echolocation

October 27, 2022

This report provides draft excerpts from my PhD dissertation titled "The Inaudible Sounds of Science and Medicine: Animals and Media from the Galton Whistle to Bat Echolocation," a chapter of which explores the laboratory work of Donald R. Griffin – and especially the emergence of the concept of bat echolocation – as it contributed to a sonic history of "ultrasound" and other typologies of liminal sound vibrations. Such "inaudible sounds" repeatedly defied amplification (efforts to make them louder); their frequencies were too high or too low to vibrate the human eardrum. But humans have long suspected that insects, bats, dogs, and other animals could hear them and communicate through them. The following research on bat echolocation in the Griffin laboratory is one aspect of a much more comprehensive historical project, which platforms nonhuman listeners in 19th- and 20th-century experimental contexts as they repeatedly pushed the limitations of human hearing. Broadly speaking, the dissertation suggests that animal figures are useful vectors for exploring an expanded history of sounds, including high-pitched frequencies, in science and medicine. My objective is to better understand how scientists designed media and choreographed animal listeners in order to make meaning from the sounds they could not hear on their own. I am most invested in understanding how humans exploited, collaborated with, and coexisted with animals to make sense of the insensible – or, to understand the unheard bestial worlds of communication.  In this report, I draw on material from the Donald R. Griffin Papers, held at the Rockefeller Archive Center, which includes a vast array of Griffin's laboratory notebooks, correspondences, sound films, newspaper clippings, and publications. The analysis spans the years between Donald Griffin's first experiment on bat navigation in the dark (1938) – conducted during his early graduate training years – and his postwar research on the physical principles of bat pulses into the 1960s.  More specifically, I characterize the ways in which various forms of media were deployed in experimental settings to study bats and the inaudible sounds emitted by them for orienting their bodies in flight. Scientists and collaborators of the Griffin lab relied on an array of mixed media, from the sound transposing devices of Harvard physicist George W. Pierce, to mechanical-visual apparatuses such as cathode-ray oscillograms and sound spectrographs, through to hand-written laboratory notes and printed correspondences and – ultimately – the bats themselves, to answer their questions. Furthermore, I explore the epistemic techniques of listening for sound and silence in the Griffin laboratory, in which the ears and eyes of scientists interfaced with special acoustic media to produce certain knowledges about bats and their patterns of flight. This project also engages with the highly militarized scientific contexts that constituted Griffin's work on bat echolocation.

Legal and Policy Barriers to Self-Managed Abortion

September 13, 2022

We envision a world where individuals seeking abortion care can exercise full reproductive autonomy without any impediments or gatekeepers. This includes the ability of individuals to have self-managed abortions, which are those performed through self-care interventions or without clinical supervision, particularly early in pregnancy through medication abortion. Self-managed abortion is grounded in an array of human rights, including the rights to health, equality and non-discrimination, information, privacy, and to benefit from scientific progress.This mapping aims to better understand the global legal landscape on self-managed abortion, with a focus on medication abortion1 as the safest form of self-managed abortion. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that individuals have the option to self-manage abortion using medication abortion at least during their first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The WHO recognizes that individuals can safely and effectively self-assess their eligibility for abortion and self-administer abortion medication, demonstrating that self-managed abortion is a critical tool for enabling individuals to safely exercise reproductive freedom.Yet, as this mapping shows, even in countries with liberal abortion laws, guaranteeing access to medication abortion and enabling individuals to self-manage abortion care requires a reconceptualization of legal and policy frameworks on abortion.

Business as Usual: How major weapons exporters arm the world’s conflicts

March 3, 2022

This research provides the first global analysis of how conflict in, or involving, a recipient state, impacts exporters' willingness supply arms. It analyses the top eleven global arms suppliers over the ten-year period 2009-2018 Listed in order by the volume of major conventional weapons transfers, these global sales leaders are: the United States, Russia, Germany, France, China, the United Kingdom, Spain, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. These countries assert widely varying formal policies regarding arms exports, but the empirical record is, for the most part, remarkably similar.

Global Public Opinion in an Era of Democratic Anxiety

December 7, 2021

As democratic nations have wrestled with economic, social and geopolitical upheaval in recent years, the future of liberal democracy has come into question. In countries across the globe, democratic norms and civil liberties have deteriorated, while populists have enjoyed surprising success at the ballot box. Newly democratic nations have struggled, while more-established, once self-assured democracies have stumbled, exposing long-simmering weaknesses in their social fabrics and institutional designs.These trends have been well-documented by organizations such as the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, International IDEA and the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), which measure and track the quality of democracy around the world. Public opinion researchers have also focused on these issues by examining how citizens think about democracy and its alternatives. At Pew Research Center, we've applied a comparative, cross-national lens to explore global trends in attitudes toward political representation and individual rights.

When Costs Are a Barrier to Getting Health Care: Reports from Older Adults in the United States and Other High-Income Countries: Findings from the 2021 International Health Policy Survey of Older Adults

October 1, 2021

Issue: Unlike older adults in other high-income countries, those in the United States face significant financial barriers to getting health care, despite Medicare's universal coverage. These barriers may affect use of health services as well as health outcomes.Goal: To compare the out-of-pocket spending and care-seeking experiences of older Americans with those of older adults in 10 other high-income countries.Methods: Analysis of findings from the Commonwealth Fund's 2021 International Health Policy Survey of Older Adults.Key Findings: One-fifth of older Americans spent more than $2,000 out of pocket on health care in the past year. Only a small share of older adults in most of the other surveyed countries had such high out-of-pocket health costs. Similarly, a higher share of older Americans reported forgoing health care because of costs. Rates of skipping dental care because of costs were similar for older adults in nations that do not offer coverage of such services, including the U.S.Conclusions: Older Americans pay more for health care and are more likely to not get care for cost-related reasons than people in other high-income countries. Affordability remains a concern and should continue to be a focus of research and policy.

Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly - Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries

August 4, 2021

Issue: No two countries are alike when it comes to organizing and delivering health care for their people, creating an opportunity to learn about alternative approaches.Goal: To compare the performance of health care systems of 11 high-income countries.Methods: Analysis of 71 performance measures across five domains — access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes — drawn from Commonwealth Fund international surveys conducted in each country and administrative data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Health Organization.Key Findings: The top-performing countries overall are Norway, the Netherlands, and Australia. The United States ranks last overall, despite spending far more of its gross domestic product on health care. The U.S. ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes, but second on measures of care process.Conclusion: Four features distinguish top performing countries from the United States: 1) they provide for universal coverage and remove cost barriers; 2) they invest in primary care systems to ensure that high-value services are equitably available in all communities to all people; 3) they reduce administrative burdens that divert time, efforts, and spending from health improvement efforts; and 4) they invest in social services, especially for children and working-age adults.

2021 Ariadne Forecast for European Social Change and Human Rights Funders

March 1, 2021

To create the 2021 Ariadne Forecast, 275 Ariadne members and friends of the network filled in surveys, participated in interviews, and attended online forecast meetings to share their insights into trends in European social change and human rights philanthropy for 2021.The report looks at the challenges and opportunities this year might bring for grantees; how funder practice could change; which political events are likely to affect their work; what will become more important in the months ahead; and -- perhaps most importantly -- what to feel hopeful about. There are chapters on France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and the UK, plus a broader, global focus.The challenges ahead may be great, but philanthropy can play a role in helping us overcome them.

European Philanthropy at the Nexus of Disability and the SDGs

December 1, 2019

This publication, jointly elaborated by Fundación ONCE and the European Foundation Centre, focused on how the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals are serving as a framework for foundations to develop their action on disability inclusion. The publication includes key reflections on this topic as well as examples and testimonies of eleven relevant foundations from nine countries -France, UK, Italy, Spain, Austria, Ireland, Netherlands, Turkey and Georgia. The publication has been developed in the framework of Disability Hub Europe, an initiative led by Fundación ONCE with the co-funding of the European Social Fund.

Armed Drones in Europe

November 1, 2019

The use of armed drones in the European Union has become a topic rife with controversy and misinformation. This report gives a comprehensive and in-depth overview of the approach to, and use of, armed drones in five European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. Further, the report is intended to start a wider debate about armed drones in Europe and to serve as a guide on this topic for the European Parliament.

The Realities of Research Data Management Part Four: Sourcing and Scaling University RDM Services

April 26, 2018

The Realities of Research Data Management is a four-part series that explores how research universities are addressing the challenge of managing research data throughout the research lifecycle. In this series, we examine the context, influences, and choices higher education institutions face in building or acquiring RDM capacity—in other words, the infrastructure, services, and other resources needed to support emerging data management practices. Our findings are based on case studies of four institutions: University of Edinburgh (UK), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US), Monash University (Australia) and Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands), in four very different national contexts.Another key facet of RDM capacity acquisition is determining where that capacity will be sourced: will it be built and maintained internally, or will it be acquired from an external provider? Similarly, the question of scale must be addressed: should RDM solutions be deployed as institution-scale services, or should they be organized at scales above the institution?This final report of the series examines the sourcing and scaling choices made by the four research universities regarding their acquisition of RDM capacity. What variables are being maximized in these decisions: efficiency/cost reduction? Reliability/trust? The choices that individual institutions make with respect to sourcing and scaling likely depend on a host of factors, including local staffing and infrastructure, availability of cooperatively sourced or nationally provisioned services and willingness to pay for commercially sourced solutions.While each of the four case studies partners pursued a different strategy, there are trends that span the institutions, including:curation services are the most likely to be externalizededucation and expertise services are largely local in scale . . . so farone size does not fit all: sourcing and scaling RDM changes to fit institutional needs