The Story

Howard Bornstein was working at the Gates Foundation one summer when a friend asked him to recommend a top-performing education nonprofit where she could make a donation as a gift to her mother. She went to Howard for advice because she had recently read that an organization's overhead ratio and CEO salary were not great ways to make a donation decision because those factors often have little or no correlation with impact.

Having been at the Foundation only for a few months, Howard did not feel prepared to make a recommendation and didn't know a good website where he could direct his friend. It occurred to him, however, that just down the hall from his office sat dozens of foundation professionals with hundreds of years of collective work experience. How could he leverage their collective expertise to come up with a recommendation for his friend? It was from this initial question that Philanthropedia was born.