Highlighted Philanthropists
Veronica Atkins
Atkins is one of the top fifty most generous philanthropists. Newsweek also proclaimed her part of the “All-Star Team" in philanthropy.
Naveen Jain
Jain has been named one of the Top 20 Entrepreneurs by Red Herring, recognized for winning the Albert Einstein Technology Medal Winner, and received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2007.
George Soros
The Soros Foundations are an international network of local, Soros-founded foundations promoting sociopolitical activities.
Kenneth Langone
In 1978, he partnered with Bernard Marcus and Arthur Blank to found Home Depot, which today is one of the largest and most successful chains in the home improvement industry. He has contributed almost $150 million dollars to various charities.
Paul Jansen
Paul Jansen is currently the Director of the Global Non-Profit Practice, McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco. He joined the company in 1984. Paul Jansen is responsible for opening McKinsey & Co's Hong Kong office, where he worked for four years.
McKinsey & Company is an international management consulting firm that caters to clients ranging from government agencies to manufacturers to nonprofit organizations. With their tools, knowledge, expertise and principles, they provide clients with management solutions from a global perspective, covering various areas such as finance, sales and marketing, research and development, management information systems, planning and control, operations, and manufacturing and distribution. The firm identifies opportunities for their clients, and helps maximize revenue and maintain growth.
Paul Jansen has been active in the nonprofit sector since 1992. As a consultant, he has worked with nonprofit organizations, foundations, colleges and universities, and public and private partnerships.
- On May 15, 2002, Paul Jansen and former Senator Bill Bradley published an article in New York Times entitled Faster Charity, where they suggested that foundations should be distributing more of their resources now, rather than saving them for the future, considering that the needs of the social sector are ever-growing. Jansen made calculations by using a standard business analysis of the time value of money by comparing the value of a dollar exhausted today with a dollar spent twenty years after.
- In May 2003, Paul Jansen co-authored with former Senator Bill Bradley and Les Silverman a broadly publicized Harvard Business Review article, entitled “The Non-Profit Sector's $100 Billion Opportunity". They suggested that the nonprofit sector may save $100 billion annually by critically shifting their performance to more important measures through:
- Reducing funding costs
- Dispensing funds faster
- Reducing costs for program services
- Cutting back on administrative costs
- Improving sector effectiveness
- Jansen also presented to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) a study on horizon issues and drivers for change in higher education, which is used as a perspective for discussion.