Stanford PACS Impact Report 2025-26
Message from the Executive Director
Welcome to the 2025-2026 impact report for the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. The 2025–2026 academic year was a consequential year for Stanford PACS. With a focused strategy, we demonstrated what becomes possible when rigorous research, practical learning, and purposeful convening reinforce one another. Across Stanford PACS and Stanford Social Innovation Review, we brought scholars, students, philanthropic leaders, and civil society practitioners together to examine difficult questions, test new approaches, and help translate knowledge into action.
This year, we launched our inaugural Faculty Affiliates program, connecting 40 faculty members across seven Stanford schools whose scholarship intersects with philanthropy, civil society, and social innovation. PACS faculty and faculty affiliates published 15 research articles in leading academic journals, while our broader research community came together through the Civil Society and Sustainability Conference, PACS-SCANCOR seminars, and the Technology, Culture, and Power Speaker Series. Together, we explored how organizations, civic actors, philanthropy, policy, and technology shape the conditions for a thriving and sustainable civil society.
Education remained central to our mission, cultivating a philanthropic mindset for learners across various stages of their careers. Through our Philanthropy for Sustainable Development course, Stanford students engaged directly with the ethics and practice of grantmaking. Since 2012, 335 students across 14 classes have helped direct over $1.3 million to nonprofit organizations. This year, we also served 85 philanthropy professionals across our programs, connecting participants from the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia through practical learning and peer exchange. We began developing new offerings as well, expanding both by topic, including how financial capital can be leveraged for social impact beyond traditional philanthropy, and by region, including a pilot program for financial advisors and family office professionals in Hong Kong.
Convening is another essential way that PACS connects knowledge with practice. This year, we brought together more than 400 people across 20 events. Our Beyond the Summit Salons created space for candid, cross-sector dialogue on questions with significant implications for civil society, from strengthening American democracy to supporting locally led resilience amid a changing global aid landscape. These gatherings reflected PACS’ distinctive role as a trusted convener: connecting evidence with experience and bringing varied perspectives into constructive conversation.
SSIR extended these conversations to a global audience. The relaunched Author Conversations series invited readers to examine the motivations and assumptions behind philanthropic practice. The Summer 2026 cover story, “Why Don’t Philanthropists Build Anymore,” and my accompanying essay, “The New Gilded Age Needs Civic Leaders, Not Just Philanthropists,” challenged conventional thinking about wealth, civic leadership, and philanthropy’s responsibilities in society.
None of this work happens alone. I am deeply grateful to our faculty directors and affiliates, students, staff, advisory board, university colleagues, supporters, partners, authors, and practitioners. Your insight, trust, and participation make PACS a place where interdisciplinary knowledge can become shared understanding, and where shared understanding can inform meaningful action.
As we look ahead, we remain committed to asking hard questions about philanthropy and civil society, strengthening the people and institutions that sustain the third sector, and creating more opportunities for research and practice to inform one another.
With gratitude,
Priya Shanker
