Giving Compass' Take:

• This Philanthropy News Digest blog posts details the 100&Change Solutions Bank: a collection of ideas from organizations and entrepreneurs around the globe. Though originally submitted for a grant competition, the ideas serve as a useful database for funders in search of inspiration.

• The ideas in the Solutions Bank are at various stages of development (and, as the writer admits, just a snapshot for a specific point of time), but grantmakers and grantees alike will find it useful as a repository for innovative problem-solving across the social sector.

• For more on the 100&Change competition and its origins, be sure to read this.

Our original goal for 100&Change, an open competition for a single $100 million grant, was fairly simple: identify a project outside our usual networks that with substantial resources disbursed over a compressed time period (three to five years) could make significant progress in addressing a critical problem. And we succeeded. In December 2017, MacArthur's board of directors selected an early childhood intervention project, a collaboration between Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee, as the recipient of the $100 million grant. The other three finalists — Catholic Relief Services, HarvestPlus, and the Rice 360° Institute for Global Health (Rice University) — were each awarded grants of $15 million and a commitment from MacArthur to help identify additional sources of funding.

After we launched the competition, however, we realized that 100&Change's open call had an important side benefit: the surfacing of a wealth of ideas for solving problems around the globe, ideas at various stages of development but good ideas nonetheless. We were logging those ideas into a database here at the foundation but soon recognized the database could be a public resource serving other funders who might find interesting projects to support, communities looking for innovative solutions to their challenges, and problem-solvers and researchers looking for others with similar interests. So, after a number of conversations and phone calls, we found ourselves collaborating with Foundation Center on the 100&Change Solutions Bank, a searchable (by geography, subject area, keyword, and Sustainable Development Goal) repository of submissions to the 100&Change competition.

Read the full article about how 100&Change's Solutions Bank can be a resource for funders by Cecilia A. Conrad at PhilanTopic.