Not too many years ago, we were part of the first cohort of UC Berkeley undergraduates piloting an experiential curriculum designed to teach and train students on how to become effective philanthropists, principally by “doing”.
This unique field-based approach, championed by the “Learning by Giving” program (LxG), taught us about the in’s and out’s of strategic grantmaking from a first principles perspective and culminated with a grant the class awarded to a local, well deserving nonprofit (mind you, this came after numerous hours of in-class framing, social evaluation, operational diligence, modeling, memorandum composing, deliberation, etc.).