Doug Bitonti Stewart is the executive director off the Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation and a former NCFP Fellow. Recently NCFP sat down with him to talk about his reflections on the evolution of NCFP and the field. This article was originally published on ncfp.org.

1. How did you first get involved in philanthropy?

Outside of raising money as a child for UNICEF during my trick or treating, my first real exposure to philanthropy was in college. After failing to succeed in pre-med and finding myself in business school, a friend told me about a job at the development fund for the university. While I didn’t know what development was at the time, after a few years of serving in that role part time, I found a new way to accomplish my pre-med dreams of serving medical caregivers, advocates, researchers, and educators by helping them raise money.

For the first 15 years of my career, I worked for universities and children’s hospitals until I received a call to consider becoming the first executive director for the Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation. While I didn’t know then what it would take to launch a new family foundation, I knew I wanted to learn alongside the Fisher family. It has been 15 years since I started that role, and I couldn’t be happier with all the lessons we have learned together.

2. As you think about the broader philanthropic field, what strikes you as the biggest changes or evolutions?

We are now recognizing the role foundation endowment investments—the money we have in the market focused on growing the grant budget each year—play in either contributing to or helping to alleviate the issues we face together. I’ll never forget how excited I was when Luther Ragin from the F.B. Heron Foundation asked a group of us during a conference, “Should foundations simply be private investment houses that give away 5% each year? Or could we be more?” That, and the passion of our trustees, sent us on a learning path that started as forgivable loans to impact organizations and has now resulted in nearly $12 million in impact investments and in December 2020 our board passed a motion to fully align our assets with our values.

As the market becomes more and more transparent, I believe impact investing will continue to play an increasing role and it will become less of a practice by a few and instead will become a necessity for us all to ensure we are contributing to solutions on both sides of the balance sheet.

Read the full article here