What DARO’s Reading Right Now
Welcome to What DARO’s Reading Right Now! We’re sharing what articles have caught our attention lately and why they're worth reading. We'll be regularly posting what's inspiring us, interesting us, and making us think deeper about our work.
What We’re Reading June 24, 2025:
→ This quarterly Philanthropy Confidential series that answers candid questions from funders and grantees. In this installment called “On Gatekeeping”, they respond to the question, Why do foundations continue to gatekeep even after awarding grants, instead of offering “radical acceptance” like unrestricted funding?
It’s an interesting discussion on process, internal politics, and what accountability and relationships look like with grantees - all things we think about when thinking about what will actually work and what will actually drive impact. You have to create solutions for the real world.
→ This article in the Journal of African Economies, called “The Political Economy of Economic Political Advice” that talks about the incentives and motivations at work for economic political advice.
This one also speaks to our obsession of what works in the real-world and “offers a framework to show that offering advice that ignores politics and the objectives of those in power is not just naive but could be sub-optimal and even may entrench bad outcomes". For further reading, you can check out this article by the same author, Stefan Dercon, "Best buys meets political realities: The political economy of education research". Both articles discuss how you need to account for political motivations in research and policy advise in order to be impactful, asking the key question, "how do you marry researchers’ and policymakers’ interests in one intervention?"
→ This one’s a bit older, but worth revisiting! From Statecraft , “How to Fix Risk Assessment in Child Welfare” is a conversation with Alex Jutca, who leads analytics and technology at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. Allegheny County is a leader in linking data, known for having the best integrated data of any state and local system in the US.
A couple of key takeaways from this one are:
They focus on having an in-house development team
Their approach is to "stack wins" instead of searching for magic bullets
They can be honest and upfront about how challenging their work is and don’t have to rely on vanity metrics to sell their work