25 Years, One Partnership: Kevin Bolduc
Phil sits down with Kevin Bolduc, CEP’s second employee and longtime vice president of Assessment and Advisory Services, for a conversation that moves between the urgent and the personal. Kevin starts by challenging foundations to stop defaulting to minimum required payout levels, laying out the scale of the crisis facing nonprofits right now and pushing back on the reasons boards give for holding steady: fear of shrinking the endowment, reliance on concrete financial projections over harder-to-model social impact, and a sense that “we already had this debate” during COVID. Kevin and Phil also discuss the troubling pattern of funders pulling back from organizations serving LGBTQ communities, immigrants, and survivors of trafficking and domestic violence.
The conversation then turns reflective, as Kevin looks back on 25 years of research and relationship-building between funders and the nonprofits they support, including two decades of work with the Ford Foundation that shaped how it engages with its grantees. He describes his realization, early in CEP’s history, that effective philanthropy is ultimately about relationships between people rather than organizational structure. Kevin also offers blunt advice for a new wave of newly wealthy tech and AI donors tempted to declare philanthropy broken and in need of reinvention: start giving now, resist the urge to treat nonprofits as contractors for your own ideas, and build humility about the work already being done before assuming you’ve found a better way.
The episode closes with Phil and Kevin reflecting candidly on their 25-year partnership and friendship, as Kevin prepares to leave CEP to become president and CEO of PEAK Grantmaking, the association representing grants management professionals across the field.
Guest Info:
Kevin Bolduc is the incoming president and CEO of PEAK Grantmaking, joining in early 2027 after 25 years at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, where he served as vice president of Assessment and Advisory Services. He joined CEP as its second employee in 2001 and helped design the organization’s groundbreaking Grantee Perception Report, along with its broader suite of funder assessment tools. His research and writing on philanthropic strategy and grantmaking practice has appeared on CEP’s blog and in outlets including the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Before joining CEP, Kevin was a consultant with The Parthenon Group. He has served on the board of directors of PEAK Grantmaking and on advisory boards for Independent Sector and the Communications Network, and was an inaugural Independent Sector American Express NGen Fellow and an Aspen Institute Fellow for Emerging Nonprofit Leaders.
Credits:
Podcast Production: Cold Italian
Artwork: Jay Kustka
Resources:
PEAK Grantmaking
The Debate That Belongs In Every Boardroom Right Now
Grantee Perception Report