A Fond Farewell to a Catalyst of CEP’s Growth and Evolution

When Grace Chiang Nicolette joined the Center for Effective Philanthropy in 2011, our staff numbered 32. Our audience was overwhelmingly foundations. Our media profile was relatively modest — and it was pretty common for folks who we were convinced should know us to say that, well, sorry, but they had never actually heard of us. Our conferences were highly regarded, but attended by maybe 250 people.

Today, CEP’s staff is about 60 and our audience is much broader and more diverse in a host of ways, including both individual donors and grantmaking organizations of various stripes. We’re much better known and frequently looked to by media for our perspectives on philanthropy. Our conferences and webinars draw much, much larger audiences.  

These are just a few of the shifts that Grace helped make a reality in her 15 years of service at CEP. They matter, because they have helped us influence more funders to be more effective — to do more good. They matter because they helped funders and nonprofits work better together to achieve shared goals.

After an incredible run, Grace has decided to step away from her role at CEP to be more available to her family, particularly her aging parents. Her work to massively increase CEP’s influence is appreciated by everyone on our staff and board — and we will continue to benefit from it long after her last day, at the end of June of this year.

Grace started as a manager on our assessment and advisory services team, leading relationships with our clients. Just a couple of years into her tenure, however, I asked her to lead up our programming, external relations, and eventually also development functions. She has served in that capacity as a vice president at CEP for more than a decade now.

Grace has done too much work, across too many different initiatives and projects, to list it all here. But she has, in particular, come to be known to so many in the philanthropic community as the gracious (pun intended) host and skilled facilitator of our biennial CEP conferences. Since the first conference Grace oversaw in 2015, she has brought to our stage speakers like, to name just a few, Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam, Equal Justice founder Bryan Stevenson, musician and activist John Legend, podcast host Ezra Klein, U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón, and Gambian musician and multi-instrumentalist Sona Jobarteh. She has carefully curated, planned, and presided over five of our conferences and countless virtual programs.

In the spring of 2020, Grace and I were talking over Zoom about the challenge of reaching people in a time when we could not gather and decided to start a podcast together. We joked about our worries that there might be more podcasts than people who listen to podcasts but decided to give it a try anyway, launching Giving Done Right as an effort to build on my 2019 book (which Grace had helped me to revise and make better) by the same name and share insights about effective philanthropy with a broad audience including individual donors.

Since then, we have produced five seasons of the podcast, breaking into the top 5 percent of podcasts globally in terms of listenership. Co-hosting the podcast with Grace has been among the most fun projects in my career. We talked, together, to committed donors like former NBA star Jeremy Lin and Jeff and Tricia Raikes and to inspiring nonprofit leaders like Angelica Salas and Julie Butner.

Beyond all this, Grace has been a shaper of our culture at CEP, a mentor to many, and a close colleague and advisor to me. Grace is known by all her staff colleagues at CEP for her kindness, her moral clarity, her smarts, and a sense of humor that makes meetings, and long work trips, more fun. She fosters a climate of inclusion and is often the first to note holidays and observances that might be of importance to some on our staff — and to let them know she is thinking of them.

Grace’s ideas have had a major influence on our strategy. She has pushed us to seek to reach a broader swath of philanthropists, including many in the faith-based philanthropic communities to which she has numerous connections. She’s also encouraged us to do more work globally, contributing to our efforts to connect to donors and foundations in countries around the world.

Grace has helped me be better at my job at CEP and made me see the world differently. I know I am not alone among my colleagues in being able to say that.

I can’t overstate my gratitude to her for all she’s done to promote more — and more effective — philanthropy and all she’s done to make CEP what it is today.

I am grateful to Grace for her 15 years of incredible service.

Phil Buchanan is president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, author of  “Giving Done Right: Effective Philanthropy and Making Every Dollar Count,” and co-host of the Giving Done Right podcast.