December 04, 2008
Ways to Support Social Causes Without Giving Money
People who can’t afford to give money to charity this holiday season can learn about other ways to do good at a new Web site, the Give List.
“Times are tight. We know, we know,” the site says. “We’ve all seen the scary headlines. Too many of the scary headlines. And we’re all feeling the pressure in other ways, too. But, still, we want to contribute what we can to making the world the better place.”
The site is collecting ideas from people who are offering them on their blogs and social-networking services like Twitter and Delicious – -all tagged in a way that they can be picked up.
Among the suggestions so far:
- Participate in the Whole Foods Wooden Nickel program, which gives money to charities when shoppers bring in and use their own shopping bags.
- Ask people who are attending an event you’ve organized to donate to a food drive.
- If you crochet or knit, and have extra yarn, make gloves or scarves and donate them to a nonprofit group that works with at-risk people.
- Write to people in the nonprofit world and let them know how much you appreciate their work.
- Write a blog post about a charity you care about and include a link to its Web site.
The site was created by Allison Fine, a senior fellow at Demos, a New York think thank, and author of A. Fine Blog, and Marnie Webb, co-chief executive of TechSoup, a group that offers technology equipment and guidance to nonprofit groups.
What are your ideas for giving to causes without spending money? Click on the comment link below. Or if you are more technologically advanced, tag your blog post or Delicious bookmark “GiveList” or mark your Tweeter entry “#givelist.”
Can Foreclosed Houses Become Shelter for the Homeless?
Two outcomes of the country’s economic downturn are a proliferation of bank-owned foreclosed houses sitting empty and an increase in people lacking adequate shelter.
Joel John Roberts, chief executive of PATH Partners, a social-service charity in Los Angeles, wonders if something positive can come out of this situation.
“Why not match these people who are home-less, with homes that are people-less?” he writes on his LA’s Homeless Blog “The banks need someone to protect their homes, since vacant properties attract criminal elements. And people need temporary places to stay.”
An antipoverty activist group in Miami, he notes, has started to explore this possibility with some success.
“It’s a creative alternative to putting people into shelters,” Mr. Roberts writes. “Granted, it’s not a permanent solution. But it gives people the taste of home life, and keeps them off the streets.”
What do you think? Is this an avenue charities should explore?
Ex-Gates Foundation Head to Write "Do-Gooding" Advice Column
Patty Stonesifer, who stepped down earlier this year as chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has found a new calling — advice columnist.
Ms. Stonesifer’s daughter, Sandy, has announced that she and her mother plan to start a weekly column at the beginning of next year for Slate, the online news magazine, called “My Goodness.”
“Most of us — and not just recent college grads — struggle to find ways to help others without ruining our own lives,” she writes. “Given my student loans, can I really afford to work for that African aid group? Should I take a high-paying job and make larger charitable donations? Or earn less and volunteer my time?”
When the younger Ms. Stonesifer — identified as project manager of a national study of the consequences of unintended pregnancy in San Francisco — asks questions like that, she turns to her mother for help. “Sometimes I take her advice, and sometimes I don’t, but I always value her opinion,” she writes. Now, she says, she’d like to give others the same option.
She invites readers to send their “real-life-do-gooding dilemmas” to ask.my.goodness@gmail.com.
December 03, 2008
How We Think About Foundation Grant Making Is Wrong
Writing on his blog at the Nonprofit Quarterly, Rick Cohen says the nonprofit world needs a new way to measure foundations and their grant making.
“Our understanding of foundations is faulty, because we lump all different kinds of foundations together in our analysis of their grant making and spending practices, like a ball of string or rubber bands,” he says.
Mr. Cohen says the nonprofit world suffers from “misplaced aggregation.” For example, foundations that are spending all their assets in a set time, and those led by living donors who tend to give more, are calculated together with traditional foundations that rarely give above legally required annual payment of 5 percent of assets per year.
That means statistics like one calculated by the Foundation Center, which says “independent foundations” distributed 6.1 percent of assets last year, makes foundations look more generous than they are.
Mr. Cohen says that foundations use “misplaced aggregation” not only to defend themselves from pressure to give more, but also against regulation that they think would prevent them from hiring additional employees.
He says that foundations argue that, on average, they employ very few people. But a tiny number of large foundations account for most of the staff members, Mr. Cohen, says, skewing the averages well above the medians.
“Until we get to compare apples to apples—that is, endowed foundations to endowed foundations, culling out the unendowed and spend-down foundations that make foundation pay outs artificially higher—we will never be able to understand them, much less advocate about and regulate foundations appropriately and accurately,” he concludes.
Do you agree with Mr. Cohen’s assessment? Click on the comments box below to add your thoughts.
December 02, 2008
Voting for Innovative Cell-Phone Ideas
A nonprofit group is helping the U.S. Agency for International Development select the winners of its Development 2.0 Challenge. The government is turning for help to NetSquared, a project of TechSoup, a technology organization in San Francisco, that looks at how charities can use Web 2.0 technologies in their work.
The competition is looking for innovative ideas on how cell phones can be used for international development in areas such as agriculture, banking, education, health, or trade.
Submissions will be accepted until Friday, and then December 8-12, visitors to the NetSquared site will vote for 15 finalists. A panel of judges selected by USAID will select the winners, who will be announced January 15.
The winner will receive a $10,000 grant, and two runners-up will each receive $5,000 grants. All three will get the opportunity to present their ideas to senior USAID officials and other development experts in Washington.
— Nicole Wallace
Can You Have Too Many Donors?
Can development projects in a poor country have too many donors?
If the donors are not working well together, then yes, says Neil Squires, a human-development adviser in Mozambique with the British Department for International Development.
Mr. Squires writes on the agency’s blog that Mozambique is a “donor darling,” a reflection both of the great needs and the government’s transparency.
But, “whilst being a donor darling brings the benefit of increased funding, it also brings the challenge of coordinating large amounts of donors,” writes Mr. Squires.
His blog post includes a pie chart showing the many donors who support improvements in health in Mozambique. Financial support from foreign donors in 2008 was $147-million, about the same as the funds provided by the Mozambique government.
One of the biggest donors is the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria. While Mr. Squires says the Global Fund’s money is significant and welcomed, the process of applying for and reporting on that money is overly complex. The government of Mozambique is already producing progress reports for many other donors through an agreed-upon set of performance indicators.
“Keeping 26 agencies happy, with regular reporting on the performance and expenditure, has huge administrative costs for Ministries of Health in poorly resourced countries,” writes Mr. Squires, “and one of the things we’ve been working on in Mozambique is the development of a common framework for reporting and measuring progress, with a single set of indicators that all donors can buy into.”
Do you agree that a lack of donor collaboration can impede development? Are there good models for a common framework for assessing progress?
'Secret Millionaire': What Message Will New Show Send About Charity?
Picture this: A millionaire goes undercover, posing as a minimum-wage worker to get a taste of what it’s like to be one of America’s working poor.
Along the way, the millionaire is so moved by the experience that he gives away some of his wealth to a person he meets on his journey.
Reality? Not really.
But it is the premise behind a new reality television series, The Secret Millionaire, which debuts Wednesday night on Fox.
The new series is the latest in a string of network offerings with a charitable bent — a trend that includes shows like Oprah’s Big Give, ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice.
Some of the shows have been quite popular, offering feel-good stories while raising money for charity.
“The shows are praised by some scholars and charity officials for inspiring viewers to help the less fortunate and raising money for charitable causes,” wrote Chronicle reporter Ian Wilhelm in a recent story on the trend. “Extreme Makeover, for example, has donated part of the proceeds from the sale of its first-season DVD to Habitat for Humanity International, garnering about $50,000 for the Americus, Ga., nonprofit organization.”
But they have also been criticized as exploitative and as giving viewers a skewed vision of how charity really works.
For example, Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, in Washington, was highly critical of celebrity Oprah Winfrey‘s reality show in a recent Chronicle essay.
“Television offers a great opportunity to educate and to make people passionate about causes — especially when a philanthropist and television personality as popular as Oprah Winfrey is sponsoring the lessons,” Mr. Horwitz wrote.
“But the show ended up featuring amateur and embarrassing efforts at giving. It passed off as entertainment people wasting thousands of dollars of donated money and did little to help the American public learn what it really takes to change the lives of other people.”
Where will Secret Millionaire fall in this debate? Will it inspire more Americans to give? Or will it exploit those it sets out to help?
Check out a preview of the show below and click on the comments link below to share your impressions.
Staying on Message
In these tough economic times, the fund-raising consultant Roger Craver says it’s all the more important for charities to succinctly and powerfully make the fund-raising case for their cause- -a process he calls “messaging.”
In his The Agitator blog, however, Mr. Carver and a guest writer Bob Levy, a creative consultant and copywriter, point out the “structural barriers” that have sprung up in many nonprofit organizations that can dilute this “messaging” process.
“Creative consultants and copywriters once had access to the leaders of nonprofits and were viewed as ‘channelers’ for the organization’s message to key constituents,” Mr. Craver writes. “This is no longer the case. The ‘professionalization’ of nonprofits has resulted in isolating fund raisers and copywriters from those who determine mission and message.”
The job of crafting a charities “message,” is now spread across numerous departments, Mr. Craver writes, leading copywriters to rely on mid-level employees “who may not have a clue as to the direction their organization is taking.”
“Donors are short changed on the information they receive.” Mr. Craver concludes. “And ultimately the organization pays the price as its mission is lost or diluted somewhere down the organizational food chain.”
What do you think? Should charities be concerned about the “barriers” that can exist between the leadership, who know where the charity wants to go, and the creative personnel and consultants charged with presenting this message to donors?
In Planning Board Meetings, Timing and Location Matter
The location and timing of trustee meetings may not be among charity leaders’ top concerns while assembling a board. But where and when charities hold their board meetings does matter, says Kelly Kleiman, a lawyer and nonprofit consultant who writes The Nonprofiteer.
Nonprofit executives might think they are being inclusive by not scheduling meetings too far in advance. But in fact, they’re being “unintentionally exclusive,” shutting out people whose lives require advance planning, says Ms. Kleiman. She says that simply having a regular schedule for meetings makes it more likely that current trustees will attend, and new members will join.
Also important, according to Ms. Kleiman, is to schedule meetings during “business-friendly times.” Plan meetings for weekday mornings or evenings, not weekends, she says. “Scheduling the board’s work for a weekday shows a regard for board activity (and the agency as a whole) as a serious commitment rather than a social engagement or hobby.”
Finally, Ms. Kleiman advises scheduling meetings in offices, not people’s homes. Strangers’ living rooms can be unwelcoming to newcomers, she says, and “why put obstacles in the way of inclusiveness?”
What do you think of Ms. Kleiman’s advice?
—Caroline Preston
December 01, 2008
How Foundations Can Help Hard-Hit Charities?
To help grant makers navigate the financial crisis, the Council on Foundations has started a new Web site, the Economic Xchange, to share ideas about how to support cash-strapped charities, help cities hit by economic woes, and how foundation themselves can survive tough times.
Ideas offered by some of the association’s 2,000 members include rejecting grant proposals for capital campaigns, providing more operating support to charities, and canceling special events.
For example, the Philadelphia Foundation says it canceled a November celebration of its 90th anniversary at the Please Touch Museum. In addition, it published its most recent annual report only on the Internet. The two moves generated more than $100,000 for nonprofit groups in the region, it says.
The council’s president recently talked with The Chronicle about the economic problems facing foundations. Read the article here.