NewsTrust - Philanthropy - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Craig Newmark driven by philanthropy, fact checking

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By James Temple - Nov. 23 (Interview) - In early March, some 16 years after launching his namesake mailing list, Craig Newmark fully pivoted in the direction he'd been leaning all along. The founder of the for-profit - but certainly not for-maximum-profit - Craigslist launched a full-fledged philanthropic venture, Craigconnects. The goal is to leverage the power of the Internet to identify, connect and empower sustainable nonprofits. Eight months after the launch, and with the holidays upon us, it seemed an appropriate time catch up with Newmark.

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His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong delta ..

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Bill Gates: Was the $5 Billion Worth It?

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By JASON L. RILEY, Bill Gates - Jul. 24 (Editorial) - A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters—and regrets. 'It's hard to improve public education—that's clear. As Warren Buffett would say, if you're picking stocks, you wouldn't pick this one." Ten years into his record-breaking philanthropic push for school reform, Bill Gates is sober—and willing to admit some missteps. "It's been about a decade of learning," says the Microsoft co-founder whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the nation's richest charity. Its $34 billion in assets is more than the next three largest foundations (Ford, Getty and Robert Wood Johnson) combined, and in 2009 it handed out $3 billion, or $2 billion more than any other donor. Since 2000, the foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships. Seated in his office at the new Gates Foundation headquarters located hard by the Emerald City's iconic Space Needle, Mr. Gates says that education isn't only a civil-rights issue but also "an equity issue and an economic issue. . . . It's so primary. In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success."

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Fixes: A Scorecard for Companies With a Conscience

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Tina Rosenberg - Apr. 12 (Opinion) - The law states that the duty of a business’s directors is to maximize profits for shareholders. Obviously, there are many ways to maximize profits; even costly socially responsible activities can do just that in the long term. But when a business is on the block, there is often no more long term for shareholders. The difference in the prices offered by Hot Fudge Partners and Unilever offered was too great. The directors of Ben and Jerry’s felt that if they had accepted the lower offer, they could have expected a lawsuit from shareholders — which they would likely have lost. The company was acquired by Unilever in April 2000. Ben and Jerry’s is far from alone. The typical pattern for a new, successful, triple-bottom-line company is that it quickly gets gobbled up by a major corporation

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The Genius of the Tinkerer

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - Sep. 25 (Editorial) - In the year following the 2004 tsunami, the Indonesian city of Meulaboh received eight neonatal incubators from international relief organizations. Several years later, when an MIT fellow named Timothy Prestero visited the local hospital, all eight were out of order, the victim of power surges and tropical humidity, along with the hospital staff's inability to read the English repair manual.

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Africa Reboots

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Bono - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - I spent March with a delegation of activists, entrepreneurs and policy wonks roaming western, southern and eastern Africa trying very hard to listen — always hard for a big-mouthed Irishman. With duct tape over my gob, I was able to pick up some interesting melody lines everywhere from palace to pavement ... Despite the almost deafening roar of excitement about Africa’s hosting of soccer’s World Cup this summer, we managed to hear a surprising thing. Harmony ... flowing from two sides that in the past have often been discordant: Africa’s emerging entrepreneurial class and its civil-society activists. It’s no secret that lefty campaigners can be cranky about business elites. And the suspicion is mutual. Worldwide. Civil society as a rule sees business as, well, a little uncivil. Business tends to see activists as, well, a little too active. But in Africa, at least from what I’ve just seen, this is starting to change. The energy of these opposing forces coming together is filling offices, boardrooms and bars. The reason is that both these groups — the private sector and civil society — see poor governance as the biggest obstacle they face. So they are working together on redefining the rules of the African game.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Partying to Change the World

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - BeadforLife, which teaches entrepreneurial skills to impoverished Ugandans, is an example of how Americans can make a difference.

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Learning From the Sin of Sodom

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Feb. 28 (Opinion) - Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.

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Suffering

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By George Packer - Jan. 18 (Comment) - The night after the earthquake, Haitians who had lost their homes, or who feared that their houses might collapse, slept outdoors, in the streets and parks of Port-au-Prince. In Place Saint-Pierre, across the street from the Kinam Hotel, in the suburb of Pétionville, hundreds of people lay under the sky, and many of them sang hymns: “God, you are the one who gave me life. Why are we suffering?”

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Imagining Newspapers of the Future

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Lynn Klyde-Silverstein, Elliot Neaman, Tim Straus, Martin Kimel, Joel Kramer, Jessica Wanke, Louise Dufresne - Jan. 31 (Comment) - Re “News You Can Endow,” by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt (see link), which says endangered newspapers can be saved if we “turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities”: The writers don’t seem troubled by the rule that endowed status would prevent newspapers from attempting to “influence legislation.” Candidate endorsements are not the only thing this would suppress. Wouldn’t this also prevent newspapers from editorializing about any pending legislation? Isn’t that one of the most important jobs of a newspaper?

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News You Can Endow

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By David Swensen, Michael Schmidt - Jan. 28 (Opinion) - Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information — even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, “a cesspool” of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved. Although the problems that the newspaper industry faces are well known, no one has offered a satisfactory solution. But there is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities. Endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down. In the standard business model, newspapers rely on revenues from circulation and advertising to pay for news coverage and generate healthy profits. In the past decade, however, as Americans embraced the Internet, newspaper circulation has declined every year. Advertising revenues, which are tied to circulation levels, fell even faster. Classified ads, in particular, suffered as the Web offered cheaper, easier and more effective alternatives.

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Bill Gates on the future of aid

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Economist - Jan. 26 (Interview) - The financial crisis may have an impact on aid, but individuals can be better risk takers than their governments

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Don’t Muffle the Call to Serve

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Jonathan Alter - Jan. 04 (Opinion) - The day before the inauguration is the Martin Luther King holiday, and the president-elect wants it to be devoted to service. But Barack Obama knows that one Monday of good deeds—even if it becomes an annual tradition when people help each other rather than sit home watching TV—isn't enough. Throughout the campaign, he talked about something much bigger—a new era of civic engagement, with a quarter-million young people helping pay for their education by serving their country at home and abroad.

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Budget your giving, even in hard times

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Michelle Singletary - Dec. 28 (Opinion) - With rising unemployment and the stock market looking like a bungee jumper whose cord has snapped, it’s hard to argue that people should continue their charitable giving. And yet, I will make that plea. I know that in tough times you want to pull back on your spending, including planned donations, but that’s exactly when your giving shouldn’t go down —- when the need is so great. The way to continue giving is to be a regular donor. Although the percentage of American households that report giving to charity (67 percent to 70 percent) has remained constant in recent years, it’s not always the same households, according to new research by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. The center studied the charitable giving of the same 8,000 families in 2000, 2002 and 2004, and it found that nearly one-third alternate between donating and not donating. The researchers found that “persistent donors” give much more on average than others. In 2004, consistent givers made total charitable gifts averaging $2,659. Occasional donors, people who gave in one or two of the three years, contributed an average of $820, according to the “Center on Philanthropy Panel Study.” Charitable giving is a vital part of the budget for my husband and me. We believe the line item on your budget for giving should be as important as your mortgage, rent or car payment. Make giving a priority and you’re less likely to dispense with it in hard times.

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Redeem yourselves, liberals, and be more charitable

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Nicholas Kristof - Dec. 27 (Opinion) - This holiday season is a time to examine who's been naughty and who's been nice, but I'm unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy. Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates. Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, "Who Really Cares," cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

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When the Big Spenders Fail, Who Will Save Jewish Charity?

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Lucette Lagnado - Dec. 27 (Opinion) - The Madoff scandal has shaken the American Jewish community to its core -- maiming institutions large and small, wiping out life savings and triggering soul-searching: How could one man deceive so many? And what does the affair say about American Jewish values?

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Who Gives The Most?

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Forbes - By Elisabeth Eaves - Dec. 26 (Opinion) - Americans give more to charity, per capita and as a percentage of gross domestic product, than the citizens of other nations. But why? It would be nice to believe that as a group they are just more generous. Of course, it's more complicated than that. For instance in the U.S., which is notably religious among wealthy Western nations, about a third of all charitable giving goes to houses of worship. Some of that money, in turn, goes to projects that have an obvious benefit to the needy, like soup kitchens. But some does not, rather going toward paying the church secretary and the rent. Volunteerism also complicates the picture. The Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies compiled a ranking of private philanthropy in 36 countries from 1995 to 2002. Based on giving alone, the U.S. comes first, giving 1.85% of GDP, followed by Israel at 1.34% and Canada at 1.17%. But based on volunteerism alone, the Netherlands comes first, followed by Sweden and then the U.S.

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How To Be a Good Billionaire

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Forbes - By Susan Kitchens - Dec. 25 (Interview) - I actually started out thinking about philanthropy in the late 1990s when I was writing about a lot of the dot-com millionaires at the time and finding that a number of them were talking about philanthropy as a solution to what psychologists call sudden-wealth syndrome. There was a sense that getting rich very fast would be bad for their kids. They also didn't expect to have this money, and so they wanted to find ways to put it to work.

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The Sin in Doing Good Deeds

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Dec. 25 (Opinion) - Mr. Pallotta argues powerfully that the aid world is stunted because groups are discouraged from using such standard business tools as advertising, risk-taking, competitive salaries and profits to lure capital.

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Community-Owned Media: What Does It Mean?

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

PBS - By Jessica Mayberry - Dec. 25 (Opinion) - Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working. Instead, they favor the idea of 'community-led development', in which communities themselves design the social programs, and interventions only arise from the stated needs of the communities. The goals of all these programs is the idea of eventual 'community ownership' of programs themselves and of the social change process. It means that communities won't only participate, but they will be able to drive social change in their area entirely on their own without outside intervention (except perhaps financial support.) This is seen as the most sustainable way to address poverty for millions of people. For Video Volunteers, this is also the goal of the community video program--that the Community Video Units (CVUs) we set up will be 'owned' by the local communities, the villagers and slumdwellers in whose area the CVU is running. But what exactly does it mean for us? Here's one way to put it: when a CVU is entirely owned and loved by that community, it would mean that if anyone ever attempted to shut it down or the money dried up, local people would be banging on the CVU door saying, 'we will not let this close. This is our media, we need it, and we will do whatever it takes to keep it going.'

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Profile of a Social Entrepreneur

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Marshall Goldsmith - Dec. 25 (Interview) - My friend Pamela Hawley is a global social entrepreneur, devoted to creating Web-based marketplaces that make a social impact. A practitioner of social entrepreneurship, Pamela is committed to marrying the compassion of the nonprofit world with the effectiveness and efficiency of business. She is the founder and CEO of UniversalGiving, which helps people give and volunteer with the top-performing projects across the world, and which helps Fortune 500 companies manage their corporate social responsibility programs. I thought the holidays were a good time to talk to her about real "giving"—not just the buying of presents but truly helping others, an idea that feels especially pertinent during these tough times.

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Every bit makes a difference for those in need

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Gannon Gillespie, Ellen Agler - Dec. 24 (Opinion) - In times of financial hardship, the less fortunate suffer in amazingly disproportionate ways. While many of us make ends meet by cutting back on "discretionary" spending and pushing larger purchases off into the future, people living in poverty have no such options. They might be forced to cut their one daily meal in half, forgo medicine or stop sending their children to school.

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'Strategic Corporate Philanthropy'

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Bill Gates - May. 08 (Opinion) - How important is access to information technology? A World Bank report released earlier this year found a very high correlation between the rate of technology progress and income growth.

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The IoS happy list

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - Apr. 27 (Review) - Who needs rich lists, when there are so many other things that are worth celebrating? Here, George Webster and Sophie Davies present profiles of 100 people who make Britain a better and a happier place to live.

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We Have Ways to Make You Happy

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By John Tierney - Mar. 27 (Opinion) - Your pursuit of happiness is always our paramount concern here at the Lab, but this week we're making a special effort. We've been talking about how to nudge people into making better decisions, and also about a report in Science that spending money on others can make you happier than spending it on yourself. Clearly we have an opportunity for synergy here: How can people be nudged into making themselves happy by giving away money?

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