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Cities Crack Down on Homelessness With New Laws - Philanthropy Today - The Chronicle of Philanthropy- Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Chronicle of Philanthropy - By Chronicle Staff - Jun. 12 (News Report) - Dozens of U.S. cities are cracking down on camping and providing food for people in public in what antipoverty activists characterize as an attempt by urban officials to criminalize homelessness, writes USA Today.

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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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Back to school for the billionaires

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

iWatch News - By Rita Beamish - May. 04 (Special Report) - Microsoft chairman Gates, computer magnate Michael Dell, investor Eli Broad, and the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame have collectively poured some $4.4 billion into school reform in the last decade through their private foundations.

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Obamas Donated 14% of Their Income to Charity in 2010

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Chronicle of Philanthropy - By Lisa Chiu - Apr. 19 (News Report) - President Obama and his wife, Michelle, donated 14 percent of their income to charity in 2010, according to the couple’s 2010 tax return. The couple, which reported an adjusted gross income of $1.7-million in 2010, gave $245,075 to 36 charities.

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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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Budget Plan Brings Big Changes to Tax Incentives for Donors

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Chronicle of Philanthropy - By Ben Gose - Feb. 14 (News) - President Obama proposed on Monday to sharply limit the value of charitable tax breaks taken by wealthy people.

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I.R.S. Attacks Abuse by Charity Support Groups

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Stephanie Strom - Feb. 14 (News Report) - In the last five years, the Internal Revenue Service has revoked the tax exemption of 72 groups, known as supporting organizations, that obscure philanthropies created to support specific charities.

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Google Finds It Hard to Reinvent Philanthropy

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Stephanie Strom, Miguel Helft - Feb. 01 (Special Report) - JUST before Google first sold its shares to the public in 2004, Larry Page, one of its founders, excited the nonprofit world with a bold commitment to philanthropy. He vowed to dedicate about 1 percent of Google’s profits, 1 percent of its equity and a significant amount of its employees’ time to the effort, which became known as Google.org, or simply DotOrg. “We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to potential investors. Although Google intended to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases, it declared that DotOrg would not be “conventional” — a four-letter word in Google-speak. For starters, the organization would operate in part as a business, thus freeing itself from various constraints placed on nonprofit groups.

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Philanthropy Must Challenge the Idea That Gun Violence Can’t Be Stopped

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Chronicle of Philanthropy - By Ellen S. Alberding - Jan. 14 (Opinion) - We see this latest tragedy and ask, How could this happen? How could it not happen, when we systematically make it easier for angry and troubled people to get ever-more-powerful guns, and harder for the police and public-health people to stop the mayhem? Those words appeared in The Chronicle of Philanthropy 2007, in the days after the Virginia Tech massacre.

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Iceberg Economies and Shadow Selves

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

guernicamag.com - By Rebecca Solnit - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp. How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don’t happen, the forests that aren’t leveled, the species that don’t go extinct, the discriminations that don’t occur?

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When Generosity Hurts: Bill Gates, Public School Teachers and the Politics of Humiliation

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry Giroux - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - His words reflect something of the all too evident brutish transformation of the revolutionary zeal that marked an earlier era's investment in substantive democratization to that which piously and patriotically calls itself revolutionary some 50 years later, and seeks nothing less than the total destruction of the democratic potential of American education.

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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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Why We've Given Less To Pakistan's Flood Victims

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Brett Neely - Sep. 03 (News Analysis) - By and large, Americans haven't opened up their wallets to help victims of the flood disaster in Pakistan. According to Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy, charitable donations by individuals, foundations and companies totaled just $25 million as of Aug. 30. By comparison, the center's data show that Americans donated $900 million to relief efforts in Haiti within five weeks of the earthquake there. Disaster relief experts were nearly universal in agreeing that there are at least three reasons why fundraising for this disaster has been challenging. The first has to do with the nature of the disaster, says Randy Strash, the strategy director for emergency response at World Vision, a Christian relief agency with worldwide operations, including programs in Pakistan.

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Bill Clinton gets tough as donors fail to honour $5bn Haiti pledge

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Richard Luscombe - Jul. 16 (News Report) - Six months after the disaster that killed 220,000 people and left more than 1.5 million homeless, only $506m of $5.3bn raised at an international donors' conference in March has been handed over, according to the United Nations Development Programme.

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Oh Yeah That: Haiti, Six Months Later

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

theawl.com - Jul. 12 (News Report) - "Jean Renald Clerisme, the presidential adviser, says that in any case the Haitian government hasn't received the money it was promised by the donors, which it would need to buy land and reconstruct. 'At a big donors' meeting in New York, we were promised $10bn (£6.64bn),' he says. 'But we haven't received even 2% of this money – how do you explain that?'"

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The $600 billion challenge

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Fortune - By Carol J. Loomis - Jun. 17 (News Report) - Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett are asking the nation's billionaires to pledge to give at least half their net worth to charity, in their lifetimes or at death. If their campaign succeeds, it could change the face of philanthropy.

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Gates seeks more spending on clean energy research

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Frederic J. Frommer - Jun. 10 (News Report) - Gates and other business leaders were meeting with President Barack Obama and lawmakers Thursday to pitch their plan to increase the annual federal spending on clean energy innovation to $16 billion, from $5 billion now. But tight budgets make it a tough sell. A report released Thursday by the American Energy Innovation Council called for an increase in spending and the creation of an independent National Energy Strategy Board to coordinate federal energy research.

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eBay Founder's Next Bid: Online News Service

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Ben Markus - Apr. 26 (News Report) - The newspaper industry is not doing very well in general, and it appears Honolulu is about to become a one-newspaper town. The Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser will likely merge in the coming months. But residents now have another option for local news: the online news website Civil Beat. Half a dozen reporters -- some clutching their morning coffee -- gather around Editor John Temple for their daily news meeting: "This week, just to be clear, I mean, articles and beat updates and then Twitter are our focus, not topic pages, and we'll work on that. So I think we should jump into beat updates." Topic pages. Twitter. This isn't classic newspaper lingo. Then again, this is a newsroom starting in 2010. Civil Beat went live Wednesday and will officially launch May 4. Temple has a long track record in print journalism, most recently at the Rocky Mountain News. But he also has extensive online experience.

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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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Seeking to Help Budding Researchers With a Click of the Mouse

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Victoria Schlesinger - Apr. 02 (Special Report) - The Eureka Fund hopes to finance small-scale, independent scientific research through online contributions.

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WellPoint's giving for uninsured falls short, records show

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Noam Levey - Mar. 18 (Investigative Report) - The firm had pledged in 2007 to spend $30 million over three years to help those who lack health coverage, but its tax records and website show it gave only $6.2 million. The company disputes that.

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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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Salvation Army is a residential real estate powerhouse

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

Los Angeles Times - By Stuart Pfeifer - Mar. 14 (Special Report) - Salvation Army is a residential real estate powerhouse

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