"Tax me," writes Abigail Disney, a philanthropist and heiress to the Walt Disney fortune, in an opinion piece in USA Today supporting the reinstatement of the estate tax.

"The estate tax incentivizes people like me to do good with our wealth because there is no estate tax on donations to charity," writes Ms. Disney, who founded the Daphne Foundation, which makes grants to fight poverty in New York City, and a charity called Peace Is Loud, to encourage women around the world to find nonviolent ways to end conflict.

Her charitable activities, she says, "rely on a tax code that supports a vigorous nonprofit sector, a vital part of our society that is bigger and stronger because of the many millions of dollars that flow into it as a result of the estate tax and other tax provisions."

Ms. Disney joins Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and other wealthy Americans who believe Congress was wrong to let...

While the controversy about the Social Innovation Fund's process for selecting its first round of grantees seems to be winding down, nonprofit social-media circles continue to buzz about the fund's future and the potential damage caused by the dispute.

The Social Innovation Fund represents an important experiment in the way government interacts with the nonprofit world, but it's in danger of being worn down before it even gets started, the victim of overanalysis by the people who should be most supportive, Nell Edgington, a nonprofit consultant, writes on her blog.

"If we don't give the government some space to actually innovate, they may never go down this road again," she writes. "Instead of beating innovation to death, let's get out of our own way and see where this goes."

Not everyone, however, agreed that the time for talk was over. On Wednesday afternoon, a one-hour Twitter...

ShoreBank—a Chicago financial institution that for more than 30 years provided loans in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in the city and later in Cleveland, Detroit, and the Pacific Northwest—failed late last week and was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Chicago Tribune reported. The bank had been struggling for months to raise enough money to stay afloat, according to the paper.

A consortium of large banks and foundations, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and the Ford Foundation, bought the bank's deposits and most of its assets in the Midwest. It has reopened as the Urban Partnership Bank. OneCalifornia Bank, another community-development financial institution, bought ShoreBank Pacific, which was not part of the seizure.

An article in The Economist points to the severity of the downturn in the areas where ShoreBank made loans as well as its...

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, at left, had some unflattering things to say about nonprofit workers during a recent broadcast—and Robert Egger, president of D.C. Central Kitchen, has posted an amusing retort on YouTube.

While excoriating Democrats and the left for allegedly trying to kill the "private sector," Mr. Limbaugh refers to "lazy idiots" and then segues into an evaluation of the nonprofit world:

"Nonprofits siphon contributions as their salaries and so forth and think of themselves as good people, charitable people. These people are rapists in terms of finance and the economy."

Mr. Egger's video—which as of Wednesday morning had been viewed more than 40,000 times—takes Mr. Limbaugh on a mini-tour of the nonprofit world, wondering if the radio host was referring to the "lazy idiots" who organized the World War II memorial, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial...

The Giving Pledge keeps giving—as a source of inspiration for philanthropy bloggers, journalists, and commentators.

The Giving Pledge is the effort by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage other rich people to give at least half their money away. So far, they've succeeded in convincing 40 rich people and families to take the pledge.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Dennis says the Gateses and Mr. Buffett aren't likely to have anywhere near the positive impact in their philanthropy as they've had in their business lives. Ms. Dennis, president of the Searle Freedom Trust, a nonprofit group that promotes free-market policies, asks readers to "think for a moment: Can you point to a single charitable accomplishment that has been as transformative as, say, the cellphone or the birth-control pill?"

Ms. Dennis also wonders why businesspeople feel they have a...

Richard Marker, an adviser to donors and a professor at New York University's Center on Philanthropy, sees lessons for philanthropy in the furor over the Islamic center and mosque slated to be built two blocks from the former World Trade Center site.

Mr. Marker says that misunderstandings about the project have fueled its unpopularity. And just because the center seems to be unpopular with many Americans, he says, doesn't mean it shouldn't be built.

Philanthropy, too, needs to be careful about caring too much about what's popular or what the majority thinks, he says. Efforts to push private philanthropy away from being so "private," by creating consensus measurements around societal needs, could be harmful, says Mr. Marker.

It might not seem very controversial to suggest that supporting soup kitchens is more important than supporting rich institutions such as Harvard University. But...

After 40 U.S. billionaires promise to give away at least half of their fortunes to charity, can the glass still appear half empty?

It can, according to a roundup of gloomy accounts of this months’ billionaires’ pledge by the Atlantic Wire.

Although careful to praise the intent of the pledge and its signers, critics are voicing concerns about the effort’s “echoes of robber-baron philanthropy in the Gilded Age.”  One even suggests an alternative pledge for the ultra-wealthy: ponying up their full tax bills on time and committing to better business practices.

The Stanford University professor Robert Reich calls the donations admirable in a post on Salon but says the pledge is a troubling reminder “about how much money is now concentrated in so few hands.”

Similarly, Steven Pearlstein writes in The Washington Post that the pledge “has raised the bar on social responsibility even as it...

Last week, more than 40 of the world's wealthiest people indicated that they are donating at least half of their net worth to charity as part of the Giving Pledge, started by billionaires Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett. Yet some of Wall Street's richest have yet to participate.

So Bookmaker.com's chief executive, Mickey Richardson, and his team have calculated the odds of the next Wall Street billionaire most likely put his or her name down. It turns out the highest odds go to John Paulson, a hedge-fund manager, with an 11.8 percent chance.

Here are other top contenders:

• Carl Icahn, American financier and private-equity investor, 11.1 percent
• George Soros, stock investor and philanthropist, 10.5 percent
• Peter Thiel, hedge-fund manager and venture capitalist, 9.10 percent
• Marc Lasry, hedge-fund manager, 9.10 percent
• Steve Mandel Jr., hedge-fund manager, 8.3 percent
• ...

Americans' approach to spending has been changing in recent years, with people placing more emphasis on buying "experiences," such as travel or entertainment, rather than material goods, according to an article in The New York Times.

If that's true, what are the implications for raising money, wondered Tom Belford, a long-time fund raiser, on The Agitator.

"For fund raisers, the challenge is how to create that sense of 'experiencing' your cause or organization and its mission or work," he writes.

Consumers' hunger for experiences underscores the importance of in-person events so donors can interact with a charity and with one another, writes Mr. Belford.

Social networks also allow their donors to interact with one another and share their passion for a cause, he notes. And such networks make it easy to share vivid photographs and video that are perhaps the simplest way "of...

How does a magazine that lost $30-million last year turn its fortunes around?

That's the question Sidney Harman, electronics mogul and philanthropist, is facing after buying the venerable but decidedly unprofitable Newsweek magazine this week.

Rick Edmonds, a writer for the Poynter Institute, speculates that Mr. Harman may be considering turning the publication into a nonprofit group. There are a few signs that suggest this could be the case, Mr. Edmonds writes, including Mr. Harman's statement that he doesn't think of the Newsweek acquisition in "traditional business terms" and that he'll consider breaking even to be a victory.

In an interview with Mr. Edmonds, the Duke University professor James (Jay) Hamilton suggested that the idea of Newsweek going nonprofit isn't too far-fetched. But he said the magazine would need to tone down its coverage of frothy topics in favor of ones with...