The ability of commercial microfinance institutions to fight poverty is under renewed scrutiny because of the current financial crisis.

While subprime housing loans — loans made to people who don’t have long credit histories and documented earnings — triggered the market meltdown and the collapse of several venerable investment banks, Daniel Gross, a writer for Slate magazine, says the poor need greater access to credit.

“What the world needs right now is more subprime lending — a lot more of it,” writes Mr. Gross.

To be sure, the journalist was supporting the growth of microcredit, but others have derided any comparison between subprime lending and microloans.

Last week during a World Business Forum meeting, Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel-Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank, said the subprime market failed for one reason — greed.

According to Felix Salmon, a blog writer...

Congressional leaders spent all weekend debating the $700-billion bailout of the financial industry. Ruth McCambridge and Rick Cohen, of The Nonprofit Quarterly, are asking their readers to do the same.

Ms. McCambridge and Mr. Cohen ask readers to weigh in both on the overall merits of the bailout (“Is it the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do or something in between?”) as well as what the nonprofit world should be doing to influence the debate.

“What should the nonprofit sector do, locally, regionally, and nationally, to make sure our voices are heard on what could be not only the largest federal government intervention in the economy in modern history, but the most threatening economic climate since the Great Depression?” they ask.

Some readers said that nonprofit organizations could use a bailout, too. Wrote one commentator: “Perhaps a $700-billion bailout is in...

Much has been written in the past few days about the philanthropy of Paul Newman, the actor who died on Friday at age 83. Michael Seltzer, a consultant to charities and foundations, writing on the PhilanTopic blog, says Mr. Newman should be remembered as the pioneer of a specific kind of giving: “consumer philanthropy.”

Newman’s Own, the company Mr. Newman and his neighbor, A.E. Hotchner ,started 28 years ago, helped “prove that the generosity of Americans does not stop when they go shopping,” says Mr. Seltzer.

The two men created the company just before Christmas of 1980, when they stocked the shelves of a local store with Mr. Newman’s homemade salad dressing. By the end of the 1990s, Mr. Newman’s dressing had annual retail sales of $33.5-million, making it the eighth-biggest seller in the salad-dressing market. By 2008, the Newman’s Own Foundation had given more than...

Changes the Federal Emergency Management Agency made since Hurricane Katrina are hurting charities, writes Mary Theroux, senior vice president of the Independent Institute, on the group’s blog.

Ms. Theroux says that by creating the Aidmatrix Foundation to collect donations, the agency is depriving disaster-response charities of money.

She describes how government officials told the Salvation Army that it would be among the organizations listed on a screen at the Republic National Convention, when Cindy McCain and Laura Bush made an appeal for hurricane victims. But instead, the screen directed viewers only to Aidmatrix’s toll-free number.

Says Ms. Theroux: “The flow of money out of Aidmatrix is completely intransparent, and will, by definition, be determined politically by inside interest groups. In the case of the aforementioned Gustav appeal, for example, Web sites for the...

Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative religious think tank in Washington, is questioning Barack Obama’s work with a nonprofit effort to improve public schools in Chicago.

During the 1990s, the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate led the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which awarded $100-million to support educational causes. William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, a 1960s leftist group, also helped guide the effort.

In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Kurtz writes that due in part to Mr. Ayers, Mr. Obama oversaw an educational project that proposed bad ideas.

“The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism,” he...

A Chronicle online discussion Tuesday focused on what charity leaders can do to navigate their organizations through the current economic turmoil.

One member of the audience — Robert Egger, president of the D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington — asked a much broader question:

“It’s understandable that many will want to focus today’s conversation on the micro level, and how this ongoing meltdown will impact their causes. I understand that, as this is a huge issue for every nonprofit in America. But is there any macro advice you all can offer “us” about how nonprofits might use this current dilemma to get an entirely new dialogue going? Wouldn’t this be an ideal time to reframe the debate, so that the economic role of nonprofits becomes a part of the dialogue?”

What do you think? Is it time to rethink how nonprofit groups fit into the American economy? If so, how?

Click on the...

As Congress debates a $700-billion bailout of troubled Wall Street companies, Diana R. Sieger, president of the Grand Rapids Community Foundation, in Mich., recalls with amusement on her blog how, back in the 1990s, making community foundations run more like businesses was all the rage.

The fever, she writes, started in 1992, in the wake of Fidelity Investments’ creation of its first charitable gift fund, a practice other for-profit companies followed in subsequent years.

For the next several years, Ms. Sieger writes, “the field fought hard and generally with one another. Should we take on the attributes of the giant investment firms that try to accommodate client needs by having their fund statements online 24/7 updated daily to show how their accounts are faring? Should we become more transactional? Ultimately should we focus on high net worth people only who want a charitable...

A new report that looks at how foundations are using interactive Web 2.0 technology, such as blogs, podcasts, and social networks, in their communications has been announced — appropriately — on the blog run by the Communications Network, a membership organization for people who handle public relations at foundations.

Some foundations are already embracing technology tools that allow for two-way communications, write the report’s authors David Brotherton and Cynthia Scheiderer.

The Daniels Fund, in Denver, for example, set up a Facebook group to communicate with young people who receive college scholarships from the foundation and to try to foster a sense of camaraderie among the students. The fund took that step after it realized that students were not using its Web site or responding to e-mail messages.

“For them, e-mail is kind of the 8-track player,” Peter Droege, vice...

When you measure your charity’s performance, what do you focus on?

Do you focus on whether your group is within its budget, whether it is serving more people than it has in the past, or if it is receiving enough mentions in the news media?

Robert Thalhimer, senior vice president at the Community Foundation Serving Richmond and Central Virginia, encourages nonprofit leaders to question whether they are actually asking the right questions.

Instead of asking questions that can be answered with a few statistics, Mr. Thalhimer says charity leaders should instead focus on results. He borrows the concept from Marilee Goldberg Adams’ book Change Your Questions, Change Your Life.

“Are we really interested in how many people we served (an output)?” he writes on Philanthromedia “Or, do we care more about whether we changed their lives for the better (an outcome)?”

What questions does you...

The leader of an association of grant makers has a beef with The New York Times.

In a letter to the editor, Steve Gunderson, president of the Council on Foundations, writes that the newspaper “critically” overlooked community foundations in a September 10 article about donor-advised funds. The article instead focused on the growth of such funds at financial-services companies.

“A financial-services company is a business whose prime purpose is to increase its revenue. Community foundations are nonprofit agencies whose prime purpose is to support programs that meet the specific needs of communities and residents,” he writes.

What do you think? Did the article fail to give a full picture of donor-advised funds?