President-elect Barack Obama has made a point of promoting national service—and he will give it another boost at next week’s Inaugural parade.

AmeriCorps Alums, a group in Atlanta that connects former participants in the service program, has been selected to march in the parade that follows the swearing-in ceremony on January 20. It is one of the few groups that aren’t a marching band or a military or law-enforcement group.

Amity Tripp, the group’s executive director, says 150 AmeriCorps alumni from around the country will march, along with a few VIPs, including David Eisner, the former chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service. So many alumni wanted to participate that the group had to hold a lottery, she says.

Marchers won’t be decked in fancy uniforms like many of the other participants, but they will l carry state flags and wear jackets with the...

Want to get a phone call from Michelle Obama? If so, get to work making a YouTube video explaining how you plan to participate in the national day of service on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Renew America Together, President-elect Barack Obama’s new community-service program, is sponsoring a video contest to promote the volunteer activities that will take place across the country on the January 19 holiday.

The winner will receive a call from Ms. Obama and the top three videos will be posted on USAService.org, a new Web site that allows people to post and find volunteer opportunities.

You will need to move fast. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow (January 15). Other details are available on the USAService.org site.

The Obamas plan to volunteer in the Washington metropolitan area on the King holiday, which takes place one day before the Inauguration, although the...

Nonprofit experts often talk about how to develop good leaders. But Doug Sauer, chief executive of the Council of Community Services of New York State, says more attention should also be paid to the people in the trenches.

“We lose the connectedness between who we are as a community—the nonprofit community and the broader community—and what people are actually doing,” he told the closing session of the Nonprofit Congress.

Mr. Sauer said his organization spent two days meeting with employees at a legal aid society who handled cases involving juveniles—and were suffering “vicarious trauma” because the children were treated so brutally. He said the workers were burnt out, felt unappreciated by the legal system and the public, and did not see themselves as successful.

Not one could say what their organization’s mission or values were, he added. “What they knew was what they did on a...

What ails the charity world?

Alan Abramson, professor of government and politics at George Mason University, listed seven things at the final session of the Nonprofit Congress:

Loss of public confidence; fiscal stress; increasing workloads due to bad economic times, a growing number of older Americans and immigrants in need of aid; more competition from both for-profit and nonprofit groups; increasing pressure to perform; personnel problems such as burnout and intergenerational tensions; and coping with all those problems in a greater media spotlight.

Mr. Abramson, also a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program, said those pressures have prompted some charities to act more like businesses, seeking fees and other types of revenue; emphasizing efficiency, offering higher salaries; and marketing themselves. But that sometimes creates new...

Speakers at a plenary session on diversity — the first on that topic ever held at a Council on Foundations conference — sparred over legislation in California that would require big foundations to publish information about the race and gender of grantees, staff members, and board members.

Foundations must do more to improve their track records on diversity, but legislative solutions are “fraught with sandbags and land mines,” said Robert K. Ross, president of the California Endowment, in Los Angeles. He noted that the California bill, adopted by the California Assembly in January, ran into trouble because it was amended to require foundations to provide data about sexual orientation, which then drew complaints about violating privacy rights.

“There is no model definition of diversity,” said Mr. Ross, who also heads the Diversity in Philanthropy Project, a group of about 40...

Despite Sen. Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the presidency, women are greatly underrepresented in the U.S. political system – -a scenario the White House Project is attempting to change.

Marie Wilson, the group’s president, told a conference session about her group’s efforts to train women across the country to run for political office, calling it an example of nonpartisan political activity that is permitted under the tax code governing charities.

The United States ranks 71st in the world in the percentage of women serving in parliament (here, the House of Representatives). “It is not really a representative democracy,” said Ms. Wilson.

Ms. Wilson, who headed the Ms. Foundation for almost two decades before starting the White House Project in 1998, said many of the women who received grants from the foundation were creating innovative social programs that focused on HIV/AIDS...

Foundations should work more with government at all levels on issues they care about—and get over their reluctance to advocate for public-policy changes, speakers at a conference session said.

Foundation boards are far too timid about trying to influence lawmakers, mistakenly fearing it would jeopardize their tax-exempt status, said Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, in Washington, and a former Democratic U.S. senator.

“The IRS encourages philanthropy to be engaged in public-policy issues,” he said. Foundations should collaborate with government bodies, both to tap into their budgets and to have a greater impact, he said. A small change in public policy often has a huge “multiplier” effect, he said.

Jean Case, chief executive of the Case Foundation, in Washington, said her organization gives preference to projects that involve government collaboration...

Nonprofit groups that work on campaigns to change policy or get people to vote must learn how to measure whether they are accomplishing their goals, Eli Il Yong Lee, executive director of the Center for Civil Policy, in Albuquerque, told a conference session.

“We have to focus like a laser on external metrics,” said Mr. Lee, whose center puts together coalitions to promote liberal causes and increase voter participation. For example, a coalition might declare success if 9,000 out of the 10,000 people it targeted in a get-out-the-vote effort showed up at the polls. However, he said, “there’s no way to say what we did caused the turnout.”

He said his organization works with local professors to design “treatment and control” tests to determine whether its activities have produced the desired results. Such tests compare the behavior of a group of people who have been targeted by a...

Steve Gunderson, president of the Council on Foundations, welcomed more than 3,000 people from 39 countries to the council’s big philanthropy conference on Sunday night by urging grant makers to think of themselves as part of a global movement.

“We have tended to see what divides us rather than what unites us, leaving us with a world of philanthropy composed of its separate parts,” he told the opening plenary session.

Mr. Gunderson has been planning the “leadership summit” for more than two years as a way to get all varieties of foundations to look beyond their particular giving structure and work with each other to strengthen philanthropy.

“The common citizen in most of the nations represented here this evening does not know us at all,” he said. “Nor have we done all that well at even knowing ourselves.” As philanthropy grows and attracts more scrutiny, philanthropists must...

Of 38 foundations that provide the most grants to American Indian causes, only nine said they had any permanent American Indian staff members, according to a new survey presented today at the Council on Foundations conference.

Two of the foundations hired American Indian consultants, interns, or volunteers, and four said they did not collect racial or ethnic data on their employees, according to a draft report on the survey. Eight said they had at least one American Indian on their board.

The survey was conducted by Native Americans in Philanthropy, in Minneapolis, as part of a study on the impact of leadership by American Indians on the level of giving to Indian causes. The group, which works to promote such giving, discussed the draft report at its annual meeting at the council conference.

The survey sought information from the 100 foundations that give the most to causes...