This month the Global Philanthropy Forum will be held in Washington, bringing together donors and nonprofit leaders to discuss world problems and the ways philanthropy can help solve them.

Jane Wales, the co-founder of the forum, tells the Foundation Center why the event will focus on five topics — domestic and international poverty; climate change; access to health care; education; and supporting nations that are recovering from war and civil conflicts.

“We’ve selected those issues because they are in the in-box of not only the president of the United States, but of leaders worldwide. And in each instance, governments cannot solve these problems alone,” she says in an interview with the center’s Mitch Nauffts.

“Indeed, the public sector will need to be able to tap all sources of social innovation — be they from the private, philanthropic, or civic sector.”

Next week...

Ken Berger, chief executive of Charity Navigator, has made 10 predictions for how the nonprofit world will change in the years ahead.

One prediction: Government support for charities will grow, which will trigger a debate about how much federal and state money nonprofit groups should seek.

“Since charity staff leadership are predominantly liberal leaning, some of the criticism may be muted (as was the case with the proposed reduction in the charitable tax deduction for the affluent),” the charity watchdog leader writes on his blog, Ken’s Commentary.

“However, many charity boards are made up of more conservative individuals. In addition, some participants in the sector (such as those who are managing donor-advised funds) have interests and perspectives that are more independent of party affiliation and therefore are likely to increasingly raise the question of what type of role...

Cynthia Gibson, a philanthropy consultant, wants to get nonprofit researchers to find new topics to study.

“There’s rarely a day that goes by that we don’t see yet another report about something that’s already been studied to death and that many see as ‘stating the obvious,’” she writes on her blog. “So why do these studies keep getting funded, disseminated, and reported on?”

She has compiled a list “of all the things that most of us in the nonprofit sector think are pretty much established” to get researchers to either explore new issues or find new ways to examine the established ones.

On her list of well-known facts are:

• Charities need operating support, but most foundations don’t provide such grants.

• Mergers are easy to talk about, but hard to do.

• There is almost no agreement on what social entrepreneurship means.

Ms. Gibson is asking others to...

Last month, Robert Egger, executive director of the D.C. Central Kitchen, joined a chorus of nonprofit leaders that objected to a report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog in Washington.

Today, Mr. Egger writes that he made a “big mistake” by not discussing his concerns with the committee first.

“Simply put, when you know (and respect) the group that issues a report, and you disagree, the very least you can do is to call and meet to talk it through,” he writes on his blog, One Voice for Change. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, you learn that your worst fears are often unfounded. If I had done that — if I had afforded professional courtesy to a colleague —I would have had my worst fears mitigated.”

The report sets standards for how foundations should make grants and be governed. Critics have said the standards, including one that says...

During a recent forum on grant making during a bad economy, participants debated whether foundations should focus their giving on social services or instead support advocacy efforts to influence the government.

Two foundation leaders at the meeting at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University encouraged the advocacy route.

According to an anonymous blog writer on the school’s Web site, Ann Beeson, director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Institute, said the economic crisis presented an opportunity to set a new policy agenda.

Gara LaMarche, president of Atlantic Philanthropies, agreed and said that grants today to make changes in public policy could reverse “systematic injustices” in the near future.

Both foundation leaders acknowledged that their organizations are in a somewhat different financial position than other grant makers,...

The ONE Campaign, an antipoverty advocacy group, is debating a leading critic of international aid.

On his Aid Watch blog, William Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University, derides ONE for asking some “high-profile Africans” to discuss what they think of Dead Aid, a new book that heavily criticizes Western government efforts to help Africa.

(For more about the book, visit the the Web site of the author, Dambisa Moyo.)

Mr. Easterly says that ONE should challenge Ms. Moyo’s ideas, but not recruit others to do so. By “rounding up some Africans who happen to disagree with Zambian-born Moyo doesn’t alter the quality of her proposals, which deserve to be debated on their own merits,” he writes.

In a response on Aid Watch, Edith Jibunoh, Africa outreach manager for ONE, writes that Mr. Easterly’s “post suggesting ONE is trying to ‘discredit’ and ‘misrepresent’ Ms....

The Washington Blade, a newspaper in the nation’s capital that writes about gay issues, recently reported that the leaders of several charities that advocate for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights are taking pay cuts because of the recession.

As part of an article that examined pay at 30 nonprofit groups, the newspaper said that at least seven “executive directors had or would soon take a reduction in salary in 2009 due to problems associated with the nation’s economic downturn.”

For example, the newspaper reported that Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group in Washington, reduced his salary by 10 percent, decreasing his total compensation from $338,400 to $302,200.

The president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, with offices in Los Angeles and New York, also agreed to a pay cut, reducing his salary by $20,000. The official, ...

Does America need a new call for public service?

Michelle Nunn, chief executive of the Points of Light Institute, says yes, while Brian Brown, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation, says no.

In opinion articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the two nonprofit officials debate President Obama’s support for volunteering and national-service programs.

Ms. Nunn writes that Mr. Obama’s efforts build on a long history of American civic action and would help the thousands of struggling charities that have been hit hard by the recession.

Mr. Brown counters that while the spirit of public service is strong in the United States, it is hurt when the government tries to organize volunteerism.

For now, most lawmakers seem to agree with Ms. Nunn. Last week the Senate approved the Serve America Act, which will greatly increase the number of Americans who participate in...

While foundations are able to do more than the World Bank or governments to support human rights and innovative development projects abroad, they are failing to do so, writes Steven Lawry, senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

“Foundations in my view are not making full use of their freedoms to support innovation, help people claim essential rights, and pursue complex problems over the long-term. In the process, they run the danger of becoming more like conventional, public-sector donors, and adding little that is distinctive to the funding mix,” he writes on the center’s Humanitarian and International Development NGOs blog.

Mr. Lawry identifies three factors contributing to “philanthropy’s retreat from ambitious international funding agendas.” Foundations are under growing scrutiny in the United States, which makes them risk...

Mike Burns, a nonprofit consultant, notes that leading Democrats are asking questions about how taxes affect the charitable giving of two very different types of donors.

On his blog, Nonprofit Board Crisis, he writes that President Obama this week defended his proposal to limit tax breaks for charitable deductions for wealthy people. The president said the change would have little effect on giving, in part because tax benefits do not motivate philanthropy.

Mr. Burns points out that several Democratic senators have taken a slightly different approach with foundations. They have introduced legislation that they argue would lower a tax that dissuades grant makers from giving more.

“How ironic is it that foundations, institutions whose first, middle, and last names are about charitable giving, should need an incentive to give more,” he writes. “Something’s wrong with this system.”...