The Corporation for National and Community Service board has elected Mark Gearan, president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges since 1999, as its new chairman. Mr. Gearan, a Democrat, formerly served as director of the Peace Corps under President Clinton and held several positions in the Clinton White House.

Mr. Gearan, who has served on the bipartisan board since 2000, will become chairman on June 1, replacing Stephen Goldsmith, a Republican who has been named deputy mayor of New York.

His previous positions include director of federal state relations for Massachusetts and executive director of the Democratic Governors' Association. He was also campaign manager for Al Gore's vice-presidential campaign in the 1992 elections.

The national-service board—which supervises AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and other volunteer programs, along with the new Social Innovation Fund grant program for ...

Stephen Goldsmith, chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service board and an expert on social innovation, has been named New York's deputy mayor of operations. He said he plans to step down from his board post "whenever the timing works best for the White House."

Michael Bloomberg, the New York mayor, praised Mr. Goldsmith's tenure as mayor of Indianapolis in the 1990s, saying in a statement, "Lots of people talk about 'reinventing government' -- Steve Goldsmith has actually done it."

Mr. Goldsmith, a Republican who has led the national-service board on and off since 2001, is also a professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He said in an e-mail message that he plans to take a leave of absence from that position.

He added that "no city has embraced service like NYC."

Mayor Bloomberg started a program, NYC Service, a year ago to promote volunteerism to ...

The Department of Education officially started the Promise Neighborhoods program today, inviting applications for $10-million in grants to plan comprehensive antipoverty projects in urban neighborhoods, rural areas, or tribal communities.

The department said it would award up to 20 one-year grants of between $400,000 and $500,000 for projects modeled after Harlem Children's Zone, a charity program that offers educational and social services to help poor children from birth to college in a nearly 100-block area in New York.

The application deadline is June 25, and grants will be awarded by September.

The department said applicants must:

• Operate a school or work with at least one school.
• Be a single entity, either a nonprofit group or higher-education institute, that is representative of the  geographic area that will be served.
• Obtain matching funds of at least 25 percent or 5...

As part of a broader probe into corporate payments to health charities and other medical groups, Sen. Charles Grassley has asked the National Alliance on Mental Illness to report what it is doing to encourage its state chapters to disclose donations from pharmaceutical companies.

"NAMI chapters are surely accepting funds from pharmaceutical companies, and some of them have accepted substantial sums over the period of our inquiry," Senator Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a letter sent to the group this week.

The letter includes a chart highlighting the 10 NAMI chapters it said received the most drug-company contributions from January 2005 to October 2009. The California chapter topped the list ($632,000), followed by Ohio ($623,000), and New York ($448,000), according to the letter. Senator Grassley requested information from the chapters last...

In announcing the new director of the Social Innovation Fund, Paul L. Carttar, the Corporation for National and Community Service said that more than 200 groups had indicated they planned to apply for the $50-million in grants that the fund will award this year.

But officials declined to say who, or specifically what kind of groups, had sent the letters.

One applicant, however, has fessed up: New Profit, a charity in Cambridge, Mass., that specializes in providing money to promising nonprofit groups, kind of like the Social Innovation Fund itself. New Profit also happens to be Mr. Carttar's former employer (though he will recuse himself from any discussions of the organization during the grant-awards process).

Kim Syman, a managing partner at New Profit, says the group is applying for a social-innovation grant in the area of youth development. Like other applicants, New Profit is...

The Corporation for National and Community Service announced Tuesday it is seeking proposals for $1-million in grants under the new Nonprofit Capacity Building Program.

The program, created by the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, will provide grants to organizations that can offer training and management help to small and medium-sized nonprofit groups. Matching funds from nonfederal sources are required.

Further details are available here.

The national-service agency also announced last week it is seeking grant propoals for the $4-million Volunteer Generation Fund, another program created by the Serve America Act. The money will go to state national-service commissions for projects to help nonprofit groups attract, manage, and retain volunteers.

Further details are available here.

The application deadline for both grant programs is May 18.

The new health-care overhaul that Congress has approved will affect nonprofit groups both as employers and as human-service providers. The legislation offers tax credits to help small charities offer their employees health insurance and penalizes larger employers that do not offer coverage if any of their employees need subsidies to purchase their own. It also expands the number of people who will qualify for Medicaid.

The Chronicle is working on an article we will publish shortly to explain how the health-care overhaul will affect the way nonprofit groups operate, and we would like to hear from you. Please send any comments to Suzanne Perry by noon on Monday, March 29.

Nicola Goren, the former acting chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, is leaving the federal agency to become president of the Washington Area Women's Foundation.

Ms. Goren, who has been at the corporation for 12 years, served in the top job during a drawn-out search for a successor to David Eisner, the former chief executive, who left the post in November 2008. Mr. Eisner's successor, Patrick Corvington, took office last month. Ms. Goren then moved into a position as senior counselor in the chief executive's office.

She supervised the national-service agency during a high-profile period when Congress and the White House agreed to greatly expand AmeriCorps and create the Social Innovation Fund, which provides grants to help nonprofit groups expand successful social programs.

Mr. Corvington said Ms. Goren would take a break before starting her job at...

The historic health-care bill adopted by the House of Representatives Sunday night provides relief to small charities that offer health insurance to their employees -- a victory for nonprofit leaders who fought for such language.

By adopting the Senate version of the major health-care overhaul, the House agreed that both nonprofit groups and businesses could qualify for tax credits. The original House bill offered only income-tax credits to small employers, which would not have helped tax-exempt groups.

The final bill, set to be signed by President Obama in the next day or two, allows nonprofit groups to apply the credit to certain payroll taxes, like the money withheld from employee checks for Medicare. The provision applies to employers with no more than 25 full-time employees and average wages below $50,000.

For tax years 2010 through 2013, nonprofit groups will be eligible for up ...

The National Council of Nonprofits is asking nonprofit groups to send stories about problems they are having with government contracts or with new fees or taxes so it can propose strategies to battle efforts it says are weakening charities at a time when their services are in high demand.

That pitch comes in a new council report, "State Budget Crises: Ripping the Safety Net Held by Nonprofits," which highlights obstacles some charities are facing in getting paid by recession-battered states and moves by some states or local governments to eliminate tax exemptions or impose new fees on nonprofit groups.

The council is working with the Urban Institute's Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy to survey the nonprofit world to document problems at federal, state, and local levels. It asks groups to send their problems, or their success stories in resolving them, via the Web page "Share Your ...