People throughout the nonprofit world are paying tribute to Sen. Edward Kennedy, who died Wednesday. Among them:

• Steven Waldman, editor of the religious Web site Beliefnet, highlights Senator Kennedy’s role in getting a bill passed to create AmeriCorps in 1993. Mr. Waldman wrote a book about that fight, The Bill. “I got to watch up close Kennedy’s extraordinary skill as a legislator,” he writes on The Huffington Post. “Far from being an ideologue, Kennedy was invariably the guy going for the deal.”

• Michael Brown, chief executive of City Year, an AmeriCorps program in Boston, recalls Senator Kennedy’s support for City Year and national service.

• ServiceNation, a coalition that promotes national service and volunteerism, pays tribute to Senator Kennedy on its blog. The senator was a key mover behind a bill that became law last spring to expand the country’s...

California charities that depend on state money to survive are facing a mixture of confusion and fear after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency and the state said it would start paying many of its bills with IOU’s.

You can read more in an article from The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

What are the key questions for policy makers and others to consider as they review President Obama’s proposal on federal spending for education programs?

The New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, spent the day combing through the proposal and developed dozens of questions to consider.

Has your organization developed a set of questions about how Mr. Obama’s spending policies should be considered? Let us know by including a link to your documents in the comments box or sending an e-mail message to our Web editor, Peter Panepento.

While the plans for the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation are still being worked out by the Obama administration, its newly appointed head, Sonal Shah, gave some details about them during the Global Philanthropy Forum, a meeting of donors that started Wednesday in Washington.

See more details in our conference notebook.

Hospital fund raisers won a major victory when Congress passed a measure Friday to provide $787-billion to stimulate the economy.

The compromise version of the measure knocked out a provision passed by the House of Representatives that would have restricted fund raisers from gaining access to the names and addresses of patients. Fund raisers often use that information to identify and solicit potential donors.

The House passed the restriction out of concern about patients’ privacy. While the final measure dropped the restriction on what fund raisers could obtain, it toughened rules that require hospitals to offer patients the option of rejecting any further communications from hospitals and medical centers. It also increased the penalties for violating patient-privacy regulations.

Now that House Democrats have released their economic-stimulus package, antipoverty charities say the proposal is an unprecedented opportunity to help the needy.

The package includes billions of dollars in spending on Medicaid and other federal programs that will help nonprofit groups in cash-strapped states, reports The Chronicle.

Calling it “the mother of all stimuli,” the Bread for the World Institute, an antipoverty group in Washington, says that the package is “positively breathtaking. There’s no other way to describe it.”

“For those who are used to fighting for every nickel of new spending on antipoverty, this is also, perversely, our moment. We’ll never see spending like this ever again,” an unnamed staff member writes on its blog.

Angela Glover Blackwell, chief executive of PolicyLink, a nonprofit group in Oakland, Calif., has also said the stimulus proposal could...

The Internal Revenue Service announced today that it will hold a public hearing on January 23 on proposed rules to make sure donors keep proper records to prove they made gifts of cash and property to charities.

The IRS published the proposed regulations last summer to explain how the government plans to enforce recent laws that included provisions designed to cut down on abuses by donors and charities.

Members of the public who want to speak at the hearing in Washington must have submitted written comments about the proposed rules to the IRS by a November 5 deadline and must provide outlines of the topics they want to address at the hearing no later than tomorrow, December 23.

The proposed regulations were published in the August 7 Federal Register and are available online.

For more information, including instructions on how to attend the hearing, see IRS Announcement 2008-122...

Change.org, a Web site that connects donors with causes, is taking President-elect Barack Obama up on his offer to hear from “all Americans.” The site is asking readers to submit their ideas for how Mr. Obama should change America, and many of the proposals have a nonprofit bent.

Readers interested in humanitarian relief proposed the creation of a Cabinet-level department of development, ending the differentiation between emergency and longer-term development assistance, leading an “economic surge” in Uganda, and many other ideas.

For those who care about social entrepreneurship, starting a national-service corps to improve local infrastructure, recruiting volunteers from overseas to help in the United States as part of a “two-way service corps,” and giving “every business the opportunity to become a social business” were among the suggestions.

Those and hundreds of other...

Technology experts are drawing attention to the fact that the Internal Revenue Service is raising questions about the Mozilla Foundation’s tax exempt status.

Revenues for the organization, which is behind the Web browser Firefox, were $75-million in 2007. Search-related royalties from Google accounted for 88 percent of that income, says Erick Schonfeld on Tech Crunch.

The Mozilla Foundation argues that search-related fees should be treated as royalties, and thus not count as business income under the tax code. If the IRS rules against it, the organization will lose its status as a charity and will have to become a private foundation.

Mr. Schonfeld says that Mozilla is “pretending to be a nonprofit foundation when everyone knows it is a charitable arm of Google.”

He says another question remains: How Google counted the $66-million it paid to Mozilla last year. He says: “Was...

By a vote of 93 to 2, the Senate has passed legislation that would renew and extend several tax provisions affecting charitable giving.

One key provision would allow older donors to get a tax break when they give charities money from their individual retirement accounts.

The House of Representatives now will review the Senate legislation. In May, the House passed its own bill that would renew and extend tax provisions, including the one for IRAs. The Senate and House differ over how the legislation should be paid for and would have to agree before Congress could pass final legislation.

Until December 31 of last year, donors age 70 1/2 or older were able to transfer up to $100,000 to charity from their individual retirement accounts each year without paying income taxes on the money.

The Senate-passed legislation would renew the provision retroactive to January 1, 2008, and...