November 5, 2009, 6:29 pm
By Jennifer Moore
Expanding on a key theme of this year’s Independent Sector conference, Diana Aviv, the group’s president, called on nonprofit leaders at all organizations – regardless of size or mission – to take a broad view of their work and their responsibility to help make society better.
“We do not and cannot work in a vacuum,” she told participants at the gathering of charities and grant makers, which drew some about 1,100 attendees in all.
“If our employees and their families can’t afford medical care, it limits their productivity,” she said. “If our transportation infrastructure makes it hard to get to work, it affects people’s performance. If we don’t collectively attend to the harm inflicted on our environment, polluted air and climate change will ultimately damage everyone’s work. And if we don’t demand greater civility in Congress and in the public square, we diminish our ability to…
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November 5, 2009, 5:07 pm
By Jennifer Moore
Several speakers at Independent Sector’s annual meeting offered their insights about how to make wise financial decisions in these trying economic times.
Above all, they said, nonprofit leaders need to develop a sound plan that fits their organizations. Relying on hope or mounting debt to try to ride out this time of shrinking revenue simply won’t work, they said.
“Fundamentally, vulnerable organizations cannot serve vulnerable people,” Dione Alexander, vice president of the Midwest region for the Nonprofit Finance Fund, told conference participants.
“You can only do so much,” she added. “Figure out what it is.”
‘Crash-Test Dummy’
Rick Sperling, founder and chief executive officer of Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit, said he feels something like “a crash-test dummy” as he tries different approaches but has yet to hit on the ultimate answers.
He says his group has shifted its…
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November 5, 2009, 4:50 pm
By Jennifer Moore
Reflecting on his first year as head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Jeff Raikes told participants Thursday at Independent Sector’s annual meeting in Detroit: “I love my second career.”
He added: “One day I’m learning about malaria and the next day I’m learning about U.S. high school education and the next I’m learning about rural sanitation in Tanzania.”
The former Microsoft executive said he has identified three broad goals for his foundation work as he looks five, 10, 15 years out.
“What I hope is that I can look back on the Gates Foundation and see that we, with our partners, contributed to significant impact on the problems that we were focused in on,” he said.
In addition, Mr. Raikes said he is constantly pushing to improve the internal workings at the foundation and to create “a great environment for people to do their best work.”
He said his experience at…
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November 4, 2009, 9:35 pm
By Jennifer Moore
Detroit
With a mix of urgency, excitement — and at times, frustration — speakers here at the opening session of Independent Sector’s annual meeting called on nonprofit leaders to find new ways to work together in response to the nation’s problems.
This is an “all-hands-on-deck, walk-and-chew-gum kind of moment,” Melody Barnes, President Obama’s domestic policy adviser, told the audience.
She said the administration is committed to finding innovative ways for the federal government to support and promote nonprofit groups.
For example, through the Office of Social Innovation, officials hope to identify successful programs and help them expand to serve more people, she said. “We believe somewhere out there is the next Teach for America or Harlem Children’s Zone, and we want to find it,” Ms. Barnes said.
The work of nonprofit groups, she added, figures heavily in the discussions…
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October 16, 2009, 10:27 pm
By Jennifer Moore
The National Committee on Planned Giving did it when it changed its name earlier this year to the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning.
Now it may be time for charities to follow suit.
“It’s time to get away from the planned-giving phrase because apparently it is not resonating with people,” Larry Stelter, a marketing consultant in Des Moines, Iowa, told a group of, well, planned-giving officers at the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning’s annual meeting today.
More than six out of 10 Americans in a new study said they were not familiar with the term planned giving, explained pollster J. Ann Selzer, who surveyed 800 people 30 years or older. At the same time, she said, many more people were familiar with specific ways to make planned gifts, such as by leaving money to a charity in a will.
“The jargon of planned giving may in fact be an obstacle rather than an open door,” Ms….
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October 16, 2009, 3:09 pm
By Jennifer Moore
Robert F. Sharpe, a Memphis fund-raising consultant, came to the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning’s annual meeting Friday to assure planned-giving officers frustrated by the economy that history does, in fact, repeat itself.
Armed with financial and tax data going back more than 100 years, and old newspaper accounts of donations, Mr. Sharpe demonstrated the ups and down — and ups — of philanthropy over time. Perhaps most heartening: His research shows that by 1937, charitable giving had returned to pre-Depression levels, and had continued to grow from there.
“What I was trying to do is give people confidence that we’ve been through it before and will get through it again,” Mr. Sharpe said in an interview.
He told his audience that during the Depression, like now, outright major gifts had dropped at many organizations, but that bequests and other estate gifts had continued.
…
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October 15, 2009, 1:15 pm
By Jennifer Moore
For many of the planned-giving officials in the audience at the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning’s national conference, in Washington, Dan Pallotta’s message may have seemed personal.
Mr. Pallotta, a former fund raiser and author of Uncharitable, said that donors unfairly judge charities by the share of money they spend on programs versus administration and fund raising.
“There’s a notion that overhead somehow steals from the cause,” Mr. Pallotta said.
After the presentation, Brian Overcast, a planned-giving officer at the University of Tampa, let out a deep sigh.
“We are that overhead he is talking about,” Mr. Overcast said. “This was a reminder that too many people think that we are the ones ‘eating up’ the resources instead of the ones asking for, generating, the resources.”
Tanya Howe Johnson, chief executive of the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning (formerly…
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May 6, 2009, 12:22 pm
By Jennifer Moore
Michael R. Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor, told a session at the Council on Foundations meeting today that New York City has made a concerted effort to help nonprofit groups struggling because of the poor economy by employing a “three-pronged strategy.”
First, the city is testing a “group purchasing” program for organizations that get city contracts.
If successful, Mayor Bloomberg said, he hopes to expand the program to all of the city’s 30,000 nonprofit groups as a way to help them reduce their overhead costs by offering discounts on supplies, insurance, and other purchases.
City agencies are also making it a priority to pay nonprofit groups quickly for services provided. “Too often, too many nonprofits in New York have suffered because New York City hasn’t paid them as promptly as we should — but not anymore,” he said, to applause.
Thirdly, Mr. Bloomberg said the city is he…
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May 6, 2009, 11:20 am
By Jennifer Moore
In a session billed as “CSI for foundations,” speakers at the Council on Foundations meeting in Atlanta dissected the Bernard Madoff investment scandal, which resulted in the deaths of 51 foundations and left 143 others “seriously injured,” according to Jeffrey R. Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, in New York.
Speakers noted how many of the organizations that were hurt by the scandal missed signs of potential problems when investing with Mr. Madoff because officials relied on personal, religious, and social connections that they shared with him.
Melissa Berman, president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, said one lesson that has emerged in the scandal’s wake is that such relationships and a sense of trust are no longer enough.
The “acid test” for financial advisers, she said, must now be, “Can you fire these folks comfortably?”
The…
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May 4, 2009, 7:22 pm
By Jennifer Moore
The home-foreclosure crisis represents a huge and complicated challenge for the United States, but local and regional grant makers of even modest size can make a big dent in the search for solutions, speakers at a Council on Foundations session said.
Laurie Latuda, a program officer at the Goldseker Foundation, in Baltimore, said her organization has spent $640,000 in grants on foreclosure issues from 2005 to 2008 and given roughly an equal amount to neighborhood groups for broader use.
Goldseker has gathered nonprofit, government, and for-profit leaders in the city to devise solutions to the foreclosure problem and has provided “seed money” to test experimental solutions. The foundation has paid for research to identify the scope of the problem in Baltimore as well.
And Goldseker has dedicated some of its staff members to play the “worker-bee” role of coordinating and tracking is…
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