Philanthropic Prizes Grow in Popularity, Plus More: Monday’s Roundup
October 5, 2009, 11:37 am
By Maria Di Mento
- Since the X Prize Foundation awarded $10-million to stimulate human spaceflight five years ago, philanthropic prizes have grown dramatically in number, writes Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, on his organization’s blog. He says X Prize plans to offer new prizes in health care, tuberculosis diagnosis, and ocean conservation.
- Home loans brokered by nonprofit groups contributed to the nation’s housing crisis, write Jeff Horwitz and Dave Jamieson in the Huffington Post. Mr. Horwitz and Mr. Jamieson, both freelance writers, say that arrangements made by charities — by which home builders provide donations to nonprofit groups that are then given to low-income people as a down payment — resulted in unusually high default rates.
- Patrick Corvington, an official at the Annie E. Casey Foundation who is President Obama’s pick to lead the Corporation for National and Community Service, has “the networks and experience to create bolder partnerships between the public and private sector,” writes Harris Wofford, a former chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, on the Change.org blog.
- To improve their philanthropy, companies should look at Dow Chemical and Microsoft, which make a small number of big grants to key nonprofit groups, writes Julie Lloyd, assistant director of the Center for Social Value Creation at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Her opinion article appears on Triple Pundit, a Web site that focuses on corporate social-responsibility work.
- How should donors interpret the results of testing on an HIV vaccine in Thailand? Laura Starita, managing editor of Philanthropy Action, writes that despite the vaccine’s promising early results — it seemed to prevent infection with the strain of HIV common in Thailand and South Asia about 30 percent of the time — science is still years, if not decades, away from a vaccine that works in a majority of cases. Philanthropists, she says, should focus now on promoting behavior that prevents the disease.
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