Marking the biggest health-care merger in the Twin Cities area in two decades, two of the area’s biggest nonprofit health systems have signed a pact to join forces, the Star Tribune reports.

Pending regulatory approval, the deal between HealthPartners and Park Nicollet will create Minnesota’s second-largest hospital network in financial terms and could be the start of a statewide wave of health-care consolidation as providers face rising costs and the rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

The combined entity, with some 1,500 physicians and two of the region’s premier hospitals, will maintain the HealthPartners name and be linked to the eponymous insurance provider, which covers 1.4 million people.

Keith Halleland, a Minneapolis health-care lawyer, said the deal shows organizations are thinking about how to “provide total cost of care for a variety of populations—people with…

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The foundation, development, and “guerrilla marketing” success of advocacy group Invisible Children, which made headlines earlier this year with its viral video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, is examined in a Bloomberg Businessweek feature.

The documentary Kony 2012, posted online in March, stirred a global discussion of both war-crimes suspect Kony and the use and effectiveness of social media in promoting causes.

The article looks at Invisible Children’s operations before and since that watershed and its unprecedented success in connecting with, and securing donations from, millennials whose giving patterns differ significantly from those of baby boomers and Generation X. Bloomberg Businessweek estimated that the organization will at least triple its 2011 revenue of $13.7-million this year.

New dance groups are increasingly choosing to join established arts entities rather than form their own nonprofits, The Wall Street Journal writes, citing a new study from the service organization Dance/NYC.

The report, to be issued next week, examines dance companies that have opted for a model known as “fiscal sponsorship”—joining larger organizations that handle financial and administrative matters, leaving choreographers and other creative staff to focus on artistic pursuits.

The sponsor organization typically charges a fee or takes a percentage of donations to the dance group, but the costs are generally lower than those of establishing and maintaining an independent nonprofit, a key concern in an era of tighter culture support.

“It comes at a time when the field is re-evaluating the nonprofit model,” Lane Harwell, director for Dance/NYC. “The resources that might have in…

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Wendy Schmidt, the wife of billionaire Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, has quietly become a philanthropic force in her summertime home of Nantucket Island, The New York Times writes in a profile of Ms. Schmidt.

ReMain Nantucket, a nonprofit group Ms. Schmidt founded in 2007, has focused on preserving and refurbishing the Massachusetts resort community’s downtown. Her multimillion-dollar projects have included buying a popular bookstore to keep it open, donating land for a transit hub, and financing the renovation of a film and performing-arts venue.

“On Nantucket, if something is broken it is Wendy to the rescue,” said movie producer Armyan Bernstein, a friend of Ms. Schmidt’s who also summers on the coastal island.

The Schmidts bought an estate on the island in 1999. While Mr. Schmidt spends most of the year in Silicon Valley, his wife spends June to October on…

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The Community Foundation of Northern Illinois announced on Thursday that it has received a $15-million bequest from the estate of a prominent local doctor and his wife, says the Rockford Register Star.

The posthumous gift from Louis and Violet Rubin, longtime donors to the foundation, boosts the charity’s assets by more than a third and will be used to fund a broad array of organizations in education, medical research, and human services.

Dr. Rubin, a dermatologist who started a practice in Rockford in 1949, died in 2007. Ms. Rubin passed away in March. They had previously given the foundation $1.1-million to establish a fund in their name.

The gift is the largest from a family to the community foundation, which had net assets of $43.7-million at the end of 2011, and amounts to more than it received in contributions for the past five years combined.

One of the nonprofit groups managing a $5-million fund for those affected by last month’s Aurora, Colo., movie-theater shootings said the victims and their families will eventually receive all the donated money, reports the New York Daily News.

The statement by the Colorado Organization for Victim Assistance, or COVA, came after relatives of most of those killed in the July 20 massacre and several survivors held an emotional press conference Tuesday expressing anger at being left out of decisions on distributing contributions to the Aurora Victims Relief Fund.

So far, $350,000 of the fund has gone to victims or their families. That disbursement came after families complained to COVA and the Community First Foundation, which is administering the fund.

“One-hundred percent of donations made to COVA in the aftermath of the Aurora shooting are going directly to the victims,” the…

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A California foundation will give $500-million to hospitals over the next decade to help them reduce preventable causes of harm to acute-care patients, including loss of dignity, says The Wall Street Journal.

The grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, founded by the co-founder of technology giant Intel and his wife, will also target infections people contract while hospitalized and other complications deemed to arise from inadequate patient monitoring.

George Bo-Linn, program officer of the foundation’s patient-care program, said the loss of dignity and respect acute-care patients and their families suffer during treatment “is a heretofore unrecognized harm.” A majority of patients report that they do not feel included in and respected by the health-care system, according to the foundation.

The initial grant for $8.9-million, announced Tuesday, will go to the Johns …

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Billionaire arts patron Eli Broad’s charity is out of arrears with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art after paying $1.5-million on its five-year pledge to support exhibitions, writes the Los Angeles Times.

The Broad Foundation had withheld $750,000 payments due in October 2011 and January 2012 because the museum, known as MOCA, had not yet spent $2.1-million in previous grants. As part of a 2008 agreement to bail out the then-struggling institution, Mr. Broad committed $15-million for MOCA programming, to be paid in quarterly installments over five years.

Charles Young, the museum’s former interim CEO, said the 2008 pact did not allow for delayed payments and gave MOCA the right to stockpile the Broad funds rather than spending them to get more.

Karen Denne, a foundation spokesman, said the organization had now paid $17.5-million of the 2008 pledge, which included…

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Negotiators for musicians in contract talks with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra say management is out to reduce the ensemble’s size and wages, according to the Indianapolis Star.

Rick Graef, a horn player and chairman of the musicians’ negotiating committee, said the orchestra is seeking to cut the number of contracted players from 87 to 63, shrink wages by 45 percent, and reduce the symphony’s season from 52 to 36 weeks. Indianapolis is the smallest U.S. metropolitan area still maintaining a year-round orchestra.

Musicians’ current three-year contract expires Sunday. Mr. Graef said the union has offered concessions such as annual furloughs for players that would save the orchestra $3.2-million, which he said “will sustain it at the current artistic model” and that players will exit, “quickly if they can,” if the proposed cuts are implemented.

The orchestra’s budget is $25….

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The families of victims of last month’s shooting rampage at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater bitterly criticized the fundraising campaign for victims Tuesday, saying they have been shut out of aid decisions and received relatively little money, according to CNN and the Associated Press.

At a news conference attended by relatives of 11 of the 12 people slain in the July 20 attack, family members demanded a say in how the more than $5-million raised to date by the Aurora Victims Relief Fund is spent. Families of the 70 people killed or wounded have received $5,000 each from the fund, administered by the Colorado-based Community First Foundation.

“When you generate donations for a fund called ‘the Aurora Victim Relief Fund’ using pictures and names of our murdered loved ones, it would stand to reason the fund is for victims of the Aurora shooting,” said Tom Teves, whose son Alex was a…

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