May 09, 2008
The End of Philanthropy?
While corporations award billions of philanthropic dollars each year, they need to do more to truly aid the world, says Marc Benioff, the chief executive officer of Salesforce.com, a software company.
“It’s a large amount, but the world’s problems go beyond what funding can fix. Too many corporate philanthropic efforts occur in isolation, with little relationship to their community, employees, or corporate missions,” he writes on The Huffington Post.
If businesses harness all their assets — workers, expertise, money, and products — for good causes, it could mean the “end of philanthropy,” he says.
“Together, companies can unite so that communities don’t have to wait for the generous gifts of the very wealthy. Together, we can create a model that is simple, sustainable, and successful. We call it “the power of us” and there’s room, reason, and benefits, for everyone,” he writes.
As an example, he writes, Salesforce.com follows the so-called 1/1/1 approach — pledging 1 percent of its shares to a foundation, donating 1 percent of its product to charities, and committing 1 percent of its employees’ work hours to volunteer service.
What do you think? Is a better approach to corporate giving needed? What do you think of the way Salesforce.com gives?
— Ian Wilhelm
May 08, 2008
Donor Disclosure And Politics
As The Wall Street Journal editorial page and others push for former President Bill Clinton to release the names of donors to his foundation, Liz Towne, director of advocacy programs for the Alliance for Justice, worries that other nonprofit organizations will face similar scrutiny.
“The Clinton Foundation, and millions of other public charities, have no legal obligation to disclose their donors. Many have suggested this is a travesty, a miscarriage of justice — ‘bring on the sunshine to the whole 501(c)(3) public charity community,’ they cry,” she writes on the Alliance’s Nonprofit & Foundation Advocacy Blog.
If such disclosure were required, she says, it would discourage support to controversial causes, such as reproductive rights.
She suggests that one possible solution is a proposal in Congress that would force presidential libraries to disclose contributors.
But she wonders why the Journal and other conservative commentators have not promoted the legislation. “It would seem to me that to do otherwise proves that these cries for disclosure are politically motivated,” she writes.
What do you think? Should presidential libraries be required to disclose their donors?
— Ian Wilhelm
May 07, 2008
Laura Bush and the Myanmar Relief Effort
In appealing to help for victims of the cyclone in Myanmar, First Lady Laura Bush should have known better than to “mindlessly repeat the toothless U.S. policy positions on a government we disapprove of,” writes Richard Walden on the Huffington Post.
Mr. Walden, president of Operation USA, in Culver City, Calif., says that most aid workers have strong views about the governments in countries where they work.
“But when disaster strikes, a bad or ineffective local government is an obstacle to be danced around not bludgeoned to death thus guaranteeing it will not allow the entry of urgent humanitarian aid for its people,” he says.
“Laura Bush read the administration’s long-standing talking points on Myanmar while simultaneously demanding that its government accept a team of US disaster officials to make an independent assessment of its needs,” he says. “That the International Red Cross, the United Nations, the European Union and a number of highly competent relief agencies were already on the ground doing exactly that did not seem to matter.”
What do you think of Mr. Walden’s criticisms?
New Philanthropy And Social Change
Kavita N. Ramdas, chief executive of the Global Fund for Women, takes to task how Bill Gates and other businesspeople-turned-philanthropists are seeking to ameliorate global problems.
In an essay on openDemocracy.org, a Web site devoted to discussing democracy and human rights, Ms. Ramdas says so-called philanthrocapitalism is flawed.
“Despite many good intentions, this version of philanthropy is all too often beset by a hubristic assumption of its ability to resolve the world’s most deep-rooted problems,” she writes.
It fails to examine “the root causes of current economic or political inequality and injustice,” she writes.
To create long-term change, a broad discussion is needed between wealthy donors, nonprofit leaders, government, companies, and advocates for social justice. They need to struggle “with the wisdom contained in [black feminist] Audrey Lorde’s words: ‘you cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house,’” Ms. Ramdas writes.
OpenDemocracy has other essays from nonprofit leaders on the value of mixing philanthropy and business.
Read a Chronicle opinion article on the subject by Michael Edwards, author of Just Another Emperor? The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism.
What do you think? Is philanthrocapitalism unable to create lasting social change?
— Ian Wilhelm
May 06, 2008
Foundation Leader Passes on Big Meeting
Due to a heavy workload, Diana R. Sieger, president of the Grand Rapids
Commmunity Foundation, in Michigan, has chosen not to attend the Council on
Foundation’s summit this week. But
her peers have admonished her for not going.
“[W]hat surprised me after being in this field for more than two decades was
the look of disdain from one of our larger Community Foundation CEOs when it
was learned I was not going. Oh please. And added to that was a mini-lecture
from another prominent CEO who actually told me that he was disappointed
that I chose not to go because ‘it is so necessary for our private
foundation colleagues to see that community foundations do regard themselves
as part of the larger field of philanthropy.’ As if I didn’t know that! He
did hear my perspective after that comment,” she writes on her group’s
blog.
“In spite of the ‘peer pressure’ and the daily e-mails from the council
designed to promote attendance, we all decided to take a pass on this
important summit,” she writes about herself and her staff.
What do you think? Are you like Ms. Sieger and just too busy to attend
conferences? What do you think of the reaction of her peers? Click on the
comment link below this post to share your thoughts.
— Ian Wilhelm
May 05, 2008
A Paternalistic View of Philanthropy?
As more and more bloggers cover the Council on Foundations annual meeting this week, debates are erupting about the future of philanthropy and how the meeting handled them.
Peter Manzo, a board member of National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, writes that the opening remarks by Steve Gunderson, the council’s chief executive, and a video presentation about philanthropy “were abysmal.”
“Gunderson gave an unremarkable speech filled with vagaries, platitudes, and so many buzzwords that during one heavy stretch where he seemed to touch on a half-dozen in a row, I had to stifle the urge to yell ‘Bingo!’” Mr. Manzo writes on the Tactical Philanthropy blog, where several conference-goers are writing about the event.
What bothered him about the film, he said, was that it “presented a paternalistic image of philanthropy as the heroic savior of the wretched, and made outlandish claims that philanthropy, as the ‘fifth estate,’ accomplishes more than the combination of the other four (originally, religion, government (nobles), the common citizenry and the media).
He adds: “At one point the video claims that philanthropy has accomplished more good than any government ever has, and at another, fantasizes about a world without governments, just institutions that see the world as problems to be solved, with “no one to tell them what they can and cannot do.’”
But others were more supportive of the opening session.
Peter Deitz, founder of Social Actions and another guest blog writer on Tactical Philanthropy, writes that Mr. Gunderson made several points worth noting, such as “Philanthropy must become a movement, more than an institution” and “Our greatest power is not in the checkbook but in our vision.”
He describes the meeting of 3,000 nonprofit leaders as the “Davos of Philanthropy.”
To learn more about the conference, The Chronicle has frequent blog updates from various sessions of the event.
What do you think? If you are attending the meeting what has been your impression so far? Click on the comment link below this post to share your thoughts.
— Ian Wilhelm
May 02, 2008
Questions About Nonprofit Groups in Peru
Peruvian officials are concerned about the work of nonprofit groups in their country, according to an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a Journal columnist, writes that American nonprofit organizations have given money to human-rights groups linked to leftist guerrillas and that Álan Garcia, president of Peru, told her that “anticapitalism” charities — or nongovernmental groups — supported by foreign funds are blocking economic development in Peru.
“No wonder the term NGO has become a dirty word in Peru,” she writes.
What do you think?
— Ian Wilhelm
Mr. Yunus Goes to Queens
The microfinance pioneer and Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is testing the waters to see if his approach to fighting poverty can work in the United States — but skeptics are not sure he will succeed.
According to City Room, a blog operated by The New York Times, last week in Queens Mr. Yunus attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the opening of the first office of Grameen Bank America. The office, which officially opened in January, so far has made small loans to 175 people and expectations are high.
“Over the next year, all eyes in the domestic microfinance world are on Grameen to see whether it can attain the level of success in the United States that it has achieved in the developing world,” writes Amanda M. Fairbanks, a Times reporter.
Jonathan Morduch, an economist at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School, praises Mr. Yunus’s move to New York, but wonders how much he can accomplish. “Ultimately in America, the biggest holes are serving working Americans. A lot are not in situations where group lending makes sense,” he told City Room.
(Read the Chronicle article about Mr. Yunus.)
What do you think? Will Mr. Yunus succeed in New York? Can antipoverty programs from Bangladesh and other developing countries work in America? Click on the comment link below this post to share your thoughts.
— Ian Wilhelm
April 30, 2008
Should Harvard Pay for Writing by a Noted Author's Mistress?
Harvard University has paid the longtime former mistress of the late author Norman Mailer an undisclosed sum for a collection of writing that includes lengthy passages about her sexual encounters with Mr. Mailer.
Included in the collection, according to the Associated Press, is a 20-page passage outlining a sex scene with Mr. Mailer and a 50-page scene that is based on the woman’s relationship with the author.
The woman, Carole Mallory, considers the collection to be part of literary history and worth preserving.
But Tom Durso, a public-relations consultant, writes on the 501c Files that Harvard shouldn’t have paid for the materials.
“if I were a Harvard alum or even, perish the thought, a paying student or parent, I’d be put off by the thought of my tuition dollars or annual fund gift funding the purchase of what is undoubtedly bad writing about Norman Mailer’s sex life,” Mr. Durso writes. “It’s difficult to see what kind of academic mission such a transaction advances.”
Did Harvard fulfill its mission by buying Ms. Mallory’s papers? Or is it veering too far into voyeurism? Click on the comment link below this post to share your thoughts.
Why the Evaluation Craze Is Costly for Charities
Kelly Kleiman, a laywer and journalist who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, urges her nonprofit clients to spend more time wooing individual donors than writing grant proposals. A new report on the downsides of the evaluation craze among grant makers, by ProjectStreamline.org, underscores why.
“The report’s most provocative observation is that grantors’ evaluation demands of grantees are the philanthropic equivalent of outsourcing — that is, securing services from underpaid and unrepresented workers,” writes Ms. Kleiman.
Grant makers are better positioned than grantees to evaluate success, both because they have the money to do so and because they’ve (presumably) seen more of it. Involve grantees in discussions about evaluation, says Ms. Kleiman, but don’t make them assume the entire burden of determining success.
Other perils of the grant maker-grantee relationship?
Charities can be tempted to stray from their mission in pursuit of a big grant, writes Ms. Kleiman. “Stop letting the fund-raising tail wag the operating dog. Do what you do, and find people who want to support that,” she says.
What do you think? Do you see many downsides to foundations’ focus on evaluating the success of their grants? What more could grant makers do to improve their relationship with grantees?