November 2008
November 26, 2008
Online Petition Asks Obama to Create Secretary of the Arts Position
Quincy Jones, the musician and record producer, recently told a radio interviewer he plans to ask President-elect Barack Obama to create the position of Secretary of the Arts. That prompted arts lovers to start an online petition asking Mr. Obama to take up that suggestion.
Almost 1,200 people have so far signed the petition, which refers to a November 15 interview with Mr. Jones on “Soundcheck,” a program produced by WNYC, a public-radio station in New York.
“My passion in life now, and one of the first conversations I’ll have with President Obama, is to beg for a Secretary of the Arts,” said Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones initially endorsed Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, but he released a video in support of Mr. Obama shortly before the November 4 general election.
Obama's Economic Aides Praised
Advocates for international aid are expressing their support for Barack Obama’s top two picks to lead his economic team, saying they are stout antipoverty leaders.
Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is Mr. Obama’s choice for secretary of the U.S. Treasury, while Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and a former president of Harvard University, was tapped to lead the White House National Economic Council.
Both are board members of the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington and “are tremendously knowledgeable about the problems and challenges faced by the world’s poor and are committed to policies to help address those problems — both in the interests of the poor in the developing world and of the United States itself,” writes Nancy Birdsall, the center’s president, on its blog.
In addition, Mr. Geithner’s father directed the Ford Foundation’s Asia programs for a period, and the family lived in East Africa and Asia.
The One Campaign, an antipoverty advocacy group in Washington, on its blog praises Mr. Geithner’s support for vaccine and health programs and Mr. Summers work to spread education to African women.
Mr. Summers role as an advocate for women is somewhat in question, however, given his resignation from Harvard, which came in part because of comments he made that some said were sexist.
But Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook who used to work for Mr. Summers at the Treasury Department and the World Bank, defends her former boss on The Huffington Post.
Ms. Sandberg, who also helped shape Google’s charitable programs, called Mr. Summers a “tireless advocate for girls’ education.”
What do you think of Mr. Obama’s choices?
"Be the Change Inaugural Ball" Will Celebrate Community Service
ServiceNation, a coalition of nonprofit groups that is promoting community and national service, and MTV, the music cable-television network, plan to hold an inaugural ball to celebrate the high turnout of young voters in the presidential election and highlight young people who are volunteering for social causes.
The “Be the Change Inaugural Ball,” which MTV plans to broadcast live on the evening of January 20, will feature performers, celebrities, government officials, and hundreds of young volunteers, the two organizations said in a statement.
The event, which will be held in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, will include live broadcasts from locations around the world where young people are participating in community-service projects. MTV said it will also broadcast stories about young volunteers every day from January 1 through Inauguration Day.
The time of the event has not yet been set.
An estimated 23 million people under age 30 voted in the November presidential election, an increase of 3.4 million over 2004, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. Estimated turnout rose to between 52 percent and 53 percent for that age group, an increase of four or five percentage points over 2004, the center found.
More than two thirds of young voters cast their ballots for the Democratic ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the center said.
November 25, 2008
IRS Discloses 2009 Plans for Reviewing Tax-Exempt Organizations
The Internal Revenue Service today announced the projects related to tax-exempt organizations it plans to pursue in 2009, including a long-term study of fund raising and spending by charitable organizations, a broad effort to educate the agency’s employees about governance issues, and an examination of nonprofit student-loan organizations that have related for-profit arms.
Lois G. Lerner, director of the exempt-organization division of the IRS, told reporters that it is especially important to monitor the nonprofit world during the current economic downturn as demand for charitable services rises and donations fall.
“We believe that compliant organizations are better positioned to serve the public interest and meet the growing demand for their services,” said Ms. Lerner, in a letter accompanying the department’s goals.
That philosophy has driven many of the agency’s recent past and ongoing measures to make the nonprofit sector more transparent and accountable, such as the redesign of the Form 990, the federal disclosure forms that will be required for about 30 percent of all nonprofit groups for the current tax year. The new forms require a much greater level of detail about executive compensation and outside business activity of tax-exempt groups.
The 2009 plans are largely consistent with previous efforts.
One of the major new studies the IRS plans to begin next year is a lengthy examination of how tax-exempt groups raise and spend money compared to how much they spend to achieve charitable goals. To start, the study will focus on organizations that raise unusually large amounts of money, have unrelated trade or business income, and spend relatively little on their programs.
The effort is not an attempt to formulate a so-called commensurate test — to determine if charities are spending a reasonable amount on exempt activities — Ms. Lerner said. “We haven’t decided what the answer is, we’re just looking for information,” she said.
Nonprofit student-loan groups also will be under greater scrutiny from the IRS next year, as the agency seeks to guard against abuses by organizations that are connected to for-profit businesses.
While those arrangements are legal, the federal tax agency is concerned that executives and other insiders at the nonprofit groups are improperly benefiting from profits of the associated businesses, said Ms. Lerner
In addition to federal tax filings of nonprofit lenders, the agency intends to issue a broad questionnaire to those groups and conduct audits to examine how much nonprofit-lending executives are being paid compared to the charitable spending of their organizations.
The IRS also will look at how nonprofit organizations and donors account for non-cash gifts, such as pharmaceuticals or used clothing, that are given to tax-exempt groups, which in-turn donate to a different nonprofit group. The IRS is concerned that donors and charities are crediting the donations with inaccurately high values.
The agency also plans to take a look at its own operations next year, and give its employees guidance on how to consider governance issues that may be used in determining whether an organization qualifies as a charity.
Critics of the IRS have charged that the agency is using the lack of certain governance policies to reject organizations’ applications for tax exemption, even though the law does not require those policies.
In July, the IRS issued a letter ruling saying that a group applying to be recognized as a church did not have “safeguards” to prevent the organization from benefiting the proposed board of directors, which was composed entirely of one person’s family. In addition, the applicants had not submitted bylaws or a conflict-of-interest policy.
While the IRS cannot require groups to have a conflict-of-interest policy or independent board members, the lack of those policies could trigger other questions about how a nonprofit organization would prevent abuses and insider dealing, Ms. Lerner said.
“What we want our staff to understand is that, while we want organizations to look at governance issues, we are not going to tell you how to govern yourselves,” she said.
— Eric Kelderman
Charity Lauded by Obama Lays Off 10% of Its Staff
Harlem Children’s Zone, the New York charity that President-elect Barack Obama has held up as a model for fighting poverty, laid off 10 percent of its staff this month because of the deepening economic crisis.
“We thought this was a fiscally prudent move given the economic conditions in the country,” says Marty Lipp, the group’s communications director.
While on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama announced a plan to fight poverty that included creating “promise neighborhoods” in 20 cities modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone Project — an effort that provides a comprehensive set of education, medical, and social services to residents in a 100-block area of Harlem.
Geoffrey Canada, the charity’s president, told The Chronicle in October that he was working with education experts to propose a way to take his program national should Mr. Obama win the election. Now, says Mr. Lipp, “We are essentially waiting for a call from either the transition team or the administration.”
The layoffs affected a staff of more than 1,200 part-time and full-time employees, Mr. Lipp says. The decision was not in response to any specific drop in revenues, he says, but rather in recognition that the group needed to prepare for hard times as the economic crisis spreads.
For example, he says, the organization won’t be able to rely on some past Wall Street donors. Among others, the Lehman Brothers Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the now-bankrupt financial-services firm, gave Harlem Children’s Zone $1-million a year for the past six years. (The group’s annual budget is more than $60-million a year.)
Mr. Canada told a conference last week that money woes had caused a social-service crisis in New York City of the magnitude faced by New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina.
November 24, 2008
Google.org Executive to Help Obama Transition Team on Technology and Innovation
Sonal Shah, head of global development at Google.org, the search-engine company’s philanthropic arm, has been named co-chair of a working group that will propose policies for President-elect Barack Obama’s administration in the areas of technology, innovation, and government reform.
Ms. Shah, also a member of the Obama transition project’s advisory board, is co-founder of Indicorps, a nonprofit group that offers fellowships to Indian-Americans working on development projects in India.
The transition project has announced the leaders of seven policy working groups to propose priorities for the new administration when it takes over on January 20. The others will focus on the economy, education, energy and environment, health care, immigration, and national security.
The head of the education working group — Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at Stanford University – -is a somewhat controversial choice in the nonprofit world. Ms. Darling-Hammond, a leading education thinker, has published several studies that questioned the effectiveness of Teach for America, the nonprofit group that places recent college graduates as teachers in schools in poor neighborhoods.
IRS Raises Questions About Charity Status of Mozilla Foundation
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 it a charitable contribution, or lumped in with its regular traffic acquisition costs?”
John D. Colombo, writing on the Nonprofit Law Prof Blog, says the case is not the first where questions about whether payments are “royalties” or unrelated business income have arisen, citing previous tussles with the Sierra Club and AARP.
“My guess is that the IRS is going to classify this income as UBI (unrelated business income), not royalties, but there’s certainly enough doubt about the definition of royalties that I wouldn’t bet much on it,” he writes.
What do you think? Click on the comments box below to share your thoughts.
— Caroline Preston
November 21, 2008
Judge Denies IRS Attempt to Audit Minn. Church
A U.S. District Court judge has rejected an effort by the Internal Revenue Service to force a Minnesota Church to comply with an audit, ruling that the agency violated a 1984 law that raises the bar for examining churches.
The tax agency was trying to get the federal court to enforce a summons, issued in March, against Living Word Christian Center, in Brooklyn Park, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, after the church refused to turn over documents about its financial operations and governance.
The tax agency began investigating the center in 2007, following reports that the church may have been involved in improper political activities, according to court documents.
Instead the IRS said it found financial transactions that may have benefited the organization’s pastor, the Rev. James M. Hammond. Living Word leased planes owned by Mr. Hammond, and the pastor borrowed money from the organization, which eventually forgave a portion of his debt, according to the case history.
But the judge ruled that the federal agency had not properly followed the Church Audit Procedures Act of 1984, enacted to give churches greater protection in audits. Among other things, that law dictates that only certain high-level officials within the IRS are allowed to initiate an examination.
The person who signed off on Living Word’s audit, the director of examinations for the exempt organization department at the IRS, was too low-ranking to have that authority, the judge said in his report.
—Eric Kelderman
November 20, 2008
Obama Examines Nonprofit Ties of Potential Appointees
As Bill Clinton seeks to decrease concerns about his foundation work so that his wife potentially can lead the State Department, another possible pick for a cabinet position is under scrutiny for his nonprofit ties.
Tom Daschle, a former Democratic senator from South Dakota, has been tapped to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to The New York Times.
But the newspaper writes that some concerns have been raised about Mr. Daschle’s role as a lobbyist for the health-care industry and as a board member of the Mayo Clinic, a nonprofit health center.
To be sure, the newspaper says the positions may not prevent Mr. Daschle from accepting the post and that such work is common for ex-lawmakers. But given that Barack Obama has set stringent conflict-of-interest rules for his appointees, Mr. Daschle may test them, it says.
Some nonprofit observers say such rules have gone too far.
Jack B. Siegel, a lawyer specializing in nonprofit law, writes on his blog, Charity Governance, that the vetting of Mr. Clinton is unfair.
While also scolding Mr. Clinton for some decisions the former president has made, Mr. Siegel writes, “We like good government as much as the next guy, but at some point conflicts-of-interest and disclosure standards can be too stringent. A good case can be made that if we live in a world of equality and two working spouses, then one spouse’s activities should not be taken into account when making hiring decisions for public office.”
Read The Chronicle’s article about the questions being asked of Mr. Clinton.
What do you think? Should the nonprofit ties of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Daschle be a concern for the Obama administration? Click on the comments link to share your views.
November 18, 2008
Nonprofit Representatives Advise Obama Administration on Transition
President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, which is in the process of preparing for a change of power on January 20, includes a number of representatives of nonprofit groups, foundations, and think tanks.
Most are members of “agency review teams” that are charged with examining particular government bodies and offering advice on policy, budgetary, and personnel matters. Members from the nonprofit world, and the agencies they will review, include:
Robert Beers, president, National Security Network. (Homeland Security Department)
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president, global development program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)
Barbara Chow, director, education program, Hewlett Foundation. (Office of Management and Budget)
Bill Corr, executive director, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. (Health and Human Services Department)
Stephen Crawford, deputy director, metropolitan policy program, Brookings Institution. (U.S. Postal Service and Postal Regulatory Commission)
Ivo Daalder, senior fellow, foreign policy, Brookings Institution. (National Security Council.)
Clark Kent Ervin, director, homeland security program, Aspen Institute. (Homeland Security Department)
Ralph Everett, president, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. (Commerce Department)
Alan H. Fleischmann, managing director, ImagineNations Group. (Inter-American Development Bank)
Michele Flourney, president, Center for a New American Security. (Defense Department)
Marilyn Golden, policy analyst, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. (National Council on Disability and U.S. Access Board)
David Hayes, senior fellow, World Wildlife Fund; senior fellow, Progressive Policy Institute. (Working group responsible for energy and natural-resources agencies)
Alan W. Houseman, executive director, Center for Law and Social Policy. (Legal Services Corporation)
Michele Jolin, senior fellow, Center for American Progress. (Council of Economic Advisers)
Deborah Jospin, nonprofit-strategy consultant and president, Daniel A. Dutko Memorial Foundation. (Corporation for National and Community Service)
Bruce Katz, director, metropolitan policy program, Brookings Institution. (Housing and Urban Development Department, Federal Housing Finance Board, U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness)
Brad Kiley, vice president, finance and operations, Center for American Progress (on leave). (Office of Administration)
Jim Kohlenberger, executive director, Voice on the Net Coalition, and senior fellow, Benton Foundation. (National Science Foundation)
Nicole Lurie, director, Center for Population Health and Health Disparities, RAND Corporation. (Health and Human Services Department)
Amy Comstock Rick, chief executive, Parkinson’s Action Network. (Office of Government Ethics and Office of Special Counsel)
Mara Eve Rudman, senior fellow, Center for American Progress, Washington. (National Security Council)
Shirley Sagawa, nonprofit-strategy consultant and fellow, Center for American Progress. (Corporation for National and Community Service)
Phyllis Segal, vice president, Civic Ventures. (Federal Labor Relations Authority)
The full list of transition-team members is available on the president-elect’s Change.gov Web site.
November 17, 2008
Nonprofit Groups Press Congress for Continued Giving by Mortgage Giants
Nonprofit organizations in Washington are continuing their efforts to make sure that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can sustain their levels of charitable giving.
The two mortgage companies, which were taken over by the federal government this fall, donated $47-million to charities last year, according to the Center for Nonprofit Advancement, an association of tax-exempt groups. The association is coordinating its second campaign to press Congress to ensure that donations from the lenders don’t dry up in the current economic downturn.
Tomorrow, association members are being asked to e-mail their Congressional representatives about the matter. A similar effort was made in October, which resulted in a letter from six members of Congress to James B. Lockhart II, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Mr. Lockhart is the conservator placed in charge of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after the U.S. Treasury Department bailed-out the troubled lenders in September. — Eric Kelderman
November 14, 2008
Philanthropy and an Obama Administration
This week Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors, a company that assists donors, had teleconferences to educate philanthropists about how changes likely to be advanced by the Obama administration should affect their giving to five causes: health, poverty, the environment, education, and global development.
For each phone call, the company gathered nonprofit experts to identify ways donors could collaborate with a new administration or support causes that it is likely to overlook.
- To improve health, the Obama administration is expected to expand programs to help the uninsured, especially children. While a notable goal, even with insurance, minorities and impoverished people often have other barriers to getting access to quality health care, such as transportation problems and a lack of education about disease prevention, said the speakers. Philanthropy could help reduce these “non-insurance barriers to health care,” said Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund, in New York. In addition, Mr. Redlener and others said that foundations and charities could do more to teach Americans how to navigate the sometimes Kafkaesque health care system.
- In education, the new president has said he will emphasize early childhood education, training teachers, making college more affordable, and helping school districts improve how they evaluate themselves. Philanthropy should support research efforts to find out what school programs are working and disseminate information about them, said Marshall (Mike) S. Smith, education program director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif. Mr. Smith also recommended that grant makers examine how the Obama campaign organized people through social-networking Web sites, text messaging, and other technological communication; similar tools could be used to organize parents and others to advocate for changes in public education, he said. “This is not easy for the government to do,” he said. “We’re missing the boat if we don’t try to do this with education.”
- In foreign aid, Mr. Obama has pledged to double the budget for overseas assistance and set up new programs, such as one to educate women and girls worldwide. According to Arabella’s speakers, philanthropy should give to small charities on the ground in African villages and elsewhere. Often, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies overlook these groups, said Ruth Levine, vice president for programs at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington. “They’re the equivalent of biotech start-ups” doing innovative work, she said. Other experts suggested that donors should invest in small and mid-sized businesses in impoverished countries to create jobs, support programs that train women to be political leaders, and in nations where there are honest elected officials, work with state-controlled ministries instead of independent nonprofit groups.
- On environmental issues, the experts said an Obama administration is likely to propose efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, make the country more energy efficient, and support the development of alternative energy sources. Tom Steinbach, environment program director at the Hewlett Foundation, said Hewlett saw opportunities to connect environmental work with economic recovery plans. Others encouraged donors to try and make impoverished neighborhoods more energy efficient, which would fight climate change and produce a costs savings for low-income families.
- To fight poverty, the new president has proposed expanding the earned income tax credit, unemployment insurance, and support effective charitable programs. John E. Morton, managing director of the Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia, said now is the time for foundations to “think boldly” about antipoverty programs that may pay off three to five years from today. Under an Obama administration, he suggested philanthropies should influence federal policies to assist the poor. Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in Washington, agreed, but encouraged donors to focus their advocacy efforts on state capitals. According to the center, in the next 2.5 years, states will be facing $200-billion to $250-billion in budget deficits, which could lead to big cuts in antipoverty programs at the state-level, he said.
Despite the expectations that Mr. Obama will make big moves in each of these areas, the experts admitted that the financial crisis will limit his ability to do as much as he promised during the campaign.
What’s more, several of them cautioned that despite the election of Mr. Obama, charity advocacy efforts need to continue
Jane Wales, president of the Global Philanthropy Forum, in San Francisco, warned that when Bill Clinton was elected president, foundations cut grant making for nuclear nonproliferation efforts believing — incorrectly — that the Clinton administration would handle the issue. Mr. Steinbach, of the Hewlett Foundation, echoed her comment: “We’re not in a situation that’s mission accomplished,” he said.
On its Web site, Arabella offers free audio files of the five sessions.
Read The Chronicle’s articles about Mr. Obama’s policies for the nonprofit world.
November 13, 2008
Think Tanks Propose White House Office of Social Entrepreneurship
President-elect Barack Obama should create a White House office to highlight the important role social entrepreneurs and nonprofit groups play in solving the country’s social problems, according to two liberal think tanks that released proposals this week for reorganizing the federal government.
The Center for American Progress Action Fund, in Washington, and the New Democracy Fund, in New York, proposed that the Obama administration create a White House Office of Social Entrepreneurship. The office, it said, would “give social entrepreneurs and other nonprofit leaders a greater voice in the public policy debates of the day by being part of the White House domestic and economic policymaking processes.”
The proposal, written by Michele Jolin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, was included in “Change for America: a Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President.”
While the recommendations carry no official weight, they are considered influential because John Podesta, who heads the Center for American Progress, is co-chair of Mr. Obama’s transition team (he is on a leave of absence from the center).Mr. Obama proposed creating a Social Entrepreneurship Agency while he was on the campaign trail, but he envisaged it residing in the Corporation for National and Community Service, rather than in the White House.
The think tanks’ proposal said the White House Office of Social Entrepreneurship should ensure that all relevant federal agencies spend money to help successful social projects expand. It should also create an “Impact Fund” at the Corporation for National and Community Service to help nonprofit groups collect data and better evaluate their success, it said.
It also suggested that the office:
- Create an annual multimillion-dollar prize for the most creative, high-impact solution to a defined social problem. It could also make “smaller, daily efforts” to boost innovative nonprofit groups, for example by creating a weekly “Changemakers” award.
- Explore changes to the tax code that would reward partnerships between nonprofit groups and businesses, and encourage charitable giving that would help successful nonprofit groups grow.
- Work with the U.S Agency for International Development to create an Innovation Investment Fund to support new approaches to global development, such as the Acumen Fund, which provides money to entrepreneurial anti-poverty projects.
- Coordinate with the Commission on Cross-Sector Solutions to America’s Problems, a new entity that has been proposed by the Serve America Act, a bill to expand the country’s national-service programs. The 21-member commission would suggest ways the federal government can help nonprofit groups work more effectively.
(Learn more about what nonprofit groups think about a new agency to spur charitable activity and what philanthropy executives from around the country hope Mr. Obama will do when he takes office.)
November 10, 2008
Obama Expected to Overturn Restrictions on Family-Planning Groups
Many international charities are optimistic that President-elect Barack Obama will overturn the so-called global gag rule, which prevents government money from supporting family-planning groups that counsel women overseas about the availability of abortion.
An informal group of nonprofit organizations is working with Senator Obama’s transition team to repeal the rule, which was first implemented by President Reagan and later reinstated by President George W. Bush when he took office in January 2001.
“We’re confident that President-elect Obama recognizes that this is a destructive policy and is having a horrible impact on women’s health,” said Tod Preston, vice president of U.S. government relations for Population Action International, an advocacy group in Washington. “It’s not reducing abortion; if anything, it’s increasing the number of abortions and unintended pregnancies.”
Charities are also pushing Senator Obama to restore money for the U.N. Population Fund, which the Bush administration has withheld over disagreements surrounding the agency’s work in China.
Nonprofit officials say the so-called global gag rule, also known as the Mexico City Policy, has not only cut down on money, forcing clinics in places such as South Africa to close, but also reduced the supply of donated contraceptives.
Marshall Stowell, a spokesman for Population Services International, a Washington organization that provides health and family-planning services abroad, said that if the restrictions were overturned, his charity could expand its programs and forge ties with more grassroots groups and clinics in developing countries.
— Caroline Preston
Discussions About Philanthropy and the Obama Administration
Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors, a donor-consulting company, is holding teleconferences this week to educate philanthropists about how the incoming Obama administration will affect grant making.
The company will examine five topics: health, poverty, the environment, education, and global development. The first session is today.
There is no charge for joining the teleconferences.
November 06, 2008
Foundations Get Help Vetting Foreign Grantees
The Council on Foundations announced today that a San Francisco nonprofit group has been picked to help private foundations in the United States ensure that recipients of grants to foreign charitable groups meet U.S. antiterrorism standards.
TechSoup Global, in the Bay City, is planning to become a repository of information about international groups, noting their purposes and activities, financial data, and copies of relevant foreign laws governing the organization.
Such information is necessary under Internal Revenue Service rules for U.S. groups that distribute grants to foreign organizations. Under the law, each group seeking to award a grant to a foreign group must get approval before doing so. The repository will help foundations by storing the documents, making it easier to navigate the approval process.
The council has been working on the repository project since 2007 with help from the Foundation Center, Independent Sector, and InterAction. The council is entering into a multi-year contract with TechSoup to build the repository.
—Eric Kelderman
November 05, 2008
Charities Benefit in Ballot-Measure Votes on Election Day
Charitable organizations that rely on state aid got a lift from Tuesday’s election as voters rejected measures that could have led to major cutbacks.
While the tax proposals on several state ballots were not aimed specifically at nonprofit organizations, the reductions in state revenue they would have prompted could have harmed charities that receive state and local grants and contracts to run arts, education, social-services, and other programs.
Among the proposals that were under consideration this week:
- Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly defeated a measure to eliminate the state’s personal income tax, a proposal that could have reduced the state’s budget by an estimated 40 percent. Michael Weekes, president of the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers, said the tax cut would have slashed nearly $2.6-billion from nonprofit social services.
- North Dakota residents rejected a ballot measure to cut the state’s personal income tax in half and reduce the corporate income tax by 15 percent[—]cuts that would have reduced state revenue by an estimated 17 percent. North Dakota residents also turned down a measure that would have placed some tax money tied to oil and natural-gas extraction in a trust fund, a move that would have reduced state general-fund revenue by as much as $125-million.
- Oregon voters turned down a measure that would have allowed residents to deduct federal taxes from their state income-tax returns, trimming the state’s budget by about $1-billion.
Oregon residents also voted on a measure to bar automatic deductions from the paychecks of government employees. The measure was meant, in part, to prevent labor unions from collecting dues and using them for political purposes.
Nonprofit groups generally opposed the effort, fearing that donations to charities from government employees also could be prohibited. The measure passed by a very narrow margin. Oregon voters defeated three similar measures in recent years.
Minnesota voters, meanwhile, approved a constitutional amendment to raise the state sales tax by three-eighths of 1 percent for 25 years. The new money will pay for projects to protect wildlife habitats, clean up lakes and rivers, and promote the arts and cultural heritage. Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, an arts advocacy group, said the measure would raise about $58-million a year for arts and historical groups.
— Eric Kelderman and Suzanne Perry
Nonprofit Leaders Considered for Obama Cabinet
A number of high-profile supporters of President-elect Barack Obama are being floated as possible candidates for spots in his Cabinet, according to Obama advisers who spoke to Politico.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer for a nonprofit environmental group and the son and namesake of the late New York Democratic senator and U.S. attorney general, is being strongly considered for leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency in an Obama administration, according to Politico.
Democratic officials told Politico that President-elect Barack Obama is considering Mr. Kennedy, an environmental activist and lawyer who represents Riverkeeper, an environmental watchdog organization that protects the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. Mr. Kennedy, who has also worked as an assistant district attorney in New York, has long championed the cause of a clean-water supply for that city.
Among other names under consideration for Cabinet jobs: Retired Gen. Colin L. Powell is being considered for secretary of defense or education, the advisers told Politico. Mr. Powell founded the charity America’s Promise, which seeks to aid children.
What people from the nonprofit world do you think Mr. Obama should tap? Add your thoughts by clicking on the comment link below.
November 03, 2008
High-Tech Election Monitoring
Twitter Vote Report an all-volunteer effort, is giving voters a high-tech way to report on their experiences at the polls this election season.
Voters can report inaccurate voter rolls, broken machines, and long lines via Twitter, an online service that lets people send very short, frequent messages to one another, by sending a text message, or even using a touch-tone phone. Twitter Vote Report aggregates the information to create maps that show where there are problems.
“Imagine a nationwide Web map with pins identifying every zip code where Americans are waiting over 30 minutes to vote or indicating those election districts where the voting machines are not working,” the effort’s founders write on the Twitter Vote Report Web site. “Collectively we will inform each other when the lines are too long and ensure that media and watchdog groups know where problems exist.”
— Nicole Wallace