Philanthropy Today - Philanthropy.com

These are items on other Web sites that are of interest to the nonprofit world. The Chronicle has no control over their content or availability. To reach the Philanthropy Today staff, send an e-mail message to daily.news@philanthropy.com

Compiled by Noelle Barton, Caroline Bermudez, Maria Di Mento, Audrey Hill, Anne W. Howard, and Candie Jones.

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April 2008

April 30, 2008

Montana Court Says Museum Board Failed in Duties

The board of the Charles M. Bair Family Museum, in Martinsdale, Mont., which closed the facility in 2002, is being ordered by the state Supreme Court to reconvene within six months after a ruling in which the court found the board breached its fiduciary duties by closing the museum, reports The New York Times.

In a case that the Times says has been followed closely in the nonprofit world, the court said the board did not spend enough money to establish and maintain the museum. As a result of the court’s ruling, the museum’s trustee, U.S. Bank, was ordered to create a new board, the paper reports.

The museum was established after the death of Alberta M. Bair, the heiress to a family fortune her father had built through his work in minerals, finance, and sheep. It was home to European antiques, works of art, and Native American artifacts, the paper reports.

“It’s great news,” said Mike McGrath, Montana’s attorney general. “The Montana Supreme Court said the board does not have unfettered discretion.”

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Aid Groups Help Create Prosperity in Sudanese Town

The influx of United Nations agencies and private charities into the North Darfur capital of El Fasher in the past several years has created a boom for the town in ways most of the region is not experiencing, reports the Los Angeles Times.

El Fasher has new office buildings under construction, new rental homes costing as much as $5,000 a month, and paved streets instead of the former sand roads, the paper reports. Its population has nearly doubled since 2003 as the city has attracted refugees from the humanitarian crisis in Darfur as well as aid workers who have made the town their base for operations.

“People are beginning to think in a more business-minded way,” Adam Ahmed Sliman, an economics analyst in El Fasher, tells the Times. “And for the first time, really, there is an opportunity for people to make some money rather than just getting by day to day.”

But while the “aid boom” seems to be benefiting most corners of the town’s population, some observers wonder what the long-term prospects are for the town, especially after the crisis in Darfur ends.

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Charities Ask Taxpayers to Donate Rebates

Some charities see an opportunity this week with the government’s mailing of rebate checks to taxpayers and are planning to ask people to donate of some or all of those rebates, reports The New York Times.

Among these groups is the VFW National Home for Children, in Eaton Rapids, Mich., which is sending postcards to ask people to donate part of their rebates, the Times reports.

“For us, a few hundred thousand dollars raised this way would be extremely helpful,” said Tim Smith, the organization’s development director. “It’s too big an opportunity to ignore.”

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Global Food Crisis Presents Mounting Challenges for Aid Groups

The sudden increase in food prices around the world is challenging aid groups, which have had to reduce the number of people they feed, reports The Seattle Times.

While donations to charities such as Mercy Corps and World Vision remain steady, higher food prices have meant fewer people can be helped. Among the causes of the higher food prices are higher fuel prices, more corn being grown for fuel, more demand for grains and meat in China and India, and droughts in Australia and Russia, the paper reports.

“What’s surprising is how severe it’s become all at once,” Penelope Anderson, director of food security for Mercy Corps, tells the Times. “The level of need and the quickness with which it’s arisen has kind of swamped us.”

Ms. Anderson says the food crisis has affected other programs as well. “You can’t talk to someone about economic-development programs when suddenly their family is hungry,” she says.

For more on how the global food crisis is affecting charities and their work, see articles in the International Herald Tribune and The Sun, in Baltimore. Also see the Chronicle’s coverage of the issue.

(Free registration is required to view the Sun article, and a paid subscription or short-term pass is required to view the Chronicle article.).

Wall Street's Woes Hit Charities

New York charities, long dependent on steady donations from New Yorkers who earn big salaries on Wall Street, are starting to feel the strain of the uncertain economic times, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The collapse of Bear Stearns, for example, is causing the charity Citymeals-on-Wheels to look elsewhere for the half million dollars in support it counted on last year from Bear Stearns employees, the paper reports. At the same time, the demand for assistance from such charities is on the rise.

Michael Nilsen, spokesman for the Association of Fundraising Professionals, tells the Times it is too early to know exactly how the economic downturn will affect donations. “There’s definitely a sense, particularly in the first quarter of this year, that [fundraising] is going to be challenging,” he says.

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From The Chronicle: Charity Auctions Losing Steam?

Bob Levey writes in a fund-raising column in The Chronicle of Philanthropy that he revels in being an auctioneer but believes charity auctions are starting to fade as big money makers.

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Correction: Naming Gifts

Yesterday’s Philanthropy Today linked to a Financial Times article about gifts to business schools that misstated the title of Angel Cabrera. He is president of Thunderbird School of Global Management.

April 29, 2008

National Civil-Liberties Group Takes Over Its South Carolina Affiliate

For the first time in its history, the American Civil Liberties Union has voted to take over one of its state affiliates, reports The New York Times.

The organization voted to take over management of the South Carolina affiliate, which has been plagued by poor management. Its last executive director stole money; it has relied on the financial support of the national organization; and its board is marked by tension.

Some people allege that other ACLU affiliates are also in bad shape but that the South Carolina branch is being unfairly singled out for its criticism of the national organization.

The branch’s representative on the national board, David F. Kennison, fought with Anthony D. Romero, the national organization’s executive director. Furthermore, it was the only affiliate that attached its name to a Web site that is highly critical of the national ACLU, based in New York.

Robert B. Remar, vice president of the ACLU and a lawyer in Atlanta, defended the national group’s decision to supervise the South Carolina affiliate. He said, “South Carolina as a state has a tremendous amount of civil-liberties challenges, and our goal is to make sure there is a strong and viable affiliate to deal with those issues.”

Neil Caesar, president of the South Carolina affiliate’s board, said, “I believe this will truly be harmful to the ACLU and how it is perceived in the state by both our friends and our enemies.”

Previously, two other local affiliates in Texas and Mississippi have agreed to voluntary control by the national ACLU.

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Volunteer Opportunities Help Companies Attract Young Workers

More companies are offering employees the option to volunteer for charity while receiving a company salary, as a way to build employees’ skills and attract young workers, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Instead of encouraging employees to volunteer to do basic tasks – like feeding the homeless or cleaning up parks – many companies are now lending their employees to nonprofit organizations with the condition that the charities find ways to use the professional skills of the employee volunteers.

After these volunteer work assignments, employees “come back with more substantial leadership skills and a better strategic sense of how to navigate in different types of environments,” says Robert Mallett, a senior vice president at Pfizer, in New York, and president of the pharmaceutical giant’s corporate foundation.

Many young employees say that corporate volunteer programs can be a crucial selling point for a job. A 2006 survey of adolescents and young adults by Cone, a marketing company in Boston, found that 79 percent want their employers to demonstrate a commitment to society. Major companies, looking to the retirement of the baby-boom generation, are using corporate volunteer programs as a way to respond to those needs and attract and keep young workers.

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Naming Gifts Attract Business-School Alumni

In the past several years, a number of alumni have made major donations to U.S. business schools — often with naming conditions, reports The Financial Times.

These gifts include an $85-million gift to the Wisconsin School of Business at Madison from a small group of alumni that required the school’s name to stay the same for at least 20 years; a $30-million gift to California State University’s business college, in Fullerton, in January; and $25-million to the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

“There’s much less resistance within university systems to having business schools named than with other schools,” says Carolyn Woo, the dean of the Mendoza College of Business, at the University of Notre Dame.

However, “not every gift is a good gift,” says Angel Cabrera, president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, in Glendale, Ariz., citing an example in which a gift offered to Thunderbird had so many conditions, it had to be turned down by the institution.

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Public Radio Seeks to Broaden Reach

Although public radio drew its largest audience last year, it is aggressively seeking to broaden the programs it offers in the hopes of drawing a larger and more diverse number of listeners, reports The New York Times.

On Monday, Public Radio International, supported by a $2-million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in Miami, introduced a new live morning program, “The Takeaway,” to serve as an alternative to National Public Radio’s popular “Morning Edition.”

Besides “The Takeaway,” public radio stations have started Web-radio hybrid programs, online searches for new and less conventional hosts, and other, more interactive features. When it comes to drawing new listeners, Tom Thomas, co-chief executive officer of the Station Resource Group, says, “Everything is on the table.”

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New York City Council's Charity Support Under Scrutiny

A New York City Council member supplied more than $400,000 in city money to a nonprofit organization with sloppy financial records that was run at times by his current or former employees, reports The New York Times.

The organization, Libre, did not file a tax return for the past two years, never registered as a charity with the state office, as required by law, and was headed in recent years by two women who had worked for the council member Hiram Monserrate as chief of staff and director of constituent services.

The Libre situation came to light as a result of a wide examination of the nonprofit organizations that the City Council supports, itself sparked by last month’s revelation that the council used the names of fictitious groups to stow money to spend later without undergoing a normal budget review. Now auditors from the city comptroller’s office, federal investigators, and lawyers at the city’s Department of Investigation are examining the millions of dollars in discretionary funds that council members have given to community groups.

At Libre, a group created to help immigrants and others in Queens, the current director, Rodolfo Herrera, calls the organization “a mess.”

Mr. Monserrate has said that he had no control of the organization and believed that it followed the law in accounting for its finances. However, his account of whether certain staff members worked for him and Libre concurrently differs from what the one tax return filed, from 2005, indicates.

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Rockefellers Want Exxon Mobil to Split Top Job

Members of the Rockefeller family want the chairman and chief executive positions at Exxon Mobil to be separated, reports The Dallas Morning News.

Family members heavily involved in foundations and nonprofit groups — including those founded with Rockefeller money — will hold a press conference on Wednesday to explain the motivations for the request, which comes in advance of a May 28 shareholder resolution to split the head position.

The Rockefellers, while no longer among the company’s top shareholders, founded Exxon’s predecessor, Standard Oil. Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, sponsored a resolution this year that asks Exxon’s board to examine the effects of climate change and consider developing sustainable technologies.

Exxon’s board has recommended that shareholders vote no on both resolutions.

Speaking at the press conference tomorrow, according to a press release distributed Monday, will be Ms. Goodwin, as well as Peter O’Neill, a Rockefeller heir and businessman active in many nonprofit organizations, and Stephen B. Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Transcript: The Future of Religious Causes

Read a transcript of our discussion today about trends affecting religious causes.

Government Regulation of Fund Raising: Share Your Views

“It is none of the government’s business to oversee fund raising for nonprofits,” says one commentator on The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Prospecting blog. “People need to be wise in making contributions. We really don’t need more “nanny state” involvement to protect us from something that people should take care of for themselves.”

“My gut reaction is to agree that the government has no business regulating charity efficiency,” says another. “But, since they ‘subsidize’ us in effect, through our tax-exempt status, they should have a say at the table. I think, however, they should set standards and expectations that would guide donors, not establish regulations that would box us in.”

Read the comments by those observers and by others —including a leader of the National Association of State Charity Officials — on our Prospecting blog. We hope you will join the debate on these important issues about regulation of fund raising.

From The Chronicle: Benefits of Company Volunteer Programs

Volunteering programs that use and hone skills are an effective and inexpensive professional-development tool, according to a national survey of human-resource managers, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. Yet few companies regularly integrate employee training needs into volunteer activities.

April 28, 2008

Some Nonprofit Hospitals Demand Payments Before Treating Patients

In an effort to reduce debt and costs associated with treating uninsured or poor people, some nonprofit hospitals are asking patients to make payments before they receive treatment, reports The Wall Street Journal.

In 2006, unpaid bills cost hospitals of all kinds a total of $31.2-billion, an increase from $21.6-billion in 2000.

Hospitals defend demanding upfront payments, saying the practice improves their finances and the quality of care they provide.

However, some say the practice is questionable for nonprofit hospitals since they receive tax-exempt status in part because they treat poor people. A study conducted by Ohio State University found that net income per bed nearly tripled at nonprofit hospitals to $146,273 in 2005 from $50,669 in 2000.

Uwe Reinhardt, a health-care economist at Princeton University, said nonprofit hospitals “shouldn’t behave this way.”

A 2006 survey by the Internal Revenue Service found that 14 percent of 481 nonprofit hospitals required patients to make payments before receiving treatment.

Charity Eavesdropping Case Leaves Defense Lawyers Worried About Privacy

Ever since the investigation of the Saudi charity al-Haramain Islamic Foundation on allegations that it supported terrorist activity, defense lawyers for clients who are suspected of terrorism have feared that they are under government surveillance, reports The New York Times.

In August 2004, the government mistakenly gave the charity’s defense lawyers a logbook of intercepted phone calls between the charity’s lawyers in Washington and clients in Saudi Arabia. This month, the charity’s lawyers went to federal court in Portland, Ore., to ask a judge to make sure that the confidentiality of communications between lawyers and clients are protected.

Sean M. Maher, a co-chairman of the national security committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said that the case of the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation compels defense lawyers not to take cases in which people are accused of terrorism for fear of having their privacy invaded. He said, “People just aren’t going to get involved in this process. I find it unfathomable that in our adversarial system, we’ve created a process to weed out qualified defense counsel.”

The Department of Justice does not deny that the government has monitored phone calls and e-mail messages between lawyers and their clients as part of terrorism investigations, but it says that such actions are legal and done prudently. Anthony J. Coppolino, a Justice Department lawyer, said to the federal judge in Portland, “We do conduct ourselves ethically and adhere to our responsibilities under the rules of ethics.”

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British Philanthropists Giving More

The very rich in Great Britain are giving more and more to causes in developing countries, reports The Times.

British philanthropists are backing projects such as supporting teachers in Rwanda and providing AIDS treatment in Mozambique. Such giving has led to a 97-percent increase over the past year in donations from the 30 most-generous donors among Britain’s 1,000 richest people.

Leading the charge is Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish sportswear tycoon who plans to give more than $1.5-billion of his fortune to charity.

Read The Chronicle’s profile of Mr. Hunter. Also see The Chronicle’s list of America’s top donors.

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Philanthropists Use Film to Promote Social Causes

“Filmanthropy” has led to the rising popularity of documentaries looking to promote social messages, the Financial Times reports.

That term is often used to describe wealthy philanthropists who give money to movies that call attention to social problems, based on the success of documentaries such An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, the newspaper reports.

Some critics say filmanthropy is not practical and that money should be given to efforts such as humanitarian aid.

Ted Leonsis, a technology entrepreneur, defended investing in movies, saying, “If you make a movie that’s a hit and has a celebrity attached to it, it focuses public opinion on your story and you get to use [the film] as a platform for additional funding.”

Perhaps the most successful and most prominent filmanthropist is Jeff Skoll, one of eBay’s early employees, whose Participant Productions supported Syriana and An Inconvenient Truth.

Venture Capitalist's Charity Focuses on Eye Research

The Foundation Fighting Blindness, started by the venture capitalist Gordon Gund, has raised more than $300-million for research and education on retinal disease, The Philadelphia Inquirer notes in a profile of the organization.

Mr. Gund founded the charity in 1971, shortly after he lost his sight at the age of 31. Mr. Gund is a former owner of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and the NHL’s San Jose Sharks.

Foundation Fighting Blindness provides financial support for research that is in the early stages — and unlikely to attract support from other organizations — and career-development awards for scientists working on eye research.

Mr. Gund says, “You get the more conventional funding later if the small enterprise is successful. There’s such a long distance between the lab and the trials and FDA approval. We need to de-risk those things.”

Online Discussion Tomorrow: Religious Charities

Join us on Tuesday at noon for a live online discussion about the future of religious charities. Taking your questions will be:

William O’Keefe, the senior director of advocacy for Catholic Relief Services, in Baltimore, an organization that receives federal money to provide overseas development aid.

Paul Lichterman, an associate professor of sociology and religion at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, and co-editor of the book Civic Life in American Religion.

Joshua Hale, executive director of the Big Shoulders Fund, in Chicago. The fund has raised more than $155-million to help defray tuition and operating costs for 93 of Chicago’s most-needy inner-city Catholic schools.

The discussion will start at noon, Eastern time, and is open to everyone, not just Chronicle subscribers.

People who ask questions in advance have a better chance of receiving answers during the online discussion.

From The Chronicle: Neighborhood Groups Lead New Orleans's Renewal

Neighborhood associations have been at the heart of recovery efforts in New Orleans, taking on new roles to fill needs created by Hurricane Katrina, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

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April 25, 2008

Lawsuit Against Smithsonian Executive Thrown Out

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a former custodian against a Smithsonian Business Ventures vice president, saying the Smithsonian official is protected by a law that insulates some federal employees from such lawsuits, reports The Washington Post.

Mary T. Majano sued to recover damages from injuries she said she sustained in an altercation with Jeanny Kim five years ago.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer determined that Ms. Majano had exaggerated the violence of the encounter but also said that “neither was the incident as tame as Ms. Kim would like to portray.”

Still the judge ruled that she could not determine whether the incident caused Ms. Majano to need surgery for a herniated disk. Ms. Majano’s lawyer, David Jones, said that Ms. Kim violated Smithsonian employment policies and is considering an appeal.

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Darfur Group Protests Olympic Sponsors

The activist group Dream for Darfur will organize protests against 16 companies sponsoring the Beijing Olympics for exhibiting what it calls “moral cowardice” and reluctance to pressure China, a major investor in Sudan, to help end conflict in Darfur, reports the Associated Press.

The group said it would urge viewers to turn off commercials during the Olympic Games in August and also plans to protest at the companies’ headquarters. The first demonstrations are to take place against Coca-Cola in Atlanta on Saturday and New York on Sunday and against Staples in Boston on Sunday.

In response, Coca-Cola called attention to its company’s charitable work in Sudan, including a $5-million donation to water projects. “We view this as a more direct — and more effective — route than Dream for Darfur’s public posturing,” the statement said.

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Opinion: Clinton Foundation Should Disclose Donors

Bill Clinton, who says he will maintain the anonymity of his foundation’s donors even if his wife gets elected President, should disclose their names to avoid the potential for political conflicts, writes The Wall Street Journal in an opinion piece.

Ms. Clinton says the foundation is not her business. However, donations to the Clinton Foundation increased significantly as she drew closer to a presidential run, rising to $135-million in 2006, 70 percent more than the year before. With this growing generosity to the foundation concern is also growing about whether these contributors have given their money with expectations of preferential treatment and influence over foreign and domestic decisions.

At the Clinton Global Initiative last year, Mr. Clinton said he believed he would “have extra responsibilities for transparency should Hillary get elected, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. He said he would consider naming future contributors to his charity but not people who had given in the past with the understanding that their gifts would be anonymous.

Government and Politics Watch

Among the highlights from The Chronicle’s Government and Politics Watch is a new effort by a powerful senator to enact tougher penalties on charities that don’t step up their efforts to improve their reporting on the Form 990 informational tax return.

Online Discussion Next Week: Religious Charities

Join us on Tuesday at noon for a live online discussion about the future of religious charities. Taking your questions will be:

William O’Keefe, the senior director of advocacy for Catholic Relief Services, in Baltimore, an organization that receives federal money to provide overseas development aid.

Paul Lichterman, an associate professor of sociology and religion at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, and co-editor of the book Civic Life in American Religion.

The discussion will start at noon, Eastern time, and is open to everyone, not just Chronicle subscribers.

People who ask questions in advance have a better chance of receiving answers during the online discussion.

Fund-Raising Regulation: Join the Debate

The debate over how best to ensure that charities aren’t overspending on fund-raising is growing more intense.

In recent days, a number of proposals have been floated:

A top official at the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday it will figure out how to use its authority to crack down on charities that are inefficient in their spending on fund raising and other expenses.

Members of the House of Representatives are considering asking charities that send direct-mail appeals to post data about how much money from a solicitation will end up benefiting a charitable cause.

A key member of the Senate has proposed that the Federal Trade Commission start regulating charities to determine if their fund-raising appeals are fraudulent — especially if too little money raised goes to the cause.

An executive at a prominent direct-mail company has drafted a legislative proposal to overhaul the way nonprofit groups disclose information about their fund-raising activities.

We want to hear what you think of all these efforts. Join the conversation on our Prospecting blog.

From The Chronicle: IRS Steps Up Efforts to Monitor Charity Efficiency

The Internal Revenue Service is stepping up efforts to ensure that the nation’s charities are not hoarding or wasting money, a top official of the agency told charities on Thursday.

Steven T. Miller, commissioner of the IRS’s tax-exempt and government-entities division, said the tax agency will be “more aggressive” in monitoring the “efficiency and effectiveness” of charitable organizations, even though such monitoring is not expressly within the agency’s jurisdiction, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

From The Chronicle: Fund-Raising Appeals

Lawmakers who want to discourage charities from spending too much money on fund raising are considering introducing legislation to require nonprofit groups to post information for donors to a Postal Service Web site, including the ratio of their fund-raising costs to program spending, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

From The Chronicle: $100-Million Gift to Harvard U.

David Rockefeller has pledged $100-million to Harvard University, his alma mater. The pledge is the third gift of that size that he has made in recent years, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

April 24, 2008

U.N. Warns of Food Crisis

Sharply rising food prices are sending millions of people deeper into poverty and creating a crisis that threatens economic and political stability around the world, reports The Washington Post.

A combination of factors — including skyrocketing fuel and fertilizer prices, droughts, increases in demand from third-world countries, and the use of crops for biofuels — has created a $755-million shortfall in the United Nations’ food-program budget, says Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program. She says that the price of a metric ton of rice in parts of Asia has risen from $460 to $1,000 in less than two months.

“This is the new face of hunger — the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are,” Ms. Sheeran says. “The world’s misery index is rising.”

The United States has pledged an additional $200-million and Britain another $60-million in emergency food aid. The food shortages have resulted in riots in Haiti, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, the Post writes.

Meanwhile, the Red Cross says that intense fighting in Iraq’s Sadr City has cut residents off from medical supplies, food, and water, reports CNN.

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Smoking Bans Mean Fewer Charity Bingo Players, Groups Say

Organizers of charity bingo games are complaining of declining revenue in states where smoking in businesses has been banned, reports The New York Times.

One manager of a bingo game estimates that smokers outnumber nonsmokers three to one; others insist they won’t be able to recruit new nonsmoking players. Groups in California, New Jersey, New York, and Washington State told the newspaper that smoking bans are taking a serious toll on their budgets and on the money they give away.

After Minnesota adopted a statewide ban on smoking in indoor workplaces, charity-gambling revenue dropped 13 percent in the last quarter of 2007 compared with the year before. “It’s had a profound effect on us here,” says Charlie Lindstrom, who manages bingo night at a Minnesota chapter of the American Legion. “We’ve sponsored several baseball teams here in the past, but we can’t give as much now because the smoking ban has really reduced our revenue.”

Legislators say that attendance will bounce back eventually.

“Whenever places have put in smoking bans, there is a six-month period where there is a drop in business in bars and restaurants, which is where this gambling takes place, and after that, it starts to rebound,” says Minnesota State Representative Thomas Huntley, a chief sponsor of Minnesota’s Freedom to Breathe Act.

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N.Y. Real-Estate Investor Makes Philanthropic Commitment to Baltimore

William Polk Carey, a New York real-estate magnate and member of an old philanthropic Baltimore family, says he will donate most of his fortune — potentially hundreds of millions of dollars — to his eponymous foundation, which has a focus on his Maryland hometown, reports The Sun, in Baltimore.

Mr. Carey, who is not married and has no children, would not tell The Sun how much money he has, but he owns about 30 percent of the W.P. Carey & Co. investment firm, which has a market value of about $1.2-billion. That could mean more than $350-million for the foundation.

The great-great-great grandson of a Quaker abolitionist who bought property for the city’s first African-American congregation, Mr. Carey, 77, has focused his philanthropy on education in Baltimore. In 2006, for example, he donated $50-million to establish a business school at the Johns Hopkins University. He has also given money to the Gilman School, the Calvert School, the Bryn Mawr School, the Baltimore School for the Arts, and the Maryland Historical Society, all in Baltimore.

“I’m proud of being from Baltimore,” he says. “It’s a great city full of wonderful people, and I just want to continue seeing it get better and stronger every day.”

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MIT Student Organizes Jewelry-Making Charity for Sri Lanka

A student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has turned her own jewelry-making pastime into a means of psychological and economic support for abused Sri Lankan girls and other needy people, founding “a nonprofit group called Emerge, reports The Boston Globe.

Alia Whitney-Johnson, on a tsunami-relief trip in Sri Lanka, visited a shelter for very young mothers — girls who had been raped, often by their own fathers.

“Working with the victims of the tsunami was very different,” says Ms. Whitney-Johnson. “They had lost their homes and material things, but people pulled together. Here there was no sense of community. No one talked to each other.”

Ms. Whitney-Johnson, who brought beads and other supplies to make jewelry, found that the girls responded positively to the activity, becoming more animated and gaining a feeling of greater control of their lives.

Now she aims to raise $500,000 for a women’s cooperative center and has opened bank accounts for the participants.

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Prospecting: Fund-Raising News and Tips

Prospecting is an online fund-raising column published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the recent topics discussed:

Debate over a new fund-raising disclosure plan

A drop in readership for charity e-mails

Turning patients into “guardian angel” donors

Government and Politics Watch

Among the highlights from The Chronicle’s Government and Politics Watch:

A look at John McCain’s proposed antipoverty efforts

A bill to give the Federal Trade Commission new power to regulate charities

From The Chronicle: Corporate Giving Up 7%

Corporations reported a 7 percent increase in their grant making in 2007, according to a new study by the Foundation Center, in New York, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

April 23, 2008

University to Pay Off Loans for Students Who Work in Public Service

Tufts University, in Medford, Mass., announced yesterday that it plans to help pay off the loans of its undergraduate and graduate students if they work for a nonprofit group or a public-sector employer, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The amount of loan reimbursement will depend on a student’s loan burdens and income levels. The new plan also applies to alumni in public-service jobs. Tufts officials said the program is the first of its kind in the country to promise this level of education-debt relief to all undergraduate and graduate students.

University officials told the newspaper that the initial $500,000 for the program will come from the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund, a $100-million donation the university received from Tufts graduates Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and his wife, Pamela.

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N.Y. Politician Funneled Government Money Into Charity Run by Wife

In yet another twist in the ongoing probe by New York’s Department of Investigation and the city’s U.S. attorney, a Brooklyn, N.Y., city councilman has been found to have funneled more than $180,000 of taxpayer money into a small nonprofit organization run by his wife, reports the New York Daily News.

The councilman, Erik Dilan, was the only sponsor of “discretionary” city funds for the North Brooklyn Community Council, a nonprofit organization that began as a youth football group but has expanded through the use of government money. Mr. Dilan’s wife, Jannitza Luna, has been executive director of the group since at least 2005, according to tax records the newspaper obtained.

While all city council members in Mr. Dilan’s borough are allowed a certain amount of discretionary money to use for pet projects in their districts, there is concern that Mr. Dilan’s use of the money was improper and constituted a conflict of interest.

Mr. Dilan told the newspaper that no one on the council objected when he disclosed the possible conflict, but the newspaper claims that a letter sent to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board does not clearly describe details of the arrangement.

Habitat for Humanity Beneficiary and Spokesman Murdered

A San Francisco man who was that city’s first homeowner through the Habitat for Humanity charitable housing program, and a proud spokesman for the nonprofit organization, was murdered near his home on Monday, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Ken Arthur, a 46-year-old father of three, overcame poverty after becoming the city’s first homeowner in the charitable program 12 years ago. He spoke last week to a crowd of more than 500 people at the San Francisco Habitat for Humanity’s annual fund-raising event about his success and invited everyone at the event to fly with him to Tennessee next month for his son’s college graduation, an occasion, family members say, Mr. Arthur spoke of with immense pride.

But his dream of seeing one of his sons graduate from college was not to be realized. At 12:30 a.m. on Monday, Mr. Arthur was found stabbed to death in the street, a few blocks from the Habitat home that he and his family helped refurbish and moved into in 1996.

The San Francisco police have made no arrests and say they have little to go on in the case.

Commission Allows Institution to Rename Flagship Building for Donor

The New York Landmarks Preservation Commission agreed yesterday to a controversial change to the name of the New York Public Library’s main building — permitting it to become the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, The New York Times reports.

The final move in a contentious battle, the commission’s unanimous vote yesterday overcame the last impediment to making the first substantive changes in a century to the facade of the building’s 42nd Street entrance.

The flagship building, a much-beloved New York landmark, is being renamed for Mr. Schwarzman, a Wall Street financier, who pledged to give the institution $100-million in March. The money will be used to support a $1-billion overhaul of the library system. Mr. Schwarzman serves on the library’s Board of Trustees.

Some opponents of the proposal worried that it could set a dangerous precedent. Others said that while they did not oppose honoring Mr. Schwarzman for his gift, they thought the library’s approach was excessive.

The newspaper could not reach Mr. Schwarzman, who spoke with The Chronicle of Philanthropy last month about his pledge to the library.

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Calif. Parents Seek Private Donations to Cover Public-Education Basics

As California’s schools face a $4.8-billion cut in government money and possible layoffs of as many as 20,000 teachers, librarians, nurses, and others, parent are setting up fund-raising groups to raise money for their children’s public schools, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Since 1978 public-school districts have had related charities to help parents give money for music classes and field trips. However, private donations are now being used to help cover education basics, the paper reports.

Janet Berry, president of the Davis Schools Foundation, says, “Public education is free, but an excellent public education is not free at this point.”

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Campaign 2008: Where the Candidates Stand on Nonprofit Issues

The Chronicle has compiled information about the contenders of the White House — and where they stand on the issues that matter to nonprofit causes — in a new section of its Web site. Readers are encouraged to send suggestions about additional information for this section to editor@philanthropy.com.

April 22, 2008

Arts Groups Feel Economic Woes

Arts institutions are starting to experience the effects of the ailing economy, reports the Associated Press.

Museums, symphony halls, dance companies, and other arts groups are feeling the impact of spiking interest rates on municipal bonds and low returns on investments. Plus many groups fear that the sagging economy will lead to a drop in ticket sales and donations.

“We’re being extra careful and conservative in our budget for next year,” said Christopher Clinton Conway of the Joffrey Ballet, in Chicago.

Texas State U. Cuts Ties with Donor

After a series of scandals at the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Foundation, Texas State University at San Marcos announced that it will cut ties with the donor, reports The Austin American-Statesman.

Texas State University has received more than $9-million since 1997 from the Mitte foundation.

The university’s decision comes as Michael Scott Mitte, the grant maker’s executive director and the son of its founders, faces charges of cocaine possession.

Mr. Mitte, who goes by his middle name, had previously settled four sexual-harassment cases brought by women who were either employees of the foundation or a subsidiary of the insurance company, Austin Insurer Financial Industries, which his father founded.

Additionally, Roy Mitte, now deceased, was fired by his company in 2002 after an audit revealed that he had channeled company money into the family foundation without permission.

“I think what we’ve witnessed is a steady degradation of the foundation’s integrity over the last several years,” said Mark Hendricks, a university spokesman.

The university will return an $800,000 endowment for an honors program to the foundation and plans to use its own money to finance scholarship students and faculty members currently supported through aid from the Mitte foundation.

Small Donations From N.Y. Governor Draw Scrutiny

New York Gov. David A. Paterson’s small charitable donations last year — just $150, according to his 2007 tax returns — are bringing his philanthropic activities unwanted attention, reports The New York Times.

Among statewide elected officials, the governor gave the smallest percentage of his income, which was $269,815 last year, to charity. However, in a radio interview on Monday, he said that his donations were actually greater than reported but that he did not disclose the sums to avoid journalistic scrutiny.

“I felt to go further into an explanation opened the door to a feeding frenzy that I thought I was the victim of in the last month,” Governor Paterson said, referring to a period in which he disclosed previous extramarital affairs and suggested budget cuts.

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What’s in a (Major Donor’s) Name?

The New York Public Library, replete with buildings and rooms named after major benefactors, is struggling to find balance between naming rights and cluttering the institutions with inscriptions, reports The New York Times.

“There are at least three families with six places of recognition within the building,” said Paul LeClerc, the library’s president, who called the institution “a billboard to philanthropy,” as he walked through its main branch.

However, a proposal to name a building in honor Stephen A. Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group, who announced a $100-million donation to the library in March, is generating opposition. A community-advisory group in New York recently voted against the most prominent proposed carving of Mr. Schwarzman’s name on pedestals flanking the library’s Fifth Avenue entrance, even as it approved other placements for his name.

Howard Mendes, chairman of the community group’s landmarks committee, called the proposal “excessive.”

The Landmarks Preservation Commission, which will make the final decision on this issue, is holding a public hearing today. Its decision could have an impact on fund raising: When the commission rejected the proposed name placement for the developer Samuel J. LeFrak on the Guggenheim Museum in the 1990s, his $10-million donation to the museum fell through.

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Transcript: The Changing Face of Donors

Read a transcript of our online discussion about how the changes in the nation’s demographics affect fund raising.

From The Chronicle: Rising Costs Plague Charities Providing Overseas Aid

Charities that work overseas have been battered by a spate of recent economic troubles, including rising food and oil prices and the weakening dollar, reports The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

From The Chronicle: Background Checks for Nonprofit Volunteers

Many social-service charities do not do nearly enough to screen volunteers, exposing the people they serve to potential victimization and the organizations themselves to liability, a new study has found, reports The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

April 21, 2008

Body Shop Founder Gave Entire Fortune to Charity

Dame Anita Roddick, founder of the cosmetics retail chain the Body Shop, gave away her entire fortune, about $101-million, to charity, reports The Daily Telegraph.

Ms. Roddick believed that leaving money to family was “obscene” and wished to give her money to support environmental causes and issues in developing countries.

Ms. Roddick died of a brain hemorrhage last year.

Controversial Prize Divides Animal-Rights Group

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has announced plans to support a $1-million prize for anyone who can mass produce tissue cultures that can be eaten like meat, but the prize has created divisions within the organization, reports The New York Times.

The prize is for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

However, some staff members of the animal-rights group say that the organization shouldn’t promote the consumption of animal tissue, even if no animals are killed. The disagreement has caused a “near civil war” within the group, the organization’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk, told the newspaper. Lisa Lange, a vice president at the organization, says, “I remember saying I would be much more comfortable promoting eating roadkill.”

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Web Site Encourages Gambling for Charity

A Web site is drawing gamblers looking not to win money but to donate to charity, reports the Financial Times.

Bet2give invites people to bet money by predicting the results of an event, such as who will win the Democratic presidential nomination. The winning bets go to whatever charitable organizations the winners choose.

The Web site has drawn 400 traders and donated about $1,000 to charities. Traders open accounts by purchasing play money and then deciding at what price to buy or sell shares that will pay $1 if an event happens and will be worth nothing if the event does not occur.

Emile Servan-Schreiber, a cognitive scientist who co-founded NewsFutures, an online prediction market that started Bet2give, says, “We are trying to leverage the immense interest in betting to make it a force for good rather than a quick profit.”

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Web Sites Allow People to Donate Without Giving Money

Web sites that allow people to support charities by looking at advertising are becoming increasingly popular and effective, reports The Wall Street Journal.

SearchKindly.org is a site that features ads and a Google search engine. When users click on an ad or do a search, advertisers donate money to charity. The site has donated more than $10,000 since last year. Another searching site, GoodSearch.com, donates about one cent to charity for every search performed on the site.

These sites have been inspired by the success of TheHungerSite.com, which allows users to donate food by simply visiting and clicking a button. The site was created in 1999 and directs advertising revenue to hunger-relief groups such as America’s Second Harvest and Mercy Corps.

Gene Tempel, executive director of Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, says the number of sites is growing in part because of the bad economy. “When people are insecure about the future or have fewer resources,” he says, “they give less. You could see people trying to assist in more creative ways.”

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Ray Charles's Foundation Caught in Estate Tangle

A legal battle is being waged over the estate of Ray Charles, pitting the singer’s 12 children against the executive in charge of his foundation, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Charles left most of his assets to his charitable foundation, the Robinson Foundation for Hearing Disorders, but questions have been raised about who will control it.

The California attorney general’s office is investigating the foundation for being run solely by Joe Adams, without an independent board. On top of directing the foundation, Mr. Adams is head of Ray Charles Enterprises and trustee of the children’s trusts.

Mr. Adams declined to comment on the matter.

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At Boston Marathon, Competition Is Heavy for Charities

Competition to run in the Boston Marathon has significantly increased when it comes to raising money for charity, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Twenty-four charities have been given permission to enter runners in the marathon even if they wouldn’t qualify otherwise, as long as they pledge at least $3,000.

Charitable donations made through the marathon have increased by almost 50 percent to more than $10-million since 2004.

The competition to run for a charity is fierce. For example, the Children’s Hospital Trust received 470 applications, about double the 225 official running slots it has received for this year. Patty Heisler, a local runner, says getting one of the rare charity spots for Boston is “like applying for school.”

It can take a number of years for charities to apply and receive slots in the Boston Marathon. “It’s almost like writing a grant proposal,” says Nathalie Favre-Gilly, spokeswoman for Casa Myrna Vazquez, a charity that helps victims of domestic violence.

Online Discussion Tomorrow: the Changing Face of America's Donors

Join our online discussion about how the changes in the nation’s demographics affect fund-raising strategies.

The discussion will be held Tuesday, April 22, at noon, Eastern time, and is open to everyone, not just Chronicle subscribers.

John W. Jensen is a senior vice president and gift-planning consultant at the Sharpe Group, a fund-raising consulting firm, and James Chung, president of Reach Advisors in New York, will take questions and offer suggestions.

People who ask questions in advance have a better chance of receiving answers during the online discussion.

Prospecting: Fund-Raising News and Tips

Prospecting is an online fund-raising column published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the recent topics discussed:

Free video lessons for fund raisers

How to learn more about your donors

From the Chronicle: McCain's Charitable Giving

Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, has released his tax returns for the past two years, including details about the money he donated to charitable causes, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. In 2007, he contributed 26 percent of his total income to charity.

From The Chronicle: The Losers in 'Oprah's Big Give'

The grand prizewinner was announced last night as Oprah’s Big Give concluded its first season, but the real loser was the nonprofit world. The show missed an opportunity to educate donors about what effective giving is all about, writes the leader of a Washington advocacy group in an opinion article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

April 18, 2008

From The Chronicle: Foundation Caught in Election Crossfire

The Woods Fund of Chicago has been thrust into the middle of the latest controversy in the heated Democratic primary battle between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, reports The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Aid Organizations Focus on Global Food Crisis

Aid organizations meeting in Kansas City, Mo., this week at the U.S. government’s annual conference on global food aid said that while increased money for food aid to hungry nations is desperately needed to tamp down the swelling global food crisis, long-term investments to improve agriculture productivity in the developing world are equally important, reports Reuters.

Crop producers, shipping companies, and aid groups warned that the rise in global food prices is hampering donations, and U.S. aid officials have said they might be forced to slash donations this year after their commodity costs jumped by more than 40 percent in the first half of fiscal 2008, adding approximately $200-million to the program’s cost.

Experts predict high prices to linger through 2009 before farmers worldwide can adjust supplies and major financiers of development efforts, such as World Bank, can put more money into agricultural projects.

High-Powered Financial Leaders Take Nonprofit Jobs

Finance executives who have left high-powered jobs to take posts at nonprofit organizations say they find their jobs more rewarding but acknowledge that they had to make both professional and personal adjustments, reports CFO.com.

“It’s a completely different mind-set,” says Usha Chaudhary, who after 20 years (and 80-hour workweeks) as a vice president of Freddie Mac, left her corporate post to become chief financial officer of United Way of America.

Ms. Chaudhary says she now works about 60 hours a week, but at this job, working hard isn’t a hardship.

“Maybe it’s psychological, but I don’t mind it as much,” said Ms. Chaudhary. “Even though the challenges and stresses are there, because of the type of work I do or the environment I’m dealing with, it doesn’t seem as stressful as it did at Freddie Mac.”

Former corporate financial officers used to their own administrative assistants say they now find themselves working on the front lines of a nonprofit group, making their own copies, answering their own phones, and generally working without the corporate luxuries they were used to.

“You have to be the type of person who will roll their sleeves up and not only help within the financial and accounting department but also be willing to help deliver the services that the nonprofit is delivering,” says David Seabrook, of College Summit, which helps low-income high-school students get a higher education.

Two Family Services Groups in Pennsylvania Merge

Officials at Pressley Ridge, a Pittsburgh charity that provides behavioral health care services to troubled youths, said Thursday that the organization will merge with another nonprofit group that offers similar services, the Pittsburgh Business Times reports.

Pressley Ridge will join with Family & Children Services of Central Pennsylvania, a Harrisburg organization that runs programs for children and families throughout the central part of the state.

The new organization will operate under the Pressley Ridge name and have 1,200 employees plus an annual operating budget of $70-million.

Used Dentures Raise Charitable Dollars in Japan

Old, stained dentures are being used to raise money for charity in Japan, reports the Associated Press.

The Japan Denture Recycle Association, in Tokyo, has recycled 30,000 dentures, generating $176,500 for charity, since the organization was established in 2006.

“Dentures use parts made of gold, silver, palladium, and other precious metals,” Mr. Miyoshi said, calling the recycled dentures “a treasure mountain” for the money they can raise for charity.

Mr. Miyoshi said his group donates half of the money raised to Unicef for needy children around the world, and the rest it gives to local government offices for welfare projects.

Government and Politics Watch

Among the highlights from The Chronicle’s Government and Politics Watch is an article about a new Senate bill to extend provisions that benefit charity.

Online Discussion Next Week: The Changing Face of America's Donors

Join our online discussion about how the changes in the nation’s demographics affect fund-raising strategies.

The discussion will be held Tuesday, April 22, at noon, Eastern time, and is open to everyone, not just Chronicle subscribers.

People who ask questions in advance have a better chance of receiving answers during the online discussion.

April 17, 2008

Dubai Charity to Donate $1-Billion to Improving Education

Dubai Cares has announced that it will give $1-billion to improve education in some of the world’s poorest countries, reports Agence France Presse.

The money will pay for new schools, renovations for existing schools, medical services, and drinking water. The group’s goal is to educate one million children.

Dubai Cares will work with the international charity Save the Children and plans to start its effort in Sudan. It will also give money for schools in Bangladesh, Bosnia, Chad, Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Maldives, Mauritania, Niger, Pakistan, occupied Palestinian territories, and Yemen as well as giving money to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan.

N.Y. City Council Aides Accused of Using Fake Charities to Embezzle Money

Two aides to a New York City Councilman face multiple charges for allegedly embezzling city money through nonexistent charities, reports The New York Times.

The case suggests “a lack of control and oversight of the millions of dollars the city appropriates annually to nonprofit groups through council-member earmarks, often referred to as pork-barrel spending,” the newspaper writes.

Asquith Reid, chief of staff for Councilman Kendall Stewart, oversaw the Donna Reid Memorial Education Fund, a charity whose mission is to provide tutoring and other services in the Flatbush neighborhood. The charity received approximately $356,000 from funds at Mr. Stewart’s discretion. About $14,000 went through two charities that existed in name only: the New York Foundation for Community Development and the American Association of Concerned Veterans.

Mr. Reid is accused of using at least $145,000 of the money for personal and political purposes, including $31,000 to send to relatives and friends to Jamaica. He faces up to 80 years in jail if convicted on all charges, which also include two counts of witness tampering. Joycinth Anderson, who worked part time in Mr. Stewart’s office on senior-citizen matters, is accused of aiding Mr. Reid and faces up to 40 years in prison.

A lawyer for Mr. Reid, Michael A. Marinaccio, said of his client, “He is a public servant. He runs a charitable organization, and that organization in turn provides a number of services to the community.”

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Couple Donates $25-Million to Washington Children's Hospital

A children’s hospital in Washington has received one of the biggest donations ever to an American pediatric hospital, reports The Washington Post. The hospital soon plans to announce a $500-million capital campaign.

Diana and Stephen Goldberg have given $25-million to the Children’s National Medical Center for diabetes and obesity research and to help recruit top doctors. The Goldbergs, who have devoted their philanthropy to medical research since their son was diagnosed with leukemia, gave $25-million to the hospital seven years ago.

Mr. Goldberg is a real-estate developer, and Mrs. Goldberg is a longtime volunteer at the hospital.

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Donors Who Fail to Pay Up Leave Charities in Thorny Spots

A donor who failed to pay on a pledge of roughly $1-million for a polar-bear exhibit at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo highlights the tough positions charities must navigate when donors do not follow through, reports the Chicago Tribune.

The zoo removed a plaque honoring Stuart Levine’s family for its contributions. Mr. Levine has testified about his drug use and admitted to taking kickbacks in the corruption trial against the real-estate developer Tony Rezko. The zoo stated that its decision to remove the plaque was not related to the trial.

However, such situations can attract negative publicity for a nonprofit organization, even though the charity is not at fault. Charities must weight whether going to court to recover the money is worth the bad public-relations risk.

Jack Siegel, a Chicago lawyer who runs Charity Governance Consulting, recommends that charities conduct credit checks on donors; include in a donation contract provisions for taking away naming rights should a donor renege on a gift; delay construction of a building named after a donor until 30 percent of the pledge has been paid; and insist that a donor’s spouse sign all gift agreements.

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Prospecting: Fund-Raising News and Tips

Prospecting is an online fund-raising column published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the recent topics discussed:

Why celebrities don’t make a big difference in fund raising

The trouble with percentage payments

Measuring the impact of increased spending on fund raising

Recovering from a fund-raising scandal

Give and Take, a Roundup of Nonprofit Blogs

Give and Take is a service of The Chronicle of Philanthropy that rounds up the best postings that appear on blogs about the nonprofit world.

Among the most-recent postings:

The importance of a catchy charity tagline

A new way to deal with nonprofit salary caps

You can also read previous postings on issues about philanthropic giving, fund raising, and management of nonprofit organizations.

Give and Take is updated regularly throughout the day.

From The Chronicle: Barack Obama's 2007 Donations

Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, and his wife, Michelle Obama, have released their tax return for last year showing that they donated 5.7 percent of their income to charitable causes, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

From The Chronicle: $100-Million Corporate Pledge

The AT&T Foundation, in San Antonio, plans to announce a $100-million grant-making program that seeks to keep students in school and prepare them for college or a career, reports The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

April 16, 2008

NYU Medical Center Gets $100-Million From Home Depot Founder

Kenneth G. Langone, a financier and a founder of Home Depot, and his wife, Elaine, have donated an unrestricted gift of $100-million to New York University Medical Center — their second gift of this size to the institution, which received $100-million from the Langones anonymously in 1999, reports The New York Times.

The donation will be used to begin a $1-billion capital campaign for a new hospital pavilion. Mr. Langone is chairman of the medical center’s board, and Mrs. Langone had a hip-replacement operation there five weeks ago.

The medical center said it has raised an additional $50-million from other donors: $45-million from Stanley F. and Fiona Druckenmiller and $5-million from Walter and Marjorie Buckley.

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Couple Donates 50 Artworks Each to Institution in Every State

Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, New York art collectors, have created a “Fifty Works for Fifty States” collection and will donate a total of 2,500 artworks to 50 arts institutions across the United States, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Ten recipients have been announced so far: the Delaware Art Museum, in Wilmington; the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles; the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Speed Art Museum, in Louisville, Ky.; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Harvard University Art Museums, in Cambridge, Mass.; the Montclair Art Museum, in New Jersey; the Blanton Museum of Art, at the University of Texas in Austin; and the Seattle Art Museum.

The Vogels began amassing their collection of contemporary art in the late 1960s; they lived on Mr. Vogel’s salary as a U.S. Postal Service employee and bought artworks with Ms. Vogel’s salary as a reference librarian, the Times reports.

Another 20 organizations will receive donations by the end of this year, and the Vogels will make donations to the final 20 institutions in 2009.

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Cindy McCain Pursues Philanthropic Travels

Cindy McCain, wife of Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, has been touring some of the world’s most destitute areas to help remove land mines, offer medical supplies, and raise awareness about poverty, reports The Chicago Tribune.

Ms. McCain recently visited Kosovo with the Halo Trust, an international organization that removes mines after wars have ended. She began her philanthropic efforts in Micronesia when she went with an injured friend to a hospital there.

“They opened the door to the OR where the supplies were, and there were two cats and a whole bunch of rats climbing out of the sterile supplies,” Ms. McCain says. “They had no X-ray machine. It was very rudimentary, and also they had no beds. To me, it was devastating because it was a [U.S.] trust territory. It was embarrassing.”

She sent back equipment and supplies to Micronesia and has since visited Kuwait, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Rwanda, and Vietnam, among other areas, to do humanitarian work.

The newspaper reports that the McCains donate about $200,000 a year. Ms. McCain is a board member with Halo, Operation Smile, and CARE.

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Oil Company Disputes Award Given to Ecuadorean Activists

The Chevron Corp. is protesting a prestigious award given to two Ecuadorean activists, Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and Luis Yanza, who are fighting the company to clean up oil contamination in Ecuador, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Goldman Environmental Prize, which carries an award of $150,000 apiece, is typically given to six environmental advocates each year. (Mr. Fajardo and Mr. Yanza won one of the six awards as a team.)

The Chevron Corp. is being sued in Ecuadorean court by a group organized by Mr. Fajardo and Mr. Yanza for an environmental problem in the Amazon that the company says it has already helped clean up. The company argues that the Goldman Foundation was “misled.”

“We tried to reach out to the Goldman Foundation when we heard they might be in consideration, but we were stiff-armed,” says a Chevron spokesman. “No one ever cared to hear our side of the story.”

Richard Goldman, who with his wife, Rhoda, created the prizes, told The Chronicle that Mr. Fajardo and Mr. Yanza were selected in a process that includes rigorous fact checking and research by environmental experts from various groups.

N.Y. Governor Deducts Just $150 in Charitable Gifts for 2007

New York Governor David A. Paterson and his wife, Michelle Paige Paterson, earned $269,815 last year but made just one gift to charity, $150 worth of items given to the Salvation Army, according to their tax return for 2007, reports The New York Times.

That equals 0.06 percent of the Patersons’ income. The newspaper cites Internal Revenue Service figures that estimate that the 2.5 million taxpayers who earned $200,000 to $500,000 in 2005 and deducted charitable contributions donated an average of $8,528.

The Times spoke with New Yorkers waiting at the post office to file their tax returns yesterday about the Patersons’ donation. “That’s the equivalent of, ‘Let them eat cake,’” said Alitha Martinez, a comic-book artist. “That’s not cool.”

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Gossip Influences Generosity, New Study Suggests

A new study at an Irish university suggests that gossip influences generosity, reports Reuters.

Researchers asked 72 college students to distribute tokens with a monetary value between themselves and another person, and half of the students were also told their decision would be discussed with a third person.

“Participants who were told that the receiver would be communicating their economic decision with the third party were significantly more generous in their allocations of the tokens than participants who were not led to believe that their decisions would be discussed,” wrote Jared Piazza and Jesse M. Beringa in the study they published.

Government and Politics Watch

Among the highlights from The Chronicle’s Government and Politics Watch is a prediction that advocacy groups will face increased scrutiny as they take on an expanded role this election cycle.

From The Chronicle: Ford Foundation President's Plans

The Ford Foundation is thought by many to be too staid and in need of change, but Luis A. Ubiñas, its new president, says he will hew to the grant maker’s traditions, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

(A paid subscription or temporary pass is required to view this article.)

April 15, 2008

Smithsonian Official Resigns After Ethical Violations

Pilar O’Leary, the head of the Smithsonian Latino Center, resigned in February after an internal investigation found that she had violated ethical and conflict-of-interest policies, according to records released Monday by the Smithsonian Institution, reports The Washington Post.

The report found that Ms. O’Leary violated 14 rules and ethics policies by misusing her expense account, attempting to direct a contract to a friend, and soliciting free tickets for fashion shows, concerts, and music-award ceremonies.

“The investigation revealed that O’Leary has not always acted in the best interest of the Smithsonian,” the report stated. “Her conducted has violated the basic ethical rules of the Institution.”

Ms. O’Leary denied any wrongdoing, saying in an e-mail message to The Post that the tickets were “not gifts” and that her travel had been approved by her supervisors.

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Demands From Donors Restrict Use of Endowments

Responses to a query by the Senate Finance Committee about endowment practices at the wealthiest colleges and universities show that, at some institutions, 80 percent or more of the endowment is constrained by donors’ wishes, raising questions about the degree to which such institutions are being limited by the interest of donors, reports The New York Times.

While many restrictions allow for broad usage of money donated to endowments, others make it difficult for institutions to keep up with changes in student interests and other demands placed on today’s universities.

“Institutions do get shaped by the interests of donors,” said Robert K. Durkee, vice president and secretary of Princeton University, which now offers a plethora of Greek-related studies thanks to a $2-million gift, stipulated for that purpose, received nearly three decades ago — an amount now worth $33-million because of the investment growth achieved by the university’s endowment.

Critics counter that although large portions of university endowments may be restricted, the wealthiest among them still could use more of their endowments to reduce tuition.

“It is simply false to claim that donor restrictions prevent increased spending,” said Lynne Munson, an adjunct research fellow at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. “Almost half of endowment funds at private institutions are unrestricted, as are nearly a quarter of endowment dollars at wealthy public institutions.”

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'Smart Volunteerism' Gains Popularity

Skills-based volunteering, also known as “smart volunteerism,” seeks to match volunteers’ professional expertise or experience with the needs of charitable organizations and is attracting growing attention in the business and nonprofit worlds, reports The Boston Globe.

This contemporary approach to volunteerism is proving doubly beneficial for charities and their supporters, providing volunteers with valuable job experience that makes them more marketable professionally and charities with assistance that strengthens them internally and helps their constituents.

See a Chronicle opinion article that discusses the merits of this approach to volunteerism.

(Free registration is required to view the Boston Globe article.)

Technology Innovation Reaps Social and Business Profits

A growing number of organizations — especially those rooted in technology — are blending social goals and profit-making efforts, reports The New York Times.

Groups like Mozilla Corporation, which maintains and develops the Firefox Web browser, and TechSoup, started two decades ago to connect technology experts with nonprofit organizations, are among the best-known examples of such efforts.

“We went through all these decades where we had nonprofits that thought business was evil and sustainability was irrelevant,” Debra Dunn, who advises many social entrepreneurs, tells the newspaper. “Now there has been an influx of business thought. People are saying, ‘I have enough money and I care.’”

See The Chronicle’s special report on business and charity.

(Free registration is required to view the Times article.)

Online Discussion: Foundations in Tough Economic Times

Read a transcript from today’s discussion about how foundations should navigate through challenging economic times.

From The Chronicle: Seeking Ways to Keep Young Workers in the Nonprofit Job Market

As nonprofit groups increasingly compete with business and government employers to attract young workers, many people in their 20s and 30s are pressing charities to improve salaries, offer greater opportunities for career development, and do more to promote the diversity of their work forces, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. At a meeting of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, people from around the country gathered to discuss how they could help solve the problems that prevent young people from joining nonprofit organizations and staying in the nonprofit world for a long time.

April 14, 2008

As Wall Street Falters, Charities Seek Donors Elsewhere

Charities that traditionally find financial support from Wall Street investors, corporations, and law firms in New York are adopting a cautious attitude in response to the economic downturn, reports The New York Times.

Those charities with strong ties to the hard-hit financial industry are particularly vulnerable and are now seeking new donors as well as applying pressure to long-term supporters.

While Manhattan philanthropy has been booming over the last decade, the outlook is now decidedly more gloomy across the board.

“Corporations are cutting back because they don’t know how the rest of the year will play out, and they are nervous,” said Stephanie Astic, who organizes fund-raising events in New York.

For a series of articles on dealing with the economy’s turmoil, see “Bracing for Tough Times,” a special report from The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Clinton Foundation's Ties to Chinese Company Come Under Scrutiny

Bill Clinton accepted a donation to his foundation from a Chinese Internet company accused of censorship, in lieu of his normal speaking fee for a presentation in 2005, reports the Los Angeles Times.

As his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, increasingly speaks out against China in regards to its treatment of Tibet, Mr. Clinton’s relationship with foreign donors is coming under greater scrutiny.

The William J. Clinton Foundation has come under criticism for its secrecy regarding foreign donors, the newspaper notes. The foundation, which has raised $500-million over the last 10 years, has accepted money from the Saudi royal family and the Middle East countries of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar, among others.

The foundation has refused to release a full list of donors and that has made international and philanthropic experts uneasy, the newspaper says, particularly as Mrs. Clinton has spoken of her husband serving as a roving international ambassador.

The Chinese donation “is a perfect example of why it’s critical for both Clintons to provide prompt and complete disclosure of all their sources of income, not just personal sources but also his foundation, “ Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, told the newspaper.

Foundation Provides $1.7-Million for a Study on Local News

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute have appointed a committee to examine how the changing news-media market is affecting people’s ability to obtain important information about the cities and towns where they live, reports the Associated Press.

With newspaper readership slipping, people using online news sources, and a number of news organizations cutting back their reporting staffs, the commission intends to examine the consequences on people’s ability to get local news to help them make informed decisions about their neighborhoods.

Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Miami-based Knight foundation, which is providing $1.7-million in grants for the roughly yearlong project, said the commission might recommend actions that the Federal Communications Commission could take or changes in the tax code that could have an impact on the changing news environment.

Environmental Prize Awarded to Seven Advocates Around the World

The Goldman Environmental Prize was awarded on Monday to seven advocates, including two Ecuadorean activists who have sought to pursue lawsuits against Texaco for oil contamination in the Amazon rain forest, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The Ecuadorean activists, Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and Luis Yanza, have alleged that Texaco, which later merged with the Chevron Corporation, created massive oil spills during the mid-1960s through 1990, while producing oil in partnership with the state-owned Petroecuador in the Ecuadorean jungle. Mr. Mendoza and Mr. Yanza contend that the oil companies’ activities caused an increase in cancer in the affected areas, as well as a polluted water supply.

The two activists will receive $150,000 each for organizing a half-dozen indigenous groups to protest the oil companies.

Chevron, while not disputing that oil pollution occurred during Texaco’s tenure in the region, said the company provided remedies that were overseen by the government and that released Texaco from legal liability.

The Goldman prize was founded in 1990 by the San Francisco insurance executive Richard Goldman and his wife, Rhoda Haas Goldman, an heiress to the Levi Strauss denim fortune. It rewards grass-roots environmental activism globally.

British Charities Urged to Improve Investment Returns

British charities should seek to improve the return on their investments by taking greater risks, according to a new report by the Institute of Philanthropy, reports the Financial Times, in London.

The British advisory service reviewed a sample of 60 charities with assets of $20-million or more and found that the organizations had achieved a median return of 8.7 percent.

The report recommended that the Charity Commission, the organization that regulates charities in Britain, change its guidelines to be less risk-averse and provide education about alternative assets.

Prospecting: Fund-Raising News and Tips

Prospecting is an online fund-raising column published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the latest items:

How to choose top-notch board members.

Fund-raising tips for trustees.

Online Discussion Tomorrow: Grant Making During Tough Times

Join our online discussion tomorrow about how the worsening economic slump is affecting grant makers’ decisions.

The discussion will be held at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern time, and is open to everyone, not just Chronicle subscribers.

The experts answering questions will be Jennifer Leonard, executive director of the Rochester Area Community Foundation, in Rochester, N.Y., and Joel J. Orosz, a professor of philanthropic studies at Grand Valley State University, in Grand Rapids, Mich.

People who ask questions in advance have a better chance of receiving answers during the online discussion.

From The Chronicle: Bush and Cheney Disclose 2007 Donations

President Bush and Vice President Cheney and their wives have released information about their contributions to charities last year, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. Mr. Bush and the first lady, Laura Bush, gave nearly 18 percent of their total income to charitable causes.

April 11, 2008

9/11 Memorial Reaches $350-Million Construction Goal

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center has raised the $350-million it sought to build a memorial and is now seeking $25-million more, reports The New York Times.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who chairs the memorial organization and has given at least $15-million to the project, announced that the memorial just passed the $350-million milestone this week, the newspaper reports. He also announced a new $25-million campaign to conduct programs at the memorial and build an endowment.

More than 60,000 people in each state and in 31 other countries have contributed to the campaign, the paper reports.

The memorial and museum are scheduled to open in 2011.

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'Idol' Charity Event Raises $225-Million

American Idol’s annual Idol Gives Back charity event raised $225-million for six charities this week, in large part due to a $200-million contribution from Britain, reports The Los Angeles Times.

The sum raised tops the $76-million raised in 2007 during the same event. Six charities will be the beneficiaries of this year’s donations: the Children’s Defense Fund, the Children’s Health Fund, the Global Fund, Make It Right, Malaria No More, and Save the Children’s U.S. programs, the Times reports.

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Mass. Agency Breaks With Anti-Defamation League Program

Citing the Anti-Defamation League’s failure to acknowledge the World War I-era Armenian genocide, the Massachusetts Municipal Association broke its ties with the league’s No Place for Hate program, reports The Boston Globe.

The association, a nonprofit organization that advocates for Massachusetts cities and towns, will no longer sponsor the league’s antibigotry program. The association took its stance after the Anti-Defamation League did not support legislation in Washington last year recognizing the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1918 as genocide, the paper reports.

“We think this is an issue on which there can be no equivocation,” Jonathan Hecht, a member of the Watertown city council and trustee of the municipal association, tells The Globe. “No Place For Hate is not credible as long as the ADL is unable to unequivocally recognize the genocide.”

The anti-defamation league said it did not think more towns would pull out of the program following the Watertown decision.

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Seattle Librarian Joins Gates Foundation

Deborah Jacobs, who oversaw the rebuilding of the Seattle Public Library system as the city librarian, will join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reports The Seattle Times.

Ms. Jacobs oversaw the renovation of all the city’s library branches and saw the library system’s budget nearly double to $47-million, the Times reports. The foundation supporting the public library also has built a $25-million endowment since she came on in 1997.

At Gates, Ms. Jacobs will be deputy director of the global-libraries program and will work to expand technology access at public libraries around the world, the newspaper reports. The program has awarded $118-million to programs in countries around the world.

Leader of Nonprofit Theater in New York Steps Down

The Public Theater’s executive director, Mara Manus, will step down at the end of her contract in August, reports The New York Times.

Ms. Manus, who was hired in 2002, is credited with ushering the New York theater out of a deficit and into secure financial growth, the paper reports. A former program officer for economic development at the Ford Foundation, Ms. Manus has no immediate plans to move on to another job.

Under her direction, the Public’s annual budget, donations, corporate support, and subscriber revenue all rose sharply. Ms. Manus hired a new artistic director and new board chairman and started a major renovation project, the Times reports.

“She oversaw a complete financial turnaround at the Public Theater,” Kenneth B. Lerer, the chairman emeritus of the board who hired Ms. Manus, tells the Times. “There was a time when I had to loan the theater money to do the payroll.”

The theater expects to begin a search for a new director in the coming weeks.

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From The Chronicle: Giving for Global Causes

While donors may be hesitant to support efforts that seek to end foreign conflicts and abuses because the problems are so vast, philanthropic solutions do exist, said speakers at the Global Philanthropy Forum, in Redwood, Calif., The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

From The Chronicle: Celebrity Philanthropy

NBC has announced that it plans a new television drama, The Philanthropist, about a “renegade billionaire” helping the needy. The Chronicle is conducting an online poll so you can vote on the actor or actress you think should play the starring role. We’ll announce the winner soon, so vote now.

Online Discussion Next Tuesday: Grant Making During Difficult Times

Join our online discussion about how the worsening economic slump is affecting grant makers’ decisions.

Our guests will be some of the nation’s top experts on foundations.

The discussion will be held Tuesday, April 15, at noon, Eastern time, and is open to everyone, not just Chronicle subscribers.

People who ask questions in advance have a better chance of receiving answers during the online discussion.

April 10, 2008

From The Chronicle: Winners of the MacArthur Charity Awards

Nonprofit groups that promote human rights in Russia, protect the environment in Madagascar, and improve public radio in the United States are among the winners of a foundation prize recognizing the contributions of small, adept organizations around the world, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

Scottish Multimillionaire Plans to Donate $400-Million Fortune

Duncan Bannatyne, a 59-year-old Scottish multimillionaire who made his fortune through nursing-home and health-club businesses, says he will endow a foundation with most of his fortune, worth about $400-million, reports The Scotsman.

“I am going to set up my own foundation to give away my money, and I hope other rich-listers will be encouraged to do the same,” Mr. Bannatyne says. “That will mean I’m not going to die the richest man in the graveyard.’‘

Mr. Bannatyne has made a documentary called “Britain’s Rich List: Giving It Away,” in which he meets with some of the richest people in the country to ask how much they are donating to charity.

“I believe that giving the money you make away is the best reason for making it in the first place, and that we rich in Britain don’t do enough yet,” he says.

Russian Security Agency Says Nonprofit Groups Help Terrorists

The director of the Russian security service has accused foreign nonprofit groups of helping terrorist organizations recruit new members in Russia, reports The Moscow Times.

“Emissaries of foreign terror and religious-extremist organizations, exploiting socio-economic problems and ethnic and religious differences, are trying to conduct recruiting efforts,” Nikolai Patrushev said in televised comments.

Another federal agency has reported that the number of nonprofit groups operating in Russia has fallen from 600,000 in 2002 to 227,577 in 2007, and some aid organizations said they expect that number to drop by another 15,000 to 20,000 this year. The Kremlin has cracked down on foreign groups, claiming the organizations are spying.

“We are already forecasting that a mass liquidation of NGO’s will occur this summer,” says Maria Konevskaya, director of the Resursny human-rights group in St. Petersburg.

Palestinian Billionaire Steps Into Philanthropy

Munib al Masri, a Palestinian billionaire, is becoming more active in the charitable sector, recently building a museum at his West Bank home and planning to remake his estate into a research center for foreign professors, reports National Public Radio.

Mr. Masri, who made his money in the oil industry overseas, was educated in the United States but moved back to the Palestinian territories in the 1990s. At his 70-acre estate, which includes olive groves and an Italian-style villa, he hopes to create an academic retreat to lure scholars to teach at Palestinian universities and discuss the “subjects we want to create a strong Palestinian state,” he says.

He plans to let the public visit a new museum at the estate, which is filled with mosaics and other relics of a fourth-century Byzantine church he uncovered while building his home. Mr. Masri has also founded a lobbying group, the Muntada Forum, to advocate reform and create discussion among Palestinian groups.

Number of Pets in Shelters Rises Due to Home Foreclosures

A growing number of pets at some animal shelters are left there because their owners are facing foreclosure or other economic troubles, reports The Washington Post.

“We get give-ups all the time, but typically it’s someone with allergies or a young animal with behavior issues,” says Kathy Dillon, operations coordinator at the Montgomery County Humane Society. “Now every week we’re seeing whole families come in to say good-bye to a longtime pet because they have to move. We’ve had a lot of children in tears.”

Several counties in the Washington metropolitan area have reported that as many as a third of the animals are brought to the shelter by people who were forced to move for economic reasons, the newspaper reports. Some families can no longer afford an older pet’s medical bills. Other cats and dogs have been found abandoned in foreclosed homes or simply set loose by the owners before they move.

“In some low-income areas, you’ll find one in about every 20 homes,” says Elizabeth Weintraub, a real-estate columnist for About.com, who recently wrote an article about real-estate agents finding pets left at homes. “You feel for the owners of these places, but the animals are suffering, too.”

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Hershey Trust's Leader Retires Early

The chief executive of the Hershey Trust Company, the group that manages an $8-billion charitable endowment, will retire early, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Robert C. Vowler, president and chief executive officer for 12 years, had planned to retire in April 2009 but says he is grateful the trust allowed him to retire early. The Hershey Trust manages the assets of the Milton S. Hershey School, which serves needy children in kindergarten through high school. Forty percent of the school’s endowment is in stock for the Hershey Company, the chocolate maker, and the Hershey Amusement Park.

Critics have said that the school is too vulnerable to the company’s recent market declines. Mr. Vowler tried unsuccessfully in 2002 and again in 2007 to negotiate a sale of the Hershey Company stock in to diversify the trust’s portfolio.

Vincent B. Rudisill, chief investment officer, will become executive of the trust.

Musician Gives $15-Million to Arts Institute

Eight-time Grammy winner Herb Alpert gave $15-million to the School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts, which will be renamed in his honor, reports the Los Angeles Times. The gift will endow three faculty chairs and provide money for student scholarships, as well as new and existing programs.

Mr. Alpert, a Los Angeles native, also pledged $30-million to the University of California, Los Angeles, in November to establish the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

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Prospecting: Fund-Raising News and Tips

Prospecting is an online fund-raising column published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the most-recent postings:

Fund-Raising psychology of “American Idol”

The real cost of turnover in the development office

Calculating what salary to seek in the next fund-raising job

Online Discussion Tuesday: Grant Making During Difficult Economic Times

Join our online discussion about how the worsening economic slump is affecting grant makers’ decisions.

Our guests will be some of the nation’s top experts on foundations.

The discussion will be held Tuesday, April 15, at noon, Eastern time, and is open to everyone, not just Chronicle subscribers.

People who ask questions in advance have a better chance of receiving answers during the online discussion.

April 09, 2008

Hospital Executives' Salaries Prompt Consideration of Pay Caps

In a sharp increase from just a few years ago, 14 top executives at nonprofit hospitals in Massachusetts earned $1-million-plus compensation packages, according to a review by the Boston Herald. The latest pay packages of Boston’s hospital executives — which include six-figure performance bonuses, retirement contributions, and expense accounts comparable to those of executives at for-profit corporations — has drawn criticism from citizens and businesses struggling with rising health-care premiums and benefit cuts.

“You can’t do God’s work on a banker’s salary. It just shouldn’t work that way,” said Mark Montigny, a state senator whose bill to cap pay at nonprofit groups is scheduled for a legislative hearing tomorrow. The bill would limit compensation to $500,000 at charities whose annual revenues exceed $1-billion.

Officials at the state’s nonprofit hospitals said they must provide competitive salaries to attract and retain the best executives, who could make millions more at private companies.

Homebuilder Delays Payment on $5-Million Gift

After making an initial “seven-figure” payment on his gift, John Wieland, an Atlanta homebuilder, said Monday that he has “put on hold” the remaining balance of a $5-million pledge made in 2006 to build a new ethics center at Emory University, reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Mr. Wieland would not say how much he still owed on the gift.

“The pledge included the possibility of recision in case something terrible happened in the homebuilding business, and, obviously, something terrible has happened in the homebuilding business,” said Mr. Wieland.

Ron Sauder, Emory’s vice president for communications, said the new building, which will no longer open with Mr. Wieland’s name on it, will be completed this summer on schedule. However, Mr. Wieland’s decision will cause other campus projects to be delayed.

New Google Mapping Effort Aids Humanitarian Workers

Google offered up a new feature starting Tuesday for its mapping programs that traces the movement of refugees around the world, reports the Associated Press.

According to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is working with Google on the project, the maps will assist humanitarian groups and help raise public awareness about the millions who have fled their homes due to violence or hardship.

Google is considering offering a stand-alone version of its mapping software for use by aid workers in remote areas who do not have Internet access and said it will also provide nonprofit groups in several countries with training and free copies of its mapping software.

Duke Endowment Gives $50-Million to Duke U. Medical Center

The Duke Endowment, in Charlotte, N.C., announced yesterday that it plans to give $50-million to the Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, N.C., the Triangle Business Journal reports.

Officials at Duke Hospital said they will use $35-million of the grant money to build an education center and $15-million for a new facility for the institution’s children’s health center.

The Duke Endowment is not part of Duke University, but the two have a long and interconnected history. James B. Duke, a tobacco mogul, created the Duke Endowment in 1924 with $40-million. He left another $67-million to the trust fund when he died in 1925.

A portion of the trust’s money was set aside for what was then called Trinity College, which was renamed Duke University.

Local Newspaper Reveals Names of Anonymous Donors

The names of two elderly siblings in Mount Pleasant, Wis., who donated $10-million anonymously to their town for a new municipal complex, have been revealed by the town’s local newspaper, much to the chagrin of the donors and most of the townspeople, the Associated Press reports.

The newspaper, the Racine Journal Times, learned the names after filing a request under the state public-records law. The newspaper’s editor said the anonymous gift made people wonder whether someone was attempting to influence or profit from the new complex.

The donors and Mike Andreasen, the town’s administrator, asked the paper not to publish the pair’s names. When it turned out that the donors were not giving the gift to bolster their own business interests, the newspaper decided to go ahead and publish their names anyway because they were disclosed on documents available to the public.

Government and Politics Watch

Among the highlights from The Chronicle’s Government and Politics Watch:

IRS officials takes Senate charity-watchdog role

Nonprofit group may remove Sen. McCain from board

Give and Take, a Roundup of Nonprofit Blogs

Give and Take is a service of The Chronicle of Philanthropy that rounds up the best postings that appear on blogs about the nonprofit world.

Among the most-recent postings is a little-known detail about the background of the new American Red Cross top executive.

You can also read previous postings on issues about philanthropic giving, fund raising, and management of nonprofit organizations.

Give and Take is updated regularly throughout the day.

From The Chronicle: Two Universities Share $272-Million Gift

Tufts and Lesley Universities are sharing a $272-million gift from trusts established by the late Frank C. Doble, a businessman and Tufts alumnus, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

April 08, 2008

Woodruff Foundation Awards $200-Million to Atlanta Hospital

The Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, in Atlanta, has been revealed as the source of a $200-million grant to the city’s Grady Memorial Hospital, reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The grant was a key factor during months of negotiations to transfer management of the hospital from the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority to the nonprofit Grady Memorial Hospital Corporation.

The donor had remained anonymous since last year, when the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce first recommended the management transfer and used the prospect of the donation as incentive.

The hospital has sunk into debt over the past decade because of rising health-care costs, decreasing government support, a lack of paying customers, and years of neglect, the newspaper said.

The hospital had accumulated $55-million worth of debt at the end of last fiscal year.

Food Banks Struggle to Keep Pace With Soaring Demand

In what is quickly becoming commonplace, a depressed economy and rising prices are forcing many families to turn to already struggling food banks for groceries, reports The Washington Post.

Requests for food assistance in the past year are up 30 percent throughout the nation, said Maura Daly, a lobbyist for America’s Second Harvest, a Chicago group that provides food to nearly 200 food banks. And nationwide, directors of food banks say their problems are multiplying, not only because of an increased need for food assistance, but also because of the increasing cost to provide it.

Officials at the Capital Area Food Bank, in Washington, which helps supply more than 700 hunger-relief agencies in and around the nation’s capital, say their organization’s annual electricity costs have risen 35 percent, to $135,000, in five years.

The increase in fuel prices is also a contributing factor. The Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, in Orlando, operates eight trucks that pick up and deliver food across the state. At $4 a gallon for diesel fuel, it costs $680 to fill up the tank of one tractor-trailer.

“I’ve been in food banking for 16 years, and outside of disaster-relief assistance, I’ve never seen anything like what’s going on,” said Dave Krepcho, executive director of the Florida group. “It’s the cost of gas, the cost of food, and there’s no such thing as affordable housing anymore.”

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Hawaii Nonprofit Groups Face Financial Strains

Charities in Hawaii face shrinking government support and dwindling private donations and grants from foundations, The Honolulu Advertiser reports.

As a result, some nonprofit groups in the Aloha state have started to consider cutbacks or hiring freezes. Aloha United Way, in Honolulu, laid off four people last month and cut the hours of its “211” telephone service, which links people in need with other charities.

Meanwhile, the Institute for Human Services, which runs two emergency shelters in Honolulu and provides other services to homeless people, plans to slash at least five vacant positions by training existing employees to do more than one job.

Leaders of nonprofit groups say recent news about big layoffs at Aloha Airlines and other companies in Hawaii will only serve to curtail giving as people worry more about the future and their economic well-being.

“Hawaii is still pretty much in denial. But it’s become more and more difficult to deny there’s a change” in the economy, said John Flanagan, the president of Hawaii Alliance of Nonprofit Organizations. “There has to be some forward thinking.”

Politician Is Convicted for Misuse of Charitable Funds

Thomas E. Wright, a Wilmington, N.C., member of that state’s House of Representatives, was convicted yesterday on three felony counts of obtaining property by false pretenses, thus ending a yearlong investigation into whether he took out a fraudulent bank loan and deposited charitable contributions into his own bank account, reports The News & Observer.

Mr. Wright received three consecutive sentences, which will send him to prison for at least five years and 10 months.

Mr. Wright, who is African-American, told jurors that he was targeted by political enemies who didn’t like it when he pushed to commemorate a race riot that took place in Wilmington in 1898.

Jurors convicted Mr. Wright of fraudulently taking out a $150,000 loan and pocketing $7,400 of charitable contributions meant for a Wilmington health-care foundation he led. Prosecutors said Mr. Wright urged a state health official to write a letter in 2002 about a nonexistent state grant that, prosecutors said, Mr. Wright then used to get the $150,000 loan.

Mr. Wright’s attorney, Doug Harris, said he plans to appeal the conviction.

Transcript: Discussion on Coping With Stress

Read yesterday’s transcript from our discussion about strategies for nonprofit employees coping with stress.

From The Chronicle: Red Cross Names New Chief Executive

The American Red Cross today named Gail J. McGovern, a former corporate executive and currently a Harvard Business School professor, as its new chief executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

From The Chronicle: New Form 990 Instructions From IRS

The Internal Revenue Service has posted the draft instructions for the new Form 990, the primary document that charities file each year with the government, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

From The Chronicle: Economy's Impact on Solicitations

The signs of an economic downturn continue as a new study shows that donations made in response to direct-marketing appeals are growing at a considerably slower rate than in past years, according to a new study reported on by The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

April 07, 2008

Pittsburgh Foundation Takes Huge Hit in Slumping Market

The finances of the McCune Foundation, in Pittsburgh, have plummeted by nearly $100-million since 2007 as a result of heavy investment in shaky bank stock, reports The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The foundation invests heavily in National City, a bank founded by its original benefactor, Charles L. McCune.

Since last year, National City stock has tumbled from $38.32 per share to $6.56 because of trouble in the mortgage market. The foundation’s holdings in National City dropped from $185-million to a low of $32-million before recovering to $48-million.

Other investments have buoyed the foundation’s endowment a little, but it still sank from $606-million last year to $515-million now.

The foundation has sought to diversity its stock portfolio, which at one point consisted of almost 30 percent National City stock. That stock now forms 11 percent, but the concentration in one stock is still much higher than at most foundations.

'American Idol' Raised $76-Million for Poverty Relief; Second Effort Will Be Broadcast This Week

The television show American Idol raised $76-million for charity last year and is planning on Wednesday to broadcast a second effort to raise money, notes The New York Times.

Most of the money raised last year has gone to organizations that fight poverty in the United States and Africa, the newspaper said, based on interviews with recipients of the money. The Charity Projects Entertainment Fund, which oversaw the distribution of the money, was not able to provide details because its financial statements were being audited, the newspaper said. A new group called Idol Gives Back, which is controlled by the producers of the program, will distribute the money raised through the program broadcast on Wednesday.

Last year’s “Idol Gives Back” broadcast collected $55-million from at-home viewers who called in, $14-million from corporations, and $7-million in matching grants from businesses and foundations.

Some $5-million of that money, or 7 percent, went to covering administrative costs. Of the rest, $68-million has been pledged to nine groups, which collectively received half that total last year and will receive the rest this year. Six groups will receive the money raised in 2008.

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New Civil-Rights Groups Replace Established Organizations

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the civil-rights groups he invigorated have seen a steep drop in membership, budgets, and prestige, The Washington Post reports.

Once-vital groups like the Congress of Racial Equality and the Rev. King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference are nearly bankrupt. (The former briefly had its power shut off.) Even the largest civil-rights group, the NAACP, has shrunk to 300,000 members, down from the 500,000 dues-paying members it long claimed.

The reasons for the decline are myriad. Many groups designed to serve black professionals have sprung up to replace the old-time groups. Organizations like the Black Panthers made traditional civil-rights groups seem timid. And most of the groups were slow to adopt innovative fund-raising techniques in the past few decades.

However, the biggest factor may have been civil-rights groups’ success. They long ago won their big battles, securing voting rights and desegregating schools. In addition, the marches and protests they pioneered have been adopted by newer groups, and the organizing and leadership roles of the original groups no longer seem as necessary to black Americans, the newspaper says.

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Fisk U. Asks Court to Reverse Decision About Donated Artworks

Fisk University, in Nashville, will appeal a judge’s order that it put on display the paintings it owns by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, reports the Associated Press.

Fisk received the collection of art in 1949 from Ms. O’Keeffe on the condition that the pieces not be sold and must always be displayed. However, the university put the 101 works in storage in 2005 because the museum that housed them was falling apart and officials feared damaging the work. Nevertheless, in March a local judge ordered them re-hung in the gallery.

The university also recently tried to sell the paintings to shore up its weak finances, but the attempt was denied by the courts. In addition, in a separate lawsuit, another party, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in New Mexico, has sued Fisk to gain control of the paintings. That museum is the legal representative of Ms. O’Keeffe’s estate.

Microfinance Becomes Big Business in Mexico

The success of microfinance in Mexico has led some experts to criticize entrepreneurs there for placing too high a premium on profits, reports The New York Times.

The article focuses on Compartamos, a business in Mexico that lends small amounts of money, sometimes as little as a few hundred dollars, to women and poor people to help them start businesses and escape slums. The worldwide microfinance movement has been very popular recently, and one of the founders of the movement won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

However, Compartamos is run like a big business. It went public last year and began to trade stock and has made profits of $80-million for investors. In the past year, investors have seen returns of 40 percent.

The company has low overhead, the newspaper notes, but many of its savings have not been passed on to loan customers, who still must pay interest rates of 25 to 45 percent.

Read a Chronicle report on microfinance and philanthropy.

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From The Chronicle: Charitable-Giving Figures Released by Bill and Hillary Clinton

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former president Bill Clinton made charitable contributions of $10.2-million from 2000 through 2007, or more than 9 percent of their total income, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. The information on the Clintons’ income and giving was released by Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.

April 04, 2008

Nonprofit Hospitals Face Increasing Pressure to Justify Tax Breaks

Nonprofit hospitals are under increasing pressure to justify the tax breaks they receive, The Wall Street Journal reports.

According to the American Hospital Directory, nonprofit hospitals make up the majority of hospitals in the United States.

While 77 percent of nonprofit hospitals have money left over from their annual operating expenses, only 61 percent of for-profit hospitals are operating in the black. The directory also reports that the combined net income of the 50 largest nonprofit hospitals increased nearly eightfold to $4.27-billion from 2001 to 2006.

Sen. Charles Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, believes that lawmakers should be asking questions about whether some wealthy nonprofit hospitals can justify their tax-exempt status. “Some nonprofit hospitals seem to forget that their operations are subsidized with generous tax breaks,” he says. “They allow their priorities to get out of whack.”

New standards adopted by the Internal Revenue Service, scheduled to take full effect in 2009, will require nonprofit hospitals to report to the public more details about what they do to serve their communities.

The newspaper examines Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, for example, which reported spending $20.8-million on care for the needy in 2006, less than 2 percent of its revenue and far less than what the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago nonprofit organization, estimates the group receives in tax breaks.

The hospital has also been under fire for what many consider to be excessive executive compensation and renovation projects. The hospital’s former chief executive officer, Gary Mecklenburg, received a $16.4-million payout in 2006, and the hospital recently completed a $1-billion building project.

Northwestern Memorial says it deserves tax-exempt status because of benefits it provides to society, especially because it finances research that is helping hospitals nationwide improve care.

But not everyone is persuaded, the newspaper reports.

“Nonprofit is a misnomer — it’s nontaxable,” says Edward Novak, president of Sacred Heart Hospital, a small for-profit institution in Chicago, where he receives less than $220,000 in compensation per year. “When you’re making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, how can you call yourself a not-for-profit?”

New York City Council Budgeted Millions of Dollars for Fake Community Groups

Christine C. Quinn, speaker of the New York City Council, announced on Thursday that the council has appropriated about $17.4-million to dozens of fake community groups since 2001, reports The New York Times

The newspaper says the money was budgeted for fictitious groups like the Coalition of Informed Individuals and Senior Citizens for Equality so that council members could spend money on real community programs they supported without obtaining mayoral approval.

The United States attorney’s office and the city’s Department of Investigation have inquiries under way, but Ms. Quinn said she believed that the money allocated to fictitious groups was ultimately spent on legitimate groups.

According to Ms. Quinn, who has been speaker since 2006, the practice took place during the tenures of the two previous speakers, Peter F. Vallone Sr. and Gifford Miller.

Mr. Vallone defended the practice. “If the money is used for necessary things to help the people of the city, like for police overtime, or like to fund six-day library service, if it’s used for that purpose, that’s great,” he said.

Ms. Quinn, however, said at a news conference on Thursday that “it’s something I believe is completely inappropriate and should not have gone on, and will no longer go on.”

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Museums Seek New Ways to Court Art Gifts

When the philanthropist Eli Broad announced this year that he would not donate his extensive contemporary art collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — where he is a board member and major donor — but would continue to use a lending-library model instead, museum directors and curators across the country panicked that more donors would follow suit, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“Museum directors are having some sleepless nights,” says Elizabeth Ellis, a principal at AEA Consulting, an arts consulting firm. “The rise of private museums is causing a lot of fear and anxiety.”

Collectors may be holding off on museum donations for several reasons, including a change in the tax law in 2006 that made such gifts less financially attractive. But other collectors fear that their works will be immediately sold as art prices skyrocket and museums seek quick profits, or that their works will not be on display due to lack of exhibition space.

Museum directors are not going down without a fight, however. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for example, is currently showing an exhibition titled “Collecting Collections” that displays about 250 objects from more than a dozen collections given to the museum over the years, as part of an effort to attract future donors.

While many museums also continue to put prominent art collectors on their boards as a way to encourage donations, others are undertaking more-aggressive campaigns to win donated artwork. Both the Dallas Museum of Art as well as the Seattle Art Museum have successfully courted several donors to donate large collections together.

Food Bank in Virginia Burglarized in Face of Rising Demand

A food bank in Alexandria, Va., told the police on Wednesday that more than 1,000 pounds of canned goods were stolen from its warehouse, reports The Washington Post.

The nonprofit food-distribution program, called Alive, delivers food to about 12,000 people a year. The stolen food — estimated to be a third of the stored supply — included such goods as meat, tuna, and spaghetti sauce and was intended to help people who run low on food stamps.

Gerry Hebert, president of Alive, said that the timing could not have been worse as the food bank struggles to keep pace with rising demand in the face of a slowing economy. “To lose this much food in a theft is disheartening, to say the least,” he said. “My first thought was, ‘What are we going to do for getting food to people in the short term?’”

Although the organization is optimistic that members will rally to replace the food, the question of where to store the items after the recent theft remains unanswered. “Do we put it in the same place, where someone can just steal it again?” Mr. Hebert asked. “That’s the problem.”

(Read an opinion article from the newest issue of The Chronicle about how food banks should respond to increasing poverty.)

Online Discussion Coming Next Week: Coping With Stress

Join our online discussion next week about coping with stress.

Our guests will be Lynne Cripe, a human-resources specialist at CARE, in Atlanta, and Lisa McKay, director of training and education services at the Headington Institute, in Pasadena, Calif.

The discussion will be held Tuesday, April 8, at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern time, and is open to everyone, not just Chronicle subscribers.

People who ask questions in advance have a better chance of receiving answers during the online discussion.

Prospecting: Fund-Raising News and Tips

Prospecting is an online fund-raising column published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the most-recent postings:

Why charities should abolish fund-raising committees for board members.

How to get the most from a charity phone-athon.

When it’s time to stop running special fund-raising events.

From the Chronicle: Making the Transition From Business to Nonprofit Work

Kathleen Davies gave up a successful public-relations career to put her passion for nature to work for good causes. Read her first-person account and share your own stories about career transitions.

April 03, 2008

Institutions Prepare Students for Nonprofit Leadership

In response to the high number of students seeking nonprofit careers, a growing number of institutions are offering undergraduate courses and degree programs in nonprofit management, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The increasing number of colleges that offer undergraduate courses prompted the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council — whose membership grew from 35 to 47 universities in the past six years — to release the first-ever curricular guidelines for undergraduate study in nonprofit leadership last year. The Bridgespan Group, a consulting and research organization that serves nonprofit groups, estimates that by 2016, charities will need to fill 640,000 senior-management jobs to fill the vacancies left by retiring baby boomers.

Maureen F. Curley, president of Campus Compact, a coalition of about 1,100 college presidents, says the opportunity to lead charities is more appealing to new graduates than it was in the past. “This generation has more experience than any other already because of the community-service requirements they grew up with in high school,” she says.

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Offended American Donor to Leave Britain

American philanthropist Carol Hogel, who has given more than $40-million to the arts in Britain, said she was returning to the United States due to a government tax on foreign citizens and the “hostility” she has encountered as a foreign donor, reports The London Times.

In a letter to Robert McNeil, a humor columnist for the newspaper The Scotsman who made fun of rich foreign residents, Ms. Hogel wrote: “After 24 years of working and paying taxes in the U.K., I am heading back to North America, where an individual with involvement in, and charitable contributions to, visual arts and classical music is valued, not punished.”

Through the Dunard Fund, financed by her family’s business, Ms. Hogel has supported the Edinburgh International Festival, the Scottish Opera, the London Philharmonic, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the National Galleries of Scotland.

Billionaire Philanthropist Foresees Additional Market Declines

Billionaire philanthropist George Soros said markets will fall more this year after a brief rebound, calling the current financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression, reports Bloomberg.

Worried about market disruptions, Mr. Soros returned last summer to a more active role in managing the $17-billion Quantum Endowment Fund, whose profits support his philanthropy.

Mobile Phones Ring With Calls to Action

In the United States, cellphones are catching on as a way to create social change, reports The Boston Globe. Mobile phones provide discreet access for people to receive information and a platform for broadcasting a message to like-minded activists. They also allow people the convenience of receiving information they can act on immediately, without first requiring them to return to their computers.

Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive.org, a network for organizations that use cellphones for activism, says that people who “have a relationship with an organization or really care about an issue” are willing to get information on their headsets.

“It’s about people, community-based groups basically, better leveraging their social capital to do good,” says Jeremy Liu, executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, in Boston, which has created a service called Speakeasy that enables people with knowledge of a foreign language and a cellphone to become part of a network of volunteer translators. “People talk too much about social capital these days, and it’s all in the abstract,” he says. “This makes it very concrete.”

For more on cellphones and social activism, read The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s recent coverage.

(Free registration is required to view the Globe article, and a paid subscription or short-term pass is required to view the Chronicle article.)

Boston Group Fights Addition to Historic Museum

The Boston Redevelopment Authority board has unanimously approved a major addition to the city’s famous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — also known as “the Palace” — but one group of Mission Hill residents says that the renovation may violate conditions of Ms. Gardner’s will, reports The Boston Globe.

Although the Fenway Alliance, a group of more than 20 institutions, has endorsed the addition — designed by architect Renzo Piano — the Friends of Historic Mission Hill group wants the Boston Landmarks Commission to halt some of the proposed changes, saying that Ms. Gardner’s will stipulates the preservation of the original museum.

Alison Pultinas, who has led the Mission Hill effort, explained, “We’re concerned about the scale of the project, the authenticity of the museum experience, and changes to how people experience the Palace.”

Museum director Anne Hawley says that the expansion is needed due to overcrowded working conditions for staff members and an increase in visitors.

Stephen W. Kidder, a lawyer for the museum added, “We think, in the context of the overall purpose of Mrs. Gardner’s will to create a museum for the education and enjoyment of the public forever, this is a very reasonable step to take.”

Nonprofit Association Ordered to Pay Millions for Title IX Violation

The Michigan High School Athletic Association has been ordered to pay $7.4-million in legal bills, plus interest, after a U.S. District judge ruled that the group’s scheduling system was found to have discriminated against some female student-athletes, reports the Associated Press.

Kristen Galles, a public-interest lawyer in Alexandria, Va., represented a small group of women who filed a lawsuit nearly 10 years ago claiming that their daughters were discriminated against because girls’ high-school basketball and volleyball in Michigan were played in seasons opposite those of colleges and most other states’ high schools.

U.S. District Judge Richard A. Enslen ruled against the association on every point of the suit in December 2001, citing violations of the Constitution, the federal anti-discrimination law Title IX, and a Michigan civil-rights law. The association appealed the decision, a process that ended in April 2007 when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

“I’m hoping schools will wake up and realize they need new leadership,” Ms. Galles said of the association’s membership. “They are lucky parents and kids didn’t seek monetary damages. The bills could have been significantly higher.”

A spokesman for the athletic association, John Johnson, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the group would not comment on the ruling for another week to 10 days.

(Free registration is required to view this article on the Washington Post site.)

Prospecting: an Online Column Dedicated to Fund Raising

Prospecting is an online fund-raising column published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among the most-recent postings:

Persuading donors to give again.

Closing the generation gap in fund-raising offices.

From The Chronicle: David H. Koch's Philanthropy

Having battled prostate cancer for 15 years, David H. Koch — who owns a major stake in Koch Industries, one of the largest privately held companies in the world — directs most of his giving to cancer research, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

A paid subscription or short-term pass is required to view this article.

Give and Take: a Roundup of Nonprofit Blogs

Give and Take is a service of The Chronicle of Philanthropy that rounds up the best postings that appear on blogs about the nonprofit world.

Among the most-recent postings is a critical look at Al Gore’s advocacy campaign to combat climate change.

You can also read previous postings on issues about philanthropic giving, fund raising, and management of nonprofit organizations.

Give and Take is updated regularly throughout the day.

April 02, 2008

ACLU Denies Affiliate's Request for Board-Meeting Tapes

The American Civil Liberties Union and its state affiliate in South Carolina are battling over access to tapes of a recent national board meeting that could have ramifications for the survival of the state group, reports The New York Times.

On February 23, the 14-member executive committee met to discuss a takeover of the affiliate and procedures for a hearing on the matter. But David F. Kennison, who represents South Carolina on the ACLU’s national board, said he was unable to attend the meeting because of health problems. The ACLU denied his request to receive a tape of the discussion.

The affiliate has struggled with management issues, such as weak fund raising and high staff turnover, and submitted to “voluntary supervision” last year, according to Neil Caesar, president-elect of the South Carolina affiliate’s board. But after the affiliate signed on to a Web site critical of the ACLU’s leadership, the national organization imposed tighter supervision and threatened to take over the smaller branch.

Mr. Caesar says the national office’s decision not to release the tapes runs counter to its mission of protecting rights and due process. “We’re concerned about their decision to do an about-face on a longstanding practice that has always resulted in a free flow of information at a time when our affiliate is fighting for its right to exist and needs information to mount its defense.”

John Kennedy, an ACLU spokesman, wrote in an e-mail message that the national organization was not concerned about material on the tapes but that “our concern has to do with distribution of the audio recordings to outside parties, especially since there could be litigation on this matter.” He added, “The important thing to remember is that the vital work of defending civil liberties has been left largely unattended in South Carolina due to the affiliate’s mismanagement.”

(Free registration is required to view the Times article.)

Small Colleges Say Board Members Have Been Poor Fund Raisers

Facing tighter budgets and often dwindling endowments, small and midsize colleges say that board members are not pulling enough weight in fund-raising efforts for these institutions, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

According to a new report, “Advancing Small Colleges: A Benchmarking Survey Update,” part of a 30-year longitudinal study of members of the Council of Independent Colleges, only 1 percent of the 274 college presidents surveyed believed that their board members were adept at fund-raising basics such as soliciting new donors and referring donor prospects, down from 13 percent satisfaction a decade ago. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education conducted the survey.

Wesley K. Willmer, the report’s author, said that small schools today — those with enrollments between 1,500 and 4,000 — often select board members “for reasons other than their wealth,” which may affect these figures.

Mr. Wilmer stressed that while every college “would like to have board members capable of doing more to help,” it was crucial for campus leaders to educate board members about raising money. “If college presidents and development staffs are unhappy with board members’ understanding of fund raising, they should take the initiative to get them trained,” he said.

(A paid subscription or short-term pass is required to view this article.)

Howard Hughes Medical Institute President to Step Down

Thomas R. Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2000, announced Tuesday that he will step down from his leadership post in spring 2009. HealthNewsDigest.com reports that Mr. Cech will return to his position as a medical investigator with the Hughes Institute working at the University of Colorado, where he has been a faculty member since 1978.

Mr. Cech, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said he was “ready to return to the adventure of my own research and my own teaching.”

Mr. Cech oversaw major changes in the institute’s flagship investigator program that, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, has made it one of the largest private sources of funds for scientific research.

From The Chronicle: $200-Million Campaign to Fight Malaria

The broadcasting tycoon Ted Turner announced yesterday a new partnership between his United Nations Foundation and two religious organizations to fight malaria in Africa by raising $200-million, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

April 01, 2008

Gore Starts $300-Million Advocacy Campaign

Former Vice President Al Gore will start a three-year, $300-million advocacy campaign tomorrow designed to inspire public support for aggressive action on climate change, reports The Washington Post.

The Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit organization based in Menlo Park, Calif., will use online advocacy and television advertisements to urge reductions in greenhouse gases.

“The elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public’s sense of urgency in addressing this crisis,” commented Mr. Gore, in explaining the Alliance’s “we” campaign.

Through private contributions, more than half the money has already been raised or committed for this campaign, according to Mr. Gore, who declined to identify his personal contribution. An accounting of his various donations toward the project, including all of his proceeds from the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is estimated to total at least $2.7-million.

The group aims to enlist 10 million volunteers and pepper mainstream entertainment, such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and People magazine, with advertisements.

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U. of Oklahoma Board Approves $50-Million Gift Plan

The University of Oklahoma Board of Regents has approved a plan to use a $50-million gift from the George Kaiser Family Foundation to establish the School of Community Medicine for the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa, reports the Norman Transcript, in Oklahoma.

The gift from the Kaiser foundation, in Tulsa, is the largest in the university’s history, reports the Associated Press. The new School of Community Medicine will focus on improving the health of Oklahomans, particularly vulnerable populations in rural and urban areas.

In addition to establishing the School of Medicine, the gift will be used to pay for 35 endowed chairs in community medicine, a financial-aid program for students, and expanded fund-raising efforts for the school, among other items.

High Food Prices Hamper Hunger-Relief Efforts

With skyrocketing food and fuel prices, food-aid programs worldwide are unable to feed the growing number of hungry people, reports The Los Angeles Times.

Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, cites high food and fuel prices, demand for biofuels, a faltering dollar, and poor harvests as factors that have greatly increased the costs associated with feeding the hungry, even as the numbers of needy people swell.

Confronting a half-billion-dollar deficit, the agency issued an emergency appeal for funds last month and is considering reducing rations or removing people from its program completely. In an analysis of 121 countries, the World Food Program found 40 nations to be suffering from serious hunger or in danger of doing so.

In the near future, the U.N. program anticipates riots and political unrest, such as happened recently in Egypt and Pakistan, with reductions in health and education levels for affected countries in the long term.

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Rising Utility Costs Strain Assistance Groups

The growing cost of heating, cooling, and lighting homes means that more people are unable to pay their utility bills, and energy assistance programs are unable to fulfill the demand for their services, reports The Washington Post.

On a recent day at the Light House Shelter for the Homeless, in Annapolis, Md., the emergency-assistance fund — which used to be distributed over a month — was depleted in just two hours to help those with unpaid utility bills. Many people who showed up to receive help went away unassisted after the group’s money ran out.

“We’ve always had the very poor coming in for assistance,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association. “What is different now is that we have more working-class people requesting assistance than before.”

In the Washington region, for example, major electric-utility rates have risen an average of 47 percent since 2001. At Pepco, the local utility provider, 153,000 residential accounts were in arrears, a 16-percent increase from the previous January.

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Obituary: Robert Goheen, Former Princeton President, 88

Robert Goheen, former president of Princeton University and the Council on Foundations, died at age 88 on March 31, in Princeton, N.J., reports The New York Times.

Elected to be president of Princeton in 1956 at age 37, he would revolutionize the university by greatly increasing its physical size and wealth, as well as diversity. Mr. Goheen increased the university’s indoor square footage by 80 percent, doubled alumni donations, and quadrupled the budget.

Reversing his earlier position, the former assistant classics professor supported the admittance of the university’s first female students in 1969. Mr. Goheen also hired Princeton’s first black administrator and first black full professor, and heavily recruited minority students.

After his retirement from the post in 1972, he became president of the Council on Foundations, in Arlington, Va. In 1977, he was appointed U.S. ambassador to India. He ended his career back at Princeton, as a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Mr. Goheen is survived by his wife of 66 years, Margaret, and six children.

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