February 3, 2012
Minorities
From Rhetoric to Practice: Recruiting Strategies to Make Diversity More Meaningful in Your Organization, a report from the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, argues that hiring and retaining diverse teams is not only the right thing to do but also can be smart business, especially for organizations in the mission-driven sector.... More»

January 31, 2012
Education
Implementing Education Policy: Getting From What Now? to What Works, a report from Grantmakers for Education, notes that although more and more funders are providing support to organizations advocating for education reform, additional efforts are needed to ensure that new policies are put into practice in the classroom.... More»

January 28, 2012
Public Affairs
At Risk: America's Poor During and After the Great Recession, a report from the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs, examines trends by state, age, race/ethnicity, family structure, education, and employment, as well as the successes and failures of federal safety-net programs.... More»

January 25, 2012
Philanthropy and Voluntarism
Based on a survey conducted in partnership with the Georgia Grantmakers Alliance and the Southeastern Council of Foundations, the Foundation Center report Key Facts on Georgia Foundations shows that giving by foundations in the Peach State rose an unexpected 7 percent in 2009.... More»

More Connections

Little Change in Public's Response to 'Capitalism,' 'Socialism' (January 22, 2012)

Leading Creatively: A Closer Look 2010 (January 19, 2012)

Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy by and for Communities of Color (January 16, 2012 )

The Civic and Community Engagement of Religiously Active Americans (January 13, 2012 )

Mario Morino, Co-Founder/Chair, Venture Philanthropy Partners

PND chatted with Morino recently about his new book Leap of Reason; performance measurement (and its costs) in a nonprofit context; and the importance of leadership in shaping a performance culture.....

PND: The subtitle of your monograph is "Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity." In a world awash in information, data, processing power, and other blessings of the digital economy, what is it we don't have enough of?

Mario Morino: That's a great question. My view is that even in a world awash in information, nonprofit leaders generally don't have the benefit of the right information. By the same token, most don't have the supporting culture or encouragement to put the right information to good use in managing their mission and operations.

To be sure, more public and private funders are demanding information from nonprofits, and nonprofits are dutifully complying. But in many cases, the data that funders demand are not all that useful to nonprofit executives for managing their performance and charting the strategic direction of their organizations. In fact, when you dig into the details of the information requirements, you see that too often the data are not even that valuable for the funders who request them, except for allowing these funders to check some "accountability" boxes....

Read the Q&A»

Two Years After Madoff: An Argument for Foundation Audits

Laura Barooshian and William Jenczyk, Principals, DiCicco, Gulman & Company

It's been more than two years since Bernie Madoff pleaded guilty to eleven felony counts stemming from an elaborate Ponzi scheme he devised and ran for years, swindling hundreds of investors out of billions of dollars. Still, fraud continues to be endemic in the financial community. And foundations, which are rarely audited, sometimes prove to be an easy mark for embezzlers and thieves.

Just look at the headlines on any given day: Operating under the name the Hawaiiloa Foundation, five members of a native Hawaiian sovereignty group on Maui recently were indicted on various fraud and tax offenses related to a debt assistance program. Here on the mainland, a Washington, D.C., council member was accused of using grant money and charitable donations for personal golfing trips, hotel accommodations, and a new sport utility vehicle. The list goes on.

Madoff aside, fraud long has been a problem for foundations. Google "foundation fraud" and you'll get seventy million hits. And that only includes fraud that has been uncovered. Given that foundations typically are not audited, consider how many cases of fraud have yet to be discovered. So why aren't foundations audited....?

Read the commentary»

Interview - Dame Stephanie Shirley and Roberta d'Eustachio

In the latest installment of our Alliance@PND series, Caroline Hartnell talks to Dame Stephanie Shirley and Roberta d'Eustachio, co-founders of Ambassadors for Philanthropy, about their organization and its international goals....

Caroline Hartnell: Where did the idea of Ambassadors for Philanthropy come from?

Stephanie Shirley: It's one of the great mysteries in life, but it actually came to me via Gordon Brown, who invited me to become the UK ambassador for philanthropy in 2009. I didn't have a brief or a budget, but it was an opportunity for me to rise to the occasion and really do something strategic to raise levels of giving in Britain. The tax incentives for philanthropy in this country are really pretty good, but nobody understands them since they're just so complicated; making giving easy was one of the themes that really emerged during that year.

It didn't seem like the government had dealt with philanthropists before — they really didn't know what someone like me was like and they didn't grasp the whole range of philanthropic drives and motivations. It became obvious that one of the things that we could do was to give philanthropists a voice. They were just not being invited to treasury meetings. The government would invite people from charities, foundations, philanthropy advisors, and so on to discussions about tax issues, but no philanthropists were invited....

Read the interview»

Alliance@PND
Interview – Dame Stephanie Shirley and Roberta d'Eustachio, Ambassadors for Philanthropy

Conference Calendar

Connections: Education, Public Affairs, Philanthropy and Voluntarism, Social Science

5 Questions For...
Mario Morino, Co-Founder/Chair, Venture Philanthropy Partners

Commentary:
"Two Years After Madoff: An Argument for Foundation Audits"

NPO Spotlight
Code for America

Off the Shelf
Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World

On The Web
HistoryMakers

SSIR@PND
"Five Ways to Navigate the Fiscal Crisis"

PhilanTopic
The PND Blog

Code for America

Code for America works to transform city governments across the United States by enlisting promising developers to apply Web 2.0 principles to civic problems.... More»

Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World

Melissa Brown reviews a new book by a Silicon Valley luminary that explores the many ways in which one can be "philanthropic".... More»

HistoryMakers

The HistoryMakers site offers a multimedia archive of biographical information about African-American leaders in a wide range of fields.... More»

PhilanTopic

In the first two installments of a series of posts, Demos senior fellow Michael Edwards suggests that it's time for those who work in philanthropy to debate the outcomes they seek and not just how to measure the ones they've already selected.... More»

Five Ways to Navigate the Fiscal Crisis

In the latest article in our SSIR series, Bridgespan Group's Willa Seldon and Daniel Stid provide tips for human services organizations facing cuts in government contracts.... More»

March 12 - March 14, 2012
2012 National Conference
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations
Seattle, Washington

March 19 - March 21, 2012
7th Annual Conference
Grants Managers Network
San Antonio, Texas

April 1 - April 3, 2012
49th International Conference
Association of Fundraising Professionals
Vancouver, BC, Canada