PhilanTopic

ANNOUNCEMENT: Funder-Only Event With Rebecca MacKinnon, Author, 'Consent of the Networked'

Back in March, we chatted with Helen Brunner, director of the Media Democracy Fund, about social media and the Arab Spring uprisings, net neutrality, and the role of nonprofit advocacy groups in ensuring that every American continues to benefit from an open Internet.

This Wednesday, October 19, at 11:00 a.m., MDF is hosting a funders-only talk featuring Rebecca MacKinnon, author of the soon-to-be-published Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. In the book, MacKinnon argues that freedom in the Internet age depends on whether we defend our rights on digital platforms and networks in the same way that people fight for their rights and accountable governance in their actual communities and nations. It's time, in other words, to stop thinking of ourselves as passive "users" of technology and instead act like citizens of the Internet -- as netizens -- and take ownership and responsibility for our digital future.

Interested funders can sign up for the event here.

ANNOUNCEMENT: 5th Annual Knight News Challenge Open for Entries

Hard to believe, I know, but it's been two years since we last wrote about the Knight News Challenge. Now in its fifth year, the Knight Foundation-funded media contest "seeks innovative techniques and technologies that advance the foundation's goal of informing and engaging communities." In the first four years of the challenge, a total of $23 million was awarded to 56 media innovators chosen from more than 10,000 entries. (Click here to learn more about past winners and their projects.)

This year, for the first time, the competition is featuring four experimental categories: Mobile (innovative ideas for news and information on all types of mobile communications devices); Authenticity (projects that help people better understand the reliability of news and information sources); Sustainability (new economic models supporting news and information that enhances citizen engagement); and Community (groundbreaking technologies that support news and information specifically within defined geographic areas).

(In the first three categories, the foundation prefers entries with a community focus; a place-based focus is an "absolute" requirement for the Community category. All software produced by contest-winners must be open-source.)

The contest opens for entries October 25 (today) and closes December 1. Individuals, nonprofits, businesses, schools, and government are all eligible to enter.

Entries submitted to the contest will be reviewed by experts in news, technology, and community. Final recommendations will be made by Knight staff, with the winners to be chosen by the Knight board and announced next June at an event at MIT.

The foundation will conduct an online chat tomorrow, October 26, at noon EST, to answer questions about this year's contest. To sign up for an event reminder about the chat, visit the News Challenge Web site.

-- Mitch Nauffts

ANNOUNCEMENT: Edna McConnell Clark Foundation Launches Social Innovation Fund Grants Competition

The New York City-based Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, one of eleven intermediary organizations selected earlier this year to receive an inaugural grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service's Social Innovation Fund (SIF), has opened the competitive application process for $20 million in funds -- $10 million from SIF and $10 million in matching funds from its own endowment -- which the foundation plans to invest in high-performing nonprofit organizations that are delivering "a truly effective and transformative service to very disadvantaged youth."

According to an e-mail circulated by the foundation yesterday, EMCF anticipates making 8 to 10 investments in 2011, generally multi-year grants, for a minimum of $2 million annually. The funds are intended to provide "upfront growth capital to help grantees build their evidence base and organizational capacity to prepare for greater public and private investment that can propel them to scale and sustainability."

To be eligible for funding, nonprofits must be based in the U.S. and active in localities where poverty is widespread, including rural areas. Initially, the foundation will focus on nonprofits seeking to expand in communities of need in the Carolinas, Oklahoma, and California. In those states, the Duke Endowment, George Kaiser Family Foundation, and Tipping Point Community have committed $15 million over three years to help EMCF's SIF grantees fulfill the 1:1 matching requirement of the SIF grant. (The Open Society Foundations has made a similar commitment of $2 million.)

Th e-mail also notes that EMCF will extend to its SIF grantee portfolio the principles of the growth capital aggregation approach that its has pioneered with three EMCF grantees (Nurse-Family Partnerships, Youth Villages, and Citizen Schools), and that it is "actively seeking local, regional and national co-investors that can ease what will be an enormous fundraising challenge and increase the leverage and impact of SIF dollars."

Nonprofit organizations that meet EMCF's eligibility criteria are invited to apply online.

Organizations that intend to apply should e-mail a notice of their intent to sifapp@emcf.org with the subject "Notice of Intent to Apply" and the name of their organization by 8:00 p.m. EDT on October 25, 2010. Applications must be submitted by 8:00 p.m. EDT on November 1, 2010.

Visit the EMCF site to learn more.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Foundation Center Launches Online Learning Community

(Cynthia Bailie is the director of special information initiatives at the Foundation Center and heads the center's Cleveland office. She blogs regularly at the Philanthropy Front and Center-Cleveland blog and wrote about the center's Nonprofit Collaboration Database for PhilanTopic in May.)

Are you wasting time looking for resources, tools, and training needed to kick-start your fundraising and social change efforts? Good news. The Foundation Center has added a new online community to its portfolio of web properties that has everything you need in one place.

After a year-long process built on engaging with our audiences and five decades as the nation's leading authority on philanthropy, the Foundation Center is pleased to announce the launch of grantspace.org. GrantSpace places the best information about grants and fundraising within reach of organizations of all sizes, providing grantseekers with a one-stop shop for knowledge, community, and expert guidance. Complementing the resources on the Foundation Center's main site, foundationcenter.org, GrantSpace gathers, on a single convenient platform, recent news, reports, podcasts, videos, statistics, sample documents, and requests for proposals related to the most pressing social change issues of the day. Links to relevant FAQs are included throughout the site, and an "Ask Us" link on each page connects visitors to expert assistance from Foundation Center staff via live chat or e-mail. The site also offers a comprehensive calendar that lists and allows registration for upcoming Foundation Center training opportunities in classrooms around the U.S. as well as online.

GrantSpace's user-focused assortment of tools and resources is designed to get you up-to-speed on all it takes to finance and operate a nonprofit organization. Register now (it's free) and begin rating content and weighing in on what matters to you. New members can also grab a free 24-hour subscription to the Foundation Directory Online Professional, the center's searchable database of nearly 100,000 grantmakers and more than two million grants.

But wait, there's more. Over the coming months, we'll be introducing an online diagnostic tool for nonprofit practitioners looking to add to their knowledge base; a variety of community forums; live events; and additional must-have content from the Foundation Center and its growing list of partners.

In the meantime, we want to hear from you. What would you like to see in GrantSpace? Know of a cool tool or compelling content we should add? Drop us a line using the Feedback link and we'll see what we can do.

What are you waiting for? Click on over to GrantSpace to explore a growing range of in-depth content, engage with your peers and experts, and energize your fundraising efforts. And, of course, feel free to share your thoughts and feedback in the comments section.

-- Cindy Bailie

Announcement: Foundation Center Seeks Host Orgs for Cooperating Collections Network

(Kief Schladweiler is coordinator of cooperating collections at the Foundation Center.)

The Foundation Center is looking for host organizations that are ready to join with us to meet the information and training needs of organizations and individuals whose grantseeking needs are not being met.

The center needs your help in identifying appropriate host organizations for our Cooperating Collection network. Cooperating Collections are free funding information centers located in libraries, community foundations, and other nonprofit resource centers that provide a core collection of Foundation Center print and electronic publications and a variety of supplementary materials, training, and services in areas useful to grantseekers.

We are particularly interested in reaching underresourced and underserved populations across the United States and in other locations around the globe that are in need of and can use this information and training to become successful grantseekers.

Watch the video below to learn more about the program and share it with your contacts and colleagues. And if you know of a potential host organization, feel free to use our handy online form to nominate them.

Thanks. With your help, we can continue to ensure free public access to these needed resources in the U.S. and around the world.

-- Kief Schladweiler

Introducing the Social Impact Exchange

This is interesting.

Duke University and the Growth Philanthropy Network, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have launched the Social Impact Exchange -- a collaboration of funders, philanthropic practitioners, researchers, and others that "will act as a focal point for studying, funding and implementing large expansions of proven social purpose organizations."

More specifically, the Exchange has three main goals:

• Developing and sharing knowledge on practices for expanding programs that work
• Providing venues to collaboratively fund expansion of successful initiatives
• Helping to build a field infrastructure for more efficient and effective scaling

To that end, the Exchange will make available an up-to-date library of relevant publications on a Web platform; offer training online and at an annual conference and regional meetings; and, most importantly, facilitate collaborative investment in "high-impact, well-vetted opportunities" through an online clearinghouse and a Social Impact Business Plan Competition.

If things work as planned, all this activity will serve a larger goal: the creation of a national social capital marketplace. According to Dr. S. Robert Levine, co-founder and chairman of GPN, such a marketplace, in order to be successful, must exhibit or feature:

1. investment standards, transparent information, and performance reporting;
2. a collaborative financing process that includes individuals, foundations, grants, and debt;
3. sufficient "deal flow," a pool of high-impact nonprofits to demonstrate how a marketplace works;
4. large-scale distribution to donors and a broad, diversified network of growth funders;
5. a network of expert intermediaries that aggregate growth capital for qualified scaling initiatives; and
6. a focal point for shared learning, knowledge development, and collective funding of high-impact growth initiatives.

Some of this "infrastructure" exists, while much of it is still the subject of discussion. And despite all the thought and hard work that people a lot smarter than me have invested in the idea, I remain skeptical. But that's a post (or three) for another day.

In the meantime, with folks like Joel Fleishman, Ed Skloot, Robert Levine, and Cynthia Massarsky involved, this is an effort you'll want to keep an eye on.

-- Mitch Nauffts

World Food Day 2009

Friday, October 16, is World Food Day. Here are nine things you should know about child hunger, courtesy of Save the Children USA:

1. For the first time in history, more than a billion people live with chronic hunger -- and at least 400 million of them are children.


2. In the developing world, volatile, historically high food prices together with the ongoing impact of the global economic crisis continue to drive families into poverty, putting millions more children at risk of hunger and malnutrition.


3. Drought is adding to extreme food crises in Guatemala and East Africa. In Ethiopia alone, three million children urgently need food.


4. A child dies every six seconds from hunger-related causes.


5. When there isn't enough food, poor families resort to skipping meals, pulling children from school, selling off livestock and assets and foregoing health care.


6. Poor families in developing countries typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food. Meanwhile, U.S. families spend only 5 to 10 percent of their budget on food.


7. When small children are malnourished, their physical and intellectual development may be permanently impaired.


8. Food shortages will increase as world population grows. By 2050, 70 percent more food will be needed to meet demand. Yet investment in agriculture is historically low.


9. It takes more than food to end hunger. For instance, the most agriculturally productive region of Mozambique has the highest rates of child malnutrition in the country. Poor families must be able to access a healthy diet.

(Sources: 1. FAO, WFP 2. World Bank 4. FAO 6. IFPRI, USDA 7. Lancet 8. FAO)

There is some good news. World leaders have pledged support for a $22 billion food security initiative and the Obama administration has outlined a new strategy to fight hunger. You can help these plans become reality by contacting your congressional representative today.

-- Mitch Nauffts

Ready for America's Giving Challenge?

When the first edition of America's Giving Challenge was launched in late 2007/early 2008, social networks and online giving were a still novelty for most people. Sponsored and widely promoted by the Case Foundation, PARADE Publications, and Causes on Facebook, the challenge did much to change that. Indeed, 71,000 people participated in the month-long campaign, which generated a total of $1.8 million in donations to nearly 700 charities.

Well, the challenge is back and expectations for the new campaign, which runs through November 6 at 3:00 EST, are high. The program has been designed to serve as "an example of how social networking is transforming the way people participate in philanthropy," and this year participants have the opportunity to compete for daily and overall cash awards totaling $170,000 ($150,000 from the Case Foundation and $20,00 from the Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation at the Aspen Institute).

Nonprofit organizations and individuals who wish to participate can get involved in one of two ways:

Champion a cause. Individuals who are passionate about a specific cause can become "cause champions" and compete to obtain the most donations for their cause through the Causes application.

Promote, donate, or join a cause. All individuals are encouraged to take part in the challenge by joining, promoting, or donating to causes they care about. (Facebook membership is not required to donate to a Giving Challenge cause.)

To learn more, to register to compete, and/or to donate to a cause, visit: http://www.americasgivingchallenge.com/. 

We'll keep you updated on the results as they are tabulated and released. Good luck to all!

-- Mitch Nauffts

ANNOUNCEMENT: Humanitarian Emergency in the Pacific

(The following was filed by Adele Waugman on behalf of the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership and was posted on the UN Dispatch blog earlier today.)

This week has seen a devastating series of events in the Pacific.

Over the weekend a deadly tropical storm slammed into the Philippines, causing severe flooding in urban areas and affecting tens of thousands.

Tuesday, a powerful underwater earthquake triggered a tsunami with waves 15 to 20 feet high that crashed into the Samoa islands, destroying homes and taking lives.

Then yesterday and today two successive and devastating earthquakes struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra, leaving thousands buried in rubble and in desperate need of aid.

Groups funded by the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership are deployed in all three Pacific Ocean emergencies to provide vital communications services that enable relief workers to deliver food aid and emergency supplies.

As [was] reported yesterday, both the World Food Program (WFP) and the nonprofit Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF) are in the Philippines ensuring that relief workers are connected and, on WFP's part, have access to radio communications to ensure workers' security.

Tropical storm Ketsana dumped the heaviest rains in more than forty years and has affected 2.5 million people, according to government estimates. The WFP has boosted its food aid relief program there and now aims to feed one million people in October.

TSF also deployed to Samoa, where after Tuesday's tsunami entire towns have been wiped out, over one hundred are dead, and many thousands more are now homeless.

TSF added to its roster of simultaneous deployments today when it announced it would also deploy to the Indonesian island of Sumatra to provide communications for aid workers and to conduct a "humanitarian calling operation," providing free three-minute phone calls so that those affected can give news to their family and ask for personalized assistance.

In situations of crisis such as these, a phone line can be a lifeline essential to delivering relief or reconnecting a family. Our thoughts are with all those whose lives have been affected by this deadly string of disasters, and with the relief workers working in difficult conditions to help save lives.

For more information on quake and tsunami relief and humanitarian efforts, visit the ReliefWeb site.

[Photo credit: Sulehka.com]

ANNOUNCEMENT: 74th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Winners

I'm a fan of recognition award programs -- especially when they honor great writing and have been around as long as the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Now in its seventy-fourth year, the program was created by Edith Anisfield Wolf, a poet and civic activist who became passionately committed to social justice as a young girl growing up in Cleveland, and is the only juried American literary competition devoted to recognizing books that have made an important contribution to society's understanding of racism and the diversity of human cultures. The competition has been administered by the Cleveland Foundation since the death of Anisfield Wolf in 1963.

This year's Anisfield-Wolf winners are:

• Louise Erdrich -- The Plague of Doves (Harper Collins)
• Nam Le -- The Boat (Knopf)
• Annette Gordon-Read -- The Hemingses of Monticello (W.W. Norton)
• Paule Marshall -- Lifetime Achievement Award

Congratulations to the winners! To learn more about the Anisfield-Wolf awards, click here.

-- Mitch Nauffts

ANNOUNCEMENT: Greater New Orleans Foundation Launches Community IMPACT Program

We've had a great response to the Newsmaker interview we did with Albert Ruesga, president and CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation. So before interest in post-recovery Katrina efforts begins to fade, we'd like to take a moment to publicize a new program just announced by the foundation.

The Community IMPACT Program will award $1 million in grants in six areas -- arts and culture, children and youth, civic engagement and nonprofit support, education, health, and human and social services -- to nonprofit organizations serving the thirteen-parish Greater New Orleans metro region. According a press release issued by the foundation, the ultimate goal of the program is "to create a resilient, sustainable, vibrant, and equitable region in which individuals and families flourish and in which the special character of the New Orleans region and its people is preserved, celebrated, and given the means to develop."

More from the release:

Who can apply?
Nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations that serve the Greater New Orleans region. Organizations that are not tax-exempt but have a fiscal agent relationship with a 501(c)(3) organization are also eligible.

How to apply?

1. Submit a two- to three-page Letter of Intent by September 22, 2009. To review what the Letter of Intent should include, click here. Hard copies of the information can also be picked up at the Greater New Orleans Foundation offices, 1055 St. Charles Avenue, Suite 100. GNOF will review all Letters of Intent and will notify organizations invited to complete a full application by October 12, 2009.
2. Those invited to submit a full application will be asked to submit their proposals by November 2, 2009. Awards will be announced by December 11, 2009.

Obviously, this is good news for the region and for nonprofits working to serve those who live there. But as Tony Pipa, a frequent contributor to PhilanTopic, reminded me in a comment he made in an earlier thread, there's a lot left to do. Writes Tony:

[W]hile I think there have been particular instances of philanthropy performing admirably, I think there is also much room for improvement in that response overall, and I hope that the sector takes an unvarnished look at its response and learns from the lessons. In regards to federal involvement, it's not so much whether there will continue to be support, but how that support is deployed and whether it gets to the people, businesses, and communities that really need it.

In answer to your question, many foundations (even some of the ones you mention) are wrapping up their commitments in the Gulf Coast, figuring that they've "done their part" for the recovery. If they take a second look at the Gulf Coast, though, I think they'd recognize that with the amount of creative community-problem solving going on, there are many lessons for them to learn by investing there that they could apply in other places. It requires looking at New Orleans and the Coast with new eyes, not as a region still trying to recover from crisis but as one looking to the future with energy and innovation....

We all know that foundations and individual donors were hit hard by the financial crisis. And while portfolios have recovered some of their losses and the economy may be bottoming, the future is uncertain. As Tony suggests, however, it is way too early to declare "Mission accomplished" in the Gulf. "Full recovery," still years away, should be our starting point, not a final goal. The "region was poor before the storms," Ruesga told me when I spoke to him. "The city suffered from so-called white flight in the '70s and '80s, and the region as a whole, being largely rural, suffered from years of public underinvestment."

I don't know about you, but I believe the affluent and well-to-do have done just fine over the last thirty years. It's time we turned our attention and really invested -- in thoughtful, creative, and sustainable ways -- in the poor and most vulnerable among us.

--Mitch Nauffts

ANNOUNCEMENT: New PubHub Widget

PubHub, the Foundation Center's catalog of annotated links to foundation-sponsored reports, now has a widget. You can get it here or via the "Get the widget" link under the search/browse box in the PubHub application.

The widget displays the cover images of the three reports most recently added to PubHub, which is updated daily. You can scroll between reports by clicking on the arrows and mouse over a cover image to see the report's title and publisher. Clicking on a cover will take you to the report's page in PubHub, which also lists the report's author(s), publication date and type, funder(s), and subject area(s), along with a short description of the contents. From that page, you can also link to the full report on the publisher's Web site ("PubHub link") and, in a growing number of instances, to a copy in FOLIO, a permanent digital repository created by the IUPUI University Library for the long-term preservation of foundation-funded publications. (You can learn more about FOLIO here.)

The widget includes a keyword search function that enables you to search the full text of over 3,900 reports. You can also click on "PubHub" at the top of the widget to see a weekly selection of Featured Topic reports; browse reports by organization, subject, publication date and/or type; or view the ten, twenty-five, or fifty most recently cataloged reports.

Want to share a link to a report with your colleagues? Each report's PubHub page provides a variety of tools for that purpose, including e-mail, delicious, Digg, Google bookmarks, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

The PubHub widget is another way for nonprofit and foundation staff, researchers, and the intellectually curious to share knowledge. By adding it to your blog or Web site, you can help nonprofit organizations and the philanthropic community share case studies, best practices, lessons learned, and other insights. Let us know what you think.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Philanthropy In/Sight: Mapping the Future

(Rick Schoff is senior vice president for information resources and publishing at the Foundation Center. This is his first post for PhilanTopic.)

It's been gratifying for us here at the Foundation Center to see the interest generated by the launch of our Philanthropy In/Sight GIS mapping application. For those who haven't seen or heard of it, In/Sight plots access points to information on 90,000 foundations, 150,000 grantee organizations, and 1.6 milliion grants made during 2003-2009, including U.S. foundation grants made internationally. Grants can be plotted against a variety of thematic data (e.g., demographic information) and at a number of geographic levels (e.g., congressional district). We also had the opportunity to include the Human Development Index information created by Measure of America.

What's really great, though, is seeing the beginning of a "wish list" for In/Sight functionality. From the get-go, we've been counting on getting lots of suggestions for enhancements to the application. One such suggestion is to be able to map "funding impact" in addition to grantee location. That's very much our goal for In/Sight. We also want to help demonstrate potential need and make it easy for funders to find out what other organizations are doing in their areas of interest.

I've been working at the intersection of data and new publishing technologies for years now, and from where I sit suggestions about mapping impact underscore an important point: Being able to do so has more to do with data than with technology. To that end, we're working with a number of foundations that are eager to put their best foot forward, information-wise (you know who you are, so thanks!) -- and are hopeful that many others will follow suit.

This is new territory -- for the center and the field -- and your input and feedback about In/Sight and data mapping are important to us. So let's have a conversation about how you think they should evolve!

-- Rick Schoff

ANNOUNCEMENT: Independent Sector Press Briefing (July 23, 2009)

From the IS press release...

The pace of change in today’s society presents an important opportunity for the nonprofit community to convene a conversation about the trajectory and impact of key trends that will shape the future of the nonprofit sector in the next ten years.

Join Diana Aviv, president and CEO of Independent Sector, and Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and co-chair of the Ad Hoc Group on IS Strategic Planning, for a dial-in press briefing on Thursday, July 23 from 11:00–11:30 a.m. EST to learn more about Envisioning Our Future, an exciting new initiative that uses a combination of research and innovative engagement methodologies to:

• Deepen our collective understanding of the trends that will affect the nonprofit sector;
• Generate new insights and ideas about how nonprofits and foundations can best address the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead; and
• Develop a cohort of leaders involved in thinking critically about this work for the sake of their own organizations and the sector at large.

RSVP to Matthew Briggs at matthewb@independentsector.org or (202-467-6134) for call-in details. (Update: Call is limited to members of the press only.)

 

ANNOUNCEMENT: Target Awards $3 Million Through Facebook Giving Campaign

Bullseye Gives, which kicked-off May 10, invited Facebook users to help Target decide how it would divvy up $3 million among ten national charities. During the two-week campaign, Target's Facebook page added 97,000 new fans, received more than 3,000 wall posts, and created a forum for Target's online fans to share their experiences.

With 77,427 votes (26.6 percent) out of the 291,039 votes tallied, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital garnered the most votes and will receive the largest donation ($797,123). Funds raised for St. Jude through the campaign will support the hospital's school program.

Here's how the other nine charities fared:

• American Red Cross – 77,118 votes (26.5%) = $793,942
• Salvation Army – 38,004 votes (13%) = $391,258
• Operation Gratitude – 22,627 votes (7.8%) = $232,948
• Breast Cancer Research Foundation – 19,264 votes (6.6%) = $198,326
• Feeding America – 15,574 votes (5.3%) = $160,336
• HandsOn Network/Points of Light Institute – 11,378 votes (4.0%) = $120,845
• Parent Teacher Association – 10,904 votes (3.7%) = $112,259
• National Park Foundation – 9,553 votes (3.3%) = $98,350
• Kids In Need Foundation – 9,190 votes (3.2%) = $94,613

Congratulations to all ten organizations; each one is a winner in our book. To learn more about the Facebook contest and Target's other community outreach activities, follow the links.

-- Regina Mahone