PhilanTopic

Weekend Link Roundup (April 21-22, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Civil Society

In the Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, writer, activist, and sometime PhilanTopic contributor Michael Edwards bemoans the lack of clarity around the term civil society and attempts to restore some precision to the debate over its meaning. In the process, he reminds us that "Recognizing that civil society does indeed mean different things to different people is one of the keys to moving forward, because it moves us beyond false universals and entrenched thinking."

Communications/Marketing

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Katya Andresen shares four trends, including the growing popularity of peer networks, likely to shake up nonprofit marketing. "People listen to each other more than us, so we need to stop viewing social media as another form of getting our message out," writes Andresen. "Its primary value is that it allows other people to get the message out, for us."

Entrepreneurship

On the Kauffman Foundation's Growthology log, Dane Stangler looks at the evolution of entrepreneurship and how the very definition of the word entrepreneur has broadened over the years. Writes Stangler: "In its original use by Jean-Baptiste Say, it was someone who undertook economic activities and capitalized on arbitrage opportunities. Joseph Schumpeter ushered in the modern way in which people typically use the term by equating it with newness -- new products, services, combinations, business models, etc. Israel Kirzner saw entrepreneurs as those who targeted and eliminated disequilibria in the economy (for Schumpeter, entrepreneurs created those disequilibria)." Today, however, "the word has come to be so overused as to potentially lose a great deal of meaning...."

Environment

In a guest post on the Knight Blog, Shannon Dosemagen, director of community engagement at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, explains how the decision by Google to license community-created aerial maps from the lab's archive could lead to better policy and replace commercial and government data as a recognized representation of sites of civic and environmental concern.

Higher Education

The New York Times' Room for Debate series takes up the question of whether wealthy colleges deserve their tax breaks, with contributions from economist Sandy Baum; Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation; the American Entreprise Institute's Frederick Hess; Barbara Gitenstein, president of the College of New Jersey; Andrew Coulson, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute; Osamudia James, an associate professor of law at the University of Miami; and Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

International Affairs/Development

About.com's Joanne Fritz reminds readers who are thinking about doing a little "voluntourism" this summer to use common sense and follow these tips from the Center for Responsible Travel.

Philanthropy

On his Inside Philanthropy blog, Todd Cohen offers his take on some of the investment strategies that have emerged in recent years to scale up or expand proven nonprofit programs.

Regulation/Oversight

Idealist researcher/blogger Putnam Barber reminds nonprofit organizations, many of which do not have to file their Form 990s until May 15, to make sure they have answers to three important questions:

• When is our filing deadline?
• What do we need to know to be sure we stay current with all the rules and regulations?
• Who is going to file our Form 990-N?

Social Entrepreneurship

Over at Dowser, J. Gregory Dees, a professor in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and creator of the first course in social entrepreneurship in the U.S., challenges New York Times' columnist David Brooks' characterization of social entrepreneurship as something young people do to "avoid political participation and...[tackle the] 'corruption, venality, and disorder head-on'." Writes Dees:

Social entrepreneurs do not discourage political participation -- they invent new mechanisms for achieving the public good. Quite often solutions to problems require not just mobilizing political support but actually demonstrating how to solve problems that have confounded others.... Social entrepreneurs serve as society"s "learning laboratory," developing, testing, and refining new approaches to problems in ways that government agencies, with all their budgetary, bureaucratic, legislative, jurisdictional, and political constraints cannot do. These innovators represent the kind of decentralized problem solving that Nobel laureate Douglass North identifies as essential for any society to achieve what he calls "adaptive efficiency," the ability to adjust and thrive in the face of new challenges and shifting problems....

Social Media

On her blog, Allison Fine weighs in on the value of a Facebook "like." Writes Fine:

The notion of creating a direct equation of how much it cost to get one person to like a Facebook page and how much that person bought or gave as a result might satisfy the bean counters, but misses the larger point of why social media are so much more powerful than broadcast media. If you’re just looking for one, or ten, or one hundred thousand stand alone customers or donors, then there is no extra value in using social media. You could have just sent out a direct mail piece for that. The value in using social media is that every person, every like, comes with their own network that can be activated in an instant, and at no additional cost, for the organization. And that value, the value of having an army of your most ardent fans, affects far more than the development department....

Transparency

On the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog, Mark Hager, associate professor of nonprofit studies at Arizona State University's School of Community Resources and Development, explains how students in his Theory and Practice of Philanthropy course are using Glasspockets indicators to evaluate private foundations and "reflect critically on the value of transparency and how well the Glass Pockets assessment captures the concept." In the coming weeks, Hager will share thoughts from the student who "presented the most interesting observations about foundations, transparency, and the 'Who Has Glass Pockets' indicators." Stay tuned.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

This Week in PubHub: Minorities and Higher Education

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she looked at four reports that examine the role of racial/ethnic disparities in wealth, health, and educational attainment and how those factors are linked and reinforce one another.)

Diverging Pathways: How Wealth Shapes Opportunity for Children (16 pages, PDF), a report from the Insight Center for Community Economic Development included in my last post, cites 2007 data showing that 69 percent of Latino and 71 percent of African-American households are income-poor, while 40 percent (for both groups) are asset-poor. The report argues that without the financial resources to pay for high-quality early childhood education or college, children in these households face a future of limited opportunity. This week in PubHub, we're featuring four reports that focus on trends in college enrollment among students of color, as well as the role of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs).

According to Hispanic College Enrollment Spikes, Narrowing Gaps With Other Groups (30 pages, PDF), a report from the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of Latino students between the ages of 18 and 24 enrolled in two- or four-year colleges jumped 24 percent in 2010. That compares favorably with modest increases of 5.2 percent and 5.4 percent for African Americans and Asian Americans, and a decline of 4 percent (due in part to demographic trends) among white students. Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the report also found that 44 percent of Latino high school graduates attended college in 2010, accounting for 15 percent of all college students in that age group, and that while college enrollment among Latinos is up significantly in recent years, completion rates remain low, at 13 percent, among 25- to 29-year-olds.

Raising college completion rates among Latino students is the focus of Roadmap for Ensuring America's Future by Increasing Latino College Completion (20 pages, PDF), a report from Excelencia in Education. Given demographic trends, the report notes, Latinos will have to earn 5.5 million college degrees to close racial/ethnic gaps and meet the nation's degree attainment goal by 2020. To that end, the report's authors recommend that communities develop partnerships between school districts and institutions of higher education to improve college readiness and participation rates; that colleges guarantee need-based aid for qualified students; and that states track data on equity and success in degree attainment. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation for Education, the report calls on the federal government to support capacity-building efforts at established and emerging Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) to strengthen educational quality as a way to boost degree attainment.

According to the reports, college enrollment among African Americans and Latinos reached record highs in 2010, with just over half of Latino undergraduates enrolled at HSIs. Indeed, Students Speak! -- Understanding the Value of HBCUs From Student Perspectives (39 pages, PDF), a report from the UNCF Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, notes that while HBCUs account for only 4 percent of all four-year institutions in the U.S., they graduate 21 percent of all African Americans with a bachelor's degree. According to the report, the decision to attend an HBCU is influenced by many factors, including the perception that they provide a welcoming, supportive environment and a measure of cultural empowerment. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the report suggests that students who feel connected to and supported by their institutions, both academically and socially, are more likely to stay in school, and that student-faculty interaction is a key factor in raising retention and graduation rates.

The Lumina Foundation for Education has been working with HBCUs, HSIs, tribal colleges and universities, and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions to boost degree attainment. The Role of Minority-Serving Institutions in National College Completion Goals (9 pages, PDF), a report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, describes Lumina's MSI Models of Success program, which aims to build capacity for data collection and analysis, foster a collective advocacy voice on behalf of minority-serving institutions, strengthen policy and practice related to developmental education, and raise completion rates, especially among men of color.

How do you think we should be addressing racial/ethnic disparities in educational attainment? Do you know of any promising initiatives to raise retention rates among students of color at non-MSIs, or best practices for boosting college completion rates at the community level? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

And don't forget to visit PubHub, where you can browse more than two hundred and sixty reports on topics related to minorities.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Weekend Link Roundup (February 4-5, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector...

African Americans

BlackGivesBack's Tracey Webb gives a shout out to The Root, which earlier this week unveiled its 2012 list of Young Futurists -- African Americans under the age of 22 who are "not only achievers but also innovators in the worlds of green innovation, science and technology, arts and culture, social activism, and business enterprise."

Civil Society

"[Is there] a textbook definition of the common good?" asks Steven Fajon, a Case Foundation intern, in a guest post on the Social Citizens blog. The question occurred to Fajon after panelist Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, in an Independent Sector webinar titled "What the Heck Is the Common Good Anyway?" explained that the purpose of the question was to initiate a dialogue between communities in need. For his part, Fajon remains unconvinced. "[I]n the end," he writes, "the idea of the common good doesn't need to be an exact science –- it simply has to strike up a debate, just like it did in my mind."

Communications/Marketing

Has any public charity had a worse week, communcations-wise, than the one Komen for the Cure had this week? For a complete rundown of the missteps made by the Dallas-based organization as it tried to explain its decision to de-fund grantee Planned Parenthood, badly fumbled its response when the Internet erupted in outrage, then reversed itself a day later, see Kivi Leroux Miller's post on the "accidental rebranding" of Komen.

Global Health

On his Humanosphere blog, Tom Paulson shares a Twitter map made by Marc Smith, founder of the Social Media Research Foundation, that seems to show the global health community -- at least the portion of it "active" on Twitter -- to be fairly insular and uncommunicative. "It's mostly just an echoing of the Gates Foundation," says Smith. "There's not a lot of response, or engagement. Basically, it looks like people preaching to the choir." For his part, Paulson suggests the problem isn't so much Twitter or social media as it is "the passive...and sometimes simplistic nature of the narrative within the global health and development community itself. This is a community," Paulson adds,

devoted to -- and advertising itself as -- doing good. Humanitarians, in my experience, are exceptionally uncomfortable when forced to talk about things going bad. It also doesn't help with fund-raising, of course. But it's reality, and reality makes for better stories.

Health

In a post on the Breast Cancer Action blog, BCA executive director Karuna Jaggar writes: "The sad truth is that Komen’s willingness to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, while a victory for women who rely on those resources, will not end the epidemic....Not while Komen overemphasizes the value of mammography -- mammography will never stop cancer before it starts. Not while pinkwashing remains the status quo, and not while Komen allows companies to put pink ribbons on their carcinogenic products. Not while metastatic disease, which is what kills women, gets only 2% of research dollars in this country...."

Higher Education

The Nonprofit Quarterly's Rick Cohen takes a closer look at the tax-exempt sector's "1 percent" -- elite universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford whose endowments, on average, racked up gains of 19 percent in fiscal year 2011.

International Aid/Development

In the first two installments of a four-part series here on PhilanTopic, Demos senior fellow Michael Edwards uses the paper he wrote on the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Bellagio Initiative to explore the relevance of "well-being" as a lens in development work and some of the lessons philanthropy can learn from that work. Coming up next: the role of metrics in that conversation.

On the White Courtesy Telephone blog, Greater New Orleans Foundation president and CEO Albert Ruesga weighs in on a disturbing article in the New York Times that exposed the unsafe working conditions at an Apple supplier in China. "It's not a given that being poor means having to work extremely hard in unsafe conditions to make very little,” writes Ruesga. “Fixing this in your supply chain needs to take priority over an on-time delivery of iPhones to eager consumers....”

Nonprofit Blogosphere

Hosting this month's Nonprofit Blog Carnival, Getting Attention's Nancy Schwartz shares a selection of posts that highlight the dreams of our fellow nonprofit bloggers.

Philanthropy

In a video reposted on the Humanosphere blog, Melinda Gates explains the purpose of the Gates Foundation's new visitor center in Seattle.

In the text of a speech reprinted on the Philanthropy Daily site, William Schambra, the director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, offers a typically provocative take on the difference between liberal and conservative philanthropy. "Granted, every progressive foundation has in mind a particular social ill or injustice it seeks to remedy, whether environmental degradation or poverty or racial inequity," writes Schambra. "But what do all these add up to?

Very seldom do liberal foundations tell us explicitly what their overriding political philosophy is, or how they understand the basic character of the American political order, and what’s worth preserving and what needs changing.

Instead, if you add up the range of specific problems on the agenda of liberal philanthropy, we’re left with a pretty depressing view of America -- an America beset by a wide range of social ills and injustices that desperately require philanthropic interventions of all sorts.

By contrast, conservative philanthropy tends to see beneath the problems America may be experiencing -- many of which are of course quite serious -- [and sees] a profoundly decent and good political order.

And the vision is to understand and preserve that order, the American regime of liberal democracy, in the face of powerful intellectual forces that have pulled us away from that commitment....

Social Enterprise

Is the social enterprise bubble about to burst? In an attempt to answer that question, the folks at GOOD asked half a dozen social entrepreneurs working in Africa what they think is driving the hype, where the sector is going, and what advice they have for those just starting off.

Social Media

And in a guest post on Beth’s Blog, Levi Strauss Foundation executive director Daniel Jae-Won Lee looks at how some human rights organizations are using social media to engage underserved communities on the issues that affect them. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California developed MiACLU.org, an online Spanish-language platform that's designed to educate and engage Latinos in the region about immigration issues.

That's it for this week. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org!

-- The Editors

Inequality

(Mark Rosenman, a nonprofit sector activist and scholar, directs Caring to Change, an effort in Washington that seeks to promote foundation grantmaking for the common good. In his last post, he challenged the notion that more nonprofit organizations necessarily translates into greater social good.)

Although the public and a few elected leaders increasingly are focused on growing economic inequality in America, the topic isn't receiving much attention from charities and nonprofits. This in spite of the fact that the sector itself is characterized by a similar inequality.

That silence is surprising for a couple of reasons. Today's yawning inequality exacerbates the problems many people face as well as their need to turn to charities for assistance. It also directly affects the help they're able to receive; as a general rule, the larger a nonprofit organization's budget, the less likely it is to provide the kind of assistance needed by low-income Americans and those falling toward poverty. Wealthier charities tend to cater to wealthier Americans, and as the rich get richer, inequality -- in society and the nonprofit world -- grows.

Let's look at some statistics about growing inequality in the country and then explore what it means for Americans and the nonprofit organizations that serve them. Since 1979, after-tax income for the top 1 percent has more than doubled, even as it fell for middle-class and lower-income Americans. The top 5 percent of households in the United States now hold more than 60 percent of the wealth. The imbalance is even greater in the nonprofit sector, where the top 2.5 percent of charities that report data to the IRS control more than 50 percent of the wealth and account for over 60 percent of annual revenues.

Three types of exempt organizations -- hospitals, primary healthcare facilities, and institutions of higher education -- make up the top tier of the sector. Compare their finances with those of human service groups, which comprise more than a third of all exempt organizations but account for only 13 percent of its annual revenues (including government funding, fees-for-service and other income, and donations) and 11 percent of its assets.

It gets worse. This is the first recession on record in which the median income of working-age people was lower as the economy "recovered" than it was before the economy tanked. The wealthy, of course, continue to do well. Much the same is true for charities, as larger, more prosperous organizations see modest growth in contributions while many smaller nonprofits struggle to survive.

Higher education is a perfect example. The recession officially ended in the summer of 2009, and giving to higher education rose about 3.5 percent in 2010. Compare that to giving to the human services sector, which declined 1.5 percent in spite of contributions for disaster relief and recovery efforts in Haiti and elsewhere.

That's a problem, in part, because giving to higher educational institutions contributes to inequality. Consider the top two hundred or so colleges, where only 15 percent of students come from the bottom half of the income-distribution pyramid and 67 percent come from the top quartile. At most institutions, moreover, financial assistance for low- and moderate-income students has failed to keep pace with increases in tuition and related costs. And this as the increasingly large salaries paid many university presidents makes them "1-percenters."

Indeed, retiring Amherst College president Anthony Marx recently observed that "we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution." While having a college degree remains important to getting, or at least holding on to, a good job with benefits and some security, it also helps to legitimate inequality by seeming to validate a college education as a sure-fire route to meritocratic success.

But is it? According to a College Board study using Department of Education data, students with high test scores from low-income families were less likely to complete college than those with low scores from affluent families. And an Education Trust study of almost twelve hundred four-year colleges found that only five institutions (that's a number, not a percentage) were doing a good job serving low-income students.

The problem isn't confined to higher education. Nonprofit hospitals -- a category that includes some of the best hospitals in the country -- often fail to adequately serve those in greatest need while handing out executive compensation packages that would make a banker blush. In 2009, two-thirds of the nonprofit hospitals in the country dedicated less than 2 percent of their total expenditures for "charity care" -- i.e., medical care for the poor and indigent -- while only 7 percent directed more than 5 percent to such care. And this during a severe economic downturn in which health-related crises put countless numbers of low- and moderate-income people at grave economic risk.

I'm not suggesting that nonprofit organizations at the top of the income pyramid completely fail to provide beneficial services to society at large. They do. But with their elite reputational status and considerable economic wherewithal, they could do much more. The same is true of foundations.

Human service groups and community-based organizations often are the most helpful to people on the short end of the inequality stick. In addition to the direct services they provide, community-based organizations frequently advocate for and organize around the plight of the downwardly mobile and financially insecure. Yet, faced with ongoing budget cuts and flat or declining contributions, they are among the organizations that are most strapped financially as we head into an even more challenging future.

Notwithstanding the recent assertions of various Republican presidential candidates, it's not "class warfare" or "the politics of envy" to acknowledge -- and want to address -- growing economic inequality. On the contrary, it's a gross disservice to the nation to downplay its existence and assert that we can fix the problem by giving more tax breaks to the wealthy or by further deregulating corporations. As my kids would say, been there, done that. Acknowledging the divide between the haves and have-nots is an important step -- we can't solve the problem unless we are willing to speak frankly.

In short, nonprofit and foundation leaders need to talk more forcefully and publicly about economic inequality in America -- and do more to address it in both their programs and their own operations. They can start by countering the myths and obfuscation that characterize too much of today's political discourse. It's time we united, as a sector, to help people understand and act on their shared interests and better serve the common good.

-- Mark Rosenman

Wikipedia Goes to College

(Laura Cronin is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her last post, she chatted with Karen Brown, vice president of programs at the Fairfield County Community Foundation, about the foundation's capacity-building efforts.)

Since 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation has been quietly going about the business of operating the fifth most visited site on the Internet without trumpeting its own story as one of the most successful volunteer organizations in the world.

With 20 million volunteer-authored articles in over 282 languages, the foundation has taken the old-fashioned volunteer effort online and achieved a scale for Wikipedia, its biggest and most successful project, that few people in traditional nonprofit circles would dare to imagine. For those in the sector focused on impact, the numbers are impressive. According to a Pew survey, 53 percent of adult American Internet users visit Wikipedia regularly, and the site boasts more than 400 million user visits a month (the strategic plan calls for topping one billion in 2012). Let's face it, is there any other nonprofit organization in the world that can help you find Lady Gaga's real name (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta ) or tell you how to properly categorize Pluto within seconds of firing up your smartphone?

While the Wikimedia Foundation has grown in recent years, it is still primarily a volunteer enterprise. Headquartered in San Francisco, the 501(c)(3) organization has only 73 full-time employees and, despite a very sophisticated technology infrastructure, an annual operating budget of under $30 million. To maintain and improve its financial position, the foundation has become more aggressive this year about raising additional funds. Like its volunteer efforts, these initial forays into the world of fundraising have been models of efficiency and innovation. Indeed, the foundation's first online fundraiser last year netted some $15 million in just fifty days.

Growing and diversifying its cadre of volunteers is now a top priority for the foundation. In theory, anyone in the world can edit a Wikipedia page. In practice, the barriers to becoming a successful volunteer (or "Wikipedian") are rather high. The editing protocols require technical skills and practice. And in order to make a lasting contribution, subject-area expertise and excellent language skills are needed as well.

With an eye to ensuring that more people become successful volunteers –- especially more women and people from the global South -- the foundation piloted its first Public Policy Initiative during the 2010-11 academic year on thirty-two university campuses across the United States. The project engaged university students and faculty in an effort to explore how volunteers could improve and increase the number of English-language articles on Wikipedia. Working with teams on campus, the foundation developed lesson plans and training materials that make it possible for faculty to incorporate the creation of high-quality entries into the curriculum. The foundation also provided the services of "campus ambassadors," who mentored students interested in becoming first-time Wikipedians. Veteran Wikipedians from the online community were instrumental in breaking down technical barriers and guiding students as they learned editing protocols and developed their online writing skills.

One notable success involved the work of a student at Georgetown University who had an interest in Egyptian politics and edited a page on the National Democratic Party of Egypt just months before the Arab Spring uprising in Cairo. There had been little information in English on the site about the group and its complex history, and as the uprising played out (eventually leading to the overthrow of the Mubarak government) there was considerable interest in the new content from English-language readers. In fact, the page soon was netting five thousand views a day and eventually began to be updated by people with direct knowledge of the subject on a regular basis.

Clearly, research, writing, and media literacy are all skills that students can sharpen by turning a college term paper into a Wikipedia entry. Indeed, during the Public Policy Initiative faculty conducted research on how this approach might improve student learning and shared it with the foundation. According to Frank Schulenburg, a veteran Wikipedian and director of the initiative:

The U.S. pilot was extremely successful in providing students an authentic learning experience and increasing the quality of articles on Wikipedia. We're excited to continue expanding the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States as well as in other countries, where students can improve content on Wikipedia in their native language.

With this new campus-based program as a launch pad for its outreach work globally, the Wikipedia Foundation is positioning itself to maintain and extend its position as a leading mobilizer of volunteer energies in the nonprofit sector -- and on campus. And that's something for which we can all be thankful.

-- Laura Cronin

This Week in PubHub: College Access and Success

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she looked at four reports that explore ways to strengthen teacher preparation programs.)

Much of the discussion about boosting the number of college graduates in the U.S. seems to focus on preparing students for college-level academics and expanding access to postsecondary education through community colleges. But many students who do go to college ultimately drop out without obtaining a degree -- especially those from low-income families. This week in PubHub, we're highlighting four reports that examine college access and success, with a focus on affordability, academic supports, and employment outcomes.

Instead of increasing opportunities for economically disadvantaged students, current tuition tax credits, deductions, and financial aid policies are more likely to benefit middle- and upper-income students, a new report from the Education Trust argues. Funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, the report, Priced Out: How the Wrong Financial-Aid Policies Hurt Low-Income Students (20 pages, PDF), found that as a result of regressive federal, state, and institutional policies, low-income students are often expected to pay more than their middle-income peers as a percentage of family income. Indeed, out of nearly twelve hundred four-year colleges and universities, only five enrolled low-income students at rates as high as the national average, expected those students to pay no more than middle-income students as a percentage of family income, and had a graduation rate of at least 50 percent. With only 8 percent of youth from the lowest-income quartile earning a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four (compared with 82 percent from the highest-income quartile), any reforms to financial aid policies, the authors argue, must give priority to helping low-income students, removing technical barriers to accessing financial assistance, and ensuring enough support to raise completion rates.

Cost is not the only obstacle for low-income students looking to attend and graduate from college. While nearly half of all undergraduates begin their college career at a more affordable community college, only a third of them earn a degree or certificate within six years. The MDRC report Opening Doors to Student Success: A Synthesis of Findings From an Evaluation at Six Community Colleges (12 pages, PDF) highlights lessons learned from the Opening Doors Demonstration program, which is designed to raise college completion rates through learning communities and targeted student services such as academic counseling as well as performance-based scholarships. According to the report, the scholarships helped low-income parents enroll as full-time students and earn more credits, while enhanced counseling and freshmen learning communities resulted in modest improvements in academic performance and second-term registration. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the report calls for further innovations in developmental education and financial aid reform.

Racial/ethnic disparities in college completion and transfer rates also are commonplace. According to Divided We Fail: Improving Completion and Closing Racial Gaps in California's Community Colleges (20 pages, PDF), a report from the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at CSU Sacramento, about 75 percent of African-American and 80 percent of Latino/Hispanic community college students fail to earn a certificate or degree or transfer to a four-year college or university within six years. The authors offer a model for increasing overall completion rates and reducing racial/ethnic gaps that involves analyzing and reporting student achievement data and implementing best practices based on those findings. Funded by the Campaign for College Opportunity and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the report points out that strengthening community colleges is essential to raising educational attainment among the Latino/Hispanic population, whose share of California's working-age population is projected to reach 50 percent by 2040.

The Lumina Foundation for Education report The Degree Qualifications Profile (34 pages, PDF) examines college success from the perspective of the economic and societal value of the degrees students earn. The report proposes a qualifications framework that would define degree "quality" and improve capacity throughout the postsecondary education system to ensure that students learn the things they need to know. The profile includes benchmarks for applied learning, intellectual skills, specialized knowledge, broad integrative knowledge, and civic learning at the associate, bachelor's, and master's degree levels and across all fields of specialization. Such a framework, the authors argue, would provide a common vocabulary for sharing best practices, as well as a foundation for better public understanding of institutions of higher education and more reliable measures of accountability.

Care to weigh in on efforts to expand college access and improve rates of success? Do you know of any practices or policies that are helping students from low-income families and communities of color not only gain access to higher education but also succeed in college? What aspects of the debate are missing or being overlooked? Use the comments section to share your thoughts.

And be sure to visit PubHub, where you can browse more than seven hundred reports on education-related topics.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Q&A With Aaron Dorfman, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy was created thirty-five years ago to encourage foundations to do more to address public needs that were then -- and often still are -- underfunded. The organization works to promote philanthropy that serves the public good, is responsive to people and communities with the least wealth and opportunity, and is held accountable to the highest standards of integrity and openness.

Aaron Dorfman has served as executive director of NCRP since 2007. Prior to joining the organization, he worked for fifteen years as a community organizer, spearheading grassroots campaigns to improve public education, expand public transportation for low-income residents, and improve access to affordable housing.

Recently, PND spoke with Dorfman about the public education crisis in America, how foundation support of nonprofit advocacy has changed in recent years, and the likelihood of new legislation affecting nonprofits and the nonprofit sector.

Philanthropy News Digest: Confronting Systematic Inequity in Education, a recent NCRP report written by Kevin Welner, a professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Amy Farley, a doctoral candidate at CU's School of Education, argues that the American public education system is in crisis and that foundations working in the education space are likely to have the greatest impact if they focus on marginalized populations. That's difficult, expensive work. How much of an education funder's grantmaking budget should be devoted to educational equity and access efforts?

Aaron Dorfman: I agree it's difficult and expensive work. And I think most education funders are in it for the long haul and want to see long-term, sustainable results. But there's no right way to determine how much of a particular funder's portfolio should be devoted to these kinds of efforts. At the end of the day, it has a lot to do with the comfort level of trustees when it comes to funding advocacy and focusing on long-term change versus achieving short-term results. One of the points we were trying to raise in the report is that, on the whole, there is far too little funding for efforts that confront systemic inequity in education. So I would encourage each foundation to think about its own long-term goals and how the high-impact strategies offered in the report might help them achieve those goals.

PND: In the report, NCRP recommends that foundations consider allocating at least 50 percent of their grant dollars for the benefit of marginalized communities. At the time of the report's publication, I believe you noted that roughly 11 percent of foundations in the U.S. were meeting that goal.

AD: That's right. The 11 percent figure was based on the thousand or so foundations in the Foundation Center's database that have given an average of a million dollars or more for education. Our analysis also found that only about 2 percent of foundations were allocating 25 percent or more of their grant dollars for advocacy efforts, another recommendation in the report. Again, we did not intend for the recommendations to be inflexible benchmarks -- obviously, what individual foundations can and are willing to do varies a great deal. The point is to encourage funders to have a serious discussion, at the board and staff levels, about whether or not they are devoting enough of their portfolio for the explicit benefit of underserved groups and whether they are investing enough in strategies with the potential to produce long-term systemic change. We think if funders do that, it will lead to positive change.

PND: Education reform has been a major theme of the Obama administration. Is the administration doing enough to address educational equity and access issues in low-income communities? And how would you rate its efforts to work collaboratively with foundations and nonprofits to advance educational reform?

AD: Well, the Obama administration has taken a good first step, in that it recognizes the serious and ongoing education needs in our nation's most vulnerable communities. However, it hasn't really made a meaningful attempt to break the cycle of systemic inequity or address the power imbalances we talked about in the report. Its approach has been more one of promoting favored solutions rather than focusing on policies that enhance the political voice of those most likely to be affected by reform. A focus on these kinds of participatory issues is very different than, say, devolving power to individual parents through school choice, which tends to leave schools in low-income neighborhood stuck in a cycle of decline. So, while I think the administration has done some things well, I would be more impressed if it recognized the importance of supporting active, engaged constituencies willing to fight the systemic inequities that exist in the system.

PND: How is the shift in the balance of power in Congress likely to affect nonprofits and the nonprofit sector? And how does NCRP plan to insert itself into that conversation?

AD: It's clear to me from recent events that discussions about deficit reduction are going to include changes to or elimination of the charitable deduction. I think we'll hear a lot of talk about that in 2011 -- indeed, my guess is that that will be the number-one policy issue affecting the nonprofit sector in the new Congress. And we're working on establishing a position with respect to that. We've always felt that it is important to incentivize charitable giving, and we would be open to changes in the current system that actually improve the regulatory framework for giving.

PND: Nonprofit advocacy and the need to support it is a huge concern of NCRP's. How would you rate the work of foundations in terms of advancing advocacy over the past few years?

AD: They're making progress. Foundations are much more comfortable talking about funding advocacy, and they've made some real headway in terms of where the dollars actually go. So while I'm looking forward to the opportunity to analyze 2009 data to see how much progress we have made, I do feel as though there has been movement in terms of funders recognizing the importance of funding civic engagement, community organizing, and policy advocacy work.

-- Matt Sinclair

Year in Review: Noteworthy Gifts

For many Americans, 2010 was characterized by continuing economic uncertainty and challenges. It was no surprise, therefore, that charitable giving, even among the mega-wealthy, reflected that uncertainty, with the number of gifts of $100 million or more up only slightly over 2009, when seven such gifts were announced, and way down from 2008, when at least fifteen such gifts were announced.

As they often are, educational institutions were the focus of many of the largest gifts, both eight- and nine-figure. In January, the Lawrenceville School, a four-year co-ed boarding school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, received a $60 million bequest from the estate of Henry C. Woods, an alumnus, former English teacher, and trustee of the school, and his wife, Janie, for scholarships and other programs. Six weeks later, the first nine-figure gifts of the year were announced by two mid-South institutions of higher education: Oklahoma State University, which received a $100 million challenge gift from energy tycoon and alumnus T. Boone Pickens, and Baylor University in Waco, Texas, which received an anonymous $200 million bequest in support of medical research related to aging.

A number of healthcare institutions also received major gifts in the early part of the year. In January, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, California, announced a five-year, $50 million endowment gift from South Dakota businessman T. Denny Sanford to expand and accelerate the institute's cutting-edge medical research. In April, the University of California, San Diego Health System received $75 million from the family of Joan and Irwin Jacobs for a medical center at the school's La Jolla campus. And in June, UCSF Children's Hospital announced a five-year, $100 million gift from Salesforce.com founder, chairman, and CEO Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, to support the construction of a new hospital.

No gift received more attention, however, than the $100 million pledged by Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to launch a foundation that will work closely with Newark mayor Cory Booker to improve the long-troubled public school system in that New Jersey city. The gift was especially noteworthy for being the largest made to-date by the 26-year-old entrepreneur, whose fortune Forbes puts at $6.9 billion, and for being many times larger than any gift ever made to the Newark school system.

Other noteworthy gifts announced in the second half of the year included a $100 million challenge grant from the Open Society Foundations to Human Rights Watch; a $100 million pledge from businessman Henry R. Kravis to Columbia Business School; and $50 million each from Cogent Systems founder Ming Hsieh and the Annenberg Foundation to the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In addition, Georgetown University received an $87 million bequest from Harry J. and Virginia Toulmin to support medical research at the school, while Cornell University announced an $80 million gift from David and Patricia Atkinson to endow the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, which they had established with a smaller gift in 2007.

The year came to a close with a bang, as two major arts-focused gifts were announced. In November, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded three grants totaling $50 million to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for efforts to reach underserved K-12 students, expand research and public programs, and support the design and construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open on the Mall in 2015. And toward the end of the month, the National Gallery of Art announced what was the largest gift of the year: a collection of more than two hundred pieces of early American furniture assembled by George M. and Linda H. Kaufman that is estimated to be worth more than $250 million.

Indeed, despite the uncertain economic climate, many well-off individuals were willing to dig deep into their pockets to support nonprofits and the causes they believe in. The Benioffs, for example, increased the size of their gift to UCSF Children's Hospital from the $20 million they initially planned to give to $100 million because of the difficult economy. "I had never really thought about doing a $100 million gift. That was significantly more than anything we'd done before," Marc Benioff told the Wall Street Journal. "We strongly believe in giving back to the San Francisco community that has given so much to us, and where the majority of the employees at Salesforce.com live. Additionally, given the decline in personal philanthropic giving and reduced government funding, we recognize that we need to do more."

Related:

• Number and Size of Mega-Gifts Fell in 2009 (1/6/09)
• Lawrenceville School Receives $60 Million Gift From Former English Teacher (1/15/10)
• T. Denny Sanford Donates $50 Million to Burnham Institute for Medical Research (1/29/10)
• Oklahoma State University Receives $100 Million Challenge Gift (3/2/10)
• Baylor University Receives Anonymous $200 Million Bequest (3/5/10)
• UCSD Health System Receives $75 Million for New Medical Center (4/6/10)
• UCSF Children's Hospital Receives $100 Million Gift From Marc and Lynne Benioff (6/18/10)
• Human Rights Watch Receives $100 Million From Open Society Foundations (9/8/10)
• Georgetown University Receives $87 Million Bequest (9/15/10)
• Facebook Founder Commits $100 Million to Support Newark Public Schools (9/24/10)
• Kravis Pledges $100 Million to Columbia Business School (10/6/10)
• University of Southern California Receives $100 Million From Alumnus, Annenberg Foundation (10/18/10)
• Cornell University Receives $80 Million for Research (10/29/10)
• Smithsonian Institution Receives $50 Million From Gates Foundation (11/5/10)
• National Gallery of Art to Receive Collection Worth $250 Million (11/15/10)

Year in Review: Race to the Top and Education Reform

The battle over healthcare reform early in the year and then the buildup to the midterm elections overshadowed one of the Obama administration's more ambitious goals in 2010: furthering efforts to reform America's struggling public education system.

Headed by former Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan, the U.S. Department of Education kicked off the year with two major announcements: a $250 million public-private expansion of the Educate to Innovate program, which aims to boost learning and achievement in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields; and, a few weeks later, a proposed $1.35 billion expansion of its signature Race to the Top program, a comprehensive effort, backed by a $4.35 billion investment, "to incentivize excellence, spur reform, and promote the adoption and use of effective policies and practices" in the nation's public school systems. In March, sixteen finalists from a pool of forty-six states and the District of Columbia were announced in the first round of the competition, followed, a few weeks later, by an announcement of the first two states to receive grants: Delaware ($100 million) and Tennessee ($500 million).

Those announcements were followed, in August, by news that grants totaling more than $3.2 billion had been awarded to an additional nine states -- Florida ($700 million), New York ($700 million), Georgia ($400 million), Maryland ($400 million), North Carolina ($400 million), Ohio ($400 million), Massachusetts ($250 million), Hawaii ($75 million), and Rhode Island ($75 million) -- as well as Washington, D.C. ($75 million), leading Duncan to declare the first year of the program a success. However, an issue brief published by the Foundation Center in June as part of the Foundations for Education Excellence initiative argued that the future success of Race to the Top would depend, in no small measure, on the federal government's willingness to include private grantmakers in the development of education reform policies and on grantmakers committing to being engaged, long-term partners in the process.

Indeed by then, a coalition of private foundations had already announced its intention to invest up to half a billion dollars in education reform efforts, with some of that money designated to match funds from the Department of Education's $650 million Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund, which provides grants to local agencies, nonprofits, and school districts with a demonstrated record of improving student achievement, reducing dropout rates, increasing high school graduation rates, and/or increasing college enrollment and completion rates. The foundations involved in the effort -- the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Lumina, Casey, Gates, Mott, Ford, MacArthur, and Kellogg foundations -- also joined forces to create the Foundation Registry i3, an Internet portal where education reform groups could apply for matching funds from coalition partners in a single step.

"Much of what Secretary Duncan is currently addressing at the department builds on existing foundation investments in education," said Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian. "As such, the twelve foundations realized this is a significant moment to seriously advance student learning so that all of our young people are prepared to succeed in a global economy and for citizenship in a complex world. It was time to maximize our collective efforts."

No review of the year in education philanthropy would be complete without mention of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, two of America's most successful technologists and respected "philanthrocapitalists."

In September, the 26-year-old Zuckerberg, the nation's youngest billionaire, announced a $100 million matching gift to establish a foundation dedicated to supporting reform efforts in Newark, New Jersey's long-troubled public school system, while Gates, the country's wealthiest individual, continued, largely through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to be a major supporter of education reform at the elementary, secondary, and higher education levels.

Indeed, as the year came to a close, Gates, in remarks to the Council of Chief State School Officers, called on the nation's state education superintendents to take the difficult steps needed to restructure their public education budgets, which have been battered by the economic downturn. "Our best chance to change budgets starts now," Gates told those in attendance. "Your appropriations committees will see the state school budgets and ask you to show them an easy way out. I think you can tell them -- 'there is a way out, but it's not easy'. You can lead this change, but you can't be expected to do it alone. You'll need friends in business and philanthropy to stand with you. You can count on me….The design of our schools, the way we teach, the way we budget -- has kept so much human energy locked up inside. Let's unleash it."

Related:

• White House Launches $250 Million Public-Private STEM Initiative (1/7/10)
• Obama Proposes $1.35 Billion Expansion to Race to the Top Fund (1/20/10)
• Gates Foundation Announces $19.5 Million in Grants for Next-Generation Teaching Tools in Math and Literacy (2/19/10)
• Department of Education Announces Sixteen 'Race to the Top' Finalists (3/8/10)
• Department of Education Announces First Race to the Top Grants (3/31/10)
• W.K. Kellogg Foundation Awards $1.4 Million to Rural School and Community Trust (4/3/10)
• Gates Foundation Commits $110 Million to Transform Remedial Education (4/21/10)
• Coalition of Foundations to Invest $506 Million in Education Innovation (4/30/10)
• Race to Top Offers Lessons for Grantmaker-Government Collaborations, Brief Finds (6/2/10)
• Department of Education Announces Round Two Race to the Top Finalists (7/29/10)
• Department of Education Chooses Forty-Nine Investing in Innovation Fund Finalists (8/6/10)
• Department of Education Announces Ten More Race to the Top Winners (8/25/10)
• Investing in Innovation Winners Have Secured Matching Funds (9/22/10)
• Facebook Founder Commits $100 Million to Support Newark Public Schools (9/24/10)
• Newark Mayor Secures $40 Million to Match Zuckerberg Gift (9/28/10)
• Charter School Group Fund Launches $160 Million Campaign (10/01/10)

Weekend Link Roundup (September 12-13, 2009)

Communications/Marketing

Internet marketing guru Seth Godin argues that putting "free" on top of an existing business model is a sure recipe for failure. When "advertising goes away," writes Godin, "you need to make something else abundant in order to gain attention. Then, and only then, will you be able to sell something that's naturally scarce."

Diversity

On the New Voices in Philanthropy blog, Trista Harris, executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, reminds her readers that diversity is about age, not just gender and race, and that the presence of multiple generations on a foundation's board and staff invariably improves its grantmaking.

Higher Education

In the Washington Post, Zephyr Teachout, visiting assistant professor of law at Duke University, argues that, like newspapers, the majority of brick-and-mortar universities will be rendered obsolete by digital technologies over the next decade or two. And while that might benefit millions of college-age students for whom the cost of a college education increasingly is out of reach, the cost to society will be "a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced."

Impact/Effectiveness

Guest blogging on Beth Kanter's blog, Gale Berkowitz, director of evaulation at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, argues that continuous evaluation is integral to the success of any social change effort. And at Packard, evaluation is guided by three main principles:

1. Success depends on a willingness to solicit feedback and take corrective action when necessary
2. Improvement should be continuous, and organizations should learn from their mistakes
3. Evaluation should be conducted in partnership with those who are doing the work in order to maximize learning and minimize the burden on grantees

Good advice for all of us.

Innovation

On the Posterous blog, 3BL Media -- an organization working to "advance and promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability through effective communications" -- offers nonprofits this list of 50 things they can do to "foster a sustainable culture of innovation."

International Affairs/Development

In a lengthy critique in The Nation, Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez, and Annie Shattuck examine the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to end hunger in Africa and conclude that, well meaning though it is, the foundation is making many of the same mistakes made in the 1960s by the architects of the original Green Revolution.

Writing on the UN Dispatch blog, Alanna Shaikh argues that the One Laptop Per Child project started by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte has been a failure. "The laptop," writes Shaikh

never came down to the hundred dollar price that was promised. The huge orders never materialized, and the project was very slow to allow sales to NGOs and charities instead of just governments. They abandoned the human-powered power source. They abandoned the special child-friendly OS. The laptop still didn’t sell to their target market in the developing world....

Once the laptop finally started arriving in the developing world, its impact was minimal. We think. No one is doing much research on their impact on education; discussions are largely theoretical. This we do know: OLPC didn’t provide tech support for the machines, or training in how to incorporate them into education. Teachers didn’t understand how to use the laptops in their lessons; some resented them. Kids like the laptops, but they don’t actually seem to help them learn.

That view is vigorously challenged by half a dozen people, including Negroponte, in the comments section following Shaikh's post. In a world where every organization is being asked to do more with less, it's an interesting and timely debate.

Journalism/Media

Recently, the German blogger elite launched an English adaptation of their Internet Manifesto, which details "how journalism works today." Blogging at TechCrunch, Markus Goebel notes that "the 17 articles run down from statements like 'the Internet is different' and 'the Internet improves journalism' [to swipes like] 'tradition is not a business model' and 'the web constitutes an infrastructure for social exchange superior to that of 20th century mass media.'" You can check out the entire manifesto (in fifteen different languages) here.

Social Enterpreneurship

On her Social Velocity blog, Nell Edgington, a panelist at the recent Social Capital Markets Conference 2009 in San Francisco, considers the emerging market for social capital and wonders how nonprofits, those organizations that have been creating 'social impact' since before it was cool, fit into that market? Writes Edgington:

Many would agree that the nonprofit sector and the philanthropy that funds it are dysfunctional, even broken. And I think most of us would agree the government sector is fairly broken as well.

But we cannot discount and dismiss either sector. In the true spirit of the social innovation space, we must recycle and reuse the nonprofit and government sectors, just as we are refashioning the private sector. We must reconfigure the assets of all three sectors to turn them into more effective, more productive, higher functioning sectors that can work with, not separate from, each other to create solutions....

Don't miss the thoughtful discussion in the comments following the post.

Speaking of SOCAP09, Andrew Wolk, founder and CEO of Root Cause, has put together a nice roundup of resources from and about the conference.

Do social entrepreneurs realize that the world has changed? That's the question raised by Matthew Bishop, New York bureau chief of The Economist and author, with Michael Green, of Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World, in the latest issue of UK-based Alliance magazine. The global economic paradigm that prevailed for a quarter-century has been revealed as "seriously, perhaps fatally, flawed," writes Bishop, and the battle to invent a new paradigm is under way. It's a time for "discontinuous thinking," not business as usual. "The challenge for philanthropists, social entrepreneurs and all those trying to solve the world’s most pressing problems," adds Bishop

is, first, to figure out what has changed and then to look at themselves and their organizations anew. In many cases, personal or organizational attributes that were taken for granted or even seen as weaknesses in the old world will be tremendous strengths in the new one, while former strengths may turn out to be less important, or even downright dangerous....

We couldn't agree more.

Sustainability

In a two-part series on SocialEarth, Mike Shoemaker at the Human Ventures blog, asks "If you were the non-profit god, what would you fix?" (Read part one here and part two here.) In the posts, Shoemaker discusses the problems nonprofit organizations face when using the three-party market model -- the ability to get a service for free on someone else’s dime -- and notes that for-profit organizations using the same models do not have the same problems as their not-for-profit counterparts.

And in a more recent post, Shoemaker reflects further on the subject and asks, "Are we arbitrary or fickle in how we give?" He then writes:

The big difference is that in most of the for-profit world cases, effectively serving your primary customer also directly and positively impacts your secondary customers/funders.

In the non-profit world, however, when an organization improves its ability to serve its target population…donors may receive more or better stories of good deeds and see more compelling impact numbers in the annual report, but they are still not likely to receive anything more tangible. That is, I think, the essence of what makes the non-profit model so much less sustainable.

Put a bit more conceptually (feel free to tune out here if you’re not interested in the academic speak), we do not seem hard-wired to use optimal-decision making methods when it comes to altruism. We seem to be content knowing that our money is going to a “good cause” (or that we’re getting a tax write-off), and few of us will take the time to look hard for better or “optimal” causes when it comes to how we invest our philanthropic dollars. So when it comes to giving, we’re somewhat arbitrary and especially fickle....

(H/t: Lucy B. @p2173)

That's it for this week. What did we forget? Drop us a note here. Have a great week!

-- Mitch Nauffts

Lumina Knows Everyone Is Watching: That's Part of the [Strategic] Plan

(Bruce Trachtenberg is executive director of the Communications Network, a stand-alone 501(c) dedicated to helping advance, promote, and encourage the adoption of effective communications practices in philanthropy. In March, he blogged about the strategic value of funders viewing their work through a limited-life lens.)

It's probably not in the plans, but it wouldn't be a surprise to see the Lumina Foundation for Education renting a sign in New York City's Times Square to call attention to its strategic plan -- or at least to report on the progress it is making.

In recent weeks, Indianapolis-based Lumina has been as open and as visible as any foundation could possibly be in outlining what it calls its "big goal" and what has to happen to get there. Between now and 2025, the foundation wants to see the percentage of Americans with high-quality college degrees and credentials reach 60 percent. According to the foundation, only about 39 percent of American adults today hold a two- or four-year degree -- "a rate that has held remarkably steady for four decades." Reaching the higher number, say Lumina officials, will require the United States to graduate nearly 800,000 more students each year over the next sixteen years.

The foundation is anything but shy about its initiative. To get the word out, it has been emailing detailed descriptions of its strategy to a range of audiences, providing a comprehensive overview on its Web site of how it intends to achieve these goals, and featuring its president, Jamie Merisotis, in print and broadcast interviews.

And as eager as the foundation is for others to know its plans, it is similarly committed to keeping the public informed of its progress over the next sixteen years. In other words, it will be life in a fishbowl for quite some time at the foundation. Notes Dianna Boyce, communications associate, "We haven't yet come up with the equivalent of the United Way thermometer to report on progress. But we're working on that."

But there's another reason for the foundation's ultra-transparency, and which shows how it has wisely calculated the key role communications must play in its change strategy. According to Lumina officials, the foundation not only intends to hold itself accountable for what it hopes to achieve, it is serving notice on many others throughout American society that this work cannot succeed unless a lot of players pitch in. As Lumina states in its strategy documents, to push college completion rates 50 percent higher by 2025 "will require substantial change in just about every aspect of the American education system."

It goes on to say:

As the nation's largest private foundation focused exclusively on getting more Americans into and through higher education, Lumina has a unique leadership opportunity -- and responsibility -- to create a national sense of urgency so as to stimulate action in higher education and public policy to achieve the big goal. Lumina Foundation will be a catalyst in America's pursuit of the goal and the critical outcomes.

"Cleary communicating our direction helps drive our planning and gives others a window into where we are headed, incenting them to join us along the road," said Lumina's Merisotis.

Toward that end, Lumina also says:

The Big Goal by 2025 is possible if the nation directs attention to three critical outcomes:

1. Students are prepared academically, financially, and socially for success in education beyond high school.
2. Higher education completion rates are improved significantly.
3. Higher education productivity is increased to expand capacity and serve more students.

In other words, lawmakers and policy makers at all levels, along with educators and many others, will likely share in the final grade this effort receives. Toward that end, the foundation, "in partnership with other stakeholders," says it will concentrate its energy and efforts on improving student preparedness, student success, and college productivity.

So how would you grade the foundation's work so far?

-- Bruce Trachtenberg

Global Philanthropy Forum Annual Conference

A quick post to let you know that the Foundation Center is providing the information platform for GPF's 8th annual conference, which opens today in Washington, D.C.

As part of that effort, my Research and Web Services colleagues have put together five terrific slide decks filled with background statistics and examples of innovative solutions supported by philanthropy in five key areas of activity being addressed at the forum: poverty at home and abroad, access to health care, climate change, education for a global society, and reconstruction and reconciliation in post-conflict societies. Resources compiled for the conference include data on top grantmakers and grantees, significant grants awarded in recent years, and the geographical distribution of international grant dollars. Within each issue area, three to five subtopics are further illustrated by brief case studies describing creative approaches to the issue.

To learn more, check out GPF's annual conference page. Or click here to read my interview with GPF president and co-founder Jane Wales.

-- Mitch Nauffts

TED on Sunday: Sir Ken Robinson on Education and Creativity

In this funny and thought-provoking presentation, creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we educate our children. Robinson, an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation, and human resources, is probably best known for leading a national commission in the United Kingdom on creativity, education, and the economy. The resulting report, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (244 pages, PDF), was published to wide acclaim in 1999. His new book, The Element: Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, was published earlier this year by Penguin. Enjoy. (Filmed: February 2006. Running time: 19:24.)

-- Mitch Nauffts

Memo to the President: Higher Education Is US

What should the top priority of the incoming Obama administration be?

If you're like most people, you're probably thinking "the economy." Makes sense. Things are bad -- and they're likely to get worse before they get better. But as Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education, argues in a "memo" to the president-elect on the Lumina Web site, the issue isn't just short-term economic recovery; it's about long-term economic transformation. And higher education attainment has to be a key driver of that transformation.

The key to progress, writes Merisotis,

...lies in the development of the knowledge economy, which in turn requires the American workforce to develop the skills that are required in a globally-competitive environment. Higher education attainment is increasingly important to the U.S. economy as the workforce demands education and training leading to higher levels of skills and knowledge. The implications of this shift can scarcely be overstated. For generations, the American economy has created large numbers of middle class jobs that did not require high levels of skills or knowledge. As a consequence of global competition, these jobs are rapidly disappearing. It is not that low-skill jobs do not exist in the United States -- it is that the Americans who hold them are not likely to enter or remain in the middle class. This means they are not likely to have access to quality health care, save for retirement, or assure their children access to higher education. The consequences of failing to reach the middle class are increasingly severe. What has changed is that access to middle class jobs is now mostly dependent on completing some form of postsecondary education.

Higher education attainment rates are rising in almost every industrialized or post-industrial country in the world, except for the United States. Lumina Foundation estimates that at current college graduate production rates there will be a shortage of 16 million college-educated adults in the U.S. workforce by 2025. Today, roughly 39 percent of American adults hold a two- or four-year degree. That attainment rate, which has held steady for four decades, led all other nations for much of the post-war period. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Based on data published by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), our nation now ranks only 10th in the percentage of young adults (25 to 34 years of age) with college degrees. Today in some countries more than half of young adults are degree holders. Even more disturbing for the United States is that attainment rates in these other countries continue to climb while ours remains stagnant....

The clearest evidence that rising attainment rates in the rest of the world reflect real economic demands is that the gap in earnings based on level of education continues to widen. In 29 of the 30 OECD member countries, the gap in earnings between people who have completed some form of postsecondary education and those who have not is widening despite the fact that the proportion of postsecondary graduates in the workforce is increasing. If the economy were not demanding higher levels of skills and knowledge, the gap in earnings would be expected to narrow as the supply of graduates increased -- a case of simple supply and demand. This trend is evident in the United States as well. Since 1975, the average earnings of high school dropouts and high school graduates fell in real terms (by 15 percent and 1 percent, respectively), while those of college graduates rose by 19 percent. In other words, the economic benefits -- both for individuals and the society -- of completing higher education are growing.

Dangerous stagnation is evident in another area as well: Rates of college attainment among our nation's underserved students -- first-generation students, low-income students and students of color -- are significantly lower than those of other students. These achievement gaps have endured for decades, and they're now widening -- an ominous sign when one considers current demographic and economic trends. More than 30 percent of white, non-Hispanic American adults have at least four years of college, but only 18 percent of African Americans and 12 percent of Hispanics have reached the same level of attainment. Because the average income of Americans with a four-year degree is $43,000 per year, compared to $27,000 for those with just a high school diploma, this chronic gap in educational attainment contributes to the disparities in income between racial and ethnic groups in the United States. This issue is of growing importance as the proportion of the population from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education grows rapidly. Of the total U.S. population growth of 56 million between 2000 and 2020, 46 million will be members of minority groups. The United States is projected to become a "majority minority" country by 2050.

At Lumina Foundation, we have embraced a single, specific goal that will help us address this issue. Our Big Goal is this: to increase the percentage of Americans with high quality degrees and credentials from 39 percent to 60 percent by the year 2025. How do we as a nation achieve this goal?

Click here to read the rest of Merisotis' thought-provoking memo.

-- Mitch Nauffts

'2008: The Year In Review' Now Online

As we do every year at this time, the editors of PND look back at some of the important philanthropic stories and personalities of 2008 -- and look ahead to 2009.

Enjoy. And Happy New Year!

2008: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The Economy Implodes

Political Roadblocks, Economy Hamper Response to Disasters

Foundations Urged to 'Embrace' Diversity

Global Philanthropy Edges Toward Spotlight

Environment, Climate Change Compete for Attention, Dollars

School Reform, Endowments Dominate Education Debate

Legislative Roundup

Noteworthy Gifts

People in the News

2009: Preview of the Year Ahead

-- Mitch Nauffts