PhilanTopic

Weekend Link Roundup (May 4-5, 2013)

What a gorgeous weekend! Hope yours, wherever you are, was half as nice. Here, a little late, is our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Communications/Marketing

The Catalytic Network, an interesting new initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation, aims to share tools and stories which emerge from the foundation's work with innovators around the globe. In that spirit, Michael Myers, a senior policy officer at the foundation, lays out the 5 Golden Rules of a Great Pitch on the network's site to help nonprofits better tell their story.

The five rules are:

• Keep it under two minutes.
• Know your audience, and know the ask.
• Talk about the problem you are solving -- in one sentence.
• Give two reasons why your approach is unique.
• Leave them one memorable, repeatable story.

Data

On the Harvard Business Review blog network, Mark Bonchek, "chief catalyst" at Orbit & Co, argues that without Little Data -- "what we know about ourselves. What we buy. Who we know. Where we go. How we spend our time" -- Big Data "has a tendency to become Big Brother," and that without Big Data, Little Data "is incomplete."

Fundraising

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Katya Andresen, the host of the April Nonprofit Blog Carnival, shares two dozen posts from nonprofit bloggers and readers on the theme "the best career advice you ever received."

Impact/Effectiveness

Amit Bouri, managing director of the Global Impact Investing Network, flags five themes for impact investors to keep an eye on: the emergence of better tools and improved infrastructure; a growing need for strong fund managers; the importance of supporting the "demand side" of the impact investing equation; the growing interest of "retail" investors in the field; and the growing acceptance of and emphasis on impact measurement.

Philanthropy

On his White Courtesy Telephone blog, Greater New Orleans Foundation president and CEO Albert Ruesga takes a long look at philanthropy's "uneasy" relationship with the social sciences. "We make grants because we predict (or at least fervently hope) that our interventions will shift human behavior in certain hoped-for ways," writes Ruesga. And after "we make our grants, we test our predictions and adjust our grantmaking accordingly. Those of you with grantmaking experience know, however,

that our interventions seldom, if ever, unfold as we predict they will. Our inability to predict human actions with a high degree of accuracy has been understood and discussed by philosophers, psychologists, social scientists and others longer than the field of organized philanthropy has been in existence. Yet those of us who work in foundations ignore these fundamental truths about the difficulties of predicting human behavior when, for example, we construct elaborate theories of change, or worse, when we inflict them on our grantees. These truths don't absolve us of the responsibility to change or inspire human behavior, but they do place limits on our attempts to anticipate or direct the many twists and turns of the human heart.

If the idea of philanthropy as an experimental social science unnerves you as much as it does me, how would you re-conceptualize it in a way that the most "results-oriented" among us would find compelling? If the idea appeals to you, how would you suggest that philanthropy capture and teach the lessons learned long ago in allied fields, especially those lessons that might help save our grantees and the communities we serve from unnecessary suffering?...

Like pretty much everything Ruesga writes, the post is worth your time.

On NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Trista Harris, executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, shares a list of six tips designed to help you become a (social justice) philanthropy rockstar.

Writing on the GrantCraft blog, the European Foundation Centre's Rosien Herweijer looks at a new study from the Association of German Foundations that explores how German foundations approach their mistakes and failure. Not surprisingly, the study found that larger foundations tend to do more evaluation and documenting of mistakes than smaller foundations, while operating foundations tend to be more self-critical than general grantmaking foundations.

In a post musing on the "changing landscape of philanthropy," Senay Ataselim-Yilmaz says that the annual Global Philanthropy Forum should "pay more attention to the rising impact of diaspora [contributions] in global philanthropy."

Women

In an op-ed on the CNN site, legendary investor Warren Buffett argues that women are the key to America's future prosperity. "No manager operates his or her plants at 80 percent efficiency when steps could be taken that would increase output," writes Buffett. "And no CEO wants male employees to be underutilized when improved training or working conditions would boost productivity. So take it one step further: If obvious benefits flow from helping the male component of the workforce achieve its potential, why in the world wouldn't you want to include its counterpart?"

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

-- The Editors

The Social Progress Index: Measuring What Counts?

The Washington, D.C.-based Social Progress Imperative made a splash at the Skoll World Forum earlier this month when it launched its Social Progress Index (SPI), an ambitious effort to inform and influence development policies around the globe.

Developed by Harvard Business School professor and competitiveness expert Michael E. Porter in collaboration with Scott Stern of MIT, the index is founded on the principle that "what we measure guides the choices we make." To that end, the index analyzes fifty-two outcome-based (as opposed to input-based) indicators in three dimensions of social progress: meeting basic human needs; establishing the foundations of well-being that enable individuals to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives; and creating opportunity for all to reach their full potential. (For a complete breakdown of indicators, click here.)

While the index and the report (154 pages, PDF) released in conjunction with the launch of the index includes only fifty countries, those countries represent three-quarters of the world's population. Here's a chart from the report that plots their aggregate SPI scores against GDP per capita (PPP):

As the chart shows, the countries included in the index and report are fairly well distributed across income levels, ranging from Switzerland at the high end with a GDP per capita of $51,262; to middle-income countries such as the Russian Federation ($21,246), South Africa ($10,960), and China ($8,400); to lower-income countries like Egypt ($6,281), India ($3,627), and Mozambique ($975).

So, what do the SPI team's findings based on an analysis of a full year of data reveal? For starters, that countries' level of overall development -- as measured by GDP per capita and/or indices of global competitiveness -- often mask striking social and environmental challenges and strengths. For example, Costa Rica, a lower-middle-income country with a PPP of $12,157, ranks twelfth overall in the index, ahead of richer countries such as Israel ($27,825) and Argentina ($17,554); nineteenth in terms of basic human needs; and eighth for opportunity -- ahead of France, Japan, and Germany, all of which rank higher in terms of overall score. In contrast, the United Arab Emirates, the third-richest country ($47,893) in the SPI sample, ranks nineteenth overall, including eleventh in terms of basic human needs, but only thirtieth for opportunity and a disappointing thirty-seventh in terms of foundations of well-being.

The index/report also seem to indicate that economic development is necessary but not sufficient for social progress; that it is possible to achieve a high level of social progress at a relatively modest income level; and that while low-income countries are clustered at the bottom of the index, there is a wide range of social progress within this group. For instance, Mozambique, the poorest country in the SPI sample, is ranked fourteenth in terms of equality and inclusion, whereas Rwanda, the third-poorest country in the sample, is ranked forty-fourth for equality and inclusion. At the same time, Rwanda tops the index in terms of ecosystem sustainability, while the United States, which has the second-highest PPP in the sample and is ranked sixth overall, ranks near the very bottom (forty-eighth) in terms of ecosystem sustainability.

If by highlighting each country's strengths and weaknesses with respect to various aspects of social progress these data get you thinking differently about development, then SPI is off to a good start. "The purpose of the Social Progress Index," the report's authors note, "is to benchmark performance and motivate improvement while providing useful insights that will help all stakeholders to make better choices, prioritize investments, and strengthen implementation capacity to improve the lives of citizens."

Looking ahead, SPI plans to refine its model based on feedback and empirical testing, eventually expanding the number of countries in the index from fifty to a hundred and twenty. It also plans to form a Social Progress Network comprising partners from research and academic institutions, think tanks, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and international development organizations "to identify the policies, institutions, legal frameworks, and financing mechanisms that can drive more effective and efficient social progress, through international benchmarking and fostering specific research projects." And it will explore the possibility of creating a Social Progress Capacity Index to measure the potential of a country's government, business, and civil society institutions to contribute to innovation in the social sector.

In the meantime, governments are paying attention, with Paraguay already having agreed to incorporate the SPI model into its national development framework. Which perhaps begs the question: How will the philanthropic sector, in the U.S. and elsewhere, respond? The index has already begun to spark discussions about impact investing and social entrepreneurship. Will foundations become more active in those conversations than they have been to date? And how, if at all, might the index change the way we approach economic development -- both overseas and here in the United States? Have thoughts you'd like to share? Use the comments section below.

-- Kyoko Uchida

More to Do: A 'Flip' Chat With Anika Rahman, President/CEO, Ms. Foundation for Women

While the topics du jour in the women's movement seem to be Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and New York magazine's take on "feminist housewives," there are deeper, more persistent problems in need of attention, from access to health and child care, to low wages and a shortage of quality jobs, to continued assaults on women's reproductive rights and services.

Indeed, as the Ms. Foundation for Women says on its Web site, "It's true that women have come a long way since the 1970s, but for every woman who has reached the 'top' (and who still face discrimination, by the way), there are millions of women struggling to earn a living wage, gain access to basic health care, secure affordable child care, and participate in the opportunities that should be available to every person in the U.S."

On a rainy day earlier this month, I spoke with Anika Rahman, the organization's president and CEO, about the many inequities confronting women, especially low-income women and women of color, as well as the organization's new report, More to Do: The Road to Equality for Women in the United States (58 pages, PDF).

(If you're reading this in an e-mail, click here.) 

(Running time: 7 minutes, 9 seconds) 

Have a thought or comment you'd like to share? Use the comments section below....

-- Regina Mahone

Networked Activism: Women's Causes Online

(Regina Mahone is a staff writer at PND. In her last post, she shared some takeaways from a new report that looks at homeownership and the racial wealth gap.)

Earlier this month, I attended a Philanthropy 3.0 event hosted by the George H. Heyman, Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising at New York University featuring Allison Fine, co-author of the Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change and host of the Chronicle of Philanthropy's Social Good podcast series; Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good; Nancy Schwartzman, director of the award-winning film The Line and founder of The Line Campaign, a movement committed to empowering young leaders to create a world without sexual violence; and Vanessa Valenti, co-founder of the blog Feministing and a partner in the consulting firm Valenti Martin Media. Moderated by Tom Watson, president and founder of consulting firm CauseWired, the event covered a range of topics, including the sustainability of online activism in support of women's causes.

As Valenti noted, online activism in support of women's causes has been around for years, but it's tended to be reactive and not pursued with a long-term strategy in mind. Her consulting firm was created to assist activists in developing infrastructure to support their online efforts.

In contrast, the Mom Bloggers network has always had the infrastructure needed to carry out and promote its work. As James pointed out, however, the network hasn't always focused its efforts on social change. To help women engage with nonprofits the way they do with everyday brands, James launched Mom Bloggers for Social Good, which today boasts more than a thousand mothers in thirty-three countries working to spread "the good news about the amazing work nonprofit organizations and NGOs are doing around the world."

Many people working in the online activism space, including Allison Fine and her co-author Beth Kanter, believe that because barriers to online access globally have fallen dramatically over the last few years, "free agents" like James and Valenti are able to drive support for national/global issues in much the same the way that large, well-resourced institutions such as Planned Parenthood and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People did in the past. As Fine noted, 71 percent of Internet users are women, and many of them are becoming powerful actors on behalf of social change. "We're taking our networks with us wherever we go," said Fine.

But if mom bloggers and a new generation of feminists have been effective at mobilizing their online followers to address a range of social problems, I wondered how they managed to connect with individuals beyond their networks to talk about issues in a way that made everyone feel comfortable without sacrificing passion for the cause. Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman addressed that challenge as she discussed the making of her film about sexual violence and the Circle of 6 app, which makes it easier for smartphone users of any gender to reach out to their friends when they are out late and sense that trouble might be brewing.

Indeed, said Schwartzman, for many it's about reaching "non-activists who are pissed off." In her case, her team and crew wanted to reach "people who buy Cosmo and would never talk about [violence prevention]," and so they crafted promotional messages for the film that sought to engage young people rather than frighten them with direct references to sexual abuse and violence.

All the panelists agreed that what social media does best is make it possible for "ideas and passion to move somewhat friction-free across platforms." Coverage of the Trayvon Martin tragedy, for example, may initially have been limited to a small, local paper in Florida, but once the story was picked up by social media, it went viral and eventually became a national and international cause célèbre.

At the end of the event, the only question I had about networked activism was this: How can we get more low-income women and women of color involved in these networks and work? While barriers to access have indeed fallen for most demographic cohorts, many women -- and men -- who might be interested in supporting a cause or campaign simply do not have the time, money, and/or bandwidth to get involved. How can we get them involved? And what can philanthropy do to support the online feminist movement, which, frankly, is hanging by a thread?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

-- Regina Mahone

Weekend Link Roundup (March 23-24, 2013)

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

Black Male Achievement

On the GuideStar blog, Zeina Fayyaz, manager of the Social Innovation Forum and Social Innovation Accelerator at Root Cause, announces a call for applications to the 2013-14 Black Male Achievement Social Innovation Accelerator. Modeled after the Social Innovation Forum, the accelerator program will provide, over twelve months, capacity-building and coaching support totaling more than $150,000 to five BMA Innovators, along with opportunities to network with funders and the chance to become a national leader in the field of black male achievement.

Higher Education

Is student debt the new subprime? Writing on the Demos blog, Thomas Hedges thinks it may be. "Education itself, which many considered a right thirty years ago, has become a market product," writes Hedges. "University presidents are, in the end, fundraisers, soliciting large donations and encouraging students to take out loans that will take decades to pay back. The costs of tuition, which are cleverly obscured for low-income students, slam students years after they graduate, once they realize what paying off, say, $30,000 in student debt means." As one 30-year-old woman with $120,000 in student loans tells Hedges: "The grim truth is that universities and student loans are no longer creating the American dream, they are destroying it, one wide-eyed dreamer at a time.”

Impact/Effectiveness

On the Arabella Advisors blog, Cynthia Muller, director of the firm's impact investing practice, is encouraged by signs that the strategy is gaining traction.

On his Gift Hub blog, Phil Cubeta shares an "open" letter addressed to venture philanthropy pioneer and Leap of Reason author Mario Marino. Writes Cubeta:

I work with financial people. When they learn they can keep clients from giving money out from under management by selling them a feel good story about a “social venture portfolio,” the social economy will shift from nonprofits to for-profits. What will be lost are the local, small, inept organizations that formed you. Like the parish. That is, unless we show respect for these informal orgs and love them back as they loved us, when we were weak

And Mario responds.

"Debates in the private sector have devolved into an existential struggle between two camps: one which believes that privacy is dead and profit is king, and one which fears that any reuse of data beyond the original purpose for which it was collected is a potential threat to privacy and civil liberties," writes Robert Kirkpatrick, director of the UN's Global Pulse initiative, on the Harvard Business Review blog. "[Our] goal is to insert a third pole into this discussion: Big Data is a raw public good, and we must work together to find ways to harness it for massive social impact, both safely and responsibly. For this to happen, data philanthropy has to become a private sector priority."

Nonprofit Management

Nonprofits need to lose their fear of failure, writes Ashley Good, founder and CEO of Engineers Without Borders Canada's Fail Forward project, on the Idealist.org blog, "because almost everything we do has elements of both success and failure." To get beyond that fear, Good suggests six strategies designed to "encourage communication about failures, support collaborative learning, and break down much of the fear associated with taking action."

Charity Navigator's Sandra Miniutti defends the charity evaluator's recent decision to factor out joint cost allocations from program expenses and allocate them to fundraising costs. As a result of the change, sixty-six charities in the CN database now have lower ratings, leading one of the nonprofits to compare CN to the hall monitor from the animated South Park series. Writes Miniutti:

[A]re we offended to be called the "mean-looking hall monitor from South Park?" No, we can take it. This type of response is in the nature of what happens when you make judgments and rate organizations....But what really concerns us is that wasting time calling us names doesn't change anything. Where is the outrage in the sector with regards to excessive joint cost allocations? Where are the charities that refrain from this practice? They should be standing up and demanding that other charities change their ways....

Philanthropy

To mark the centennial of the Rockefeller Foundation, the the Rockefeller Archive Center has created a Web site to tell the story of the foundation’s first hundred years. The site includes an overview of the foundation's work by subject area; a sampling of internal reports and memoranda, correspondence about Rockefeller Foundation projects, excerpts from board meeting dockets and entries from the diaries of foundation staff members; and an interactive map to help visitors to the site navigate the material. Nicely done!

Social Media

Social Media for Social Good author Heather Mansfield shares five types of tweets nonprofits should avoid sending. The list includes: 1) truncated automated tweets from Facebook; 2) automated tweets announcing new photos posted on Facebook; 3) tweets with too many hashtags; 4) poorly formatted tweets; and 5) tweets with semicolons (who knew?).

Best-selling author Seth Godin suggests that we create a standard for online communicating that encourages fairness and generosity. "Online communities are quick to form, but they're just as quick to fade, to become less open and to become less trusting because sometimes we have a cultural orientation toward taking, not giving," writes Godin. "We forget to feed the network first, to take care of those we care about."

Women & Girls

On the Huffington Post, veteran journalist Evelyn Leopold recaps the UN's recent Commission on the Status of Women conference, which concluded with all UN member states agreeing to a code that condemns violence against women and girls.

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

-- The Editors

Leveraging Momentum in the Movement to End Violence Against Girls and Women

(Jennifer Buffett is the president and co-chair of the NoVo Foundation, an organization that seeks to empower girls and women worldwide and to end the violence and exploitation against them. )

When girls are empowered, they can transform communities and the world. But for too many girls, domestic and sexual violence stands in their way.

Countless advocates have worked tirelessly for decades to end violence against girls and women. Thanks to their work, we have made progress: Attitudes have shifted. Resources have been allocated. Systems have started to change. And yet, rates of violence remain staggeringly high -- violence that makes the headlines, like the gang rapes in India and Steubenville, Ohio, as well as everyday rapes and beatings that are so commonplace in our culture they are not even considered news.

What will it take to create lasting change -- to create a world where women and girls are safe and respected and can reach their amazing potential? We believe it will take bold action. And change is certainly afoot.

There has been incredible momentum building over the last two months around ending violence against girls and women. On February 14, One Billion Rising (an initiative led by V-Day) mobilized millions of women and men around the world in the largest global action in history to end violence against girls and women. On former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's penultimate day in the office, President Barack Obama signed a memorandum that institutionalizes an ambassador-at-large to run the Office of Global Women's Issues, ensuring that girls and women have a place on our national agenda.

During the first week of March, as the 57th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status on Women explored the elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls, President Obama signed the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act. This version of VAWA, which among other things ensures critical funding for programs that support victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, education, and training for the judges and lawyers who prosecute these crimes, now guarantees that the LGBTQ, Native American, and immigrant communities also will find protection under the law. The bill also includes the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a law designed to prevent trafficking, aid victims, and hold traffickers accountable in court.

While big gains are being realized on the national and international stage, innovative organizations are changing the attitudes and behaviors of hundreds of thousands of Americans in their own communities. A Long Walk Home, an organization that uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to end violence against girls and women, has educated more than a hundred thousand survivors and their supporters to build safe communities and end gender violence in just a few years. A CALL TO MEN is working to engage men, who have the primarily responsibility for preventing domestic and sexual violence, in the solution. The organization goes where men are, from community centers and college campuses to football fields and boardrooms, and provides education, tools, and strategies to help them change their attitudes and behaviors. Over ten years, A CALL TO MEN has reached more than a hundred thousand people, including thirty thousand young men in high school and college and 90 percent of the teams in the National Football League.

While these incredible sparks of innovation are happening in pockets across America, groups tend to operate in silos, and culture-shifting campaigns like these are disconnected from one another. At the NoVo Foundation, we started the Move to End Violence program, a ten-year operational program to identify visionary leaders who are doing innovative social change work in isolation and bring them together to strengthen the movement to end domestic and sexual violence in the United States. Through their work, we will achieve a movement made up of powerful organizations working toward a shared vision for ending violence against girls and women.

Two years into our commitment, we could not be more pleased with the direction of this work. We are transforming leaders and ensuring they have the resources and capacity to lead the way in ending violence against girls and women. We are bringing together organizations that once saw one another as competitors and now see themselves as invaluable partners. We are helping these advocates adopt a more sustainable, impactful way of doing this work. And the leaders in this program and their allies are beginning to envision a new way of moving forward together.

Right now, leaders in the field are hosting "movement conversations" all across the country, engaging their allies in discussions around a bold vision for ending violence against girls and women and the actions needed to make that vision a reality. The field is on the precipice of becoming a powerful movement for social change in which talented leaders working in concert can leverage the power of their organizations to achieve bold impact.

It is clear the time is now. Years of hard work by many have set the stage for a series of policy wins, a new level of consciousness, a growing group of transformed leaders, and a public ready for change. We must collectively leverage this momentum. We need to invest in the advocacy and social change agenda that these innovative leaders are creating -- and work together as funders to put resources behind these efforts to create lasting change.

-- Jennifer Buffett

Weekend Link Roundup (March 9-10, 2013)

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

Communications/Marketing

In a two-part series on her Non-Profit Marketing blog (here and here), Katya Andresen shares highlights of a discussion she had with Allyson Kapin and Amy Sample Ward about the key themes in their recently published book Social Change Anytime Everywhere, including how nonprofits can use online tools to advance their work.

On the Communications Network blog, Courtney Williamson, the network's community manager, shares slides and video from Avoiding the Blind Spot: Telling Your Story With Pictures, a recent network webinar featuring Resource Media's Liz Banse and Scott Miller. Among other things, Banse and Miller outline three principles of good communication: 1) people are visual first, verbal second; 2) people's decisions and actions are based on emotional reaction more than rational thought; and 3) visuals are the most effective communications vehicles for evoking emotion and getting people to take action.

Disaster Relief

On the techPresident blog, Julia Wetherell looks at findings from a new Internews report on the effectiveness of crisis mapping following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. Among other things, the report found that the crisis map created on the Ushahidi platform was "not as critical to [the humanitarian] response" as previously thought, in part because many victims of the disaster weren't aware of it. "The accessibility of crisis mapping was also dependent on the availability of Internet service," says Wetherell. To address that shortcoming, the report recommends strengthening IT infrastructure, particularly in less connected rural areas, before the next disaster hits.

NPR has a good interview with reporter Jonathan Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster.

Women

Daily Beast contributor Caroline Linton announces the launch of the Half the Sky game on Facebook -- a clever use of social media that seeks to turn virtual donations made by players into real-world donations to organizations that support women and girls around the world, including the Fistula and United Nations foundations, Girls & Education Mentoring Services, Heifer International, ONE, Room to Read, and World Vision. As Linton explains, the game "helps educate the players to some of the challenges women face around the globe, especially as [the Indian woman narrator] Radhika travels to far-off lands such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Kenya."

Writing on the For Women blog on Friday, Ms. Foundation for Women senior strategist reminded us that "we still have miles to go in [the United States]" in terms of advancing women's rights. As the organization's most recent report notes:

• The U.S. economy marginalizes women and consistently relegates women of color to the lowest-paying jobs;
• Quality, flexible and affordable child care is inaccessible to working families, particularly those headed by women;
• Control over women's bodies is legislated by people who often prioritize political posturing over women's health;
• Gender-based violence remains a prevalent and complex problem, despite important policy victories like the recent renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

"[So on this] International Women's Day," writes Kay, "let's set high goals for the U.S. and challenge ourselves to make this a place in which a woman may obtain justice and equality regardless of her race, socioeconomic status, age or immigration status," writes Kay. "The U.S. should be a beacon of rights, rather than a place that offers privilege to some while turning a blind eye to others' inequality."

And while Congress did recently vote to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, extending protections to homosexual and Native American victims of violence, more needs to be done, writes Niki Jagpal on NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, especially since "many of these community members do not report the crimes committed against them." To help address the problem, Jagpal urges grantmakers to prioritize "underserved communities intentionally and [fund] social justice work heavily, including funds for advocacy and community organizing by or on behalf of these communit[ies]."

Last but not least, Beth Kanter marked International Women's Day with a nice discussion of the Global Mom Relay on her blog. "Every time you share a relay post on Facebook, Twitter, or email or donate $5 or more as part of the relay," writes Kanter, "a $5 donation (up to $8,000 per day) will be donated by Johnson & Johnson and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to one of four initiatives [-- Girl Up, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action, and Shot@Life --] that are helping women and children lead healthy and happy lives."

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

-- The Editors

Good Read of the Week: 'Women and the Web'

Today is International Women's Day, and a whole host of events and discussions celebrating extraordinary women and highlighting the inequities women around the globe continue to face are taking place -- many of them online. Yet few women in the developing world are aware of these online activities, let alone able to participate. Despite all the knowledge and opportunity the Internet has created over the last two decades and the millions of lives it has transformed, women in many parts of the world have little or no access to the mother of all networks.

According to Women and the Web (104 pages, PDF), a report from Intel and Dalberg Global Development Advisors, an average of only 21 percent of the women and girls in 144 developing countries have access to the Internet, compared with 27 percent of men -- a weighted gender gap of 23 percent. And the gap widens to 33 percent in South Asia, 34 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 43 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. The situation is even more serious, the report argues, when one factors in the tangible benefits of Internet access for women. These include increases in women's income potential and a greater sense of empowerment. Indeed, the longer a woman has been active online, the report finds, the more likely she is to engage in activities that generate economic benefits.

In contrast, societies unwilling or unable to provide women with access to the Internet increasingly must do without the tools and resources needed to achieve development goals such as reducing infant mortality or boosting per capita GDP. In other words, the Internet gender gap holds back not only women, but their families, communities, and countries. "As more of the world's communications and business migrate online, women who cannot or do not use the Internet risk deeper isolation, including missed opportunities for education, jobs and career advancement," says Nancy Hafkin, a senior associate at Women in Global Science and Technology.

What are the barriers that prevent women from accessing the Internet in developing countries? According to the report, 23 percent of the women surveyed were unaware of the Internet or its benefits, 23 percent cited a lack of facility with technology, and 8 percent cited cultural norms. On the latter point, one in five women in India and Egypt believed that the Internet was not "appropriate" for them, while a supportive family was a critical factor in enabling women's Internet use in other countries. Even when women are able to overcome social and cultural norms, however, they often are hampered by technological barriers, including the lack of a robust network infrastructure, limited availability and/or affordability of devices and network access, and the absence of public policy supportive of equal access for women.

So, how do we remove these obstacles and expand Internet access for women in the developing world? For starters, a coordinated effort among industry, the development community, and policy makers is needed to eliminate barriers at both the individual and structural levels, the authors argue. And stakeholders must do more to support and accelerate these shifts. Specific interventions recommended by the report include:

1. Forming a coalition of stakeholders to advocate for women and girls' right to access the Internet;
2. Building on existing partnerships with mobile operators to make mobile content more relevant and available on mobile devices;
3. Incentivizing entrepreneurs to create content targeted to women in local contexts;
4. Identifying women leaders in the industry to serve as advocates for the benefits of Internet access; and
5. Tracking on a systematic basis how women and girls access and use the Internet.

Clearly, there's much work to be done if women and girls are not to be left behind as the global economy continues to move online. At the end of the day, the lack of Internet access among so many women and girls is not just a problem for them; it's a problem for all of us.

What do you think about the issues raised by the report? What role -- if any -- does access to the Internet play in advancing gender equality and women's empowerment? Have any examples you can share of how the Internet has transformed women's lives? And what about other areas in which social or cultural norms have been a barrier to women's progress? Use the comments section below to share your thoughts....

-- Kyoko Uchida

Weekend Link Roundup (January 26-27, 2013)

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

Diversity

On the Tides Foundation's What's Possible blog, Toby Thompkins asks some thought-provoking questions about African Americans and U.S. history to remind us that "Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is not just a day for or about black Americans; it is a day for and about all Americans."

Governance

On her Social Velocity blog, Nell Edgington shares five questions to get your board "moving." They include: Why do you serve? What do you bring to our organization? And what do you want to contribute financially?

Impact/Effectiveness

Are we on the threshold of a new economic movement "that will result in all investors -- individual and institutional -- committing at least some portion of their investable assets to social impact"? Lisa Hall, president and CEO of the Calvert Foundation, believes we are, and in an essay in GreenMoney she explains how impact investing is driving that paradigm shift.

In a guest post on the Forbes blog, Kayleigh O'Keefe, associate director at the Corporate Executive Board, shares a "three-step method for "converting passive support into lasting partners":

1. For each of your key stakeholder groups, define a specific desired behavior.
2. If a certain stakeholder group is not doing what you’d like them to, determine why.
3. Focus your efforts o n removing the barrier to the desired behavior change.

Philanthropy

In a deeply thoughtful piece on the Nonprofit Quarterly site, longtime Public Welfare Foundation board member Thomas Scanlon reflects on the benefits and pitfalls of "strategic" philanthropy. A must-read for anyone who works in the sector.

In a similar vein, Center for Effective Philanthropy president Phil Buchanan, writing on the Harvard Business Review blog, argues that capitalism, while good at lots of things, is pretty bad at many other things -- which is precisely why an advanced capitalistic society like the United States has a nonprofit sector. Another must-read for all who work in the social sector.

On FSG's Social Impact blog, FSG board member and Global Philanthropy Forum president Jane Wales takes a closer look at philanthropy in Asia and sees a sector that, while experiencing some growing pains, has unlimited potential.

On its Philanthropy Potluck blog, the Minnesota Council on Foundations shares highlights of an open letter released by the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation in which the foundation announced that it plans to distribute $79 million in grants in the coming year and will finalize an additional $25 million in grants -- part of a larger $100 million commitment -- in support of organizations working to address climate change and encourage the development of renewable energy.

Social Media

Following up on her post about twenty-nine nonprofit bloggers to follow on Twitter, Social Media for Social Good author Heather Mansfield shares a list of twenty-nine nonprofit resources to follow on the microblogging site.

Transparency

At the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog, Rob DiLeonardi, executive director of the Chicago-based VNA Foundation, explains why there is value in small foundations like VNA signing on to the center's Reporting Commitment initiative. Writes DiLeonardi:

Small to medium-sized foundations are far more common in number, size and grantmaking level than their larger brethren. In fact, small foundations account for approximately half of America's total foundation grant dollars, and often provide the kind of essential local support that impacts lives on a daily basis.

In addition, most observers judge foundations by their effectiveness, efficiency, and transparency, not their asset size. Participation by smaller foundations like VNA (foundation philanthropy being one of the few settings in which a $50 million bank account is considered "small") is key, in my opinion, to making the Reporting Commitment's impact felt in more than a handful of sectors....

Women

Forty years after the Supreme Court protected a woman's right to an abortion in its landmark Roe v. Wade decision, "a quick look at the recent past demonstrates the tenuous status of a woman's right to choose, in spite of the fact that a majority of our population supports the Court's decision," writes Niki Jagpal on the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Keeping a Close Eye blog. Philanthropy can help protect a woman's right to choose, adds Jagpal, by stepping in "when groups such as Planned Parenthood come under attack from right-wing politicians or by supporting state groups like Reproductive Services.

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

-- The Editors

2012 Year in Review: Underserved Communities Targeted for Larger Share of Philanthropic Pie

The amount of money flowing to nonprofit organizations serving underserved populations and communities of color, and the number of private funders backing such programs, continued to grow in 2012, even as support for those communities from other sources was declining.

Over the course of the year, a number of foundations announced multimillion-dollar commitments to programs designed to address the needs of underserved communities and communities of color. They included the Ford Foundation, which announced a commitment of $100 million over ten years to extend its Ford Fellows program to young scholars from traditionally underrepresented groups; the Lumina Foundation, which awarded $11.5 million to thirteen partnerships working to increase college graduation rates among Latino-American students; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which announced an investment of $9.5 million over three years to improve the health and success of boys of color; and the California Community Foundation, which launched a multimillion-dollar initiative to expand educational and employment opportunities for African-American teenage boys in Los Angeles.

A number of corporate grantmakers also stepped up their support for underserved populations. They included Walmart, which through its foundation awarded $3.35 million to six women's foundations working to help economically vulnerable women achieve financial and economic security; AT&T, which announced a huge, $250 million commitment over five years to improve graduation rates among at-risk youth; and the UPS Foundation, which in February awarded $6 million to nearly a hundred and twenty organizations working to promote diversity and support underserved communities across the country and in June announced grants totaling $6.9 million to support the same kind of work globally.

A number of reports on the state of giving to underserved and underrepresented communities released during the course of the year also served to highlight philanthropy's growing interest in underserved and -represented communities. In January, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation issued Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy by and for Communities of Color (112 pages, PDF), which describes how identity-based funds -- funds specifically designed to pool contributions from donors and redistribute those funds through grants to individuals or organizations working at the community level -- have become essential drivers of social change. In February, Funders for LGBTQ Issues released Forty Years of LGBTQ Philanthropy: 1970–2010 (44 pages, PDF), which found that over the past four decades nearly eight hundred foundations have invested more than $771 million in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities, with a significant portion of that funding -- some 40 percent -- awarded between 2000 and 2006. And in the spring, the D5 coalition released a report (52 pages, PDF) that found a growing number of foundations and grantmaking organizations launching efforts aimed at making philanthropy more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

An article in Louisiana Weekly found more good news, citing the success of the Open Society Foundations' Campaign for Black Male Achievement, which since 2008 has awarded $29.6 million to organizations working to increase educational opportunity for black males and strengthen African-American families; and the Kellogg Foundation's Men and Boys of Color initiative. Around the same time, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy announced that the number of signatories to its Philanthropy's Promise campaign -- an eighteen-month-old effort to encourage grantmakers to provide at least half their grant dollars for the benefit of underserved communities and at least one quarter of their grant dollars for systemic change efforts involving advocacy, community organizing and civic engagement -- had nearly doubled, to a hundred and twenty-five foundations responsible for nearly $3.4 billion in annual grantmaking.

George Soros' Open Society Foundations continues to be an important driver of these efforts, and in the fall, in partnership with the Foundation Center,  it released a report which found that philanthropic support for black men and boys has grown steadily over the last decade, from $10 million in 2003 to $29 million in 2010. Two reports released by NCRP in November echoed that finding. The first, The Philanthropic Landscape: The State of Giving to Underserved Communities (6 pages, PDF), found that the share of U.S. foundation grant dollars benefiting economically disadvantaged people, the elderly, women and girls, and other marginalized groups had increased from 33 percent between 2004 and 2006 to 40 percent between 2008 and 2010. And the second, The Philanthropic Landscape: State of Social Justice Philanthropy (6 pages, PDF), found that since 2004 more grant dollars are being classified as social justice grants and that the number of foundations saying that they provide social justice funding at a substantial level has increased.

A final sign of progress was the launch, in September, of the Leadership and Sustainability Institute for Black Male Achievement, a national membership network that aims to support the growth, sustainability, and impact of leaders and organizations across the country working to improve life outcomes and create systemic change for African-American men and boys. Sponsored by OSF, the Skillman Foundation, the California Endowment, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Heinz Endowments, the institute will work to assist advocacy and service programs focused on African-American men and boys that have experienced difficulties in sustaining their own work.

"Black men and boys are challenged by entrenched and systemic problems in need of innovative solutions," said Shawn Dove, who manages the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. "Leaders working in the field of black male achievement have always grappled with a lack of funding, capacity, and momentum. With the strong network of leaders created and sustained by the LSI, we [hope to] create the support system necessary to sustain effective programs and policies that will do much to improve the lives of black men and boys across the United States."

Related items:

UPS Foundation Awards $6 Million for Diversity Programs (2/13/12)

LGBTQ Community Received More Than $771 Million in Grants From 1970 to 2010, Report Finds (2/23/12)

AT&T Commits $250 Million to Boost Graduation Rates (3/19/12)

New Initiative Launched to Expand Opportunities for African-American Boys (5/07/12)

Foundations Working to Increase Diversity, Equity, Inclusion in Philanthropy, Report Finds (5/18/12)

Foundation Initiatives to Assist African-American Males Showing Results (6/07/12)

Number of Signatories to 'Philanthropy's Promise' Campaign Nearly Doubled (6/21/12)

UPS Foundation Awards $6.9 Million to Nonprofits Cultivating Diversity (6/21/12)

Walmart Foundation Awards Nearly $3.4 Million to Support Underserved Women (8/08/12)

Initiative Launched to Help Boys, Young Men of Color Succeed (8/21/12)

Lumina Foundation Awards $11.5 Million to Boost Latino Student Success (9/04/12)

Ford Foundation Commits $100 Million to Extend Fellows Program (9/21/12)

Leadership and Sustainability Institute for Black Male Achievement Launches (9/28/12)

Foundations Put African-American Men and Boys on the Map, Report Finds (10/01/12)

Giving to Underserved Groups, for Social Justice on the Rise, Reports Find (11/19/12)

Weekend Link Roundup (December 29-30, 2012)

To help mark the end of another eventful year, we've rounded up a dozen or so of our favorite "best of" and nonprofit trendspotting pieces. Have a list you'd like to share? Let us know in the comments section below.

Communications/Marketing

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Katya Andresen shares Trendwatching's list of consumer trends to keep an eye on and weighs in on what each could mean for nonprofits in 2013.

And in a two-part series on her Getting Attention blog (here and here), Nancy Schwartz lists the nonprofit marketing trends that are "must-dos" for your organization in 2013.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Kula CEO Gerrit McGowan looks back at some of the CSR high- and lowlights of 2012 -- and tells us what companies looking to take their CSR programs to the next level will be doing in 2013.

Innovation/Leadership

As it has it has for many years, Foreign Policy magazine closes out 2012 with an eclectic list of the top global thinkers -- a list that includes Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, novelists Haruki Murakami and Chinua Achebe, and Russian environmentalist Yevgenia Chirikova.

In addition to his appearance in the FP list, Barack Obama was honored in December by TIME magazine as its Person of the Year. "We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes," explains TIME, "and Barack Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America...."

Philanthropy

Turning to the philanthropic space, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation shares the top 2012 reads from its Impatient Optimists blog, while the Ford Foundation looks back at its major accomplishments in 2012, including the launch of Time to Succeed, a national coalition that encourages and enables communities to add more learning time to the school day and year.

On the BlackGivesBack blog, Tracey Webb names the top ten African-American celebrity philanthropists of 2012. Now in its sixth year, the list was compiled with help from the Admiral Center, an initiative of New York City-based Living Cities that helps celebrities use their time, influence, and money to develop sustainable solutions to pressing global challenges.

On its site, New York City-based Bolder Giving announces the twelve Bold Givers who in 2012 "[supported] important causes at remarkable levels of income and assets...[and embody] Bolder Giving's mission to inspire and support people to give at their full lifetime potential."

And Philanthropy 2173's Lucy Bernholz wraps up her list of the top buzzwords of 2012 -- words and terms that, in a field known for its love-hate relationship with jargon, "are becoming ever more a part of the philanthropy conversation."

Science/Technology

Like the Eye of Sauron, Google never sleeps. As the year was drawing to a close, the tech giant released Zeitgeist 2012, an online platform that highlights "the searches that defined 2012."

And on the Tech Soup blog, Jim Lynch looks at the big nonprofit technology trends of the year, including cloud computing and mobile technology.

Social Media

Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes weighs in on the social media trends to watch in 2013.

Women

And the Washington Area Women's Foundation takes us out with a list of five policies that affected women and their families in 2012.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a happy and safe New Year!

--The Editors

[Infographic] Women's Wealth and the Future of the Nonprofit Sector

After Tuesday, it's pretty clear that American women are not interested in giving up the reproductive rights they won in the 1970s and 1980s. Which is one reason why, as in 2008, a solid majority of them (55 percent) cast their votes for Barack Obama.

Tuesday also saw a historic number of women, twenty, elected or re-elected to the U.S. Senate. We may not have had a female president yet, but from higher ed to the economy to philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, women in growing numbers are exercising power and making their voices heard.

This week's infographic comes courtesy of the folks at ChangingOurWorld.com, an international consulting firm with expertise in fundraising, corporate social engagement, digital, and research and analytics. Enjoy.

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor…Your Grants Data

(Jeff Falkenstein is vice president of data architecture at the Foundation Center.)

To say that Jeff Raikes' announcement of the launch of Markets for Good was big news is an understatement. Raikes' call to improve the philanthropic information infrastructure and support the quality of and access to data speaks to the core of the Foundation Center's mission and vision. The center, along with fifteen partner foundations, recently made a big announcement of its own when it launched the Reporting Commitment, a movement to improve the transparency of, and reduce duplication among, foundations through the adoption of common reporting standards and a consistent geographic taxonomy. Needless to say, these two developments have the potential to significantly impact the future of the philanthropic sector.

For over fifty years, the Foundation Center has aggregated information on U.S. foundations pulled from publicly available 990-PF tax returns, annual reports, press releases, foundation Web sites, and other information sources. In addition to offering this data through the Foundation Directory Online, the center features it in its many research reports and issue-based portals, and has taken steps to incorporate it into grants management software as well as reports and portals developed with a number of foundations and other partners. Much of the value the center adds to the information we collect comes from an intensive review of hundreds of thousands of grants made by foundations from around the world. The center also identifies the recipients of those grants: who they are, what they do, where they (generally) work, and which populations they (generally) serve. Additional analysis is done to understand the purpose of the grant, the subject area funded, the type of support provided, the specific population and geographic area served by the grant, and the strategy behind it.

One of the biggest challenges of our work -- and the critique of our products and services we hear most often -- is directly related to the fact that it's difficult to get our hands on foundation data quickly enough to make these tools as useful as they need to be for program officers, researchers, academics, grantseekers, and others. Our response to this criticism has been to encourage foundations to report their grants data directly to us. In 1998, the center established its eGrant Reporting program, a set of standards for foundations to report data electronically to us via participating grants management software systems or through a self-created Excel file. Using the grants management software of their choice, foundations can generate Excel spreadsheets of their grants in a standardized format and e-mail them directly to us. Receiving grants information electronically in a consistent format enables us to process and publish the data in a more timely fashion, while giving foundations more control over how we represent their grantmaking and communicate their work to the world. The nearly seven hundred and fifty foundations currently participating in the program are able to report their grants in near-real-time and have that data uploaded to all the Foundation Center products and platforms where the data is featured. But while the program has been an important first step toward greater transparency in the sector, we’ve only scratched the surface.

Over the last few years, the center has been working with its foundation and grant management software partners to make it easier for foundations to report their data to us in a more timely fashion. In 2010, the center acquired Grantsfire and hGrant, an HTML-based micro-format grant reporting system, and adapted it to fully complement our existing eGrant reporting program. Grant feeds published by any foundation using the hGrant Reporting program are available to the public, for free, at Glasspockets.org, our transparency-focused Web site. Indeed, the hGrant system is at the heart of the Reporting Commitment initiative announced by the center and its fifteen foundation partners.

But the hGrant system is only a start. In the coming months, we will be developing xGrant, an XML-based machine-readable version of our eGrant Reporting standard that will allow for a more flexible and easily adapted standard beyond the current hGrant micro-format. We also will be surveying our software vendor partners about their preferred export method. Why offer three ways to report grants data? Because we recognize that foundations do things differently and have varying degrees of capacity, and we want to give them every opportunity to report their grants data in the most convenient way possible.

What's more, we are working to refine the eGrant reporting standard to align with other global reporting standards, including those developed by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Why is this important? Because in order to get a holistic picture of how and where philanthropy complements international aid/bilateral organization/donor government financial flows, our standard needs to align with existing standards. To that end, we invite any and all standard-setting organizations and bodies to share their standards and taxonomies with us so we can map them to the eGrant standard. Creating "crosswalks" between standards will allow for deeper analysis of the full spectrum of development flows and contribute to greater collaboration among public, private, and philanthropic actors.

To demonstrate the usefulness of submitting data to the center in a standard format, we have been providing participating foundations with free maps of their grants -- maps that can be shared with their boards, staff, or deployed on their Web sites. Maps aside, we firmly believe that foundations which share their grants data via the eGrant Reporting program are also joining a larger conversation around transparency and open data, are putting themselves in a position to teach and learn from each other, and, as articulated by my colleague Larry McGill in the latest issue of Alliance magazine, are taking a significant step toward working more collaboratively and effectively.

New and powerful tools like WASHfunders, a Web portal for funders working to address the world's water crisis, and Philanthropy In/Sight Human Rights, an interactive mapping tool that displays grant funding for human rights issues, as well as studies like European Funding for Women and Girls are just a few examples of the ways in which foundations and funder coalitions are harnessing taxonomies and standards to forge a shared understanding of their work. The Foundation Center is delighted to contribute to this effort by offering products and services that can help funders and funder coalitions achieve their goals in this area. We encourage you to join us.

-- Jeff Falkenstein

Interested in becoming part of the eGrant Reporting community? Leave a comment below or contact Jeff at eGrants@foundationcenter.org.

Weekend Link Roundup (October 13-14, 2012)

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

Communications/Marketing

In a guest post on the Communication Network blog, Hattaway Communication's Doug Hattaway shares a couple of insights based on psychology and neuroscience into how people make decisions:

Insight 1: Two mental systems work together to drive decision-making and behavior. Effective communications influence both intuition and cognition -- encouraging instant intuitive judgments and enabling fluent cognitive reasoning.

Insight 2: People are more likely to trust information that they easily understand. "Fluency" theory holds that if people readily comprehend an idea or information, they are more likely to believe it. Being easy-to-understand obviously doesn't mean the information is more reliable, but people are more likely to perceive it as true. Hattaway's advice for nonprofit communicators: "It's smart to dumb things down."

In a post on her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Network for Good's Katya Andresen shares seven tips designed to improve the stories that nonprofits tell about their impact, the people they help, and their generous supporters.

Disaster Relief

Eye-opening article by Deborah Sontag in the New York Times about Yéle Haiti, the charity created by Haitian-American hip hop artist Wyclef Jean in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake to help the people of that impoverished country.

Journalism/Media

Fasten your seat belts. With funding from the Open Society Foundations, the Reuters Institute for Journalism has released a report, "Ten Years That Shook the Media World," which shows "that even after more than a decade of often dramatic turmoil in the media sector, we are only at the beginning of a longer transitional period."

Philanthropy

Over at the Nonprofit Quarterly, Simone Joyaux looks at what has changed -- and mostly what hasn't -- about social justice philanthropy in the eight years since she first addressed the topic in her newsletter.

Regulation

While open to the "notion that non-charitable tax-exempt organizations should have to pay property taxes," The Nonprofiteer takes issue with the city council in Scranton (PA), which threatened to withhold approval of zoning changes from tax-exempt property owners unless they made "voluntary" payments in lieu of taxation (PILOTS). "Let's not torture the concept of 'voluntary'," she writes, "by suggesting that a payment extorted in return for rezoning is somehow a free-will contribution to the public fisc."

And on her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz asks readers to answer the following question: "What would affect donors' behavior more, changes in the tax deductions associated with their giving or rules requiring greater transparency about their giving?" What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Social Entrepreneurship

Earlier in the week, serial social entrepreneur Robert Egger, the founder of DC Central Kitchen, Fresh Start Catering, the Campus Kitchen Project, and CForward, announced that after twenty-five years at the helm of DCCK, he was "moving on." To retirement? Not likely. No, Egger is "returning to the city of my roots -- Los Angeles -- to launch the L.A. Kitchen in 2013." As the always enthusiastic Egger writes on his personal blog, the new endeavor

will roar into an incredible vacuum in America. Our first goal is to recover millions of pounds of California’s abundant fruits and vegetables. The traditional model moves perishable foods through the system (from farm to food bank/kitchens to pantry to people) at a brisk pace to avoid spoilage. We want and use these precious commodities to fuel a job training program that will produce nutritionally dense salads, snacks and vegetarian/vegan meals. But we also want to develop inter-generational volunteer opportunities so that, working side by side, we can prep, package and freeze millions of pounds of produce and fruit, which will allow our partners to distribute portion controlled product that can be used in a more purposeful way, at a more focused pace.

We will also explore social enterprise through a new business we will launch named Strong Food. Like the name says, it isn't about sustenance, it's about helping people stay strong, vital and engaged.

We will also explore large scale urban composting, showing how every part of a plant can be used to build stronger bodies and healthier communities.

Most of all, I want to delve deeply into the issue of aging in America. L.A. Kitchen will be at the very forefront of supporting a new era of inclusion and health for our elders. I don't want to feed to old; I want to help redefine aging in America. And I want to show the role that food and a dynamic nonprofit organization can play in keeping our elders engaged, healthy, vital and active....

We wish Bob the best of luck in these, and all future, endeavors!

Social Media

In the most recent installment of her Social Good podcast series, Allison Fine chats with filmmaker Marc Erlbaum about his use of crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to raise $150,000 and crowdsource stories about the meaning of life for his next film project.

On LinkedIn, Charles Best, founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org, asks for help in developing a mobile strategy for his organization. "We know that mobile is important," writes Best. "We agree that mobile devices are becoming many people's primary way to connect to the Internet. We see that the percentage of site visitors coming to us from mobile devices is steadily increasing. We know we have to do something, but we're not sure what." Has your organization had success with mobile? Share your experience with Best and others in the comments section below.

Women & Girls

Thursday was International Day of the Girl, and, as Beth Kanter notes on her blog, the launch of the "Because I Am a Girl" campaign by the Plan, one of oldest and largest children's development organizations in the world. Why a campaign to raise awareness about the importance of educating girls? Because, as Kanter writes, "Globally, one in three girls around the world is denied an education by the daily realities of poverty, violence and discrimination. Every day, girls are taken out of school, married far too young, and subjected to violence in school. Not only is this unjust, it's also a huge waste of potential with serious global consequences...."

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

-- The Editors

 

Clinton Global Initiative 2012 - Monday a.m.

PhilanTopic is at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan this morning to cover the eighth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. (Watch the livestream here.) The theme of this year's meeting is "Designing for Impact" -- how can we design our world to create more opportunity and more equality? And how might we design our lives, our environments, and global systems in order to impact the many enormous challenges at hand.

The meeting opened yesterday with a session moderated by CGI founding chair and former President Bill Clinton that featured Michael Duke, president/CEO of Wal-Mart Stores; Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan; Ban Ki-Moon, secretary-general of the United Nations; and Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group. (Watch the video here.)

Things really got rolling this morning, however, with a powerful speech ("Designing Diplomacy for the 21st Century") by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton -- who was welcomed by CGI attendees as if she were a rockstar (or once-and-future presidential candidate). In it, Secretary Clinton shared a three-part framework for U.S. diplomacy and development assistance in "a time of great change." My scribbled notes don't do it justice (you can watch the livestream here), but here's the gist of what she said:

-- In a time of enormous technological, demographic, political, and geopolitical change, the goal of U.S. development assistance is "to help solve problems and support opportunities around the world."

-- In the 1960s, official development aid from donor countries to developing countries represented 70% of capital flows into those countries; today, it's 13% -- relatively insignificant compared to trade, business investment, and remitttances.

-- The U.S. aid budget has increased in real-dollar terms over that period -- but represents a much smaller share of aid to developing countries overall.

Against this backdrop, the U.S. State Department has three objectives going forward with respect to development assistance. As Clinton put it:

1) We want to move from direct aid to investment. The political and geopolitical landscape has changed, needs have changed, assistance needs to be rethought. We need to be intentional and strategic. We need to focus on and promote public-private partnerships ("You cannot do development in today's world without partnering with the private sector"). We need to recognize that many of yesterday's laggards are today's rising stars (in the last decade, six of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world have been in Africa). We need to be rigorous and demonstrate results.

2) We need to encourage "country ownership." That means building capacity within developing countries so they are able to set their own priorities, develop plans to achieve those priorities, execute on those plans, and, increasingly, fund those plans. And it means ownership by "the whole country" -- men and women. The surest path out of poverty for developing countries is educating and empowering women and girls.

3) We need to put ourselves out of business. The State Department looks forward to the day when public-sector assistance is replaced by private-sector investment. ("I'm always surprised when people are surprised to hear that.") Before we get there, however, State (and others) need to expand the number of partners with which it works; the days of government working through large international NGOs only are over. Elites around the world also have to recognize that they need to pay their fair share of taxes and support critical investments in public education and infrastructure. And donor governments around the world need to step up their efforts to combat corruption, which as much as anything is responsible for stifling innovation and smothering human aspiration in too many countries.

In closing, Clinton reminded those in attendance that "freedom and dinity are more important than food and water." And she urged everyone in the room "to stand together to resist the forces of extremism and violence and stand firm for peaceful transitions to democracy in North Africa and the Middle East." (Watch her complete remarks here.)

Back with more in a bit...

-- Mitch Nauffts