Weekend Link Roundup (March 29-30, 2014)

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

Communications/Marketing

In a guest post on the Communications Network blog, the Barr Foundation's Stefan Lanfer shares some lessons he and his colleagues have learned about communicating in times of change. The first two are simple but powerful: know what you want to communicate, by word and by deed; and know what you don't want to communicate. Check out Lanfer's the post for three more things the foundation got right.

Education Reform

Public school advocate Diane Ravitch has posted a draft version of of remarks made at an education conference earlier this month by Dissent contributor Joanne Barkan on the topic of how to criticize the role of "big philanthropy" in education reform. 

Fundraising

In today's New York Times, Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, lets readers in on a well-kept secret: Fundraising is fun. The "magic" of raising money for a cause or organization, writes Brooks,

goes even deeper than temporary happiness or extra income. It creates meaning. Donors possess two disconnected commodities: material wealth and sincere conviction. Alone, these commodities are difficult to combine. But fund-raisers facilitate an alchemy of virtue: They empower those with the financial resources to convert the dross of their money into the gold of a better society....

On the Relationship Science blog, Kathy Landau, executive director of the National Dance Institute in New York City, makes an impassioned case for seeing data and relationship building "as mutually beneficial rather than mutually exclusive."

Grantmaking

In a post on the GrantCraft blog, Grant Coates, president and CEO of the Miles Foundation in Fort Worth, explains how a reevaluation of the foundation's grantee selection process helped him and his colleagues realize that leadership often is what separates a "good" grantee from a "great" grantee. "The presence of powerful leadership," Coates writes, "is almost tangible – it's a spirit that employees exude, a confidence that the organization embodies, and an impact that's measurable – true leadership is, in short, a game-changer in the grantee selection process."

[Infographic] 10 Years in Social Media

We had three good candidates to choose from for this week's infographic: one from the Kauffman Foundation that explores the reasons behind lower business startup rates among women and proposes actions that would help to realize the promise of female entrepreneurs; a second, from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, that illustrates the critical role of forests to a healthy planet; and the one below.

We know what you're thinking -- the thought occurred to us, too. But, hey, bet you didn't know that, on the day he died, John D. Rockefeller -- who never tweeted or posted an update to Facebook -- was worth more than six times what Mark Zuckerberg is worth today.

[Report] 'Charity and Philanthropy in Russia, China, India, and Brazil'

One of the most significant international developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has been the growing economic power of the so-called BRICs — Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Dismissed in the 1970s by many as economic basket cases, the four countries, which account for over a quarter of the globe's land mass and more than 40 percent of its population, have, in the quarter-century since that momentous event, opened their economies to the world and emerged as dominant global suppliers of manufactured goods and services (China and India), and raw materials (Brazil and Russia).

The startling surge of economic activity in each of the four countries over the last twenty years has been accompanied by an explosion of wealth, which in turn has led to the emergence, in all four countries, of organized philanthropic activity and what those of us who cover philanthropy would call an infrastructure to support it.

Indeed, that activity is the subject of a new report just released by the Foundation Center, in collaboration with WINGS (Worldwide Initiative for Grantmaker Support), a global network of grantmaker associations and philanthropic support organizations. Authored by Joan E. Spero, a senior research scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (and the first president of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation), the report, Charity and Philanthropy in Russia, China, India, and Brazil (26 pages, PDF), identifies some of the cultural, economic, social, and political forces that are shaping giving in the BRICs and examines the growth and nature of foundations and the philanthropic sector in each of the four countries.

Because the charitable sector in each of the four countries is new and not well organized, the data on charitable activity in each country is limited and difficult to compare. Nevertheless, there are common characteristics and issues that emerge from a comparison of giving in these countries. For example, the report looks at the traditional cultural and religious origins of charity/philanthropy in the four countries, including the Jewish concept of "tzedakah" (or righteousness), which has influenced a small but important part of contemporary Russian philanthropy; the concept of "zakat," one of the five pillars of Islam, which has shaped giving in the Arab countries and on the Indian subcontinent; and the concept of "dana," which is embraced by Hindus and Buddhists and has also influenced the small but important Parsi or Zoroastrian community of India.

The report also examines the process of economic liberalization in the four countries (a process, as Spero writes, that "has been accompanied by the growth of the middle class and the accumulation of vast fortunes by a new, wealthy business class, often linked to the global economy"); considers the increasingly worrisome issue of inequality, which has increased in China, India, and Russia over the last twenty years and remains very high in Brazil, where it has always been a feature of the economic landscape; and looks at external influences, including philanthropic support from foundations like Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, MacArthur, Mott, and Open Society in the U.S., the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany, and the British Charities Aid Foundation.

Here are a few takeways from the report:

5 Questions for...Eric Schwarz, Co-Founder and CEO, Citizen Schools

Established in 1995, Citizen Schools works to help children, especially those from low-income backgrounds, discover and achieve their dreams. To that end, the Citizen Schools model is focused on partnering with middle schools to extend the traditional school day by a few hours and augmenting traditional classroom instruction with a combination of intensive academic support and a range of enrichment and youth development activities. Currently active in seven states, the organization also offers project-based courses led by volunteer "Citizen Teachers" who, outside of school, are scientists, engineers, artists, lawyers, and business leaders.

Earlier this month, PND spoke with the organization's co-founder and CEO, Eric Schwarz, about the Citizen Teacher concept and the scalability of the Citizens Schools model.

Philanthropy News Digest: When and where did the "Citizen Teacher" concept emerge? Is it something you and your colleagues developed, or is it something you kind of grabbed hold of and made your own?

Eric Schwarz: Well, men­tor­ing and volunteering and apprenticeships have been around for thousands of years. If you think about law and medicine, it's how much of the training happens to this day: you get young professionals training under older professionals in a kind of apprentice­ship model.

The insight we came to almost twenty years ago was that for most low-income kids enrolled in a K-12 school in the United States, the school experience had become disconnected from the real world. Many of these kids had never met someone from a fast-growing profession like engin­eering, and so their chances of growing up and becoming an engineer was close to zero. So we developed a model that made it easier for engineers and lawyers and others to connect with kids directly and do hands-on experien­tial projects with them.

I'm happy to say, the results have been terrific. We've found that Citizen Schools narrows, in most cases eliminates, and sometimes even reverses the achievement gap between middle-income and low-income kids. We're also seeing significantly higher high school and college graduation rates, which means we’re putting kids on a path to success. That's very exciting.

We've also learned that we’re actually making a big difference in the lives of our volunteers. In fact, we commissioned a business school professor from the University of Vermont, David Jones, to do a study of the program's impact on volunteers. And what he found is that there's a significant impact in terms of volunteers feeling better about their companies. They’re happy their company has sponsored or approached them about taking some flex time to give back to the community, and they're usually delighted that they have a chance to build their dele­gation skills, teamwork skills, and coaching skills.

PND: Do you see citizen-teachers as filling a gap in public education, as complementing classroom instruc­tion, or doing a little of both?

ES: The Citizen Schools model is designed to support teachers and public schools by adding three hours to the learning day, every day of the week, all year long. It's a significant extension of the learning day from a six- or seven-hour day to a nine- to ten-hour day. And bringing real-world experiential activities to kids in school is an important complement to the learning that goes on. Think of it this way: if math instruction is limited to a teacher at a blackboard — these days, maybe it's a whiteboard — explaining and talking about concepts, but you, the student, don't have a sense of how those concepts connect to the real world, it's much more likely you're going to tune out and disengage from that class and maybe even from school. Citizen Schools gives kids a sense of how to actually use algebraic concepts in designing a video game, or how, when you're presenting the opening argument in a trial, you want to lead with a topic sentence and then back it up with specific examples. Those kinds of things reinforce what teachers teach, and at the same they tend to motivate students to care more about doing well. It's a terrific comple­ment to what already is happening in public schools across the country.

Mapping DACA: New Tool Tracks Philanthropy’s Investments in Program for Immigrant Youth

(Felecia Bartow is associate director at Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees.)

In June 2012, the Obama administration announced a new policy directive that provided the opportunity for nearly two million immigrant youth and young adults across the country to apply for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This temporary form of relief offers eligible immigrants a possible reprieve from the threat of deportation and has the potential to encourage immigrant students to continue and/or complete their education and enter the formal economy.

As word of this historic opportunity spread, foundations from California to New York and Oregon to North Carolina responded. Despite differences in grantmaking and geographic priorities, these funders seized the opportunity to meet the pressing needs of DACA-eligible immigrants in communities across the country by supporting a wide range of implementation activities, including expanding outreach efforts and eligibility screenings, and helping applicants meet educational requirements and cover the cost of the $465 application fee.

The Foundation Center and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees are pleased to announce the launch of the DACA Grants Map, which provides the first-ever comprehensive overview of related investments. This tool offers information on the geographic areas served by DACA-related grants and grant details such as dollar amount, duration, date issued, strategies
supported, and investment type.

Collectively, these investments have had a direct and measureable impact on the lives of the more than half a million immigrant youth and young adults living, working, and contributing in communities across the country. With support from the philanthropic sector, the vast majority of these young people applied for DACA successfully.

Women on the Front Lines of ACA Implementation

(Ellen Liu serves as director of women's health at the Ms. Foundation for Women.)

Women have a lot to celebrate this month. March is Women's History Month, and March 23 marks the fourth anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Over the past five years, the Ms. Foundation for Women has been funding outreach and advocacy efforts to ensure that women and women's health services are a central part of implementation of the ACA.

With nearly one in five women uninsured nationwide, the need for targeted outreach to women is undeniable. Low-income women, women of color, immigrant women, and young women are uninsured at substantially higher rates than the national average for all women.

Our work on the ACA has focused on ensuring that all women have access to preventive care, treatment, and services. We know that access to health care improves the well-being of women, resulting in greater financial stability, peace of mind, and lower rates of depression.

Given the proven benefits of health insurance, it has been especially important for the Ms. Foundation to address health equity and to support those who have the least access to affordable quality care. Through our Women 4 Health Care program, we have focused on the intersection of gender, race, and class, both by funding advocacy for inclusive, comprehensive health coverage and by targeting outreach to underserved women.

In the process, we have learned some valuable lessons about successful advocacy and outreach strategies. First, we have learned that we must engage at multiple levels to ensure that women are not left out. Our grantee partners have been active on various levels, serving on governance and administrative committees for their state exchanges; monitoring legislation that pertains to women's health; providing technical assistance to state exchanges to ensure they prioritize women, as well as strategizing about how best to reach women through outreach campaigns; and leading community efforts to link women and families to resources that can help them through the enrollment process.

Weekend Link Roundup (March 22-23, 2014)

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

Advocacy

"[A]ctivist and advocacy organizations have increasingly come to look and act an awful lot like multinational corporations," and that's not a development we should applaud, write Genevieve LeBaron and Peter Dauvergne on openDemocracy's Transformation blog. It's not just the corporatization of NGOs and questions of money that make LeBaron and Dauvergne uneasy. "What’s more disturbing," they write,

is how corporatization is transforming what activists and NGOs now think is "realistic" and "possible" to change in the world.

Increasingly, NGOs are dividing advocacy into projects with concrete and easily-measurable outcomes in order to demonstrate "returns on donations." Needing to pay salaries, rent and electricity bills, NGOs have centralized their management structures and moved away from tactics that might threaten firms or governments or donors.

Advocacy for far-reaching change in world politics is increasingly off the table: radically-reorienting international organizations, redistributing global income, reining in multinational corporations beyond voluntary codes of conduct, reversing unfair terms-of-trade, protecting workers, and pushing for a different economic order that is based around sharing and an end to growth....

Data

On the Markets for Good blog, Greta Knutzen chats with Lee Sherman, co-founder and chief content officer at Visual.ly, about data vizualization and its value to the social sector.

International Affairs/Development

Humansophere blogger Tom Paulson has a nice Q&A with development economist Willam Easterly, whose newest book, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, argues that "the 'technocratic' and apolitical approach favored by the aid and development community (including the World Bank) has served to keep the poor oppressed because it ignores one of the primary drivers of poverty – the poor's lack of individual rights, of economic and political freedoms."

Are unconditional cash transfers to poor people in developing countries as effective as some claim? The team at GiveDirectly, a site that is pioneering the concept, responds to the Mulago Foundation's Kevin Starr and Laura Hattendorf, who recently suggested in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that such transfers may turn out to be "more of a 1-year reprieve from deprivation than a cost-effective, lasting 'solution to poverty'."

On World Water Day, Let's 'Toast to Water'

Today is World Water Day, the culmination of a week-long series of events coordinated by the United Nations and others to raise awareness of the global water crisis and, this year, the linkage between water and energy generation. Of course, the burden of the crisis is most keenly keenly felt by the estimated 960 million people around the globe – many of them in Africa – who live on less than $2 a day.

To appreciate the full weight of that burden, consider the following statistical portrait, which was put together by the folks at the Replenish Africa Initiative (RAIN), a six-year, $30 million initiative of the Coca-Cola Company that aims to improve access to clean water for 2 million people in Africa by 2015:

Water is a common thread between many of the most pressing challenges facing the world today, undermining development around the world.

Global water and sanitation burden

• One in nine people, or 768 million people, lack access to safe water supply globally, while 2.5 billion people do not have access to sanitation. (http://water.org/water-crisis/one-billion-affected/)
  • One billion people still practice open defecation globally. (http://www.unicef.org/media/files/JMPreport2012.pdf)
  • Globally, more people have access to a cell phone than a toilet. (http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/25/more-people-have-cell-phones-than-toilets-u-n-study-shows/)

Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene and Health

• Water and sanitation-related diseases collectively account for 80 percent of sickness in developing countries. (http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/sanitation.shtml) These diseases annually kill more children – a total of 2.2 million – than HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB combined. (WASH Advocates)
  • In addition, access to safe drinking water is vital for the success of HIV/AIDS treatment. (http://www.pedaids.org/blog/entry/wash-and-hiv-aids-go-hand-in-hand)
  • On average, a child dies from waterborne disease every 15 seconds.
  • Half of the world's malnutrition cases are caused by water and sanitation-related diseases due to the inability to properly absorb nutrients. (http://www.unep.org/documents.multilingual/default.asp?DocumentID=617&ArticleID=6504&l=en&t=long)
  • Even in the United States, water-related diseases (such as Legionnaire’s disease, cryptosporidiosis and giardiasis) cost the U.S. over $500 million annually. (http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2010/r100714.htm)
  • Water, sanitation and hygiene have the potential to prevent at least 9.1 percent of the global disease burden and 6.3 percent of all deaths. (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2008/9789241596435_eng.pdf)
  • Water-related disease costs children in the developing world 443 million school days per year. (http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR06-complete.pdf)
  • Improving access to clean water ranks as the top health priority among U.S. citizens for assistance abroad. (http://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/8508-f-2013-survey-of-americans-on-the-u-s-role-in-global-health.pdf)

The water crisis is an everyday reality for millions of Africans.

5 Questions for...Olga Lech, Philanthropic Account Supervisor, Geller & Company

As globalization, technology, and financial innovation combine to create great wealth – and great inequality – individual donors and foundations are under increasing pressure to be more nimble, more strategic, and to take more risks. Even as philanthropy struggles to respond to these challenges, the role of the philanthropy professional is evolving. Business as usual is out; managing complexity is the order of the day.

Earlier this week, PND spoke with Olga Lech, a philanthropic advisor at Geller & Company, about some of the changes roiling the field.

Philanthropy News Digest: We often hear that it's harder to give a large fortune away than it is to make one. Do you agree?

Olga Lech: I think they are equally difficult, but in different ways. The level of complexity changes – sometimes significantly – depending on what it is you are trying to achieve. If you simply want to be charitable and support good causes to make the world a better place, you may look to donate to a local charity such as a church or school in your community with a year-end gift that supports their operations and/or mission. If you are looking to be a philanthropist, however, your giving will most likely be focused on longer-term programs that seek to address bigger social issues, which would most likely cause you to look at other components such as sustainability, governance, and the recruitment of staff and volunteers.

The difference between charity and philanthropy is really where the complexity comes into play. Another dimension is impact. Philanthropy often strives for the highest impact in terms of results and outcomes, which in this global age can also require international cooperation and logistics. This often means you need to follow and measure the results of the projects you fund. That said, both charity and philanthropy are equally noble endeavors, and choosing which to pursue is a highly personal decision based on a variety of factors, not the least of which is complexity. 

PND: What are the most common mistakes made by high-net-worth donors? And what can a good philanthropic advisor do to help them avoid such mistakes?

OL: It all begins with the personal vision of the wealth owner and the degree to which an advisor can help translate that into an effective plan in line with other wealth management elements such as taxes, investments, and even succession issues. The advisor role is to not judge the endeavor, but to help strengthen it. For example, the John Templeton Foundation gave a grant to establish an institute for research on unlimited love. If the donor or client came to me with this idea, my role would be to research it, identify the most effective way to advance the cause, outline the risk factors, and find the best ways to mitigate those risks to protect the client's assets. The beauty of private philanthropy is that it allows donors to fund projects, programs, and initiatives that no federal, state, or local government would have the freedom to fund. And many of these initiatives lead to breakthrough discoveries with impacts that touch many lives.

Catalyzing Impact Investments Through Coordinated Grantmaking

(The following post was adapted from "From Grants to Groundbreaking: Unlocking Impact Investments," an ImpactAssets issue brief by Amy Chung of Living Cities and Jed Emerson.)

Philanthropy and the practice of grantmaking traditionally have been very separate from traditional investing in both culture and approach, but the emerging field of impact investing invites a productive collaboration between these two disciplines. Indeed, in an increasingly resource-constrained world, the ability to drive more impact investments into the communities and issues we care about is imperative. In the paragraphs that follow, we will explore how family foundations, philanthropic institutions, and public funders can use their grants strategically to unlock future impact investments in social businesses and socially driven business models that are either too risky or not ready for investors seeking financial returns.

In traditional capital markets, there are clear roles that different investors play in the sequence of financing for organizations as they move from seed stage to later stage. In the impact investing field, the role and needs of investors at different stages follows a similar though less clearly defined path. The relatively recent proliferation of socially driven business models makes it challenging for many to identify opportunities that are ready for investment or that have enough of a track record to provide confidence in their future returns. While such an environment provides investors with opportunities to be creative with financing, it also requires increased transparency and communi­cation from investees, funds, and intermediar­ies to accommodate different risk and impact profiles within the same deal or investment opportunity.

In many cases, the work of innovative socially driven business models may be accelerated by combining various types of impact invest­ment capital, in effect "stacking" capital that requires a financial return with capital that does not in order to "buy down risk" or otherwise make a deal happen that philanthropy or market rate investment alone would not be able to achieve. Because grants do not require repayment or a rate of financial return, they can be used more flexibly in certain transactions. For example, grants may be used to provide guarantees, fund a loan loss reserve, or serve as flexible lending capital, each of which may be needed in order to leverage or attract capital seeking a return. Coordinating grants with investment in this way may not only reduce the risk associated with particular transactions, but also can support socially driven financing models, thereby enabling impact investment opportunities that might otherwise not be possible.

'Under Construction': La Plazita Institute - Albuquerque, New Mexico

Under Construction is a multimedia online exhibit showcasing some of the best and brightest organizations working with males of color. The UC team of filmmakers, photographers, writers, and nonprofit experts worked directly with each of these organizations for several weeks. The collaborations yielded comprehensive portraits of the services men of color receive. Each profile features a short video, a photography exhibit, a visual program model, and a narrative essay detailing the efforts of these organizations.

Under Construction is a project of Frontline Solutions and was made possible through the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. For more profiles, click here.

As in the desert that surrounds this city, it seems almost all living happens at dusk. The sun throws rose-colored light on the Sandia Mountains, the pale houses empty, and the sidewalks fill. Above, the skies look brush-stroked and extravagant, and a breeze comes, as if it had been hiding, too. When you endure in the desert, this hour is your reward.

And if you are a boy here, this is the hour when someone will show you a crooked path to manhood. You'll follow an older brother or cousin down to the Rio Grande to receive an initiation of blows and beatings. There, under the Cottonwoods, you'll try not to cry when they say you need to go beat up that kid you used to play with. In just a little while they'll call you carnalito (little brother, little dude).

Like many of the Chicano and Native American youth in Albuquerque who take guidance from La Plazita Institute, Raymond Maestas was brought into gang life before he got out of middle school. He learned to go at life with a gun on his waist and to get away from it all by taking a hit. But one day when he was fifteen a man invited him to earn respect a different way, by talking about his feelings, by serving his neighborhood, and by beginning to honor a heritage he had never been taught. The man was Albino Garcia, and the place was called La Plazita. The other guys in the room, the ones he was supposed to open up to? They were the ones he'd been conditioned to hate.

"I was stuck in the life, gang style life, I grew up here in the South Valley, you know," Maestas remembers. (South Valley is a neighborhood in the city's Southeast District.) "The words of Albino made me think. I was fifteen and I had a son.

That was ten years ago, soon after La Plazita began trying to help one of the most underserved populations in the country with programs like organic gardening, ceramics, and screen printing, along with traditional Native American rituals like a sweat lodge and "Warrior Circles." Here Maestas, who is twenty-five now and is covered neck to waist in tattoos, will tell younger teens how he learned to talk about his feelings, and, perhaps for the first time, those mentees will know someone who has dared to walk a different path.

Weekend Link Roundup (March 15-16, 2014)

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

Communications/Marketing

Guest blogging on Nancy Schwartz' Getting Attention blog, Julie Brown, program director at the Findlay-Hancock County Community Foundation in Ohio, shares the steps she and a colleague have taken over the last year to achieve "storytelling success" and boost donor engagement at the foundation.

Community Improvement/Development

On the Huffington Post's Black Voices blog, Ashley Wood, Detroit editor for the HuffPo, takes a closer look at the hipsters-are-taking-over-Detroit narrative and uncovers a fascinating (and more nuanced) conversation. As Meagan Elliott, an urban planner and Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan, says at the end of the piece: "I think everyone is open to change. That's what makes the conversation interesting. Everyone recognizes that things need to change here."

Corporate Philanthropy

In Fast Company, Stephanie Vozza explains why every company should pay its employees to volunteer.

Data

Writing on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, Foundation Center president Brad Smith looks at the three types of data (transactional, contextual, impact) foundations need and suggests that "for strategic philanthropy to realize its true potential, foundations need to learn how to manage information (data) to produce and share knowledge. Doing so," adds Smith, "will depend on changing internal incentive systems, in which foundations employ static data primarily as means for approving strategies and monitoring grants."

Giving

Nice infographic on the npEngage site illustrating highlights of Blackbaud's 2013 Charitable Giving Report. Click here to download (registration required) a copy of the report, which includes overall giving data from 4,129 nonprofit organizations representing more than $12.5 billion in total fundraising and online giving data from 3,359 nonprofits representing $1.7 billion in online fundraising.

[Infographic] The Myth of the Millennial

Millennials. Generation Y. Echo Boomers. Generation We. Generation Me. The Net Generation. 

There are almost as many names for the millions of Americans born between 1982 and 1995 (or 1980-2000, or 1983-2004 -- definitions vary) as there are stererotypes about them. And there are a lot of stereotypes. Here are a few things we do know about them:

• At 86 million, millennials are the largest generation in U.S. history (7 percent larger than their parents' boomer generation);
• They are, in many respects, the best educated generation in U.S. history -- and the most burdened with student loan debt;
• As the first generation of "digital natives," they are comfortable with technology and use it at higher rates than older generations;
• According to a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center, they are the most cynical and distrusting generation ever.

Okay, this kind of generational sterotyping, as conservative Jonah Goldberg calls it, can get old in a hurry. But it can also force us to examine our assumptions and biases. This week's infographic, which was put together by the folks at Onlinempadegrees.com and the UNC School of Government, is full of stats about the generation of young people we call millennials -- some of them surprising and others not so much. Take a look. And then use the comments section below to debunk some of your favorite millennial sterotypes. 

PND Talk: Founder's Dilemma

In the fourth installment of our PND Talk series (you can find the others here, here and here), Anonymous outlines a situation with which too many nonprofit executive directors are familiar: the founder who can't or won't relinquish the reins of an organization or agency that has outgrown his or her capacity to manage it.

Fortunately for Anonymous, our late, good friend (and all-around wise person) Carl Richardson was on hand to help and responded with some practical advice that surely must have helped. But see what you think. And then use the comments section at the bottom to share your thoughts and advice....

HELP. I'm working with a great organization that is experiencing a huge growth spurt -- and approaching a total budget of nearly $1 million. But the founder is still "running the show" as if it were a tiny volunteer-driven operation. He inserts himself into everything, from giving staff directives, to changing information on the Web site, to starting new programs without consulting with anyone. Basically, he is an extremely impulsive person and is unable or unwilling to hand the agency over to a professional staff (though he claims otherwise).

A few months ago I stepped in as ED with a twelve-month contract. But despite the fact that we've made some amazing progress, I am not sure I can "save" the organization -- and am beginning to believe I helped create a monster.

We have plenty of board members who are willing to roll up their sleeves, and new blood willing to help. But through his actions, the organization's founder makes it clear that he is in charge, and after a while people get discouraged and become unwilling to engage.

This founder was the sole support of the agency for nearly a decade, and I understand and appreciate his commitment and compassion. Yet the agency has grown beyond his capacity to run - and not just because he has a business to operate as well.

I have dealt with difficult founders before, and I hate to walk away. But I fear for its future -- and my reputation!

_______

The Smartest Investment We Could Make: The Future of Girls

(Dr. Anand K. Parekh is an adjunct assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and deputy assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. His family manages the Parekh-Vora Charitable Foundation.)

As the father of two young girls, there is no greater joy for me than to see them smile and thrive. This is why I often remember former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan’s words: "There is no policy for progress more effective than the empowerment of women and girls. A nation that neglects its children, especially girls, is a nation that neglects its future and development." Given this truth, the Parekh-Vora Charitable Foundation has initiated a focus on two areas particularly important to girls: water and sanitation, and primary school education.

We could have chosen many areas of need to focus on, so why girls, why water and sanitation, and why education?

To begin with, we were struck by the numbers: globally, 2.5 billion people live without basic sanitation, while 768 million people lack access to safe water. Every day, 2,000 children die from water-related diseases. And each year, 60 million children are born into homes without access to safe water and sanitation. It's estimated that improvements in these areas alone could vastly improve health outcomes, increase productivity, and reduce healthcare costs – while increasing a country's gross domestic product (GDP) by anywhere from 2 percent to 7 percent. Girls are disproportionately affected by the water and sanitation crisis, given that they frequently miss school or drop out altogether because of a lack of a private toilet in school. Tens of thousands of other girls and women spend hours at a time walking for miles while carrying water on their heads that can weigh up to forty pounds. Simply put, access to water, sanitation, and hygiene enables women and girls to take control of their lives.

The numbers around education are equally alarming: 793 million people worldwide are illiterate. Once again, girls and women are disproportionately affected and account for two-thirds of all illiterate persons. In the developing world, an estimated 42 percent of girls are not enrolled in school, while more than 60 million primary school-aged children of both genders do not have access to education and likely will never learn to read or write. The numbers are confounding, not least because we know that even a few years of basic education empowers women and girls to take control of their lives. Educated women are healthier (an extra year of  education for girls can reduce infant mortality by 5 percent to 10 percent) and earn more (an extra year of education boosts future wages by 20 percent). If every child were to receive an education, an estimated  171 million individuals would be lifted out of poverty.