Weekend Link Roundup (March 28-29, 2015)

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Collaboration

On the Rockefeller Foundation blog, Zia Khan, the foundation's vice president for initiatives and strategy, shares four "counter-intuitive lessons" about cross-sector collaboration.

Data

On the Markets for Good blog, Bill Anderson, technical lead for the Secretariat of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), examines the potential for a people-based data revolution across Africa.

Education

50CAN, a network of local education advocates "learning from and supporting each other," has launched a new blog called The Catalyst to help local education leaders develop policy goals, craft their advocacy plans, and secure lasting change.

On the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation blog, Cari Schneider, director of research and policy for Getting Smart, suggests that one of the least appreciated barriers to effective education reform is definitional in nature.

Fundraising

Why do people give to charity? The Guardian explains.

Global Health

Building on the success of its Global Health NOW e-newsletter, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has launched a new website by the same name.

Higher Education 

Is competency-based education --  an approach that "does away with the credit-hour, grades, professors, and even classes....[and instead grants degrees] to people who demonstrate their skills through a series of self-paced online projects that are judged by academic reviewers" -- the answer to low college completion rates? Writer Ann Crawford reports in the Boston Globe.

"If we really want to promote more equal opportunity and redistribute chances in access to education we should do something about student debt," argues French economist Thomas Piketty (Capital in the 21st Century) in an interview on Big Think.

Nonprofits

In Politico, Hillary Flynn and Rachael Bade report that the IRS "may expand a yet-to-be-released rule governing 501(c)(4), 'social welfare' groups to include political groups known as 527s," requiring them — as well as other types of tax-exempt groups — to operate under the same definition of "political activity" as (c)(4)s.

On the Huffington Post's Social Impact blog, Lori Harnick, general manager of Microsoft's Citizenship & Public Affairs program, announces the software giant's Tech Talent for Good initiative, which aims to extends the technical expertise of Microsoft employees to nonprofits across the country, starting with a varied portfolio of twenty nonprofits in Washington State. 

Philanthropy

In the fourth of an occasional series of posts for Forbes, CauseWired president Tom Watson looks at the emergence of a younger, more entrepreneurial generation of donors and asks, Do they get it?

The Guardian offers a snapshot of ten trends in international philanthropy.

Phil Henderson, president of the New York City-based Surdna Foundation, explains how the foundation's approach to "challenging and complex topics" has been guided by "the Andrus family's longstanding commitment to spending and investing the foundation's assets with discipline while also preserving [its] capacity to continue to effect change under the leadership of future generations of the family."

Poverty

How poor are the poor? The answer, according to the New York Times' Thomas B. Edsall, is not as straightforward as you might think.

That's it for now. What have you been reading/watching/listening to? Drop us a line at mfn@foundationcenter.org or via the comments box below....