Weekend Link Roundup (May 7-8, 2016)

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

Civil Society

"Digital data are different enough from time and money — the two resources around which most of our existing institutions are designed — that it's time to redesign those institutions."  In a post on her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz explains why and how.

Community Improvement/Development

We didn't catch it in time for last week's roundup, but Forbes contributor Ruchika Tulshyan's profile of the Detroit-based New Economy Initiative, a startup entrepreneurship fund focused on inclusive economic development, is well worth a read.

Also in Forbes, the Manhattan Institute's Howard Husock argues that "a Detroit-style 'grand bargain' approach could — with the same level of financial contributions from both big philanthropy and organized labor — break stalemates and allow [other Rust Belt] cities to restore funding for the city services on which their economies depend."

Education

In Inside Philanthropy, Mike Scutari shares highlights of a new case study, Dancing to the Top: How Collective Action Revitalized Arts Education in Boston (48 pages, PDF), written by sector veteran Cindy Gibson for Boston Public Schools Art Expansion (BPS-AE), a multiyear effort to expand arts education in schools across the district. Gibson calls the initiative described in the study "one of the most strategic initiatives" she's ever seen and praises the funding collaborative behind the efforts as "really collaborative." Definitely worth a read.

Environment

Long considered a disaster when it comes to pollution and environmental degradation, China is beginning to appreciate the seriousness of the situation -- and its responsibilities as the second-largest economy in the world -- and is pursuing a number of solutions to environmental challenges at home and beyond. The Nature Conservancy's Mark Tercek reports.

Fundraising

Nice post-mortem by Kivi Leroux Miller on the Give Local America Day-Kimbia fail and what nonprofits can and should do to protect themselves in the future. 

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has put together a good package of articles, tool kits, and other resources on the topic of online fundraising. (Registration required.)

Giving

We know some of you are fed up with generational stereotypes and recommendations based on said stereotypes. We thought there was more than a little truth to this analysis of millennial giving motivations on the Moving Worlds blog, however.

Health

New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Washington and Lee University finds that seven of the ten most profitable hospitals in the United States in 2013 — each earning more than $163 million in profits from patient care services — were nonprofit.

Nonprofits

Most nonprofits have them posted on their website somewhere, but who really pays attention to organizational values? If you don't, you should — and not just because they're sexy. NWB's Vu Le explains.

Sometimes our best intentions as a member of a nonprofit board are not enough to disguise the fact that we're not delivering value. The Nonprofit Law Blog's Gene Tagaki shares twelve signs that maybe it's time for you to resign gracefully and move on.

Philanthropy

A year after the Wall Street Journal published his "deliciously rude essay" lamenting the state of philanthropy in America, "hacker philanthropist" Sean Parker shares his views "on how billionaires might help create the medical breakthroughs that presently elude us" with the FT's Stephen Foley.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's early forays into philanthropy received their share of criticism. But the couple's decision to commit 99 percent of their wealth "to taking on challenges like improving education, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities" through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has turned Bill Gates into a believer. Business Insider's Julie Bort has the story.

Are foundation CEOs overpaid? Nonprofit consultant Alan Cantor thinks so and explains why in a piece for Inside Philanthropy.

Recapping the opening day of Grantmaker for Effective Organization's annual conference for the Social Velocity community, Center for Effective Philanthropy president Phil Buchanan says, of the currently voguish focus on organizational culture in the philanthropy world, that we need "to keep it as a necessary element of effectiveness rather than promoting too much of an inward gaze among institutions that, in all honesty, are already often seen as isolated and insular."

Want more Phil? Marc Gunther has a nice profile of the CEP president on his Nonprofit Chronicles blog.

And on the Chicago Now blog, the elusive Kelly Kleiman (aka the Nonprofiteer) argues that because it drives out direct grants, impact investing is no substitute for philanthropy.

(Photo credit: Matthew Stockman, Houston Chronicle)

That's it for now. What have you been reading/watching/listening to? Drop us a line at [email protected] or via the comments section below....