Weekend Link Roundup (September 17-18 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....

Communications/Marketing

Did the board of the Wounded Warrior Project blunder by firing CEO Steve Nardizzi and COO Al Giardano in response to allegations in the media that the organization was spending too much on itself and too little on those it was supposed to help? Forbes contributor Richard Levick reports.

Education

On openDemocracy's Transformations blog, Megan Tompkins-Stange, assistant professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School, University of Michigan and author of the recently published Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform and the Politics of Influence, argues that billionaire philanthropists are imposing their views on the rest of society with little or no accountability for their actions.

Giving Pledge

Dean and Marianne Metropoulos of Greenwich, Connecticut, are the newest members of the Giving Pledge club.

Grantmaking

Guest blogging on the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, Jessica Bearman, principal of Bearman Consulting and a consultant to the Grants Managers Network, suggests that foundations intentionally moving to integrate operations and program have five essential characteristics in common.

Grantseeking

On the GuideStar blog, Martin Teitel, author of The Ultimate Insider’s Guide to Winning Foundation Grants and a former CEO of the Cedar Tree Foundation, shares his six-step formula for winning a grant.

Health

The board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), which was founded as an initiative of the Clinton Foundation in 2002 and became a separate nonprofit organization in 2010, has released a statement that lays out the changes that will be implemented if Hillary Clinton is elected president of the United States.

Higher Education

"Across every college sector and level of selectivity, women who received federal aid had lower annual earnings 10 years after entering higher education than the annual earnings of their male peers only six years after entering," a Center for American Progress analysis finds. And, writes CAP's Antoinette Flores, for "students from the nation's most elite colleges, men's earnings outpace women's by tens of thousands of dollars each year, with gaps showing up soon after they enter the workforce."

A University of Nebraska-Lincoln study indicates that 80 percent of college students send text messages during class, leading Joelle Renstrom, a teacher of writing at Boston University, to wonder whether there's any hope left for learning.

In a post for Slate, Cathy O’Neil, author of the recently released Weapons of Math Destruction, argues that the increasing reliance on algorithms is causing tuitions to rise faster than the rate of inflation, parents to worry, and kids to suffer. 

Here's a startling finding: A Public Agenda survey finds that just 42 percent of Americans say college is necessary for workforce success, a 13 percent drop from 2009, while 57 percent say there are many ways to succeed in today's world without a college degree, a 14 percent increase from 2009.

Impact/Effectiveness

Linda Baker, the new director of the Organizational Effectiveness program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, explains how the core values handed down by the Packards to the foundation's board and staff play out for the OE program.

A little tired of the hype around impact investing? With the fall conference season looming, Nonprofit Finance Fund CEO Antony Bugg-Levine, who admits to being "partly responsible for unleashing the beast," shares four tricks to help you get past the bulls**t.

While cynics have been known to argue that the principal reason nonprofits want to "measure impact" is to "inspire donors," that's not so much the case these days, writes Marc Gunther on his Nonprofit Chronicles blog.

Bugg-Levine isn't the only one who's weary of hype. In a post for Philanthropy Daily, Matthew Gerkin offers the "radical suggestion" that "the hype in the non-profit sphere about 'impact' and the supposed demand for it is largely fictional."

Philanthropy

It's been more than twenty years since the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel, the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, and the Association of Fundraising Professionals collaborated on a Donor Bill of Rights. The practice of philanthropy has changed dramatically since then, writes Denver Post columnist Bruce DeBoskey, who, with much credit to the authors of the original, offers an updated version.

In a post on the foundation's Equals Change blog, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker explores the nexus of power, privilege, and ignorance to explain how he and his colleagues failed to include people with disabilities in the foundation's new focus on inequality.

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Caitlin Duffy explains how a high-profile pop-culture moment caused her to rethink her own "discomfort with Black rage and my own white privilege."  

On the GuideStar blog, GuideStar president Jacob Harold weighs in with an incisive analysis of the Clinton and Trump foundations.

And the New York Times reports that New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is launching an investigation to determine whether the Trump Foundation has been in compliance with state laws.

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