Weekend Link Roundup (October 15-16, 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....

African Americans

Contra Donald Trump, the majority of African Americans do not live in poverty or inner cities. Alana Semuels reports for The Atlantic.

In Yes! Magazine, Liza Bayless interviews Marbre Stahly-Butts, deputy director of racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, about why divestment from the prison and military industries is critical to a just future.

Climate Change

On August 7, Scotland, one of the windiest countries in Europe, generated enough electricity from wind turbines to power the entire country. And it's goal of running on 100 percent renewable energy by 2020 may be within reach. The Washington Post's Griff Witte reports.

Communications/Marketing

"Most people are uncomfortable talking about race, discrimination, privilege and power," writes the Knight Foundation's Anusha Alikhan, who moderated a panel on diversity and inclusion at the Communications Network annual conference in Detroit in September. "[W]e get tripped up by the need to be nonpartisan, while balancing the interests of a variety of groups and even our own upbringings.... [But how] do we produce real change in these areas if we don’t acknowledge their roots?" Alikhan shares some takeaways from that conversation that communications teams can use to "advance hard conversations and create deeper connections with their communities."

Disaster Relief

Relief efforts for hurricane-battered Haiti gained some traction during week, with the United Nations launching a $120 million appeal to fund its activities there, the World Health Organization gearing up to send a million cholera vaccine doses to prevent a more serious outbreak of the disease, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation announcing a gift of $2 million in cash and product donations, and Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt announcing he will donate $10 million through his foundation for recovery efforts. To learn more about recovery challenges and opportunities for donors, check out this webinar hosted by the Center for Disaster Philanthropy.

In the wake of Hurricane Matthew, Haitians need all the help they can get. But according to the Washington Post's Peter Holley, they don't trust the American Red Cross to provide it.

Economy

In his first column as a regular contributor to the op-ed page, veteran New York Timesman David Leonhardt calls out economic stagnation and declining social mobility as a "central challenge of our time."

The most "unequal" big city in the U.S. is...Miami — followed by Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, Dallas, Boston, Tampa, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. And the biggest factors in the rising income inequality in those cities seems to be the disappearance of middle-income jobs and rapidly rising real estate prices. Sarah Ponczek and Wei Lu report for Bloomberg.

Fundraising

Looking for a few fundraising ideas that work? The Nonprofit Times journeyed to National Harbor, Maryland, a few months ago and came back with sixteen of them.

Gun Violence

The Center for American Progress has created an interactive map of the country that shows how each state ranks in terms of overall levels of gun violence. The rankings were based on an analysis of ten categories of gun violence across all fifty states, as described in "America Under Fire: An Analysis of Gun Violence in the United States and the Link to Weak Gun Laws."

International Affairs/Development

Hungary is the latest country to crack down on a foreign-funded NGO. The New York Times (via Reuters) has the story. And in Haiti, the lives of staffers at Fondation Connaissance et Liberte (FOKAL), Open Society's foundation in that country, have been threatened by a group inspired by demagogues and religious fundamentalists.

Philanthropy

In her annual president's essay, the MacArthur Foundation's Julia Stasch "address[es] the task of building trust in a time of flux and challenge. Philanthropy," she argues, "must learn from the ways that technology and new modes of communicating are reordering our world...examine critically our history, structures, and practices, and where necessary, take new directions...[and] listen more, be more flexible and inclusive, and allow those who experience directly the problems we seek to address even more room to participate fully and lead."

Hedge fund legend and Giving Pledger Julian Robertson talks to Philanthropy magazine about his giving, investments in education reform, and a few of his philanthropic heroes.

In the Philanthropy Daily, Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill, executive director of the Fund for Academic Renewal, a program of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, pushes back on the argument advanced by Uinversity of Chicago political scientist Chiara Cordell in a recent essay titled "The Problem with Discretionary Philanthropy" that "the moral core of philanthropy ought to be about 'giving back' what is owed by the wealthy to 'their fellow citizens who suffer from deprivation as a consequence of insufficient public provision by the government'."

And If you haven't already, be sure to read this commentary by Joanne Florino, senior vice-president for public policy at the Philanthropy Roundtable, on the value of philanthropic freedom.

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