Ending Violence Against Girls: Giving Innovative Leaders the Resources They Deserve

My great aunt, Georgeanna Gibbs Browne, born in 1876 in Philadelphia, was a victim of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). Her upbringing was church-going and "upper crust." Newspaper clippings describe her twirling across dance floors at summer soirees and charity balls.

Old medical journals report that "clitoridectomies" were indeed performed in the United States and Europe well into the twentieth century, billed as a cure for female hysteria, nymphomania, and the perils of masturbation. In Philadelphia, at the same time that Georgeanna was nearing puberty, Charles Karsner Mills, a prominent neurologist and academician, was experimenting with the procedure.

My great-grandparents may have embraced Mills' pioneering medical approach in hopes that the procedure would somehow suppress Georgeanna's budding sexuality or help solidify the family's standing in Philadelphia's social hierarchy. I'll never know their rationale. All I have now are a few sepia-tone photographs: One of a young, smiling, cherubic girl with curly hair and twinkling eyes, and another taken about a decade later. Her hair is cropped and slightly wild, her eyes a bit dazed, her expression stricken.

It's #GivingTuesday, and We're Celebrating!

It's that time of year — and not a moment too soon. #GivingTuesday! Did you know that last year, $116.4 million dollars were donated on this single national day of giving? Here's to this year's event being an even bigger success. Are you on board?

This year, Foundation Center and PND decided to approach #GivingTuesday a little bit differently. Because we know just how many amazing nonprofits there are out there, we wanted to highlight them in a special way — and came up with the idea of selecting five through a sweepstakes and turning over our Twitter feeds to those organizations for the day.

The response to the sweepstakes exceeded our expectations, and we're delighted to be able to share the work of the five winners with you throughout the day. To learn more about the great work these organizations are doing and how they're making a difference in their communities, take a look at their profiles below. And please consider making a donation so that they can continue their efforts in 2017 and beyond!

1. Community Health Alliance

Community Health Alliance in Reno, Nevada, provides quality, affordable, comprehensive health services to any member of the community, regardless of their ability to pay. For #GivingTuesday, the organization is raising funds to help one hundred children receive sealants on their molars to help keep them healthy.

"#GivingTuesday is a wonderful way to kick off the holiday giving season," said CHA executive director Emelie Melton Williams. "Northern Nevada has no shortage of need, but also no shortage of kind people who care about the health of our broader community. We hope you will consider giving from the heart."

2. Mattie C. Stewart Foundation

The Mattie C. Stewart Foundation, a nonprofit located in Birmingham, Alabama, designs tools to let young people and their families experience firsthand the powerful benefits of education and the likely consequence that await high school dropouts.

"Many people may not realize it, but one of the greatest threats to homeland security is a lack of educational progress by our nation's youth. We've got to keep finding ways to engage our young people through education and inspire them to great careers,” said Dr. Shelley Stewart, the organization's founder and president. "The more they disengage or drop out, the more our communities are left with societal ills that can be too big to handle."

To support the organization and its programs, please consider making a donation here.

#GivingTuesday 2016

Had your fill of turkey? Feel like you might scream if you see another "40 percent off" sign? Never fear, help is here.

Tomorrow is #GivingTuesday, and to celebrate the thousands of nonprofits that work tirelessly, week in and week out, to make the world a better place, we'll be turning over our Twitter feed for the duration of the day to five lucky nonprofits. Selected through the Foundation Center's "Elevate Your Cause" sweepstakes, the five nonprofits are Community Health Alliance in Reno, Nevada; the Mattie C. Stewart Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama; Building Futures With Women and Children in San Leandro, California; the American Parkinson Disease Association, Northwest Chapter, in Seattle, Washington; and Alström Angels, in Lubbock, Texas.

We know you'll want to learn more about them, so stop back here in the morning for brief profiles of all five, check out our Twitter feed (@pndblog) during the day for tweets from the organizations themselves, and please consider making a donation that will help them continue the great work they do!

Weekend Link Roundup (November 26-27, 2016)

Hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday. This week's roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector is a little shorter than normal. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog.... 

Environment

While the public recognition that comes with high-profile awards can help protect indigenous activists, many fear that the increased visibility is making them easier to target. Barbara Fraser reports for Indian Country.

Interesting profile in the Mount Desert Islander of Roxanne Quimby, the founder of the Burt's Bees natural cosmetics empire and the driving force behind the recently designated 83,000-acre Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine.

Health

Is spending on health care in the U.S. unacceptably high, or are we beginning to "bend the cost curve"? Katherine Hempstead, director and senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, shares some data designed to shed some light on an inherently murky situation.

Inequality

In remarks delivered at the OECD Cities for Life Global Summit on Inclusion, Innovation and Resilience on November 22, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker told those in attendance that he believes "inequality is the greatest threat to our society, in part because not only can it lead to violence and extremism at its worst, but by limiting opportunity and mobility, ultimately it generates hopelessness. And that hopelessness makes it harder to believe that change is possible." Worth your time to read the full text of his remarks.

Capital and the Common Good: How Innovative Finance Is Tackling the World's Most Urgent Problems

Over the past decade, the financial industry has been the subject of harsh criticism — and not without cause. Disillusioned by the abuse of esoteric financial instruments and repeated examples of corporate malfeasance, large numbers of Americans have grown tired of Wall Street and what they see as the financialization of the economy. Finance, however, is only a tool, and as with any tool, it can be used for good or ill.

Georgia Levenson Keohane, executive director of the Pershing Square Foundation, professor of social enterprise at Columbia Business School, and author of Social Entrepreneurship for the 21^st Century: Innovation Across the Nonprofit, Private, and Public Sectors, makes the case in her new book, Capital and the Common Good: How Innovative Finance Is Tackling the World's Most Urgent Problems, that traditional financial tools can be used to innovate solutions to some of the world's greatest social and environmental challenges and urges readers to regard finance not as an instrument of exploitation but rather as a force for good.

Central to her argument is the distinction between financial innovation — the creation of new, increasingly complex instruments of financial engineering — and innovative finance — the use of existing tools to overcome market failure and meet the needs of the poor and underserved. Divided into five thematic chapters, the book explores how innovative finance can be used to fund solutions to environmental, healthcare, financial inclusion, and disaster relief challenges around the world, as well as problems in the United States.

Revisiting Adam Smith's theory of the "invisible hand" in the context of public need, Keohane shows how financial techniques previously used in the pursuit of private interest can be adopted across sectors to benefit the common good and provide economic opportunities for those at the bottom of the wealth pyramid. "When markets fail to produce a set of broad-based and sustainable public goods," she writes, "we need a more visible hand: concerted efforts by governments, multilateral agencies, philanthropies, and, increasingly, socially minded investors to meet needs and solve problems." It is a perspective rooted in the power of agency, the core of which she describes as "aligning incentives in ways that encourage people — individuals and government leaders — to make decisions that both are in their own self-interest and benefit the society." The logical extension of this argument is that many negative externalities (e.g., CO₂ emissions) can be internalized by the market with the judicious application of the right tools — for example, cap and trade — while certain failures of the market can be redressed by the deployment of hybrid incentive models such as pay-for-success bonds.

With Social and Emotional Learning, All Kids Have a Chance to Thrive

It may not be a typical elementary school exercise. And, with the trend in education toward more rigid and punitive systems of testing and discipline, that's the point.

In a classroom in Anchorage, Alaska, first- and second-graders can be found brainstorming a list of conflicts — cutting in line, name-calling, swiping someone else's milk carton — and taking time to develop shared strategies for resolving each.

It's simply one of the many ways social and emotional learning (SEL) skills are taught to more than 48,000 students in the Anchorage School District, where SEL is being successfully implemented.

SEL helps children — and adults — manage their emotions, set and achieve goals, show empathy for others, establish positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.

The premise of social and emotional learning is simple: If students are exposed to positive, supportive school environments and personnel (including socially and emotionally competent adults, from bus drivers to teachers), and are equipped with social-emotional models that can help them navigate their lives, they will be in a better position to learn and thrive.

Seems like common sense to me. Yet in far too many classrooms, it's far from common practice. We're still asking students to leave their emotions at the door, and to leave the complex and challenging realities of their lives — including the effects of trauma, poverty, and violence — at home.

Weekend Link Roundup (November 19-20, 2016)

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

Climate Change

William McDonough, an author/architect and inventor of the concept of "cradle-to-cradle," wants to change the way we talk about carbon. FastCoExist's Adele Peters explains.

Communications/Marketing

Consultant (and former Chronicle of Philanthropy reporter) Peter Panapento shares some tips designed to help you write an op-ed that actually gets published.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Looking for a job that offers more than a check? Amy Elisa Jackson and her colleagues at Glassdoor have compiled a list of eleven companies that give back — and are hiring.

Current Affairs

If the 2016 presidential election told us anything, it's that the divide between rural and urban America is widening. To learn more about what that might mean for the country, The Atlantic's Sommer Mathis spoke with Kathy Cramer, whose new book The Politics of Resentment "traces the rise of conservative Gov. Scott Walker and the political evolution of Wisconsin." (The Badger State went for Trump in this election, the first time a Republican candidate has won there since 1984.)

"The scandal [of this election]," argues Travis LaCouter in a piece for Philanthropy Daily, "lay in the fact that that outcome came as such an utter surprise to half the country, and as such a desperate necessity to the other half." Looking ahead to 2020, 2024, and beyond, this is something foundations can have a direct impact on. "Programs that [bring] together partisan Democrats and Republicans to teach them the basics of dialogue," writes LaCouter, "would help bridge the empathy gap currently wrecking our politics. It sounds childish, perhaps, but also necessary given the tone and quality of this electoral season."

It's been a tough couple of weeks for a lot of folks in the nonprofit sector. As Vu Le writes in his latest blog post, "It will take us a while to understand what happened and what we need to do." In the meantime, Le, in his latest post, shares seven "agreements" designed to help folks navigate through the difficult weeks and months ahead.

A Surprising Prize: Passion and Vision

The Rathmann Challenge is helping to address the basic needs of two million kids across the country. Maybe someday soon the Challenge will assist in cooling the earth’s temperature.

Having constructed a hybrid granting vehicle that we hoped would provide all the upside of prize philanthropy while minimizing the downside (see Part I, "Small Dollars, Big Ideas"), all we needed now was to figure out the problem we wanted to address with our first Rathmann Challenge. We knew our founders had their passions with respect to philanthropic objectives, so we turned to the foundation’s grant history over the last twenty-five years for guidance. There were grants to the arts, to healthcare, to dog parks, to…well, everything imaginable. Fortunately, there was one piece of data that stood out; approximately 50 percent of our total funding was directed, in one manner or another, to education. Coupled with the involvement in that field by a number of foundation members, we had the subject of our first Challenge.

Education. Perfect…except, not so much. What problem could we possibly solve related to education that the likes of the Gates and Annenberg foundations had not already addressed — and, with four log orders more money!

The only way to find out was to pick up the phone and start calling every person we knew in the field. Soon, anecdotes were streaming in from all over, and they led us to two words: Basic Needs. Stories about kids missing classes because they had no way to get to school, being too distracted to learn because they hadn't eaten a solid meal or hadn't had a safe place to sleep for days, or feeling ashamed because they lacked the resources to buy a pencil and notebook, let alone a backpack. The more we listened, the more we learned about the endless number of missing essentials interfering with kids' ability to be ready for learning. Someone, somewhere, had to have come up with a solution to at least one of these problems.

The Next Four Years: Keep Moving Forward

A week ago, the country was in a totally different place than it is today. Regardless of your personal politics, there's no denying we are entering uncertain times. Like everyone else, grantmakers are looking around, trying to figure out how we got here, and making their best guesses about the lay of the land in the months to come. Here are seven things that you might want to consider as you think about the next four years:

1. Don't beat yourself up. The election outcome made it clear that many of us in philanthropy have overlooked the sentiments of a silent but seething portion of the population. While it's great to reflect and think about what your blinders may have been in the past, we all need to learn from what happened and move on. We have important work to do.

2. Don't gut your strengths. Just because the world has changed doesn't mean your work has been misguided. For example, as a field we have made great strides in racial equity and inclusion, and we simply can't drop that focus now. We must recognize that, just as with the stock market, we shouldn't allow short-term reactions to affect our long-term goals. If your early childhood strategy was working last week, it will work next week, and next month, and next year (albeit with a few tweaks and adjustments).

A Surprising Prize: Small Dollars, Big Ideas

The Rathmann Challenge is helping to address the basic needs of two million kids across the country. Maybe someday soon the Challenge will assist in cooling the earth’s temperature.

My family has been fortunate in the for-profit world to experience firsthand how a relatively small amount of money, if applied well (and with some luck), can launch a big idea. Would the same hold true for the nonprofit world? The Rathmann Challenge is a grantmaking tool devised for that purpose — finding good ideas that might scale to create value for many.

As with other family foundations, our founders were gracious, kind, and…a powerful influence. After their departure, we needed new options for going forward that would honor their creativity, entrepreneurial ethos, and innovative spirit. At its core, the Rathmann Challenge is like any other prize philanthropy program — with all the pluses and minuses. It garners attention by highlighting an issue of the day and then making an award ($100k in this case) to one winner ("the Challenge Recipient"). This is great news for the Challenge Recipient, of course, but not so great news for all the others who spent time working on their applications and received nothing. Perhaps even worse, all the great attention the prize brings to an important problem fades quickly after the excitement of the initial award. We wondered whether the model could be tweaked. Was there a way to make the Challenge a little less "winner take all" and a little more "applicant beneficial?" The simplest and most direct method would be to pay a small stipend to each applicant for applying, but the likely effect on the quality of our applicant pool was concerning. We needed instead to devise a process that, by its very nature, would create value for each applicant willing to put the resources into applying.

Three principles guided our efforts. First, the difficulty of each step of the process had to mirror the likelihood of success for the applicant at that stage. Second, the application itself needed to serve as a tool to help organizations promote existing internal practices that addressed the interests of funding organizations like ours (e.g., the ability to think critically and provide an honest self-assessment about past successes and failures). And, third, the criteria for a winning application needed to prompt each organization to spend time considering ways to scale their impact in the future (and thereby motivate and inspire strategic planning irrespective of the organization’s success in the Challenge).

Weekend Link Roundup (November 12-13, 2016)

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. (And what a week it was.) For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Aging

First up, an open letter to the incoming Trump administration from Bruce A. Chernof, president and CEO of the Scan Foundation, laying out five action items it can take to make America great for older citizens.

Arts and Culture

On the Americans for the Arts site, Robert Lynch, the organization's president and CEOs, pledges to work with the incoming Trump administration to advance pro-arts policies and strengthen efforts to transform communities through the arts.

Climate Change

What does Trump's election mean for the Paris climate agreement? Humanosphere's Tom Murphy breaks it down.

Communications/Marketing

On the Packard Foundation website, Felicia Madsen, the foundation's communications director, reflects on some of the things the foundation has learned about how it uses communications to support grantees.

"Your branding efforts affect the bottom line, at least in terms of meeting goals for fundraising, volunteer recruitment, and signed petitions." So why is your logo so ugly? On FasctCoExist, Ben Paynter shares some thoughts on how to avoid a nonprofit branding nightmare.

Fundraising

#GivingTuesday is right around the corner. Is your nonprofit prepared for success?

Health

Does Trump's election mean automatic repeal of the Affordable Care Act? It's more complicated than that, writes Forbes contributor Bruce Japsen.

And be sure to check out this breakdown by the Kaiser Family Foundation of the president-elect's positions on six key healthcare issues.

[Infographic] How Is Philanthropy Engaging With Legislatures?

This week's infographic — the third in our series highlighting Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy — couldn't be more timely. Legislatures, at the federal, state and local levels, are where elected officials write the laws and pass the bills that establish the rules by which we live, work, and play. They are to democracy what the heart is to the human body, the beating, messy source of its vitality and dynamism. 

At the same time, they are, as Tocqueville noted, the American political institution "most easily swayed by the will of the majority," subject, by design, "not only to the general convictions, but even to the daily passions, of their constituents....[N]othing prevents them from accomplishing their wishes with celerity and with irresistible power, and they are supplied with new representatives every year. That is to say, the circumstances which contribute most powerfully to democratic instability, and which admit of the free application of caprice to the most important objects, are here in full operation."

Without well-functioning legislatures, in other words, democracy ossifies and eventually becomes something else. Oligarchy. Monarchy. Autocracy.

In the five years, since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, many have worried that certain critical democratic functions of legislatures are being undermined by an infusion of vast sums of money into federal, state, and local elections — money that often is used to create and distribute political advertising designed to appeal to and stoke voters' anger, fears, and suspicion. As the infographic below highlights, it's a concern many in philanthropy, on both sides of the political aisle, share. In response, philanthropy has dedicated considerable resources in recent years to educating policy makers on a range of issues, including economic and community development, health care, and the environment. 

Drawing a Roadmap: The SDGs in Kenya

In September 2015, at the United Nations General Assembly, something remarkable happened: Following the biggest consultation process in the history of the United Nations — it lasted three years and reached over 7 million people through 83 national surveys — 193 nations agreed to carry through with Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The intention was commendable: To conquer poverty worldwide and usher in an age of eco-conscious equity by 2030.

A victory for human development and the planet? Not yet. Between a formal expression of intent from sovereign nations and actual on-the-ground operations, the gap can seem like an unbridgeable chasm.

A year later, efforts to bridge that chasm are taking shape. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has just published a first, highly practical guidebook to help impact investors and philanthropists contribute to achieving the SDGs.

Perhaps it should come as no surprised that UNDP took the lead. After all, the agency is famous for innovative breakthroughs: With the introduction in 1990 of its Human Development Index for ranking countries' development, it broke down economists' reliance on Gross National Product (GNP) as a key measure of wealth.  The HD Index works along three dimensions, measuring a "long and healthy life," being "knowledgeable," and having a "decent standard of living." Twenty-five years ago, this was a totally new approach for advancing human well-being; today it is largely reflected in one way or another in Agenda 2030.

For this brochure — essentially a guidebook drawing the road map for achieving the SDGs in Kenya — UNDP called on outside experts from a major consultancy firm, Dalberg, known for the quality of its work. The result is a clear and relatively short (40 pages) professional document, free and conveniently downloadable as a PDF, with a foreword from Mr. S. Chatterjee, UNDP resident representative and UN resident coordinator. This is a position that enables Mr. Chatterjee to ensure coordination between all twenty-five specialized UN agencies and entities present in Kenya, from FAO to WHO, in line with the continuing UN-wide effort to deliver aid as "One UN," ensuring that there is full coherence between all the agencies and no duplication. In fact, Kenya, in 2010, had requested the UN development system to adopt the "Delivering as One" approach in its country.

5 Questions for...Kenneth Fisher, Chairman and CEO, Fisher House Foundation

Since the early 1990s, the Fisher House Foundation has supported more than two hundred and seventy-seven thousand families of service members and veterans by providing lodging near VA hospitals and military medical centers where their loved ones are undergoing treatment. The foundation also awards scholarships to children and spouses of service members and veterans, administers the Hero Miles and Hotels for Heroes programs, which use donations of frequent flyer miles and hotel points to provide free airline tickets and hotel rooms to military families, and sponsors the Invictus Games.

Kenneth Fisher has served since 2003 as chairman and CEO of the Fisher House Foundation and is co-chair of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, both of which were founded by his late great-uncle, Zachary Fisher. Ahead of Veterans Day, PND spoke with Fisher about the role of philanthropy in addressing the needs of service members and veterans.

Philanthropy News Digest: Providing support to the families of service members and veterans traveling for medical treatment is a very specific area within the broader scope of veterans issues. What made Zachary Fisher decide to focus on it?

Kenneth Fisher: Everything started with the Intrepid. After Zach completed the conversion of the USS Intrepid to the museum it is today, he wanted to do more. So he called the wife of the then-chief of naval operations, Pauline Trost, who told him a story about the day she was at the Bethesda Naval Hospital [now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center] and saw a family run in, drop their bags in the lobby, and run up to the room to see their loved one. They didn't even think about a hotel. There was no real low-cost alternative to a hotel, there was no real housing on the base for those families, and there was a clear need. And Zach said, "This is my skill set. I know an architect; I've been a developer. I can build a house." And so it was decided that what came to be known as Fisher Houses would be built, on two conditions: First, they had to be free of charge. Second, they had to be within walking distance of a VA or military hospital.

That essentially was the birth of the foundation — one phone call that made Zach aware of a need that wasn't being met. We have a saying in our family that has been passed down over the generations: "Don't be somebody who points out problems — we've got too many of them — be part of the solution." So the roots of the Fisher House Foundation can be traced to that story but also to that philosophy.

PND: Over the last twenty-six years, more than seventy Fisher Houses have opened across the United States and in Germany and the United Kingdom. Has the need for these types of facilities near VA hospitals and military medical centers been fully met over the years? And do you expect demand to grow?

KF: Before 9/11, obviously the needs were different. People in the military aren't only hospitalized when they're wounded in battle — they also get sick or are injured in training accidents. But the need for family lodging was so basic and underappreciated that no one really ever thought about it.

After 9/11, we knew that building one or two Fisher Houses a year was not going to be sufficient. In fact, the first house we built after 9/11 was in Germany, which is usually the first stop for many men and women who are wounded in battle overseas and is where they are stabilized before they're sent home to the United States. But back then I looked at the budget and said, "How the heck are we going to meet the need?" And my answer to that question was to apply a private-sector mindset to the running of the foundation. By that I mean, every dollar would be accounted for. I wanted to know how much of each dollar was going to administration, going to fundraising, and getting to the people who needed the program. I was very focused on running the foundation as efficiently as possible. And as we built more and more houses, we got on the radar of the American public, and people responded in ways that I'd never thought possible. At one point we were building nearly ten houses a year. The program still needs to be ramped up, but I don't want it to grow so fast that we can't keep up with it.

Today, some Fisher Houses are running at 100 percent occupancy rates, some at 80 percent, some a little lower. Will we ever fully meet the need? Who knows? It's a difficult question to answer. I can tell you that if a family can't get into a Fisher House because it's full, we put them up in a hotel through our Hotels for Heroes initiative until a room opens up. Any family that comes into the Fisher House program will be taken care of. And by virtue of the support of the American public and the way the foundation is run, I think we're making a very, very positive impact in meeting that need.

Weekend Link Roundup (November 5-6, 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....

Arts and Culture

As generational change continues to roil the arts sector, what will the future look like for arts organizations? Emiko Ono, a program officer in the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, explores that question in the Fall 2016 issue of the GIA (Grantmakers in the Arts) Reader.

Civic Engagement

In a Q&A on the Carnegie Corporation website, the foundation's Geri Mannion and Jay Beckner of the Mertz Gilmore Foundation chat with Carnegie visiting media fellow Gail Ablow about how foundations can support voting rights litigation.

Have American politics ever been so divisive? Or is this year's election simply a case of  plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Regardless of how one feels about the tone and tenor of the 2016 presidential election, it is important to remember, writes Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian, that, throughout our history, we have "managed to avoid allowing ourselves to be manacled by all-powerful overlords or permitting the strength of our democracy to be leeched away by the fear of what the future may bring. That does not mean," he continues, "that we must not constantly be mindful of the importance of preserving our democratic principles and defending the individual freedoms that are the legacy of our founders' trust in the nation they established...."

Fundraising

On her Fired Up Fundraising blog, Gail Perry shares six tips for crowdfunding your way to #GivingTuesday success. But don't wait — this year's #GivingTuesday is November 29. On that day, PND and the Foundation Center will be helping a handful of lucky nonprofits get the word out by sharing our social media feeds. For details, check out this post.

Nonprofits

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, nonprofit veteran Ann-Sophie Morrissette examines five myths that help to perpetuate burnout among nonprofit employees.