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.

Open Data

With funding support from the Heinz Endowments, the Hillman Family Foundation, and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the City of Pittsburgh has launched Burgh's Eye View, an Internet-based application designed to "revolutionize" the way the public interacts with city government.

Philanthropy

Atlantic Philanthropies will have distributed more than $8 billion in grants by the time it shuts its doors in 2020, becoming the biggest philanthropy ever to spend itself out of existence. But it is already implementing a plan designed to ensure its "lasting impact." Ben Paynter reports for FastCoExist.

The Clinton Foundation has been a lightning rod for partisan attacks during this election season, most of them overwrought and lacking any basis in fact. What's the real story, and what, if anything, will change about the way the foundation operates if Hillary Clinton is elected president? Philip Hackney, James E. & Betty M. Phillips Associate Professor of Law at Louisiana State University, and Brian Mittendorf, Fisher College of Business Distinguished Professor of Accounting at Ohio State University, break it down for The Conversation.

Is philanthropy doing enough to fund social-service interventions designed to create economic opportunity and build pathways to the middle class for low-income Americans? Not really, argue Willa Seldon and Debbie Bielak, partners in the Bridgespan Group's San Francisco office, in a piece for the Huffington Post.

Ford Foundation president Darren Walker's decision to join the board of PepsiCo, one of the largest food, snack, and beverage companies in the world, has some people asking questions about the ethics and optics of Walker's decision. On his Transformations blog, Michael Edwards, a former Ford Foundation staffer, argues that Walker should just say no to Pepsi's offer. And in a post on the Inside Philanthropy blog, David Callahan argues the opposite.

On the Council on Foundations blog, Hadar Susskind, the council's vice president of public policy, takes issue with media coverage of the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual Philanthropy 400 ranking, which named the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund as the nation’s top charity by contributions received.

Good Q&A here by Alexandre Mars, founder and CEO of the Epic Foundation, featuring Giving Pledger Nicolas Berggruen, founder of the Berggruen Institute, a think tank devoted to proposing and implementing new ideas of effective governance.

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, the New York Times has cooked up a new edition of its annual Giving section, complete with yet another article about how Silicon Valley tech moguls are changing philanthropy; a look at how gay issues are entering the world of philanthropy; a Q&A with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the strategic benefits of corporate giving; a look at how a growing number of people are using crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe to help cover the cost of unexpected medical emergencies and college tuition; and lots more.

Napster founder and Facebook funder Sean Parker tells Fortune magazine why the "hacker phenotype" so common in Silicon Valley is indeed a welcome and disruptive force in philanthropy

Race Relations

Trying, as so many others have, to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon, Hua Hsu, a contributing writer to The New Yorker and author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific, wonders whether, as "whiteness becomes a badge of dispossession, earned or not...future elections will...grow more hostile, each one a referendum on our constantly shifting triangulations of identity and power." Or can we "at least contemplate the possibility that white might become a color like all the rest" -- which, he adds, "is what it would mean to enter into history, rather than simply bending it to [our] will."

Social Innovation

And not to be missed, Social velocity's Nell Edgington checks in with her list of the top ten social innovation posts from October. Enjoy!

Got something you'd like to share? Drop us a line at mfn@foundationcenter.org or post it in the comments section below....