Weekend Link Roundup (May 6-7, 2017)

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

Corporate Philanthropy

Forbes contributor Robert Reiss profiles five organizations that are redefining corporate philanthropy. 

Environment

The restoration of the Chesapeake Bay, one of the most important estuaries in the United States, is showing signs of success. So why, asks journalist and Bay Journal columnist Tom Horton on the Yale Environment 360 site, is the Trump administration seeking to eliminate funding for those ongoing efforts?

Lots of people in the climate change community are not happy the New York Times hired longtime Wall Street Journal op-ed writer Brett Stephens as a columnist for its opinion pages. Vox's David Roberts explains.

Inequality

Could persistent disagreements over inequality and opportunity (e.g., "self-made" vs. "takers") be the result of cognitive bias? On the New York Times' Upshot blog, Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard, looks at how our tendency to remember and celebrate the challenges we faced, not the advantages we've had, colors our perceptions of those who are less fortunate — and how we might use that bias to create better public policy.

International Affairs/Development

Europe averted catastrophe when French voters decisively chose En Marche! candidate Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen, the standard-bearer of the far-right National Front, to be France's next president. But in the words of the Guardian, Macron's victory is more cause for relief than celebration, and the road ahead, in a France "whose public is often more anxious and angry than confident and trustful," will be difficult. PND wishes him all the best.

On his Nonprofit Chronicles blog, Marc Gunther profiles Natalie Bridgeman Fields, founder and executive director of Accountability Counsel, one of several small nonprofits that work "to make sure the World Bank, and other financial institutions and global companies, respect the rights of [and work with] the poor to help shape the development projects that affect them."

On the World Economic Forum site, Bhaskar Chakravorti, senior associate dean, international business & finance at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, shares three steps business managers interested in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can take with respect to the "where to begin" decision.

And speaking of the SDGs, you can now embed this handy little widget on any website, enabling people who visit your site to easily learn which of the goals their work supports.

Nonprofits

Most people working in the nonprofit sector believe there's no such things as "too many" nonprofits. Not Urbanophile blogger Aaron M. Renn, who writes in a new post that what most cities "need is an infrastructure for euthanizing non-profits that are past their expiration date."

On her blog, Beth Kanter shares a post by Michael Radke, a co-founder of Ubuntu Lab, on the different ways nonprofits are using design thinking to solve problems and achieve impact.

And check out this excellent roundup (courtesy of Nonprofit Tech for Good) of low-cost or free apps and online tools for nonprofits. We confess: Most of them are completely new to us.

Philanthropy

In a new video (running time: 51:49) posted to the Northern California Grantmakers site, Aaron Dorfman, president and CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy; Cathy Cha, vice president of programs for the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; Jacqueline Martinez Garcel, CEO of the Latino Community Foundation, and Lateefah Simon, president of the Akonadi Foundation debate the proposition: How will history judge philanthropy's response to President Trump's first hundred days? We won't tell you who "won," but we will note that the debaters did agree on a set of five questions that grantmakers should be asking themselves about their response to Trump's first hundred days.

What's love got to do with effective philanthropy? Pretty much everything. Syndicated columnist Bruce DeBoskey explains.

Public Affairs

And we'll leave you with this: The suburbs were once the place where Americans moved to pursue the American dream. Those days are over, writes Richard Florida on the City Lab blog, as suburbs, with their "enormous physical footprints, shoddy construction, and hastily installed infrastructure," are visibly crumbling, accompanied by dramatically declining rates of economic mobility. Indeed, one urban expert told Florida that "the future project of suburban renewal would likely make our vast 20th-century urban renewal efforts look like a walk in the park."

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