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

Climate Change

Cities are where most of the world's population lives. But with the climate warming at an alarming rate, just how hot will they be by the year 2100? An interactive map created by Climate Central and the World Meteorological Organization has the scorching results.

Education

Anyone who cares about public education in the U.S. will want to check out the longish piece by Chris Ford, Stephanie Johnson, and Lisa Partelow on the Center for American progress site detailing the "sordid" history of school vouchers in America.

Quartz has a nice profile of Maggie MacDonnell, the Canadian winner of this year's $1 million Global Teacher Prize.

Health

Just how does the health system in U.S. stack up against those in other developed countries? Using data from Commonwealth Fund surveys and other sources of standardized data, the fund's Mirror, Mirror 2017 report identifies seventy-two measures relevant to healthcare system performance and organizes them into five performance domains: Care Process, Access, Administrative Efficiency, Equity, and Health Care Outcomes.

The Kaiser Family Foundation's Cynthia Cox and Larry Levitt examined the individual insurance market in early 2017 and, contrary to Republican Party talking points, found no evidence that it was collapsing; indeed, Cox and Levitt discovered that health insurers are on track to have their best year since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law.

Nonprofits

Brian Crimmins, managing partner at One Hundred, "the world’s first multidisciplinary, fully integrated service collective for the modern nonprofit," announces the launch of the inaugural Influencers in Philanthropy Report, which highlight four emerging themes nonprofits need to be aware of in order to succeed in the crowded and changing philanthropic marketplace.

Philanthropy

Over the last eighteen months, Priscilla Chan, the wife of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and a Harvard-educated pediatrician, has added a new job to her responsibilities: running what is likely to be one of the most well-funded philanthropies in history. Recode's Kurt Wagner looks at how Chan and Zuckerberg hope to use Facebook's billions to end disease and change education.

ImpactAlpha's David Bank checks in with the story of how Ford Foundation president Darren Walker convinced the foundation's "very conservative" trustees and investment committee to carve $1 billion out of its $12 billion endowment for mission-related investments. (And be sure to check out our interview on the same topic with Ford's Xavier de Souza Briggs.)

In the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nonprofit consultant Alan Cantor examines the "fuzzy math" that donor-advised fund sponsors seem to favor when calculating their reported payout ratios.

On the Case Foundation blog, Sheila Herrling shares her thoughts on four trends that are driving the democratization of philanthropy.

In a guest post on the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, Manivanh Khy, a program officer at the First Fruit foundation, reflects on what she has learned about "the age-old power dynamic that exists between the funder and the grantee."

Denver Post syndicated columnist and philanthropy consultant Bruce DeBoskey reviews seven lessons he has learned from his strategic philanthropy practice.

Regulation/Oversight

"Lawmakers in the current Congress have slipped language into two spending bills to protect so-called 'dark money' nonprofits from IRS scrutiny." Josh Keefe reports for the International Business Times.

Social Sciences

PND loves demography (and demographers), which means we love this post from the Pew Research Center outlining the ten demographic trends that are shaping the U.S. and the world.

Transparency

And here on PhilanTopic, Janet Camarena, director of transparency initiatives at Foundation Center, kicks off a new #OpenForGood series featuring the voices of "knowledge sharing champions" from the philanthropic and social sectors.

That's it for this week. Got something you'd like to share? Drop us a line at [email protected].