Weekend Link Roundup (October 14-15, 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....

Arts and Culture

We've always admired Herb Alpert — chart-topping musician, innovative record producer/executive, generous philanthropist — and are happy to pass on the news that his foundation has a brand brand new website.

Economy

"[F]or the first time since World War II, American children have only a 50-50 chance of earning more than their parents" — proof that our "economic system is broken," and why jobs and opportunity are America's most pressing challenge, writes Rockefeller Foundation president Rajiv J. Shah.

Giving

How might tax reform affect charitable giving? On the NPR site, Jonathan Meer, a professor at Texas A&M University and an expert on charitable giving, shares his analysis.

Cash-strapped though they may be, cause-driven millennials are finding ways to support causes and organizations aligned with their passions and concerns. Justin Miller, co-Founder and CEO of CARE for AIDS, a faith-based NGO that provides holistic care to families affected by HIV/AIDS in East Africa, explains.

Grantmaking

On the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, Anthony Richardson, a program officer at the Nord Family Foundation in Ohio, argues that it is critically important for funders "to listen and be discerning about what may be most helpful — and what may indeed be unintentionally harmful — to organizations doing challenging work on the front lines."

Gun Violence

On The Slot blog, Prachi Gupta argues that the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas distracts us from the real issues around gun violence in America: most of it is clustered in areas with high levels of poverty, low levels of education, and high rates of unemployment. “The places where our murder rates are the highest are places where there is intense poverty, and where the police are just not solving murders.”

Health

Given the increasingly polarized nature of the debate, is there a way forward on healthcare reform? And if there is, what might it look like? In a post on the California Healthcare Foundation blog, Sandra R. Hernández, the foundation's president/CEO, shares some thoughts.

Philanthropy

Education Week blogger reflects on all-too-common "arrogance" of deep-pocketed philanthropists with an abiding interest in education reform and the lessons to be learned from The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools? — journalist's Dale Russakoff's "edgy, hugely readable take on Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to Newark and the messy, controversial reforms that followed."

In a post on the foundation's blog, Barr Foundation co-founder Barbara Hostetter reflects on how much has changed since she and her husband established the foundation twenty years ago and sheds some light on "four important decisions [we've] made about governance and the rationale behind those decisions."

In a new post on the foundation's blog, Heinz Endowments president Grant Oliphant reminds us that a healthy, functioning, helping society "rests on attitudes of love, trust and shared responsibility, without which there will be no helpers left to save us, be it from disaster or from ourselves."

Slowly but surely, impact investing is gaining traction. On the Wealth Management site, Amy Bennett shares fives trends in the space that financial advisors — and the rest of us — should have on their radar.

Here on PhilanTopic, Matt Sinclair has five questions for Rye Young, executive director of theThird Wave Fund, the importance of "representation" — the notion that organizations representing vulnerable communities should be led by members of those communities — and what nonprofits and foundations can do to boost representation within their organizations and in the sector more generally.

Social Enterpreneurship

In his latest post, Nonprofit Chronicles blogger offers an unvarnished profile of media darling and nonprofit superstar Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource and LXMI, social enterprises that provide work to poor people in Kenya, Uganda, Haiti and India.

Social Media

The once-bright promise of social media has faded, thanks in part to the role it has played in coordinated misinformation campaigns, the inability of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others to ban racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic trolls from their platforms, and mounting evidence that social media is dangerously addictive. On her blog, Beth Kanter has a good roundup of links to articles that detail the threat and resources for funders and nonprofits eager to fight misinformation and fake news and the negative impact it may be having on their work.

And in the Washington Post, eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar looks at six ways social media has become a threat to democracy.

(Photo credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

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