Weekend Link Roundup (April 14-15, 2018)

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

Lincoln Center president Deborah L. Spar, who left the top job at Barnard College to helm the performing arts mecca, has decided to step down after only a year. Robin Pogrebin and Michael Cooper report for the New York Times.

And across the East River, the Brooklyn Museum has come under fire for its decision to hire a white woman, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, as a consulting curator for African art. Alex Greenberger reports for ArtNews.

Civil Society

Writing in openDemocracy's Transformation blog, Vern Hughes, director of Civil Society Australia, suggests that the problem with the public and private sectors' "embrace of ‘civil society’ is that it bears little resemblance to what civil society actually is or means. Most of civil society is not constituted formally or headed up by a CEO," adds Hughes. Indeed, "[j]ust 40 years ago, very few not-for-profits or charities had CEOs at all: that term was associated with the corporate sector, and few community groups or charities had even contemplated mimicking the language and culture of such a different sphere. But in just four decades all this has changed, and it has changed at an extraordinarily rapid rate, with very little public discussion or scrutiny of the enormity of the organizational transformation involved and its social and political impact."

Roused by certain statements made by Mark Zuckerberg during his testimony to Congress earlier this week, Philanthropy 2173 blogger Lucy Bernholz shares some thoughts about the often-unappreciated role that civil society organizations and nonprofits play in curating and moderating content for the Facebooks of the world.

Climate Change

The Atlantic Ocean's meridional overturning circulation — which brings warm water from the equator up toward the Atlantic's northern reaches and cold water back down through the deep ocean — hasn't been this sluggish in a millennium — a sign that "one of the most feared consequences [of climate change] is already coming to pass." Chris Mooney reports for the Washington Post.

Disabilities

On the Center for Effective Philanthropy bog, Miriam Heyman, a program officer at the Ruderman Family Foundation, urges funders to "prioritize disability inclusion within their own walls... [to] promote a holistic approach to inclusion...[and to] do [their] best to model that holistic approach by hiring employees with disabilities and prioritizing accessibility at all of [their] events...."

Diversity

Wynne Chan, GuideStar's manager of strategy and finance, shares some thoughts about why we all should care about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — and what can we do to model it, both personally and in our organizations.

Economy

Smart machines, artificial intelligence, and global competition are disrupting and reshaping the nature of work in ways both profound and worrying. According to The Work Ahead: Machines, Skills, and U.S. Leadership in the Twenty-First Century, an independent task force report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States needs to create new work opportunities, better career paths, and higher incomes for its people, while developing a highly skilled and adaptable workforce, if it hopes to avoid destabilizing political consequences. 

Fundraising

Future Fundraising Now blogger Jeff Brooks shares a Zen-like insight and a couple of useful things it teaches us about donor behavior.

Nonprofits

After noting that in the age of "bots" human interaction increasingly is being replaced by automation, Allison Fine and Beth Kanter argue in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that it "is incumbent upon those of us in the nonprofit and social-change sectors to start a discussion on how we both hold on to and lead with our humanity, as opposed to allowing the bots to lead." 

Congratulations to our own Sandy Pon, who has been recognized as a digital development mover and shaker by Library Journal for her work on GrantSpace, Foundation Center's online library of resources for nonprofits. Well deserved, Sandy, well deserved!

Philanthropy 

Here on PhilanTopic, Robin Snidow, board of the General Service Foundation, and Dimple Abichandani, the foundation's executive director, share some of the challenges they faced and lessons they learned after Lani Shaw, GSF's longtime executive director, passed away suddenly.

Billionaire private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman wanted to give his old school, Abington High, north of Philadelphia, $25 million. He also had a list of requests. The Abington school board and parents in the district decided it was a deal they could refuse. Kathy Boccella and William Bender report for Philly.com. 

And Washington Post News Service editor Robert Mitchell has a fascinating piece about American attitudes to Carnegie Library philanthropy in the early twentieth century, which many applauded and others rejected as plutocratic encroachment on their values and way of life.

Social Good

In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, David S. Meyer, a professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Irvine, poses the question: Are the protests sparked by the Parkland teens after the massacre of seventeen of their classmates a social movement or a short-lived response to a flash of youthful passion and grievance? And does it matter?

Got something you'd like to share? Drop us a note at [email protected].