Weekend Link Roundup (November 17-18, 2018)

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

Evaluation

On the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, Jehan Velji and Teresa Power of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation share one of the lessons the team there has learned as the foundation pursues its limited-life strategy: the most important goal of evaluation is not to determine whether a program works or doesn't work, but to discover how to make a program work better over time.

Giving

Giving Compass, a nonprofit platform that is "organizing the world's information to make it easier to give well," recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. Interim CEO Stephanie Gillis reflects on what she and her team have learned over the last twelve months.

Guest blogging on the GuideStar blog, the Identity Theft Resource Center shares a few tips designed to help you avoid scammers and keep your personal data safe this giving season.

Health

Inadequate access to quality health care is a big problem in many rural areas. On the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health blog, Melissa Bosworth, executive director of the Eastern Plains Healthcare Consortium, a five-hospital in Hugo, Colorado, shares five recommendations for anyone interested in improving rural health access and equity.

Nonprofits

Nonprofit leaders need to stop saying "There's only so much money to go around," writes Vu Le on his Nonprofit AF blog. It's "a counter-productive self-fulfilling prophecy" that jeopardizes the future of your organization — and besides, your communities deserve better.

In the same vein, Nell Edgington shares some thoughts about how nonprofits can break through the financial glass ceiling — a level above which the money just won't grow —  that seems to exist for so many of them.

Looking for a good read this holiday season? Check out this list from Beth Kanter of books that should be on every nonprofit professional's reading list.

Philanthropy

In the Winter 2019 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Rob Reich a professor of political science at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education and co-director of its Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (publisher of the Review), argues that the policies that structure American philanthropy are not only broken and ineffective, they are  indefensible. "The array of policies designed to stimulate the charitable donations of ordinary citizens and the philanthropic projects of the wealthy — chiefly through private foundations — subvert, rather than support, democratic aims," writes Reich. "Philanthropy too often undermines democracy, and it is our policies — not the preferences of individual donors or operations of particular nonprofits — that are largely to blame."

On the HistPhil blog, Kristin A. Goss, Kevin D. Gorter Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, and Jeffrey M. Berry, Skuse Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, argue that, with the "rise of highly directive 'strategic philanthropy', "it is no longer possible to think of [private] foundations solely as passive dispensers of charitable benevolence." Rather, as  Duke University's Joel Fleishman suggested in his 2007 book The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth Is Changing the World, they have become a type of interest group. And if we think of them as such, write Goss and Berry, then we need to ask: Whose interests do .philanthropies (and living donors) represent? How do they think about this question and go about answering it? What sources of information and other inputs do they use to devise their giving strategies? And What role do they play in democratic governance, as innovators, collaborators, and adversaries?  

Anti-Semitism and anti-black racism are "deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing," write Jeanne Isler and Timi Gerson on the NCRP blog, and funders need to work together to develop smarter strategies for combating them.

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