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

Children and Youth

Once a thriving center of industry, Hudson, New York, was hit hard by de-industrialization over the closing decades of the twentieth century. But a recent wave of gentrification has made it a darling of tourists and second-home owners — a renaissance that hasn't benefited all its residents, write Sara Kendall and Joan E. Hunt on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health blog. Kendall, a co-founder and assistant director of Kite’s Nest, a center for liberatory education in Hudson, and Hunt, co-director of the Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood, share some of what they have learned through the Raising Places, an initiative funded by RWJF that has spent the last year exploring ideas about how to create healthier communities that are also vibrant places for kids to grow up.

The Philanthropic Initiative's Robin Baird shares some of the themes related to the critical work of supporting young people that kept popping up at the 2018 Grantmakers for Education Conference in San Diego.

Civic Engagement

Martha Kennedy Morales, a third-grader at Friends Community School, a small private Quaker school in College Park, Maryland, ran for class president and lost, by a single vote, to a popular bot in the fourth grade. Then she got the surprise of her life. The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss shares what happened next on her Answer Sheet blog.

Fundraising/Marketing

On the GuideStar blog, George Crankovic, an experienced copywriter and strategist, shares three fundraising lessons he learned the hard way. 

Getting Attention! blogger Nancy Schwartz shares some advice for development and fundraising folks who want to use stories and photos of clients in their organizations' fundraising materials but also want to be respectful of their privacy.

Grantmaking

What kind of questions should funders ask when they are refining their capacity-building support or providing it for the first time? Where should they focus? And what's the best way to provide support? On the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, Jo Ridley, director of communications at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, shares some advice, including what GEO refers to as the "three Cs of capacity-building support": make it contextual, make it continuous, and make it collective.

International Affairs/Development

In his latest, Nonprofit Chronicles blogger Marc Gunther profiles Todd Moss, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a former state department official and PhD economist, and the brains behind the Energy for Growth Hub, a network of scholars and advocates who want to bring some common sense to the conversation about how to get energy to everyone in Africa and Asia.

Nonprofits

Forbes has released  its 20th annual list of the hundred largest charities in the U.S., compiled, as in the past, by longtime contributor William P. Barrett. 

On her blog, Beth Kanter has a Q&A with Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, head of product impact at Google and the person most responsible for the Google AI Challenge, a competition through which Google.org will  award a total of $25 million to humanitarian projects that use Google's machine learning technology.

Philanthropy

On our sister Transparency Talk (Glasspockets) blog, Clare Nolan, co-founder of Engage R+D, and Meg Long, president of Equal Measure, share some thoughts about how to strengthen the field of philanthropic evaluation.

Borealis Philanthropy, a progressive philanthropic intermediary that works to connect grantmakers to organizations aligned with their objectives, had a busy year.  Here are some of the things Borealis team members learned from the meetings and movement gatherings they attended in 2018

The recent publication of Edgar Villanueva's Decolonizing Wealth and Anand Giridharada’s Winners Take All has Vu Le wondering when we might actually see fundamental changes in how philanthropy operates. What's more, writes Le, "[i]f we as a sector are to be effective in addressing injustice and creating a diverse and inclusive society, progressive funders must be willing to examine and learn from what conservative funders are doing so well, and more importantly, act on it." To that end, he shares ten things that progressive funders need to learn from their conservative counterparts.

And the HistPhil blog has launched a mini-forum on Stanford political scientist Rob Reich's new book, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better, with a review by HistPhil co-editor Stanley Katz.

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