Dent Made

As New England Patriot faithful, we at Giving Click are loath to reminisce about Super Bowl XX. However, we will note that its MVP, defensive end Richard Dent, recently held a fund-raiser for his Make a Dent Foundation, reports the Chicago Sun-Times.

Young Philanthropists Encouraged

Encouraging other young people to do the same, the Denver Post‘s Bruce DeBoskey celebrates 24-year-old Denver native Jessica Posner and her efforts on behalf of one community in Africa.

With limited resources, [Shining Hope for Communities (shininghopeforcommunities.org)] opened the area’s first free school for girls and, in just a few years, has created a gardening program; a library; an Internet-ready computer center; ecologically friendly latrines that convert waste to methane gas, which can be used for cooking and electricity; income-generating projects for women living with HIV/AIDS; and Kibera’s first accessible community health center, staffed by a full-time nurse.

Older generations handing off family philanthropic efforts to a younger generation is an issue often discussed. Here, DeBoskey encourages young people to enlist their elders in their infant charitable efforts.

Strings Attached

NPR looks into grants to colleges that seem to come with strings attached. Unlike this previous case involving football, the NPR piece questions whether faculty hiring decisions are being ceded to wealthy donors.

UPDATE: This article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy notes that Florida State is denying that hiring decisions were affected by donations.

Still Better Than Billy Beer

The New York Post claims that President Obama’s half-brother runs an “off-the-books” foundation “that claims to support poor Kenyans — but it lies about its federal status and no one knows how it spends its money.”

Alton Ray Baysden, a former State Department employee at whose Virginia home the charity was founded in 2008, admitted the organization has not even applied for tax-exempt status.

“We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise to do this,” he told The Post. “We are informally scouting for an executive director, someone who knows how to register the charity.”

Two and a Half Mensch?

The Hollywood Reporter: Charlie Sheen to “donate proceeds from merchandise sales at his San Francisco show to benefit a man who was beaten outside a Giants baseball game.”

The only dubious aspect of this project: One has to wonder just what kind of “merchandise” is sold at a Charlie Sheen show.

Trends across the Pond

The UK’s Telegraph reviews the top ten emerging trends in British philanthropy on the occasion of the public opening of the home of William Morris, “Britain’s greatest philanthropist.”

The article notes among other things that “giving while living” is growing more popular, as is donating more and leaving less to the children.

News You Can Use

The Nonprofit Quarterly‘s Rick Cohen offers this: How to be a charter school that pays no rent in New York City. The key seems to be, make sure you’re part of a national charter school chain.

As an independent charter school – unaffiliated with one of the charter “chains” – Growing Up Green has had a much harder time finding free space than its chain counterparts. In New York City, 67 percent of chain charters receive free space in public school buildings, compared with 51 percent of independent schools, according to the New York Times.

More at the link.

A Little Something for the Ladies

We at Giving Click have heard that pictures of good-looking people without their clothes on are popular on the internet.

Since the proceeds are going to charity, we feel the release of the 2012 FDNY firefighter calendar is a great way for us to get in on the trend.

Florida Higher Education Update

From University of Florida News, we learn that “the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity held its first annual Pike’s Fireman Challenge Saturday.

The good news: the PKAs raised $1,500 for the fire department.

The bad news: the cost of responding to various alarms during the first annual Pi Kappa Alpha Pike’s Fireman Challenge Party has been estimated at well over $3,000.*

* Cost, actual occurrence of party, alarms unconfirmed.

DTWS’s Loss, Philanthropy’s Gain

Tired of the fame that comes with being on a highly rated, widely watched television program, model Petra Nemcova sees a silver lining in her recent exit from ABC’s Dancing with the Stars: at last she can turn her focus back to her first love, philanthropy:

A woman who devotes the majority of her professional life to her charity, Happy Hearts, she’s excited to get back to helping aid children affected by natural disasters. “One thing is accomplished and now there is a new chapter,” she says. “My life is about helping others, and I’m going back to what my life is about, building schools.”

Model, dancer, carpenter: Petra Nemcova, ladies and gentlemen.

Philanthropic Family Values

“As baby boomers begin to retire, thoughts turn to ensuring continuity in family giving.” At Forbes, philanthropy adviser Betsy Brill discusses the passing of the charitable baton from one generation to the next. Key is engaging the younger generation early:

The key to developing a strategy for multigenerational engagement is customizing activities that suit the particular personalities, skills and life experiences that family members bring to discussions about wealth and values.

Warren Buffett has given each of his children money to start their own foundations, rather than try to direct their giving. (Indeed, he’s given his own money to Bill Gates to give away.) I suspect some flexibility is required; your heirs will usually follow their own interests either way, may as well build that fact into your plan.

Kid Philanthropists

Today brings two kid-centered philanthropy news stories: fourth-graders in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area hold a fundraiser for Haiti, and north of the border a 12-year-old channels Canada’ greatest passion, ice hockey, into the fight against cancer.

Greed Trumps Giving?

Donald Trump, recently making noises about running for president in 2012, may be “the least charitable billionaire in the United States” according The Smoking Gun website, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

Over the past two decades, Mr. Trump’s foundation has paid out only $6.7 million in donations, according to The Smoking Gun’s calculations. By way of contrast, the foundation of another New York billionaire – Mayor Michael Bloomberg – made $235 million in charitable contributions in 2008 alone.

The Donald isn’t even the largest contributor to his own foundation. That honor goes to an even more ridiculous American institution, World Wrestling Entertainment.

Small-Time Philanthropy

At the Huffington Post, the winner of Oprah’s Big Give million dollars-to-donate prize, Stephen Paletta, reflects on the role of the “little guy” philanthropist. His site, giveback.org, allows anyone to get in on act by donating to the Give Back Foundation, while being allowed to determine where their dollars go.

No Philanthropy Shutdowns

On the occasion of the Council on Foundation‘s annual conference in Philadelphia this week, COF president/CEO Steve Gunderson and William Penn Foundation director Ronnie Bloom the “independent, innovative investment of resources” the nonprofit sector provides.

Independent Sector Co-Founder Dies

The New York Times reports: “Brian O’Connell, who helped found Independent Sector, an organization that represents the interests of charities, foundations and nonprofit giving programs in the United States, often before Congress, died March 21 at his home in Chatham, Mass.”

The Independent Sector, now with 550 member nonprofits, was an innovation:

At the time, such groups were united by type — for example, arts, colleges or museums — or by the service provided. Mr. O’Connell and Mr. Gardner, who died in 2002, saw the need for an umbrella organization that could speak for all charities and other nonprofit groups and represent their interests in Washington, where the threat of unfavorable tax legislation often loomed.

Buffet Urges Philanthropic Risk-Taking

Warren Buffet urged philanthropists to take risks and to be prepared to learn from failure, the Omaha World-Herald reported Tuesday. The billionaire investor made the comments during his and Bill Gates’s visit to India this week.

“Intelligent charity, big-time charity should tackle things where it’ll fail,” Buffett, 80, said Tuesday at a press conference in Bangalore, India. “If you succeed in everything you’re doing in charity, you’re attempting things that are too easy.”

As we’ve noted before, nonprofits have long been criticized for an unwillingness to admit failure, potentially short-circuiting any chance to learn from it. In the Nonprofit Quarterly, Rick Cohen takes a critical look at recent increases in openness:

All too frequently, the discussions of failure are really not about failure at all. They are discussions of programs that fell somewhat short of expectations. Even more frequently, the program failures are in fact small successes – the programs that didn’t achieve quite what they were intended to achieve, but still left the communities measurably better than they were before the foundation’s intervention.

Cohen argues that critical review of specific programs is not enough; a more comprehensive reform agenda must prevail. To that end, the NPQ interviewed over two dozen people inside and outside foundations to learn where foundations really fail. Read the whole thing.

 

Meanwhile in Louisiana

Rick Cohen at the Nonprofit Quarterly relays results of a study of one post-Katrina disaster relief effort. Research firm Policy & Economic Research Council (PERC) looked at efforts by the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation to “help small businesses and the self-employed in post-hurricane Louisiana.”

Surveying those who had received aid from the foundation, the researchers findings show that the foundation’s efforts had been effective and delivered sooner than other groups’.

It looks like the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation sponsored this study, so the summary’s emphasis on good news is perhaps not surprising. Cohen notes that “the summary of the data findings doesn’t do justice to the latent richness of the extended survey data.” Maybe the full data gives a more balanced view of results.

Another interesting finding:

PERC also reported significant local business distress due to the moratorium on deep water oil and gas drilling. Those businesses that were impacted by the BP spill and concerned about the moratorium were not confident about their future business prospects.

Online Scammers Cash In

At PC World, an interesting article on precisely how some cyber scammers are working to cash in on the unwary who want to donate to help victims of the Pacific disasters of last week.

Don’t Send Japan Money

Following the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, many are giving to help in relief efforts. In Slate, however, Annie Lowrey argues that donors should not insist on their money going to Japan specifically.

Nonprofits are required to spend money where it’s directed. Japan simply may not be able to use your money:

Japanese businesses and families tend to be well-insured. The Japanese government is perhaps the best in the world when it comes to disaster management, given the country’s frequent temblors and the experience of the Kobe earthquake. And the country has extraordinary financial resources.

She advises giving to an established international group and leaving them leeway to use your money where their expertise tells them it’s most needed.

UPDATE: It looks like people are following Lowrey’s advice: CNN/Money compares amounts given in the first week since the quake to the responses following other disasters and finds giving is lagging here.