Week Ten

Week ten’s reading was all about funders and Philanthropy, which etymologically means "the love of humanity" (just a fun fact). The Foundations chapter from Nonprofit Nation was one of the more interesting chapters in the book. I like that it provided some controversy and wasn’t just throwing numbers at you. What really surprised me though was the statistic that foundations contribute to only 3% of nonprofit revenue. With the amount of “Grantmakers” I found during my second scavenger hunt I expected that number to be exponentially higher.

The article about artist-endowed foundations was my favorite reading of this week as I always enjoy stories about groups standing up for what is right and actually making a difference. That sounds cheesy but so be it. What confused me about the article was what it said about how unusual it is for foundations to take a side in a controversy. Perhaps I am just uneducated in the matter but I’ve always felt that having an organization of like minded individuals devoted to a cause, no matter what it was, would lead to members convincing each other to take a stand when something negatively effecting their cause, ideal, or passion arose.

I did some further reading on the evolution of philanthropy in America and I found a short story (okay, this is from Wikipedia) about the emergence of philanthropy and the continental army. Apparently Commanding General, George Washington served as a volunteer for three years explicitly for the public good. He even often signed his letters, “philanthropically yours”. I feel like this lends a bit of credit to my previous assertion that philanthropists will take a side and stand strongly against opposition. You become involved in philanthropy in the first place because something moves you enough to become involved in its growth.  

I found The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Budget Plan Brings Big Changes to Tax Incentives for Donors” to be a bit dry in comparison to the other readings. I am glad it was part of the required reading this week though as I don’t understand our current taxation system as well as I would like to and I believe it’s important to remain educated about the things that effect me directly as a citizen.  I did like most of Obama’s tax proposals as the tax cuts given to America’s wealthy have never made any sense to me. I’m assuming the question we are suppose to be asking ourselves concerning this reading is how these cuts would effect charitable giving and I think the answer is by quite a bit. We have a gigantic federal deficit right now but scaling back tax deductions for charitable gifts is not the answer we’ve been looking for.

I found the idea of a “new normal”, referenced in the “Donors and Nonprofits Face a Defining Moment in Responding to a Crisis” Article, to be quite fascinating. It’s not often in the American school system that you talk about the slowing down of the economy in the United States being good for the world as a whole. At the same time if our economic growth slows and developing countries speed up is it in our best interest for philanthropists to be spending so much money overseas? As I mentioned in my previous post I think we still have a lot of problems to focus on here in the States.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127411127


Above is a link to a pretty interesting interview with Mohamed El-Erian, the economist who coined the phrase "a new normal". Check it out if you have the time/ an interest. 

The final article was titled “How to Do Good and Prove It: Integrate Social Impact in Your Nonprofit's DNA”. I thought Kevin Starr made a lot of sense. There are hundreds of non-profits out there with the same statement of intent and having clear solid measurements of how successful and impactful they are seems logical and necessary.