Collateral Damage
People keep asking me: How is the current political upheaval going to affect nonprofits? My first answer: I don’t really know. We’re in unprecedented political times. Who really can predict…
Read More Sidewalks, Snow, and Democracy
You can learn a lot about people and communities by how they clear their sidewalks. And I think there may be a lesson in there for those of us trying…
Read More Navigating the Evaluators
I recently gave a keynote address for a conference of nonprofit leaders in Oregon. At one point, I asked people to raise their hands if they thought that the evaluation…
Read More Giving, When You Have a Lot to Give
[Note: A version of this post appeared in Philanthropy Daily on February 8, 2018.] The rich have always played a leading role in charitable giving. Now their role is getting larger. In…
Read More Wall Street 9, Charity 0
The news last week was stunning, but at the same time utterly unsurprising: When The Chronicle of Philanthropy compiled its annual Philanthropy 400 list of the nonprofit organizations that had…
Read More Starvation Diet
A friend who serves on a nonprofit board asked me whether her organization was drawing enough from its endowment each year. “Probably not,” I answered. Then she described her organization’s…
Read More Lonely At the Top
{Note: This post has been co-published by the Maine Association of Nonprofits.} It’s not easy being a nonprofit CEO. People expect the CEO to have all the answers. The ideal CEO…
Read More Philanthropy, Weaponized
In a recent series of articles, The New York Times detailed how nonprofit think tanks are rife with conflicts of interest. The Times reported how corporations made charitable donations to certain think…
Read More A Catchy, Popular, Attractive, and Bad Idea
[This post was co-published in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on August 9, 2016.] The charitable world has been buzzing recently about a new idea from the Minneapolis Foundation: The Pay It Forward…
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