A prominent board member of the non-profit at the center of the Penn State child rape scandal just admitted that he was asleep at the wheel. Actually, he charged the organization’s staff with keeping him in the dark. Either way, this is the kind of malfeasance that is far too common in the nonprofit sector. And it shouldn’t take a front page story to focus attention on it.

Staff at the organization, The Second Mile, learned of allegations against its founder, Jerry Sandusky, a year before the board member first learned about them in a newspaper article. Chances are that all board members were equally clueless about the allegations (unless some board members were also complicit in withholding information from fellow directors).

The board member in question is a state senator. His presence on the board undoubtedly opened doors for the organization and gave it credibility in certain quarters that it might not otherwise have. Perhaps the board membership was a feather in his cap that helped the senator politically as well. Whatever both…

An ad has been running in my local newspaper for a free workshop to help seniors and their children learn how to protect their assets from nursing home costs. Or, more precisely, the workshop will tell you how to qualify for Medicaid to pay for your long-term care while preserving as much of your kids’ inheritance as possible.

The ad tells readers to “protect what is yours”. Okay, your home is yours, but so is your physical condition, and if that condition lands you in a nursing home, so is the bill for your care. That may be a bit harsh, but the ad makes it sound like the nursing home or the government is out to take your property from you. What is really going on is that you’re being offered information about how you might be able to transfer a financial liability from yourself to the rest of us tax payers.

The ad raises some very interesting questions, particularly given the current anti-government fervor dominating so much of our public discourse these days….

Or maybe I just don’t understand it.  But seems to me that it’s premised on two conflicting notions: that you have something so significant to say that it needs to be shared with a lot of people quickly, yet its significance can be captured in 140 characters or less.

Right or wrong, that’s a pretty simple and concise thought, but I couldn’t have expressd it in just one tweet. 

After Osama bin Laden was killed a football player got in trouble when he tweeted something about how strange it was to watch people celebrate someone’s death.  That didn’t go over very well at all with his Twitter followers (I think that’s the proper term, although this story makes it seem like an odd choice).  The player lost an endorsement contract, and his team rushed out a statement distancing itself from his comments.  He took a beating in the press, on blogs, and on various social media sites.

Before I learned about this incident I had been in a few conversations with well-informed, thoughtful and, in the fullest sense of the term, patriotic…

David Brooks wrote a column in the New York Times recently in which he called for an alliance among assorted interest groups to provide leadership on entitlement reform rather than narrowly focusing on their own pieces of the pie during the current federal budget process.  Many of the entities Brooks seemed to be calling to action will, of course, decline.  

Like politicians who pretend eliminating waste and fraud in the discretionary spending portion of the federal budget will wipe out the deficit and cut significantly into our debt, many advocates for particular line items seem equally unrealistic about our dire fiscal circumstances. 

Now, in fairness to the advocates, they are not charged with overall responsibility for the nation’s finances.  And if the politicians in Washington were dealing forthrightly with the budget crisis, Brooks would not have to call upon the interest groups to set aside their short term needs and instead focus on the country’s long term needs. 

His premise is that unless these advocates help solve the long term budget crisis they will repeatedly fight for their slices of a pie…

Commenting on the Tucson tragedy in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on January 11th, Diana Aviv writes that “ateful speech spawns hateful actions. In America today, people with significant influence such as public officials, talk-show hosts, and political-party leaders routinely castigate those who do not share their views. The result of such biting words of ridicule and rage is a game that no one wins—least of all us, the citizenry…People in the nonprofit world — as trusted members of communities everywhere — are in a powerful position to set the parameters for a decent society.”

For the time being, many among the perpetrators identified by Ms. Aviv are behaving better, but unfortunately that is unlikely to last.  As long as groups and individuals on the ideological fringes wield a disproportionate amount of political power, they will continue to be riled up by uncivil media provocateurs and catered to by gutless politicians with their hands out for campaign cash.

Many nonprofit organizations are primarily in the business of persuasion, and Ms. Aviv certainly has them in mind as she calls on nonprofits to…

Feels like we’re about to make sweeping changes in Washington this election day, just two years after we made a different set of sweeping changes.  Last time we chose “hope and change” and now we want to “take our country back”.  Ask ten voters what those phrases mean and you might get twenty different answers.

The country faces a myriad of complex problems, and many voters seem ill-prepared for their role in the problem-solving process, or lacking the patience to approach that role with a realistic and long-term perspective.

When a nonprofit faces operational challenges rooted in financial or personnel problems, has failed to adjust to changing circumstances, or strayed from its mission, it’s up to its board to exert leadership, taking the long view to address the problems head on. 

Voters need to act more like a board of directors, setting a direction for the country and outlining plans to be implemented by those we elect – not to lead us, but to follow our lead and solve problems based on the directions we set for them through the ballot.  This…

About half of Pennsylvanians live in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the suburban counties surrounding those two cities, but more than ninety percent of all foundation assets in Pennsylvania are geographically restricted to benefit residents of those two metro areas.  This pattern can surely be found around the country, with nonprofits in places like upstate New York and outstate Minnesota operating in virtual philanthropic deserts compared to their big city colleagues.

And the problem goes well beyond just foundation dollars.  Most university-based technical support centers for nonprofits are in urban areas.  Unlike rural and remote communities, big cities tend to have a constant influx of young professionals that can potentially expand and diversify the volunteer talent pool available to nonprofits.  Corporate giving is bigger when corporations are bigger, and the biggest ones are usually in metro areas. 

These disparities between the nonprofit sectors in rural areas versus those in urban areas can result in a less strategic, less collaborative approach to regional problems.  With less resources and support to draw upon and more parochial concerns driven by localism, nonprofits in rural and remote…

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are getting plenty of favorable attention recently for their efforts to persuade their fellow billionaires to be more philanthropic, and they deserve it.  But for years studies have confirmed that wealth and charity seem to be inversely related, and that lower income people tend to be more generous than higher earners.

Perhaps this is so because it is easier for lower income people to appreciate the need for charitable organizations.  If you’ve had to use a food bank or homeless shelter, or have friends and relatives who have, you might be more inclined to support them.  Buffett and Gates seem to be saying that we all benefit from the infrastructure of our society, which includes the nonprofit sector, and the most successful in particular have an obligation to recognize those benefits and support that infrastructure.

How lucrative a profession would medicine be if there was no public or charitable investment in medical research and technology, or hospital construction?  How vibrant a private sector would we have without the public and charitable investments that have educated generations? 

It’s…

One of the primary assets most nonprofits rely on is their good standing with the public, and the belief that their leaders are well intentioned and trustworthy.  Malfeasance happens in the nonprofit sector, but it tends not to breed the kind of wide-spread cynicism with which the public often views politicians or corporate leaders in the wake of scandals in those sectors.  

Here’s a story about how badly a nonprofit can behave behind closed doors.  Ironically, protecting this organization’s good standing with a valued donor caused its leaders to act recklessly and dishonorably.  They succeeded in covering up their misdeeds, and won back the donor’s trust.  It’s unclear whether the experience ultimately brought about any positive changes in how this particular organization operates, but others can surely learn from it.  

It began when the president of a very prominent company sent the organization a letter expressing his extreme displeasure with how the organization was characterizing his industry in a ballot measure campaign that involved an issue central to the organization’s mission.  The letter indicated that the organization could no longer count on his…

When a large national or regional foundation puts out a call for proposals only a small minority of applicants will be awarded grants, but the foundation’s impact will often extend well beyond the work of those grantees.  Frequently the application process itself will spur conversations among community groups about potential collaborations, with the grant opportunity serving as a catalyst to bring these groups together.

For example, a national foundation recently designed a grant program to fund youth advocacy projects aimed at addressing the obesity problem through public policy strategies.  Specifically, this foundation hopes to learn more about how best to effectively engage youth from communities with high rates of obesity in policy advocacy.  The call for proposals invited applications from partnerships between academic researchers and community groups. 

This alone would assure that new alliances would be explored across the country even though very few would ultimately be funded.  And then, during the proposal development process as these new partnerships sharpen their focus and put together the programs they hope to get funded, they will inevitably expand to include other groups in…