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. [...]

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’ [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Commenting on the Tucson tragedy in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on January 11th, Diana Aviv writes that “[h]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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]