Why Chile and Other Countries Are Cautious About Foreign Help, Plus More: Monday’s Roundup
By Maria Di Mento
Senior Editor
March 1, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute
- As Chile begins accepting outside aid for the massive earthquake that struck last week, Saundra Schimmelpfenning, a former Peace Corps volunteer and aid worker, writes on her blog about why Chile and some other countries are slow to allow in foreign assistance after a major disaster.
- There are much better ways to support a disaster-recovery effort than search and rescue, says David Roberts, executive director of New Dominion Philanthropy Metrics. Writing on the Philanthropy Action blog, Mr. Roberts says that search-and-rescue efforts save relatively few lives for a heavy financial cost.
- Lucy Heads, of the U.K. nonprofit-evaluation group New Philanthropy Capital, examines the trend of charities calculating their “social return on investment.” While some people may be skeptical of a charity that says its potential social return is 250 percent, Ms. Heads says high figures like these make sense.
- Fear of failure and poor planning can scuttle any attempt by a nonprofit group to establish a business arm, says Geri Stengel of Ventureneer, a consulting company. Joanne Fritz interviews Ms. Stengel on About.com’s nonprofit blog.
- While efforts to promote so-called social entrepreneurs may be good on a “superficial level,” they promote a “damaging mythology” that says extraordinary individuals are the key to social change, writes Dan Elitzer, a nonprofit and business consultant. His views appear on the Full Contact Philanthropy blog.
- The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, a prominent supporter of Jewish causes and social services in Baltimore, has made some changes in its leadership. Jacob Berkman, who writes about Jewish philanthropy for the Jewish Telegraph Agency, examines the changes on his blog.
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