‘Time’: Innovations in Giving

By Nicole Wallace

The innovators of the “New Philanthropy,” writes Time magazine (November 5), are people who “use Wall Street solutions to tackle urban poverty and expect a return on their investment.” The magazine features articles on donors and nonprofit executives who apply a hands-on, outcome-oriented approach to their work.

Among the people profiled in the issue:

• Americans Linda Rottenberg and Peter Kellner, who co-founded Endeavor, a nonprofit group that nurtures entrepreneurs in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. The group doesn’t provide financial support to the more than 60 businesses it works with, but instead offers other types of assistance, such as providing consultants with business expertise, presenting management workshops, and organizing trips to places like Silicon Valley, where the companies can seek investors. In the four years since Endeavor got started, the businesses it has helped have generated more than $390-million and created more than 5,700 jobs.
• David Saltzman, executive director and one of the founders of the Robin Hood Foundation, in New York, a grant-making organization that not only raises money for charities fighting poverty in the city but also becomes involved in their management. Robin Hood’s staff members offer their expertise and secure free services for their grantees from companies like McKinsey & Company and Deloitte & Touche. In return, charities must meet goals of effectiveness and efficiency or risk losing the foundation’s support.
• Gino Strada, an Italian surgeon who founded Emergency, a charity that runs clinics and rehabilitation programs in Afghanistan, Cambodia, northern Iraq, and Sierra Leone. He started the organization after he saw the toll war takes on civilians while he was working with the Red Cross in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the early 1990s.