Why Foundations Should Care About Shareholder Votes
To the Editor: The Chronicle and Harvy Lipman are to be congratulated for the excellent articles on foundations’ failure to vote their proxies in line with their missions (“Meshing Proxy With Mission,” May 4). In 1997 William B. McKeown of the law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, in the…
Can a Nonprofit Organization Strike?
When appealing to donors for support, nonprofit organizations often paint a cold and bitter picture of what America’s cities might look like if homeless shelters, hospice centers, or humane societies suddenly disappeared. But this begs the question: Would charities actually go on strike —…
By Robert Egger
Contributor
Opinion: Nonprofit Telemarketing Requires ‘Sanity’
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to not review the Federal Trade Commission’s rules on charitable telephone solicitations offers “hope that sanity will prevail in nonprofit fund raising,” says Jay Hancock, a columnist for The Baltimore Sun. While some charities have argued the regulations…
An Emphasis on Communications Skills Can Help Charities Survive a Public-Image Crisis
IN THE TRENCHES By Kimberlee Roth The United Way in East Lansing, Mich., broke some bad news in 2003, news that quickly had the rumor mill churning some 45 miles away — in Washtenaw County, where one of the charity’s former staff members owned a horse farm. The East Lansing group reported that the…
By Kimberlee Roth
Contributor
Opinion: Annenberg’s Philanthropy Doesn’t Redeem Him
Despite having donated billions of dollars, Walter H. Annenberg’s giving cannot whitewash his unethical behavior as a media mogul, says Jack Shafer, a columnist for the online magazine Slate. Mr. Annenberg died in 2002 and left $1-billion to his foundation. Read The Chronicle’s story about Mr.…
Opinion: Land Sale Doesn’t Help Homeless
Volunteers of America has lost its chance to pursue the most direct, effective, and “innovative” way to tackle the homelessness problem in Southern California, writes the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. The newspaper chides the organization for selling 13 of the 28 acres it received from the…
Putting Family First: How a Charity Founder Decided It Was Time to Step Down
“Is everything OK?” came the note from my friend’s BlackBerry to my inbox. “Everyone is worried about you.” Only minutes before, the charity I’d been running for the past decade — Jewish Family & Life — had sent out the news that I was going to be stepping down as its CEO in the fall. “Everything…
By Yosef I. Abramowitz
Contributor
What Stymied the Transfer of Wealth
To the Editor: One very significant piece of the puzzle to that posed by your article, “Much-Anticipated Transfer of Wealth Has Yet to Materialize, Nonprofit Experts Say” (April 6), may lie in what is unsaid and, yes, unanticipated by almost everyone starting fund-raising programs designed to…
How to Measure Foundation Giving
To the Editor: You perform an important service in reporting annually on giving by private foundations. Unfortunately, some of the information on individual foundations in your article “Slow Growth at the Biggest Foundations” article and its companion “How Much Foundations Spent on Administration…
Television Deal Sets Bad Precedent for Charities
The Smithsonian Institution stands out as one of our country’s great public organizations. It provides free, public access to world-class museums and is a caretaker of our nation’s cultural and scientific history. The Smithsonian holds our hopes and dreams, with precious artifacts of American…
By David Madland
Contributor