Charity Bills Under Review in Congress
Numerous bills affecting charities are now pending in Congress, but time ALSO SEE:Outlook for Philanthropy: Legislation Pending in Congress is growing short for legislators to act on the measures. Less than four months remain to work on bills during this session, since lawmakers will be out for the…
By Elizabeth Schwinn
Contributor
Outlook for Philanthropy: Legislation Pending in Congress
AID FOR CHARITIES (S. 1924)Background Legislative history Outlook
Federal report nudges IRS toward review of charity rulesWashington
By Harvy Lipman
Contributor
American Refugee Committee (Minneapolis): Appointed Karen Frederickson, chief of staff for U.S. Representative Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) (Washington), to be director of development. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (New York): Appointed Jeanne Baker Driscoll, director of major gifts at…
Making a Merger Go Smoothly for Nonprofit Workers
IN THE TRENCHES By Marilyn Dickey When the American Cancer Society’s New England offices merged to form one regional division in the mid-1990s, every employee except the chief executive officer had to reapply for a job in the new organization. With everything up in the air, the merger’s leaders…
By Marilyn Dickey
Senior Editor, Copy
A Hospital in East Los Angeles Reaches Out to Local Residents and Increases Its Fund-Raising Power
BRAINSTORMS By Rebecca Gardyn The gala benefit dinners and golf tournaments just weren’t working anymore. In truth, the events, which had been staples of White Memorial Medical Center’s fund-raising efforts for years, never did bring in the kind of money the nonprofit hospital in East Los Angeles…
By Rebecca Gardyn
Contributor
A Former Upward Bound Leader Tells of Learning the Value of High Expectations
ENTRY LEVEL Magda A. Escobar Age: 32 First job: Leader, Upward Bound summer residential program, Stanford, Calif. Current job: Executive director, Plugged In, East Palo Alto, Calif. When I was growing up on a dairy farm in Clint, Tex., I was exposed to several special summer programs for teenagers,…
After the New Economy Bust, Charities Report Finding Technology Workers More Easily
JOB MARKET By Marilyn Dickey Two years ago, when CompuMentor advertised to hire a technology consultant, the San Francisco charity was lucky to get 30 résumés. And of those 30, only about a half-dozen applicants were worth calling for an interview, says Mark Liu, the group’s program director for…
By Marilyn Dickey
Senior Editor, Copy
American Heart Association (Dallas): Appointed Suzie Upton, vice president of development, to be executive vice president of development, and Michael Wilson, executive vice president of the New York State affiliate (Syracuse, N.Y.), to be executive vice president of technology and customer…
Private foundations and charitable trusts distributed $19.7-billion to charitable projects in 1998, an 18 percent increase from a year earlier, the IRS reported. The 56,658 returns filed in 1998 by private foundations represented an increase of nearly 3 percent over the number of returns filed in…
By Elizabeth Schwinn
Contributor
IRS Says Heirs May Undo Charity Trusts
Three recent rulings by the IRS allow charities and donors or their heirs to terminate charitable trusts before they would normally have ended. The rulings have surprised some planned-giving experts who thought such trusts would be more difficult to end. As a result of the rulings, Christopher…
By Elizabeth Schwinn
Contributor
New Law Limits Housing Exemption
A new statute limits the income-tax deduction that ministers, priests, rabbis, and other religious leaders can claim for the housing allowances they receive from their parishes. The law, which takes effect this month, allows religious leaders who receive a housing allowance to write off the sum on…
By Elizabeth Schwinn
Contributor
Scholar Takes Roundabout Path to Philanthropy World
Several weeks into his new job as chief executive officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Carl J. Schramm was leafing through his copy of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a book by the German political economist and sociologist Max Weber. Mr. Schramm noticed that at some…
By Debra E. Blum
Contributor
How Family Foundations Can Avoid Legal Problems
Top 10 Ways Family Foundations Get Into Trouble, by Ellen Bryson and John A. Edie, points out areas of “murky and shifting ground” where family-foundation board members might run into legal problems. Most of the mistakes that family foundations make, say the authors, fall under the category of…
By Katy Marquardt
Contributor
Streamlining the Grant-Making Process
Centralization of the Grants Administration Function and the Development of Grant Processing “Best Practices”, by Paul Schofer and Shirley Young, describes how the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation streamlined the fund’s grants-management functions. After finding those functions to be “increasingly…
By Katy Marquardt
Contributor