Foundations

President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has admitted to the IRS that it violated a legal prohibition against self-dealing, which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families. That admission was contained in the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s IRS tax filings for 2015, which were recently posted online…

Close your eyes for a moment, and imagine that the Gates Foundation was instead called the Good Foundation, and nobody knew the donor behind this operation—even as its vast grantmaking affected the lives of millions of Americans school children and people in poor countries. Does that sound unnerving to you? It does to me. But…

Could the Clinton Foundation's prodigious fundraising ability suffer a similar fate as Hillary Clinton's dashed political ambitions? During her bid for the White House, the nonprofit bearing the names of Clinton, the former president and their daughter came under withering scrutiny for its fundraising and management practices. The foundation, which operates a range of philanthropic…

A newly revealed memo from a former aide to Bill Clinton detailed substantial overlap between donors to the nonprofit Clinton Foundation and the former president's personal financial activities, a $30 million-plus enterprise described in the memo as "Bill Clinton Inc." Money managers UBS and Barclays, mining giant BHP, and the for-profit educational company Laureate International…

Time matters, especially today. Time is precious. So why would you not give thanks to a foundation that took the time necessary to peruse your proposal and directly communicate with you afterward? Why would you not take the opportunity to create a connection, when connections serve as building blocks for so many amazing things?...

There seems to be a pervasive lack of starting with trust between funders and nonprofits, and it’s affecting all of us and our abilities to survive and do our work. The default starting relationship between funders and nonprofits is one of suspicion of the latter by the former, which leads to funders enacting policies and…

Hillary Clinton has gotten very lucky in the 2016 presidential election, on few items as clearly as the Clinton Foundation. And her spell of good luck continued again Wednesday night at the third presidential debate. Moderator Chris Wallace pointed out that Clinton had pledged to avoid appearances of conflict of interest between the Clinton Foundation…

Many foundations now want you to send a letter of inquiry rather than a full grant proposal when first asking for grant money. Some foundations find that it is faster to make that first cut of possible funding ideas if they are just looking at a two- to three-page letter rather than a full proposal…

Members of a rainforest charity have issued an ultimatum to actor Leonardo DiCaprio, asking him to either return illegal funds he allegedly received for starring in Martin Scorsese’s "The Wolf Of Wall Street," or step down from his position as a United Nations Messenger of Peace with a special focus on climate change. The demand…

Will America recover from this election? Whatever the result, there will be lasting impact to our society, as actual American Nazis, misogynists and bigots of every persuasion have crawled out of their bunkers for a public hearing. This has damaged our American experiment, and the impact will be felt for years. Can you imagine eight…