April 29, 2009, The Washington Post — Richard Koshalek, new director of the Hirshhorn Museum -- the Smithsonian's home for modern and contemporary art -- has a reputation as a man who makes change happen. "Richard is a wild man. Awesome, amazing and brilliant. . . . That word visionary does apply to certain people," says Diana Thater, a video artist who's a force on the Los Angeles scene.
April 29, 2009, The Washington Post — Twenty-one area nonprofit groups have suspended their memberships in the United Way and joined a fledgling competitor, citing years of frustration with a steady decline in workplace giving in the Washington region and lingering distrust of the local United Way since it was nearly destroyed by scandal earlier this decade.
April 22, 2009, The Washington Post — It seems foolproof: nonprofits using the power of the Internet to raise money through a clever Facebook application. After all, the Web earned gobs of cash for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And besides, going online means sending fewer fundraising letters, which makes it appealing to penny-pinchers and environmentalists alike.
President Obama last night defended his controversial budget proposal to cut the rate for charitable tax deductions for wealthy people, arguing that the policy shift would not have an adverse effect on charitable giving.
President Obama defends his proposal to cut the tax deductions that wealthy Americans can claim for their charitable donations by arguing that the shift would not have an adverse effect on giving, but two independent analyses concluded that the proposal could result in a drop of as much as $3.87 billion for the already reeling nonprofit sector.
I have been tweeting on Twitter (my call sign is addedvalueth) for the last two weeks, wondering why a grown-up would share mundane parts of his personal life ("heading to sleep") with complete strangers on the other end of a computer or handheld. And why anyone would want to read aforementioned drivel.
The scenes here are now familiar in places deeply bruised by the recession: The Salvation Army gets so many calls from people desperate for help with overdue utility bills that, one morning, its phone system crashed. The Family Service Center of South Carolina is deluged with clients seeking free counseling for delinquent mortgages. And the shelves at the Life Force food pantry run out of rice, canned stew meat and black-eyed peas in less than an hour.
The first federal casualty of the stimulus bill was identified by the Office of Management and Budget this week when OMB director Peter Orszag told agency heads to plan for a possible meltdown of the government's main grantmaking portal.
Over the past few years, Washington, D.C., has witnessed two explosive nonprofit scandals. In 2005, the board of American University received a letter from an anonymous whistle-blower alleging that the university’s president, Ben Ladner, was abusing his university expense account. A subsequent audit found that Ladner had indeed spent more than $500,000 of university funds on lavish personal expenses, including a $5,000 vacation in London and a $15,000 engagement party for his son. Already concerned about Ladner’s compensation—which was higher than those of all Ivy League college presidents—the board split over whether to reduce Ladner’s pay. The fracas filled newspaper gossip columns for months, sparked a congressional inquiry, and eventually led to Ladner’s termination. The board then required two years to rebuild itself and to name a new president.
Robert Gallucci will be the new president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago-based organization announced today, in tapping the veteran Washington envoy and educator to head one of the nation's most prestigious philanthropies.
