Charities Brace for Challenges From Jittery Stock Market
Chronicle of Philanthropy, 9/6/07
Monday, September 10th, 2007
Charities Brace for Challenges From Jittery Stock Market
Chronicle of Philanthropy, 9/6/07
The volatile stock market has not yet caused any major problems for charity fund raising, but experts warn that continued ups and downs or a sharp drop in stock values this fall could hurt nonprofit groups — especially since some charities raise the bulk of their donations in the last quarter of the year.
“A big market downturn would certainly pose problems for both capital campaigns and big grant requests,” says Melissa A. Berman, president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, a New York nonprofit group that helps foundations and wealthy donors manage their giving.
What’s more, she says, “there could be trouble ahead for charities even without a sharp dip in stock values. The real challenge is intense market volatility, which creates a lot of uncertainty. Uncertainty makes many people hesitate to make a commitment.”
Problems in the housing market, including an increase in the number of home foreclosures have caused jitters in the stock market, with the Dow Jones industrial average plunging by 1,000 points or more on a single day in August and stock prices declining by as much as 10 percent.
Some fund raisers are bracing for the possible impact of an economic downturn.
The Katrina crusaders
Financial Times, 8/28/07
Friday, September 7th, 2007
The Katrina crusaders
Financial Times, 8/28/07
Sharon Hanshaw was out of town when Hurricane Katrina tore through Biloxi, Mississippi in 2005, flattening houses, damaging infrastructure and washing a giant casino barge across US Highway 90.
When she returned to discover she had lost her home and the beauty salon she had owned for 21 years, she found solace among women who had begun meeting regularly to talk about life after the storm.
Last January she helped found the group Coastal Women for Change to give residents a voice in decisions about the future of their community. “There is no affordable housing, no childcare, and limited transportation,” says Ms Hanshaw, CWC’s executive director. “But there are casinos.”
On the eve of the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, more than 200,000 people are still displaced and tens of thousands are living in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers. To make matters worse, bureaucratic ineptitude has held up billions of dollars in aid.
Finding specific female focus for feel-good philanthropy
Financial Times, 8/24/07
Friday, September 7th, 2007
Finding specific female focus for feel-good philanthropy
Financial Times, 8/24/07
Melissa Berman, president and chief executive of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, says there are three strategies or ways to think about funding with a “gender lens”:
- Giving to women: in other words, to organisations that are directly helping women and girls. For example, Afghan Women Leaders Connect (www.afghanwomenconnect.org), which funds non-governmental organisations that help women and girls and are led by women
March of the Inconvenient Truths
The Wall Street Journal, 8/17/07
Monday, August 20th, 2007
With last summer’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore managed to bump global warming to the top of the national consciousness – and sell over $24 million of U.S. tickets. Now Leonardo DiCaprio is betting he can repeat the feat.
Mr. DiCaprio hosts, narrates and partly funded “The 11th Hour,” a documentary out today that paints a bleak picture of humanity’s prospects unless environmental policy is shifted almost immediately. It’s just one of an unusual number of politically motivated documentaries slated to hit tin coming months, from a Darfur film featuring Don Cheadle to “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which uses the death of an Afghadriver to examine U.S. detention policies.
But America’s stomach for such sobering fare may be starting to flag. Ticket sales this year for documentaries are down about 25% to roughly $27 million compared with this point last year – and Michael Moore’s “Sicko” accounted for all but about $3.7 million of that, according to Media by Numbers. By contrast, at this time last year, documentaries other than “An Inconvenient Truth” had racked up about $13 million at the box office.
Givers Who Keep on Giving
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 8/9/07
Tuesday, August 7th, 2007
Givers Who Keep on Giving
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 8/9/07
A movement to inspire the wealthy to donate a higher percentage of their riches gathers steam
Twenty-seven years ago, Christopher Ellinger learned to his surprise that he had inherited $250,000, and that another $300,000 would eventually be on its way from his grandparents’ estate. At the time, he was barely out of college, living on little money while finding his way as a social-change activist outside Philadelphia.
At first, he says, his new wealth was overwhelming, but eventually he figured out how much he needed to live comfortably and gave away the rest — more than half of his inheritance.
Now, Mr. Ellinger and his wife, Anne, want to help other people travel the same path through their new venture here, Bolder Giving.
Among its programs is the 50% League, whose members have given at least 50 percent of their income for the past three years or half their assets at some point in their lives to charity. The Ellingers are encouraging people who give that much to publicize their efforts, in the hope that more people will join them.
“We are out there to challenge people to look at their full giving potential and offer support and inspiration to people who are hungry to give more, so that they know they are not alone, they are not crazy, and they can find peers and financial experts who support that direction of giving,” says Ms. Ellinger.
The Other Buffett
The Wall Street Journal, 8/3/07
Friday, August 3rd, 2007
The Other Buffett
The Wall Street Journal, 8/3/07
Warren Buffett doesn’t give handouts. But you might try his sister Doris.
One day last July, UPS delivered a large cardboard box to the doorstep of a condominium in Rockport, Maine. Inside were more than 1,400 letters.
A New York state man wrote that he couldn’t afford a new glass eye. A woman from New Jersey talked about the strain of caring for a sister suffering from multiple sclerosis. A Florida woman described her efforts to regain custody of her three small children. The letters, which came from all over the world, had two things in common: All of them were pleas for money. And all were addressed to billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
Mr. Buffett, who lives in Omaha, Neb., had forwarded them to someone he knew he could trust to give them a fair hearing – his 79-year-old sister, Doris.
Read letters sent to Warren Buffett Last summer, after Mr. Buffett pledged shares now worth over $35 billion to the charity of his good friend Bill Gates, the pleas began pouring in. Since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on global health and education, doesn’t give money to individuals, Mr. Buffett began putting the letters aside for Doris, who runs a small foundation of her own. And to the great surprise of the people who’d written, Ms. Buffett began calling them.
Afghan Women Development Program
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007Click here to return to AWLC Capacity Building Fund page
The Business of Philanthropy: Intermediaries have the skill to help give
The Financial Times, 7/5/07
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
The Business of Philanthropy: Intermediaries have the skill to help give
The Financial Times, 7/5/07
Most banks are keen to hold on to their clients’ money in order to generate fees. Mark Evans instead devises ways to help his customers give theirs away.
When he joined Coutts in London two years ago as a private banker, he exploited a gap in the UK market for philanthropy services that his previous employers at Citigroup and JP Morgan had met in the US. In mainland Europe, its chief proponent was UBS in Switzerland.
All of these institutions – and a growing number today in the UK such as Barclays – are developing philanthropy practices.
“We recognised that there was a demand,” says Mr Evans. “The wealthy are getting wealthier, people are living longer, and they see the importance of a sense of purpose. They are thinking twice about giving everything to their children, and are realising they get tremendous enjoyment from giving money away while they are alive.”
The array and diversity of intermediaries to assist donors in making their choices has mushroomed.
Some, like the private banks and some asset management groups, offer philanthropy alongside other more mainstream financial services, reflecting a growing interest by the wealthy in giving money away in more sophisticated ways.
A few of the wealthiest philanthropists may create their own free-standing foundations. But for most donors, there is a growing range of bespoke services they can use. The Philanthropic Initiative in Boston says it has helped design programmes and direct $1bn over the past 18 years from companies and individual donors. “Very large amounts of money can overwhelm and it’s hard to spend smartly,” says Joanne Duhl, vice-president.
Melissa Berman, head of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, which has 40 staff in offices in New York, San Francisco and California, stresses the benefits of seeking external help, which has allowed her group to recruit 150 clients and steer $135m in grants.
“We can help with site visits, identify appropriate grantees and structure grant agreements,” she says. “Donors may want a buffer between them and a non-profit to ask the difficult questions.”
More may not be better
The Financial Times, 7/5/07
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
More may not be better
The Financial Times, 7/5/07
With US donors alone giving away the record sum of nearly $300bn last year, the trend seems bright for philanthropy. But more does not necessarily mean better.
The most striking philanthropic headline of 2006 was Warren Buffett’s decision to hand most of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in a move that is set effectively to double the endowment of the world’s largest charity to $70bn.
The positive aspects of the gift were clear. The gesture was selfless by not setting up his own foundation named after him; it “rewarded” an existing philanthropist who has set a trend for bold and rigorous initiatives; and it helped stir a broader debate about donations.
“His decision was exemplary,” says Melissa Berman from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers. “It was a really major commitment, was about ‘giving while living’, and was focused on problem-solving.”
Advisors and Clients in the Brave New World of Philanthropy
The Journal of Financial Planning, 6/2007
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007
Advisors and Clients in the Brave New World of Philanthropy
The Journal of Financial Planning, June 2007
How can you tell if your clients are charitably inclined? Is it your business to ask them? If they are charitably inclined, how do you help them?
Like it or not, more and more donors are looking to their financial planners rather than to their favorite charities for advice on making serious gifts. According to a study of donors by the National Committee on Planned Giving (Journal of Gift Planning Vol. 5, No. 1, 2001), “When donors were asked to identify the origin of the idea for their planned gift, we found that financial and legal advisors provided the impetus in 29 percent of the cases for charitable bequests and 68 percent for charitable remainder trusts, both up roughly five times the comparable 1992 results.”
The groundswell of giving in this country has fueled the demand for such advice. And the increasingly high-profile nature of philanthropy (from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey) may be increasing the supply of donors through a kind of trickle-down generosity. Both the mega-wealthy and merely wealthy compete for inclusion on lists like the Slate 60 of America’s most generous donors (see www.slate.com). According to an October 2006 report of 900 affluent Americans by PhilanthropyNow and the Luxury Institute, a new cadre of donors wishes to “brand their family name as a living icon of generosity” (www.philanthropynow.com).
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