Last year, staff members who worked in “corporate security” at eBay set out to harass a husband-and-wife team who publish a newsletter that criticized the company. Things got ugly in a hurry. The security staff sent them boxes of live cockroaches, a bloody Halloween mask, a funeral wreath and a book on how to survive …
Martha’s Table, a widely-respected charity in Washington, D.C., provides healthy food to families and operates preschool and after-school programs for kids. It serves all comers, but many, if not most, are Black people. After all, more than 60% of Washington, D.C.’s poor people are Black people. Yet a new report from the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) does not consider …
Welcome to the so-called giving season. If you have given to charity, you will soon be inundated with letters and email imploring you to do so again. Giving Tuesday approaches! Gifts will be matched! Bad charities will claim to be good! Giving is good, but don’t make any impulsive decisions. Instead, consider the work of the philosopher Peter Singer and in …
To a casual observer, Alley Cat Allies would seem to be a model charity. A Bethesda, MD-based nonprofit that calls itself “the global engine of change for cats,” Alley Cat Allies has been given a coveted Platinum seal by GuideStar, which has the “the most complete, up-to-date nonprofit data available.” For its part, Charity Navigator has bestowed a four-star rating on …
My wife Karen Schneider and I gave about eight percent of our pretax income to charity in 2018. The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit inspired by the moral philosopher Peter Singer, has a calculator that recommends the percentage of your income that you should give. I’m writing about our giving because (1) I’m a believer …
What’s going on at Alley Cat Allies? And why aren’t the so-called charity watchdogs paying attention? Alley Cat Allies is a $10-million charity that calls itself the “global engine of change for cats.” It’s got issues-poor governance practices, a board that failed to meet for nearly a year and a disgruntled workforce with high turnover, …
The giving season is almost upon us, and so millions of Americans soon will turn to Charity Navigator or GuideStar for help in vetting nonprofits. Unfortunately, neither is entirely up to the job. That once again became clear to me when I began looking into a charity called Alley Cat Allies that, by coincidence, …
This is an image from the Facebook feed of a man named Macintosh Johnson. Pictured is Katie Meyler, the founder of a charity called More Than Me that operates schools for poor, vulnerable girls in Liberia, like the girls in the photo. Macintosh Johnson and Katie Meyler were lovers. They ran More Than Me together …
Can journalism supported by a traditional foundation ask tough questions about what foundations are doing right-and doing wrong? Future Perfect intends to try. It’s off to a promising start. Launched this week by Vox, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Future Perfect plans to “carve out a space, away the regular news cycle, to …
Ah, scale. Foundations, nonprofits, anti-poverty programs all pursue scale. Advice on how to scale abounds, in reports and articles like Getting to Scale, Strategies to Scale Up Social Programs and Three Things Every Growing Nonprofit Needs to Scale. But scale is not impact. Indeed, there’s often tension between the two. “If you have $1 million to spend, …
