My wife Karen Schneider and I gave away about nine percent of our pretax income in 2019. Like most people, I delayed my charitable giving until the end of the year–a bad practice, because nonprofits have needs all year–so I’m just now writing my annual blogpost about where the money went. The Life You Can …
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 …
Reading is one of my life’s great pleasures. Here are the books that I read this year. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. A mind-bending collection of journalism and essays about conservative talk radio, September 11, John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, Tracy Austin’s tennis career and the ethics of boiling large numbers of lobsters …
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 …
Who could object to efforts to bring clean, renewable energy to people without electricity? Donors and investors love social enterprises (D.Light, Greenlight Planet, BrightLife) and nonprofits (SolarAid, GivePower) that bring solar panels, lights or phone chargers to poor households in Africa and south Asia. Why, even President Obama, on a visit to Tanzania, played with …
This special report was made possible by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Journalism. * * * Eric Reynolds was despondent. He had poured his heart and soul, his best ideas and a chunk of his life savings into Nau, the radically sustainable, greener-than-green apparel company that he founded in 2003. The global …
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, …
Five years ago, a young foreign service officer named Daniel Handel arrived in Kigali, Rwanda, to begin a new assignment with USAID. Listening to NPR online, Handel heard a Planet Money story about the nonprofit GiveDirectly, called “The Charity That Just Gives People Money.” In the story, Paul Niehaus, a founder of GiveDirectly, which delivers …
Nonprofit Chronicles 