Repeated themes throughout the Smart Growth Summit were the importance of supporting our downtowns, and the explosion of food insecurity that we know is really the unmasking and exacerbation of a much longer-term, interconnected crisis of increasing disparity, and an increasingly challenged health and human services sector.
We hope these issues have reached a point where they will no longer be ignored and that people are moved to address them. We’ve shared the following before, and we’re going to keep doing it because it’s important:
“Foundations for the Common Good — A Call to Action” written with Executive Director David Okorn of the LI Community Foundation. This article from 2019 talks about growing holes in the LI safety net and how we might fill them. Here, David also explains how the LI Community Foundation itself helps givers make the best use of their philanthropic dollars, as well as how it serves issues they’ve identified as critical directly.
Here’s a really important topic that comes up every year: The idea that a not for profit organization should be judged primarily by the % going to admin and fundraising is just plain wrong! Find out why in this article we wrote last year with Marian Conway of the NY Community Bank Foundation: “Stop the Nonprofit Budget Fantasy. It’s Not Right!”
Marian’s run a foundation for years and in one way or another served and studied countless organizations. She literally has a Ph.D awarded for her dissertation on “What are the general operating expenses for nonprofits and who pays them.” She knows what she’s talking about. Please listen to her!!!
Those articles were written well before a global pandemic made the current fashion of asking nonprofits to somehow be profitable in order to support their service to our communities largely untenable….while seriously upping the dire importance of so much of their work.. If you haven’t already — PLEASE check these pieces out, share them with others and consider giving directly to local organizations focused on whatever it is you value.
THANK YOU!!!
