Weekend Link Roundup (January 4-5, 2020)

Happy New Year! Before you get back to work for real, check out our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog….

Climate Change

To see what climate change could portend for ordinary Americans, look no further than California, where over the last decade, as the Los Angeles Times‘ Deborah Netburn writes, “[t]he wildfires were more destructive. The drought was the longest on record. And the storms, when they finally came, unleashed more water than [the] dams could contain.”

Fundraising

Ready for another year of fundraising? Future Fundraising Now’s Jeff Brooks wants to help and has pulled together a list of his favorite fundraising blogs. 

And fundraising expert Pamela Grow shares eleven things you can do to make 2020 your most successful fundraising year yet.

Giving

Nonprofit Chronicles blogger Marc Gunther shares the thinking behind the charitable donations he and his wife, Karen, made in 2019.

In an op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nonprofit CEOs Alejandra Castillo, Susan Dreyfus, James Firman, Brian Gallagher, Gail McGovern, and Jonathan Reckford make the case that, after nearly two years of data, the evidence is clear: charitable giving is down, and changes in the 2017 tax law are to blame.

Global Health

There are only eight organizations on charity rating site GiveWell’s list of top global charities and one of them is the San Jose-based Fistula Foundation. In a new post on the GiveWell blog, Catherine Hollander updates the organization’s work on the foundation, which it continues to consider “a top charity contender.”

Health

Commonwealth Fund president David Blumenthal (with research help from Gabriella Aboulafia) reviews the top developments in health care in 2019 on the fund’s To The Point blog. 

Higher Education

“In the modern university, all sources of money, be they gifts from donors, corporate grants, or investments, can be tainted in some way…. [And] students, faculty members, and alumni…are demanding that universities take responsibility for their role in laundering wealthy philanthropists’ reputations and allowing outside influence on research.” But are they? Nell Gluckman, a senior reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, takes a closer look.

International Affairs/Development

On the HistPhil blog, Álvaro Morcillo Laiz, a scholar of international relations, considers “U.S. foundations’ funding of education, the elaboration of statistics, and human rights activism in Latin America as producing public goods.” 

Nonprofits

In a post on the Charity Navigator blog, Michael Thatcher, the nonprofit ratings organization’s president and CEO, looks back at the things he and his team achieved and learned in 2019, and what they have planned for 2020.

Philanthropy

On the Candid blog, Larry McGill, our vice president for knowledge services, shares findings from a survey of six hundred and forty-five of the largest U.S. foundations conducted in early 2019 that asked if they had changed their funding priorities in 2017 and 2018 as a result of the 2016 presidential election. Check out Larry’s post to learn more.

Social Good

And writing on the Equities.com site, Thomas Kostigen explains why he thinks impact investing is likely to become a bigger fact in the financial services and  money management worlds in 2020.

(Image: @ NASA EOSDIS)

That’s it for now. Drop us a line at [email protected] if you have something you’d like to share.