HOW TO GET INVOLVED WITH PHILANTHROPY REFORM
The movement for philanthropic reform – like all movements – can be hard to get your arms around and it's not easy to figure out how to be involved.
photo: @theblacklady, Flickr
Six suggestions, including for how to be involved with the Philanthropy Project:
Help grow the movement by posting good stuff to your social media, passing along to friends, and sending your thoughts back to the authors. Bring up philanthropy reform in conversations. We need greater awareness of these issues in the nonprofit community.
How do you know what the good stuff is? Subscribe to the Philanthropy Project bulletin and Inequality.org (includes news from the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies).
Write something for the Philanthropy Project bulletins. It can be as short as a personal anecdote about an interaction with a DAF sponsor, donor, or financial advisor, or as comprehensive as a scan of, say, top DAF sponsor 990s. Write to us and let’s talk about your article!
Summarize good articles and studies you’ve read (movies too!) for inclusion in Worth Reading. If you’re interested we’d love to have you as a Summarizer where we send you articles and you summarize them/make sense of them for readers. If you wrote or have a good article in the past, send it to us for inclusion in our “Classics” section.
If you belong to a nonprofit association, suggest philanthropic reform as a topic for a conference breakout. Your AFP or YNPN chapter might also appreciate having someone from the Philanthropy Project come to a meeting and just talk about developments in the field. If your foundation or giving circle would like us to come to a meeting, we’d love to do so. We want to learn from you as well as gently grow the movement.
Donate (maybe from your DAF!) to the Philanthropy Project. We are all volunteers and donating is a way to help cover our modest costs and to be a closer partner.
And/or: just send a note using our Contact Form. We can talk about what involvement would work for you!
Numbers count in influencing public policy, and a key task for the Philanthropy Project is long-term base building: preparing nonprofit supporters for times when legislative processes are more open to regulatory improvement. First of all, we’d like to hear from you. What you think needs to be addressed, and how? What is happening with local legislation? What analysis needs to be done, and how could it be put into plain language?
In addition to the Project’s Working Group, the Project will organize groups of subscribers to track developments, recognize patterns, and build nonprofit awareness and influence over time.
Focused conversations on specific policy options – developing, critiquing, mobilizing
LinkedIn and social media: join the Philanthropy Project’s LinkedIn group here and join the discussion.
Invite the co-chairs and Working Group members to participate in conferences and convenings, offer to co-author articles or write them yourself!
Thoughts?
We are just getting started. How would YOU like to be involved? Let us know here.