There are a lot of people who want to do good in the world, but few have the resources to do it on a large scale. That’s why development and grant writing are such big parts of running a non-profit. Unfortunately, those two activities don’t often direct fund where they’ll be most effectively used. That’s why Dr. Ted Caplow started a non-profit called the Whole New World Foundation that works “to crowd-source the most promising solutions to important challenges” by offering cash prizes. The Miami, FL based organization branded this contest as Children’s Prize and gave $1 million to a Pakistani doctor who said he would be able to save 165 lives with the money.
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A few years ago I was on the board of a startup non-profit. Our programming was going pretty well, but raising money was really hard. We had meetings with a few grant makers, but we didn’t impress them enough to get any money. A grant maker’s job is to give away money, but they need to offer more than that if they want that money to be put to the best use. Grantmakers for Effective Organizations is a Washington, DC based non-profit that is “committed to advancing smarter grantmaking practices that are most critical to bolstering nonprofit success.” They’ve been working towards a non-profit ecosystem with “more grantmakers providing general operating support, an increase in support for nonprofit leadership development as a capacity-building strategy, and more grantmakers seeking input from grantees and community members to shape effective solutions.”
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A lot of thoughts come to mind when the name Hilton comes up. Hotels. Paris. Conrad Hilton’s appearance in Mad Men. Some of these thoughts are more positive than others, but the most positive should probably be for the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. It’s an Agoura Hills, CA based non-profit “family foundation established in 1944 by the man who started Hilton Hotels” that provides “funds to nonprofit organizations working to improve the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people throughout the world.” The foundations assets are more than $2.4 billion, so they’ll be doing a lot of good for a long time.
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I often hear from readers that we cover too many opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately, I have no control over where the best opportunities pop up. San Francisco’s economy has been booming for a while now, and that makes an already exciting city even more exciting. The San Francisco Foundation is a non-profit that was founded in 1948 “to pull the community together to create pride and unity and improve quality of life” in the Bay Area. Having awarded more than $800 million in grants over the past decade, the Foundation has certainly played a strong role in making San Francisco the place it is today.
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The world of non-profits revolves around money. I know it’s counterintuitive, but only the leanest organizations can operate without significant funds. When you’re a business and you’re using money to make money, you typically have some margin for error. But when you’re trying to use money to do good, every bit of effectiveness makes a difference. That’s why The Center for Effective Philanthropy exists. They are a Cambridge, MA and San Francisco, CA based non-profit that works “to provide data and create insight so philanthropic funders can better define, assess, and improve their effectiveness – and, as a result, their intended impact.” They are what I like to call a meta-non-profit; an organization that serves other charitable organizations.
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Having so much money that you can give it away is something that we can all aspire to. The Haas family certainly achieved that. The donations started in 1945 through the Phoebe Waterman Foundation when they gave for “relief in post-War Europe, scholarships for fatherless children, and support for medical and educational institutions.” By 1955 the family was making grants of more than $100,000 a year, so they hired someone to manage the foundation. By 1970 the number reached $7 million per year, and the foundation was renamed the Willliam Penn Foundation. Today the fund has nearly $2 billion, and distributes approximately $80 million annually. The organization is based in Philadelphia, PA, and “is dedicated to improving the quality of life in the Greater Philadelphia region through efforts that foster rich cultural expression, strengthen children’s futures, and deepen connections to nature and community.”
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Neuroscience is a word that is about as intimidating as astrophysics. Most people have no idea what it means, but they’re pretty sure that its definition is over their head. The truth is that neuroscience is simply the study of the brain and nervous system. That’s not to say it’s a simple science, but it’s a science that covers equipment that we all have. With that said, neuroscience gets a bit complex as it draws from “other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, medicine and allied disciplines, philosophy, physics, and psychology.” (Here’s the Wikipedia article on Neuroscience.) The Society for Neuroscience is a Washington, DC based non-profit member organization for the scientists and physicians who study the brain and nervous system.
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For me there’s nothing better than spending time outdoors fishing and being surrounded by wildlife. I think I’m particularly lucky, because I live in a time where I’ve actually seen many of my favorite fishing spots get better over the years. A lot of the conservation work done by organizations like Trout Unlimited and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is paying off. That’s not to say that we’ve eliminated the threats to nature, but it feels like we hit an inflection point some time during my lifetime. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is a non-profit organization that was created by Congress in 1984 to direct “public conservation dollars to the most pressing environmental needs and matches those investments with private funds.” They’re based in Washington, DC, and they’ve “awarded over 11,000 grants to more than 3,800 organizations in the United States, investing a total of $1.8 billion for conservation” over the past 3 decades.
Get Wild
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is all about bringing public and private conservation projects together. They don’t seem to actually do any work on the ground, but they have the money to significantly influence where conservation funding goes. You can get a sense for how the NFWF works by reading up on their Grant Programs, and you can browse their Grants Library to learn more about the specific projects (though this feature is currently giving me a server error). There isn’t all that much else on the NFWF website, though they also have a Impact-Directed Environmental Accounts Program that “receives, manages, and disburses funds that originate from court orders, settlements of legal cases, regulatory permits, licenses, and restoration and mitigation plans.” If you like what NFWF is doing for conservation, then you can get involved by checking out their Careers page. There aren’t any internships posted right now, but they’ve taken a good number of interns in the past. You may also want to keep your eye on their Idealist page since they sometimes post positions there that aren’t on their site.
Links to Help You Begin Your Research
What’s your favorite place to experience wildlife?
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So far it seems that 2011 has been a pretty good year for freedom across the world. We’ve seen dictators overthrown, terrorists brought to justice, and finally got a new mayor in Chicago after 22 years (I kid). But every time progress is made somewhere in the world, it seems that another part of the world takes a step back. Because the fight for freedom is constantly changing, it’s important to keep track of how things are progressing across the world. That’s exactly what Freedom House does. They’re a Washington, DC based non-profit organization that “supports democratic change, monitors freedom, and advocates for democracy and human rights.” As they put it, they’re all about combining analysis, advocacy, and action. The organization was founded in 1941 and has a very interesting history that you should definitely read up on.
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I’m constantly amazed by the quantity and breadth of non-profit organizations that are working to solve society’s many problems. While we often take a look at the larger organizations because they have more job and internship opportunities, you shouldn’t overlook the smaller non-profits that are deeply embedded in their communities and focused on solving a small set of problems in a specific area. These organizations are especially well equipped to make things happen, even if they can only do it on a small scale; however, they can also be limited by their size and local focus. Foundation for Sustainable Development is a San Francisco, CA based non-profit that “works to enhance the capacity of small non-governmental organizations around the world to address local health, social, environmental, and economic issues.” In other words, they help these smaller organizations by giving them access to some of the resources of larger organizations.
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Maybe I’m dating myself, but I was a big AOL user back in the day. It’s where I started learning about the Internet, so it wasn’t just about chat rooms and IMs for me. I remember getting monthly e-mails from Steve Case, who was the Founder and CEO of the company. Believe it or not, I think I actually read them. Anyway, AOL is a very different company these days, and Steve Case is no longer involved. A lot of what he does now along with his wife Jean Case is focused on The Case Foundation, a Washington, DC based non-profit organization that reflects “their family’s commitment to finding lasting solutions for complex social challenges.” That may sound a bit broad, but it’s really about investing some of the wealth that the Cases have accumulated in “people and ideas that can change the world” regardless of whether they fit into a specific category.
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As far as I can tell, most of the non-profits that we’ve featured here have originated in the United States—even the ones that do most of their work internationally. Global Green USA is an exception. They are “the American Arm of Green Cross International (GCI), which was created by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to foster a global value shift toward a sustainable and secure future by reconnecting humanity with the environment.” Global Green USA is headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, and they also have offices in New Orleans, LA; Washington, DC; and New York, NY. Though they do work on some international issues with GCI, their domestic focus is on “fighting global climate change through [their] green affordable housing initiatives, National Green Schools Initiative, national and reginonal green building policies, advocacy and education.”
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You know somebody is rich when they have a foundation named after them. You know somebody is really rich when their kids have their own foundations. That was the case with Andrew W. Mellon. In 1940 his daughter Ailsa Mellon Bruce established The Avalon Foundation, and in 1941 his son Paul Mellon established The Old Dominion Foundation. In 1969, with the combined value of the foundations at $220 million, the children decided to merge their foundations in honor of their father. That seems to have been a good decision considering that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is based in New York City, has assets totaling $6.5 billion in 2007. In case you don’t know who Andrew Mellon was, you can read his story here. The short of it was that he was held in the same esteem as men like Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Morgan, and Frick, but he differed in that “he excelled in four fields of endeavor: as a businessman and banker; as a politician and statesman; as an art collector; and as a philanthropist.”
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