#charitable-critique

#charitable-critique

Virtue signaling often manifests in social media posts that aim to elevate one's moral standing without genuine commitment to the cause, leading to frustration among observers.

Thank you...for being able to fight for my freedom. But what's more important than that is that you continue to fight for your land and to continue to fight for your people and all people.

I'm incredibly proud of the firm and what we've accomplished in the last year. We had certainly, the year before, a historic year financially, and this year was also historic in being one of our best financial years in history.

Anthropic's political activities have ramped up as the company continues to be enmeshed in a nasty legal battle with the Defense Department. The dispute erupted earlier this year over the government's use of Anthropic's AI models and what guidelines (if any) should exist for that usage.

Sheryl Davis is accused of steering millions of dollars to Collective Impact, a San Francisco-based nonprofit she previously ran as executive director, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday by the San Francisco District Attorney's Office.

Most for-profit companies still confine nonprofit relationships to corporate philanthropy. Donations flow through foundations, annual reports highlight community contributions, and nonprofit engagement is framed as evidence of corporate responsibility.

The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.

Why do I get to be the runner, and these guys get to be the homeless guys on the corner? Why can't we all be runners? She didn't have an answer. It would've been easy to let that question dissolve with her footsteps. Most people would have. But Mahlum saw something in those men that others had missed.

Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.

I've always thought it would be good to acquire an old warehouse in every town throughout the land and convert it into low-rent community workspaces for artists, local charities and small businesses getting off the ground. A kind of people's WeWork. What would others do with a humungous, but not unlimited, pile of dosh to benefit society? Roland Freeman, West Yorkshire Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

In the environmental nonprofit sector, "centering frontline voices" has become a familiar slogan, often detached from how decisions are made or resources allocated. It appears in grant proposals, conference agendas, and organizational values statements. And yet, too often, those voices are still positioned as illustrative rather than authoritative-invited to animate strategies already decided, asked to translate lived experience into language legible to funders, or flattened into narratives that travel more easily than the truths they carry.

"Are you okay?" These were Alex Pretti's last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it.

As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.

The change in the administration's tactics in Minneapolis is not a retreat. Instead, they are regrouping and planning another mode of attack, with the hopes that their repression might be met with resistance that is easier to control and contain. People who garner their relevancy and power through the dehumanization and oppression of others will do whatever it takes to cling to their soulless sense of self.

Over the years, I've worked as a consultant on numerous federal grant projects from the US Department of Agriculture and elsewhere that focused on local economic development and were granted to nonprofits serving their communities. But since the 2024 elections, the focus of my work-and that of the small New Mexico-based consulting firm, Prospera Partners, that I lead-has shifted to help nonprofits develop strategies to sustain themselves despite federal cuts in funding and to programs that once supported their work.

I've seen this before-many times, in fact. What you're describing is not unheard of in the nonprofit sector. Founder energy is one of the most powerful forces driving new missions into the world. It can also be one of the riskiest. Many organizations, especially those built from lived experience, passion, and necessity, begin with little more than a vision, a problem to solve.

While there are still January holidays on the horizon for Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, today is the 12th of Christmas - and then the holly-jolly season will be quickly wrapped and done. But looming end of the winter holidays doesn't mean that you have to give up the spirit of giving. In fact, why not make it a new year's resolution to keep donating all year long? Food insecurity, unfortunately, doesn't stop, and nonprofit organizations tend to see a drop in donations at the beginning of the year.

Dear Transparency-Committed Reader, You're not alone. So many of us want decision-making to reflect our collective values (like transparency, care, and shared power), but it's hard to actually put those values into practice. That gap between what we believe and how we decide can be frustrating. And getting stuck in the process is a common concern I hear from groups. I am happy to share, though, that decision-making doesn't have to be a nightmare.