NPQ’s Week in Review | August 15 – August 19, 2011

Good Morning! At NPQ, what moves you is what moves us. This Week in Review highlights what our readers nominate as their favorite content and what they share with us and the community in the form of tweets, comments, contributed articles, and newswires.

But first, take a look at what you might have missed last week in some of the major news stories covered in NPQ.

BUFFETT WEIGHS IN: When Warren Buffett calls on rich people to stop whining and start recognizing their obligations to society, we think a lot of them stop and listen. And when he calls on members of Congress to stop “coddling” the super-rich, we hope that our nation’s lawmakers will listen as well. It’s clear from the readership numbers for this item that NPQ Newswire subscribers are listening!

UNITED WAY PROCESSING FEES: It was just a single isolated story, but it could have huge implications for the United Way’s national system. The United Way in Buffalo, New York recently jettisoned its 13-percent processing fee on contributions designated by donors for specific charities. Everyone knows that donor-designated contributions have been on the rise for years, which leaves the United Way with a smaller share of funds that it can use for discretionary grantmaking. The ever-increasing processing fees (Buffalo’s used to be 9 percent) were partially meant to discourage designations. If other United Ways follow Buffalo’s lead, this is big news.

STATES AND NONPROFITS INTERSECT: After weeks of focus on debates around the federal budget and the debt ceiling, the press remembered the role of state governments last week. In Massachusetts, legislators called for hearings on a couple of troubled state-funded nonprofits. In New Orleans and in North Carolina, politically connected nonprofits somehow evaded state regulations against self-dealing and personal enrichment. California has devised an odd—to say the least—patchwork of tests to determine whether nonprofits can qualify for tax-exempt treatment in the state. And in a mixed piece of news, it appears that state governments seem to have dodged the worst impacts of the federal debt-ceiling deal, with Medicaid and Medicare protected from most cuts but non-health-related human-services funding still vulnerable.

CONTINUING KHAZEI STORY: The cofounder of the nationally prominent charity City Year, Alan Khazei, has run for Senate in Massachusetts once before, losing in the 2009 Democratic special-election primary. Now he’s trying again, and this time Khazei may well be facing progressive superstar Elizabeth Warren in the primary to determine who will get to take on Republican Scott Brown in 2012. Last week he got some attention in the Boston press regarding the lucrative consulting fees he’s now taking from Be the Change, another of his nonprofit creations.

 Readers’ Pick: THE Hottest article OF THE WEEK