NPQ‘s Week in Review not only summarizes last week’s most significant happenings in and around the sector but also points you to the most interesting conversations our readers are having online. This week several new studies emerged, bringing to light the massive wealth gap between youth and adults in America and revealing veterans stay homeless longer than others just in time for Veteran’s Day. And our latest “Voices of the Field” begs the question – for profit or nonprofit business model?
Boy, we’d love to take Larry Summers’ course on “Crisis Economics,” about how this nation confronted the Great Recession (which some of us think is pretty clearly still going on). But maybe his reading list could use a little improvement. . . .
Detroit’s Neighborhood Support Organization raised $50 million for renovation of a downtown office building. Now the NSO is organizing volunteer housewarming parties to buy sheets, towels, and pots and pans for the incoming residents of what will be a 155-unit homeless housing and services complex.
When you check into a hotel and you see the bath bars that get used once and then thrown away, do you think that something is awry and that someone someplace may need that soap? The Global Soap Project collects and recycles hotel soap for developing countries where there is a need for improved sanitation and hygiene—and just got recognized by the Hilton hotel chain with a $1.3 million investment.
Congressman Darrell Issa has nightmares that organizations such as New York Communities for Change, the Working Families Party, and New England United for Justice are the spawn of ACORN, have infiltrated the Occupy movement, and are pulling the strings. While there are ex-ACORN people in these groups, someone should tell the Congressman that ACORN is dead, defunct, gone, kaput . . . and not likely to sneak up behind you and whisper, “I know what you did last summer.”
Once again, nonprofit insurers have failed to distinguish themselves from those that are for profit. Is there any difference at all?
Though social media and Internet communications have become ubiquitous tools for much of the nonprofit sector, it’s important to remember that significant population groups in the United States still don’t have access to high speed (broadband) Internet at home.
With over seventy years in the nonprofit sector, Frances Hesselbein shares some advice on the qualities that make a lasting leader.
The children of an elementary school help illuminate how communities should behave.
The number of cat videos on YouTube is now legend and apparently the animals are also tops in the social media world of nonprofits.
It is testimony to the times that the loose grassroots effort to get people to desert big banks in favor of credit unions took off like few such actions have in our lifetimes. A consumers’ revolt? Be still my heart.
A successful example of faith-based development is underway in metro Washington, DC, supported by Enterprise Community Partners. It should come as no surprise, because the motivation behind the creation of Enterprise 30 years ago by the late urban visionary, Jim Rouse, was rooted in faith.