On Tuesday, San Francisco’s residents voted to approve Proposition C, a tax on business gross receipts that’s expected to raise $300 million a year, an amount that would double the city’s budget for addressing homelessness.
Why move when you can just carve your wealthier neighborhood out of the city and create a new one? Such was the tactic employed by residents of the Eagle Landing neighborhood of Stockbridge, a city south of Atlanta. On Election Day, however, Eagle Landing’s residents themselves rejected the tactic at the polls.
The outmoded, white-male-dominated “before” picture of Congress may be fading, and the “after” one is coming into focus.
“When people use their private resources to try to attain some type of public influence in a democratic society, that deserves civic scrutiny, not gratitude,” notes Robert Reich, codirector of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, in a wide-ranging podcast interview with NPQ’s Amy Costello on the nature of “big philanthropy.”
Initial estimates are that 325,000 Americans will gain health insurance coverage as, for the first time, residents in three states vote in statewide ballot issues to mandate Medicaid expansion. Other states where Democrats gained governorships may soon expand coverage also.
Monnica T. Williams and other researchers released a comprehensive review earlier this year of racial inclusion and recruitment in psychedelic research. She learned the problem is bigger than she thought.
The decertification of USA Gymnastics by the US Olympic Committee has been considered a “nuclear option” to be used only as a last resort, but in this case, even that may not be sufficient to change a poisonous nonprofit culture.
Arkansas’s failure to locate an evaluator for its controversial Medicaid work requirement reinforces questions about whether the program is even meant to be effective.
Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris assert that “public governance of our schools matters for the health of our democracy…it is paid for by the public, and it belongs to the public, not entrepreneurs.” So why do we allow its hijacking by philanthropy?
With the city’s housing costs spiraling out of control and many nonprofits being squeezed out of rental spaces, the reopening of the Fillmore Heritage Center as a mixed-use space offers a glimmer of hope.
Let’s remind ourselves as we prepare for the next two years, where much damage can be done and much progress made, that nonprofits have a fundamentally American role in helping to organize and educate the population for civic action and engagement—indeed, to teach individuals the very basic skills of democracy itself.
Make a note: Leaders of color and issues of marginalized communities have taken the main stage, and we must all step up to help center them.