Pratham wins fifth Kravis Prize

Pratham, India’s largest educational non-profit organization, has been awarded the Henry R Kravis Prize in Leadership. Founded in 1994, Pratham aims to improve the quality of education for India’s most vulnerable children. Its flagship programme, Read India, works with governments and communities to improve the reading, writing and basic arithmetic skills of children aged between 6 and 14 and has reached around 34 million children to date. Now in its fifth year, the prize, whose previous winners include Fazle Abed, founder of BRAC, and the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), is worth $250,000. It will be awarded at a ceremony on 23 March.

For more information
www.cmc.edu/kravisprize/documents/Announcement_Release_2010.pdf

Online fundraising website Bmycharity to close

UK-based fundraising website Bmycharity is to close next week after a sponsorship deal collapsed, leaving it without the resources it needs to continue. The site, which was set up in 2000, stopped taking commission charges in October last year, stating that it would instead be funded by business sponsorship. Earlier this month, the firm announced it had recruited its first corporate sponsor, financial services company Interactive Investor – and managing director Ben Brabyn said the company had not pulled out of the sponsorship deal. Bmycharity has, however, been unable to raise the capital needed to maintain and expand the site as hoped. Brabyn stressed that funds raised through the site would be safe and that final payments would be made to charities during April, although the site itself will stop taking donations on 19 March.

Source
Third Sector Online, 11 March 2010

For more information
www.bmycharity.com

Philanthropedia publishes self-assessment

Philanthropedia, which ranks non-profits on the basis of soliciting and analysing experts’ opinions, has produced a white paper entitled ‘Consolidating Expert Opinion about High-Impact Nonprofits: Review of Philanthropedia’s Methodology’. Through consideration of the four areas of research in which Philanthropedia has been active − education, climate change, microfinance and homelessness in the Bay Area − the paper examines the virtues of using experts (foundation professionals, non-profit senior staff, researchers, etc) to identify high-impact non-profits, and describes Philanthropedia’s progress towards a methodology for doing so. According to the authors, Erinn Andrews and Deyan Vitanov, using experts in this way provides high-quality information at a relatively low cost.

For more information
http://myphilanthropedia.org/whitepaper

How would you have spent $10 billion? Eight prominent philanthropists and charity chief executives give their views

Bill Gates’ pledge at Davos of $10 billion over the coming decade to help develop vaccines and distribute them to children in the developing world prompted the Wall Street Journal Europe to ask a number of prominent figures in the philanthropy or development world how they would spend that amount. The responses ranged from carbon-capture toilets to medical research prizes.

It’s a large sum, of course, but most felt that it wouldn’t be nearly enough to address the challenges they had in mind. Sir Percy Barnevik, chairman of Hand in Hand International, would spend the money on creating jobs as the best route to ending poverty. While Western governments give this top priority, he pointed out, it is a low priority for aid programmes. Mo Ibrahim would spend the money on developing national or regional statistics offices in Africa to allow for better policy-making and interventions.

Develop carbon-capture toilets, says Nic Francis of Cool nrg. Toilets that capture methane and use the gas as a cooking fuel would both produce an alternative fuel source and solve the sanitation problem ‘more or less overnight’. (Not surprisingly, most suggestions were drawn from respondents’ own area of interest.) Tido von Schoen-Angerer of Médecins Sans Frontières would create a prize fund to stimulate medical research to counter the ‘shocking neglect’ of medical innovation for diseases of the poor. He would also ‘make sure that the money is linked with efforts to keep medicines affordable’.

Don’t spend it, invest it, urges Dr Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation – on creating the will and the technical and financial means to develop successful innovations and take them to a wider scale. Sir Ronald Cohen of Bridges Ventures suggests the creation of social investment banks to boost social entrepreneurship by seeding ‘a powerful and effective social investment sector across the world’.

Stanley Fink of Absolute Return for Kids (ARK) would establish schools in the poorest parts of the world, in the belief that ‘a decent education is the single most effective tool to raise the well-being of every member of society’. Invest it in the fight against climate change, says Dame Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam GB: it is the single greatest issue and aggravates all other development challenges. It is ‘the main obstacle to Oxfam's aid efforts across 90 countries’.

To read the full article
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870378730457507535066898286...

Guidestar UK and Directory of Social Change to join forces

On 3 March the Directory of Social Change (DSC) and GuideStar International (GSI) announced that ownership of www.guidestar.org.uk, the free public website, and GuideStar Data Services has been transferred from GSI to DSC. DSC is the largest publisher of information for those who work in the voluntary sector in the UK.

Buzz Schmidt, founder of GuideStar and CEO of GSI, is confident that DSC is the right home for GuideStar. ‘It will return GuideStar UK to the ownership of a nationally focused sector leadership organization,’ says Schmidt. ‘National ownership of each national GuideStar is the model GSI encourages throughout the world.’

‘Together we will get more of the right information to the people who need it so that charities can be more effective in achieving their ambitions,’ says DSC CEO Debra Tyler. ‘There will be a programme of new services rolled out in the coming months, starting with one to help funders make more informed grantmaking decisions.’

GuideStar Data Services is a community interest company providing bespoke information. It operates the GuideStar Third Sector Database, which comprises more than 400 searchable fields of data on 350,000 organizations including charities, social enterprises and not-for-profit organizations.

For more information
www.guidestar.org.uk
www.guidestarinternational.org
www.dsc.org.uk

Contact Richard Lee at rlee@dsc.org.uk

Call for Nominations: 2010 Raymond Georis Prize for Innovative Philanthropy in Europe

We have the pleasure of announcing the launch of the seventh annual Raymond Georis Prize for Innovative Philanthropy in Europe, established by The Network of European Foundations' Mercator Fund. The Prize will be awarded at a ceremony in Brussels on the occasion of the European Foundation Centre’s 21st Annual General Assembly which will take place 2-4 June 2010.

The Prize rewards exceptional and innovative European Philanthropy and is described in detail on the Call for Nominations brochure attached.

Candidates must be proposed by a Nominator in order to be considered for the Prize, thus offering the opportunity to attribute recognition to a project, foundation, organisation or individual's contribution to European Philanthropy.

To submit a nomination, the application form and further information concerning the Prize can be obtained by contacting georisnominations@mercatorfund.net

Entries close on Friday, 30 April 2010.

For future communication, we would appreciate it if you could send us your full postal address.

We are looking forward to receiving your nominations.

Warm regards,

Norine MacDonald QC
President
The Network of European Foundations’ Mercator Fund

Alliance launches first ever online discussion

Alliance is pleased to announce the launch of its first online discussion on the subject of Civil society vs markets – a false dichotomy?

The need for greater effectiveness in the non-profit sector and for organizations to measure this is receiving growing attention. While no one seriously disputes that organizations should assess their work, the main ground of the debate has tended to become drawn away into a discussion about whether the values of civil society (the premium it puts on democracy, solidarity, social justice, dialogue, relationships, values) are in danger of being overrun by those of social capital markets (business principles, metrics, evidence, return on investment, numbers). Discussion has thus become polarized between proponents of either civil society or markets.

The aim of this online forum is to discuss whether such a polarization is misplaced, whether the two paradigms can be reconciled, and whether the real question should rather be how assessment of an organization’s work, in whatever form it takes, can be done in such a way that it takes full account of the organization’s purpose.

Tris Lumley, Head of Strategy at New Philanthropy Capital, and David Bonbright, founder and Chief Executive of Keystone, have provided the opening articles so click here to read their posts and please do add your own comment as we hope this will become a lively debate on this key issue.

Join the debate!

Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust joins move to disinvest in mining company over Indian projects

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) has sold shares worth £1.9 million in the mining company Vedanta because of its plans to mine bauxite from a mountain in Lanjigarh and the Niyamgiri Hills, in the state of Orissa, which are sacred to the area’s Kondh tribal people. JRCT’s disinvestment follows similar action taken the previous week by the Church of England; other third sector investors, including the Millfield House Foundation, have also sold their shares in the company.

According to Susan Seymour, chair of JRCT’s investment committee, the trustees ‘were not convinced Vedanta was addressing shareholder concerns quickly enough to avoid destroying people’s lives and creating irreversible damage to the environment.’ The move underlines what she termed the charity’s activist investment approach, an approach famously illustrated in 2007 when the Trust sold shares worth £2 million in Reed Elsevier because of the publishing company’s involvement in arms fairs, through its subsidiary companies, and its refusal to relinquish them despite a three-year campaign.

In the present case, a spokeswoman for Vedanta said: ‘Vedanta remains fully committed to pursuing its investments in a responsible manner, respecting the environment and human rights.’ However, the move to disinvest in the company is bound to raise questions about its claim that ‘sustainable development is a key part of Vedanta’s strategy and overall ethos.’

Sources
Third Sector Online, 17 February 2010
Alliance, March 2007

For more information
www.vedantaresources.com

New resources for effective giving

Three new guides complete Active Philanthropy’s set of brochures addressing donor involvement with civil society organisations. The guides entitled ‘What do I want to achieve with my support?’, ‘How do I engage with the selected project?’ and ‘How do I assess the effects of my contribution?’, written by Burkhard Gnärig, help donors to identify and effectively support CSOs and concrete projects that best suit their aims.

The guides add to those published in 2008 ‘How do I find the right CSO to support?’ and ‘How do I assess the work of CSOs?’

For more information www.activephilanthropy.org
The brochures can be ordered by emailing info@activephilantrhopy.org

Tactical Philanthropy Advisors to help curate a Tactical Philanthropy Track at this year’s Social Capital Markets conference

Tactical Philanthropy Advisors is working with the team that produces the Social Capital Markets conference to curate a Tactical Philanthropy Track at this year’s conference (October 4-6 in San Francisco).

For more details visit the Tactical Philanthropy website