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Opinion: Restoring Lapsed Tax Extenders Is Vital to Nonprofits (Roll Call 3/27/12)
It’s no secret that Washington’s legislative gridlock continues to impede progress on restoring America's economic health. Even more distressing is how many time-proven tools that safeguard our social safety net have also fallen victim to this standstill.
Congress might have, without great effort, eased the burden for many by renewing a broad package of individual and corporate tax credits and deductions that were instead allowed to expire at the end of 2011....
Commentary: Get Rid of Red Tape and Restrictions (Washington Post 3/18/12)
Some 13,000 nonprofits employ nearly 120,000 workers and represent 26 percent of jobs in the District. Day in and day out, these organizations provide a vital safety net for our communities and contribute to the local economy.
As nonprofits cope with increases in demand and decreases in funding, the strain has left many hurting. For the third year in a row, a study by the Nonprofit Finance Fund has found that 60 percent of nonprofits have less than ninety days of cash on hand. The challenges that nonprofits face threaten the stability of services on which so many rely....
Commentary: When Philanthropy Goes Wrong (Wall Street Journal 3/09/12)
Entrepreneur and philanthropist Chuck Feeney recently made news when his foundation donated $350 million to Cornell University. The huge gift was made to clinch that institution's victory in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's competition to build a technology-incubating campus in New York City. Behind the scenes, what generated the Atlantic Philanthropies' donation was Mr. Feeney's refusal to fall into a trap that has snared many other philanthropists.
When a foundation is set up to dribble out its funds in perpetuity, there is a high risk it will eventually drift into projects the donor did not believe in. Recognizing this, Mr. Feeney has insisted on giving away money fast to do good now....
Op-Ed: Secret Donors to 'C4s' Play Behind-the-Scenes Politics (Los Angeles Times 3/02/12)
There's no mystery about why a business or industry group might be shy about how it spends money on election campaigns. Just ask department store chain Target.
In 2010, Target, which had been known for its progressive employment policies, faced a customer and shareholder backlash after it donated $150,000 to a pro-business PAC in Minnesota that was backing a gubernatorial candidate who opposed gay rights....
Op-Ed: Trees Have Needs (Miami Herald 3/01/12)
Seventy-five years ago, Theodor Geisel wrote the first of his forty-four popular books for children under the pen name Dr. Seuss. Included among such fanciful classics as The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham is one of my family's all-time favorites, The Lorax. My wife and I can hardly wait to take our children to see the new film adaptation — not only for fun but because it explains so well what I do.
One of the most recognizable quotes from The Lorax is: "I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues." And this is why the book holds special meaning, because reading about Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, and Humming-Fish is much easier than telling my kids I work to pass legislation that adds public lands to the National Wilderness Preservation System....
Op-Ed: Prizes With an Eye Toward the Future (New York Times 2/29/12)
Last week, David Bornstein wrote about how the Obama administration is using prize competitions to solve some of the problems government faces. Agencies as different as the Department of Labor and NASA are recruiting ideas from the public by offering prizes for solving challenges.
While solutions these prizes generate are often innovative, the practice of offering them is anything but new. In 1714, the British government offered a prize of £20,000 to the person who found a way to accurately determine a ship’s longitude. As described in the book Longitude, the Yorkshire carpenter and clockmaker John Harrison won the prize after decades of work by inventing a clock that worked at sea. Harrison’s solution revolutionized the maritime world....
Letter to the Editor: The Los Angeles Schools Chief, on Teacher Ratings (New York Times 2/29/12)
Bill Gates makes a strong argument (“Shame Is Not the Solution,” Op-Ed, Feb. 23) against public release of teachers’ individual performance assessments. The last thing any educational reformer should want is for class test scores to be bandied about like ballplayer batting averages, without any perspective or context.
At the Los Angeles Unified School District, we have consistently opposed making scores public. As with Mr. Gates and the work of his foundation, our focus is on developing an innovative system to assess teachers that includes the use of data....
Op-Ed: Women, Water and the Ugly Global Crisis We’re Not Talking About (Washington Post 2/28/12)
Imagine you’re a young woman in an urban slum, perhaps Nairobi or Mumbai. You spend several hours each day waiting for water to arrive on a truck. When that truck arrives, the driver charges a price that he alone sets.
You cannot control the price, how full the truck is, how many people are in line, when the truck arrives, or the quality of the water. You are unable to take on a job with fixed hours because you can’t predict these factors with regularity. To make matters worse, you never know the quality of the water coming from the truck, so you filter and treat it as best as you can, but your family often gets sick....
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