Philanthropic bloggers have been abuzz with Kjerstin Erickson’s decision to post the details a few weeks back about a funding crisis that could put her NGO, FORGE, out of business.  After Sean Stannard-Stockton described this as an experiment in “radical transparency” on his Tactical Philanthropy blog, many folks have jumped to Kjerstin’s aid, with the [...]

(I originally posted this on Tuesday 11/11/08 and it mysteriously disappeared, so I’m reposting.  Unless there’s been foul play from a new philanthropist acolyte, I can only chalk it up to a site glitch.  Apologies for the redundancy.) It is a truth almost universally acknowledged, at least by NGO leaders and international development policy experts, [...]

A continuing theme on which I’ve commented several times (links here, here, and here) concerns the increasing share of private resources in development aid.  Sam Worthington, the president and CEO of InterAction, the leading coalition of 165 U.S. development and relief NGOs, was on campus this week to kick off the NGO Leaders in Humanitarian [...]

So, questions still remain about the ability of the U.S. disaster relief system to handle a large-scale catastrophe.  What can we do? (1) Develop a national disaster relief fund With such a fund, private contributions for relief and recovery would be collected and distributed by an independent entity, with independent oversight, whose sole purpose is [...]

As Hurricane Gustav approached this weekend, the president and both would-be presidents engaged in a bit of fund raising, mostly for the American Red Cross (ARC).  Barack Obama directly asked all those in his fund raising network to send funds to the ARC; John McCain made mention of the ARC in his remarks and the [...]

While working through a backlog of reading I came across this post by Lucy Bernholz* on Philanthropy 2173, in which she characterizes “foreign aid” as “international philanthropy” while referencing Reinventing Foreign Aid, a new volume edited by William Easterly. Private philanthropy is part of “foreign aid,” and as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, arguably its [...]

While I have some qualms about the methodology behind the data, it seems clear that private resources for international development are growing rapidly, and are beginning to rival official development aid (ODA). This could portend a shift in the relationships between NGOs and the governments and key multi-lateral institutions that traditionally set the framework for [...]

Eugene Tempel and Una Osili have an article in the recent Nonprofit Times that examines how recent trends in immigration might affect the U.S. nonprofit sector.   Their analysis provides additional nuance to the previous postings on remittances.  They too highlight the $200 billion worth of private transfers for 2005, as estimated by the World Bank, [...]

Some of the indexes mentioned in my recent posts group NGOs together with private philanthropy (i.e., grantmaking foundations) when creating their classifications, since both derive support from private contributions and are independent organizations with private oversight.  Yet I believe the similarities go much deeper. Because many international development and relief NGOs are operational – that [...]

The Index of Global Philanthropy 2008 (mentioned in my previous post) tries to take a comprehensive approach to tracking funding flows and has developed a measure called “U.S. economic engagement.”  It includes official development assistance (ODA); private giving through foundations, NGO/private voluntary organizations, universities and colleges, and faith-based groups; private capital flows; and remittances from immigrants [...]