Expanding the case for open 990 data

President Obama's 2014 budget includes a call for nonprofits to file their annual tax forms (990s) electronically (e-filing). This post by Sunlight Foundation, on why e-filing of 990s is important, hits the mark. An excerpt:

"Nonprofits are required to publish this data for good reason: their exclusion from various tax liabilities amounts to a huge subsidy from government to all kinds of activity (each dollar's worth of uncollected taxes is a dollar that has to be borrowed or collected from someone else). This subsidy will add up to around $60 billion in 2013 alone, according to government estimates (you can see this breakdown courtesy of the Pew Tax Expenditure Database by looking here, here and here). 990 data helps to ensure that the system isn't being abused. 

The IRS currently publishes -- and Public.Resource.Org redistributes -- 990 data as PDFs. But the IRS has been modernizing its systems and rules, and big nonprofits are now required to file electronically. Many smaller nonprofits do, too; after all, it's more efficient.

But so far the IRS won't publish the e-file data. Instead they give us PDFs, forcing those who want to work with 990 data to spend time and money re-digitizing information that already exists as well-structured, machine-readable data. "

Here's a letter, linked in The Sunlight Foundation post, from Carl Malamud, explaining why these data need to be made public in a useful fashion. While I have interests in these data sets that go far beyond fraud identification and prevention, I certainly agree that this is a valid reason to promote transparency.

The letter cites innovation, fraud prevention, easing regulators burdens, and the public's right to these data as reasons the IRS should act. I have another reason, appealing to American patriotism and pride. That is to say, the Canadians do it, shouldn't we?

Montreal is home to Ajah.ca - a Canadian company that turns both federal AND provincial open data on charities, government contracts, and foundation funding into a one-stop source for fundraising information can help you see more reasons to open these data. To an American, a first glance at the data on Ajah looks like the result of a Guidestar/Foundation Center mashup. The more you dig the more you realize these data are gathered much more efficiently (they're more up-to-date than 990 data - citations even include "made on" dates). Ajah includes government funding and corporate giving as well as philanthropic grants in ONE place, you can "profile" your charity and benchmark it by funding sources, look for recommended funders who've funded organizations like yours, and it is revenue self-sustaining (the costs of input are much lower than they are here, since the data are electronic to begin with and share formatting). I'm simply a fan of the potential practical utility of the information.

Ultimately, I'm most interested in electronic, open, machine readable 990 as a foundational brick in a new digital infrastructure for sharing information about the social economy, making progress on shared problems, and catalyzing new ways of working together. Here's to all the efforts that are trying to get us there.

Measuring and Indexing Social Progress

Here are two (relatively) new sources for measuring social progress

The Social Progress Index launched at the Skoll World Forum. It aims to show the degree to which nations "provide for the social and environmental needs" of their residents. It organizes data along three dimensions, basic human needs, wellbeing, and opportunity. The components of the index are explained on the site, the results can be viewed in the aggregate or by country/by component, and the methodology is explained (though the site mostly refers the reader to the full report). The site doesn't clearly state (or I couldn't find it) the data sources, except on page 45 of the downloadable methodology appendix.  The complete dataset is exportable in CSV format.

The Index is a product of the Social Progress Imperative.

The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board is a nonprofit effort to develop industry specific methods for tracking and reporting efforts at sustainable practice. As wonky as it sounds, SASB is trying to develop practices for valuing all assets and providing integrated ways to account for them. The need for this comes from the increasing recognition of "uncounted externalities" such as pollution. The desire is to help industries value and track their cumulative use of resources in standardized, comparable, required ways that can improve performance and investor knowledge.

SASB is developing the standards with many stakeholders, focusing on 88 industries, and has received financial support and endorsements from several foundations and Bloomberg LLP, as well as in-kind support from publicity firms, lawyers, and fundraisers.

Both efforts are interesting examples of data-driven approaches to change.

Giving Goes Social

On April 29, 2013 I'll be joining Rob Reich for a conversation about philanthropy and social media. The discussion follows a great workshop featuring Beth Kanter, Matthew Bishop, Jeremy Heimans, Aaron Sherinian, and Peter Sims.

Both events are hosted by The Stanford New York Alumni Board, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) and the 92nd Street Y.

Details are here.

Giving Goes Social

Workshop, Reception & Evening Conversation
Rob Reich, Lucy Bernholz & Beth Kanter
with distinguished guests

When:  Monday, April 29, 2013

Time:  Workshop 3:00-5:30 pm; Reception 5:30-6:30 pm; Evening Conversation 6:30-8:00 pm

Audience:  Public event whether you are a Stanford Alumni or not

Where:  The workshop, reception and evening conversation will all be held at the 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson St. New York, NY

Cost:  General admission is $25 each for the workshop and evening conversation. Discounted tickets for $20 each are available for Stanford alumni and their guests by using the promo code “Stanford.”  A $30 discounted package for the entire program is available by using the promo code "Stanford."

How to register:  Tickets can be purchased through the 92YTribeca website  or by calling the 92Y (1212.415.5500).

Instructions for buying tickets on the 92Y website are as follows:
1.     From the 92YTribeca webpage, select the date (April 29), click “buy now”
2.     In the promo code box enter Stanford, then click the purple arrow to validate code
3.     Add your tickets to cart and proceed to purchase
4.     If buying the a ticket for both events (workshop and evening conversation) visit http://www.92y.org/subscriptions/series/detail.aspx?series=647 and enter the promo code Stanford and proceed to purchase as above

About the workshop, 3:00-5:30 pm:
The afternoon workshop, “Social Media Mindsets and Tool Sets for Nonprofit Leaders,” will be led by Beth Kanter. Kanter is a master trainer, blogger, speaker, and author of two books, The Networked Nonprofit and Measuring the Networked Nonprofit. The workshop is intended for executive directors and organizational leaders that work for nonprofits and want to learn tips and techniques for scaling their organizations using social media. The workshop will provide a mix of content and time for discussion/reflection so leaders can begin to change their organizations from the inside out to scale the benefits of using social media for social good. They also will leave with many practical tips and suggestions for using social media tools to achieve impact for themselves and their organizations.

About the reception, 5:30-6:30 pm:
Following the workshop, a reception will be held at the 92Y Tribeca for all attendees of the event.  Stanford alumni, nonprofit leaders, social media experts, and the general public are invited to mingle from 5:30 to 6:30pm and enjoy drinks and snacks (no host bar). 

About the evening conversation, 6:30-8:00 pm:
Stanford scholars Rob Reich and Lucy Bernholz to will address a New York audience to share their far-sighted thinking on the future of good, part of the pair’s ReCoding Good in the 21st Century project. At Stanford, Rob and Lucy are engaged in leading-edge research exploring 21st Century, technology-driven innovations in philanthropy and civil society. Their talk will widen perspectives on everything from philanthropy’s uneasy relationship to democracy to how big data and the sharing economy are transforming giving.  An audience Q&A will follow the evening conversation.

The evening conversation will be kicked off by Stanford PACS Executive Director Kim Meredith and 92Y Deputy Executive Director Henry Timms who will provide an overview of the recently-launched  #GivingTuesday and how scholars, leaders, and practitioners are driving social giving. 
http://pacscenter.stanford.edu/overview/research/recoding-good

The #GoodJobs Challenge

Saturday, April 20th was a typically gorgeous Palo Alto spring day. For about 60 students and faculty of Stanford University, however, the weather outside did nothing to distract them from their tasks - using open data from the federal government, along with data from LinkedIn, GuideStar, and the Foundation Center to create online tools that could help young people find or create jobs in the social sector.

The genesis of the idea? The early signs of open data that we are beginning to see in the social sector, from GuideStar, the Foundation Center matched with the increasing numbers of open data sets available from government. Our goal? Begin putting these data sets to use - to drive demand, increase familiarity, suggest improvements and expansion needs to the data providers. And brainstorm and prototype some cool ideas that students feel would help them find or create meaningful, change-oriented careers and companies. The Challenge was an experiment by Stanford PACS, within the context of our #ReCodingGood project. It also served as a soft launch of our Digital Civil Society Lab.

Launched in partnership with the White House Office of Social Innovation, Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society hosted the codejam at the Design School. Six teams of students were joined by experts from The Aspen Institute's Impact Career Initiative,  Benetech, the Do Something Great Today Foundation, Fluxx Software, Khan Academy, LiquidNet for Good/MarketsForGood Initiative, Palantir, TechSoupGlobal/Caravan Studios, Teach Fishing, local foundations, law and venture capital firms, Stanford's Mechanical Engineering Program and ChangeLabs, and Watsi.org who worked with the teams, suggesting data sets, design features, and business model ideas.

What did they build? Civitas, ConnectU, and EXP designed tools aimed at making the application process for social sector jobs more visible, faster, and attractive to students through a combination of internship matching tools, common applications, and work experiences that serve the nonprofits while also helping students gain critical skills and experience.

AfterTheService, a special guest project at the Challenge, had a small group of students set to work on a real project - helping the White House's JoiningForces Initiative use Palantir software and GuideStar data to better understand the universe of veteran-serving organizations. In just a day's time the team identified several previously unknown gaps in the demand/supply of these services. The project is an exciting demonstration of disparate data sets - information from the Veterans Adminsitration, Census Bureau, GuideStar and elsewhere brought into view together to inform decision makers.

The judges - an incredible panel of local tech stars and social experts including Aditya Agarwal of Dropbox,  John Lilly of Mozilla and Greylock Partners, Somesh Dash of IVP and the Board of Stanford PACs, and Dustin Moscovitz of Facebook/Asana and Goodventures, and yours truly - selected two winning teams:

Aark.co is a "Career Prototyper." Using information you enter about social interests, skills, and industries/sectors of interests, it build on the LinkedIn database to show the career trajectories and workplaces of people with similar interests. Want to become a university provost or lead a global NGO? See how others who do that work got there, find contacts at places they've worked and others you may know who've worked with them.

SocialKit is designed to help social entrepreneurs make the right decision about corporate structure from the get go, and let them get on with changing the world, not filing paperwork. The brainchild of two entrepreneurial lawyers, SocialKit is already in the running of the Knight News Challenge. The team used the #GoodJobs challenge to further flesh out potential product offerings, revenue streams, and partnerships while also adding code to their prototype.

We also discovered a previously unrecognized link between data, tech, the social sector and dancing. You'll have to stay tuned for the world premier of the video... "The Evolution of Open Data Dancing," a crowdhacked version of the "Open Data Happy Dance."  In the meantime, I leave you with these photos of the event, and the new motto of the group, Carpe Datum!

Digital Civil Society

I think a lot about Digital Civil Society - how are digital technologies changing how we use our private resources for public benefit? It's easy to see the surface level changes that smart phones and laptops offer in how we organize, fund, create, and distribute these goods - online, with thumb clicks instead of by writing checks, instantly and more socially - but what really matters underneath the ease and speed? These questions are the premise to my work on the #ReCodingGood project.

I find it helpful to hash ideas out in public - and I seem to have thicker than usual skin for getting things wrong publicly - so I often put pretty half-basked ideas out there. You can find one undercooked version of a talk on Digital Civil Society here and it's pasted in below.

This post on Friday by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic caught my eye for just how quickly our involvement in digital civil society is changing. Disasters, sadly, seem to bring out plenty of opportunities to see both the best and the worst of what we can do with these tools. In his post, Madrigal points out the costs of all those volunteers searching through digital photos for culprits - vigilantism. When the crowd jumps in to help it can often nab the wrong person. It's one thing if those eager volunteers are calling in tips to hotlines - those calls get vetted and checked on by professionals, who follow a code of practice and the law (or are supposed to).

When the crowd zeroes in on a photo it can track down the identity of the person, find their online presence (Facebook, Twitter), and harass the person in significant ways. As Madrigal points out, there is a reason we have due process. As worrisome is to realize there is no recourse against the crowd - when it makes a mistake it can just walk away, leaving a trail of damaged reputations in its wake. As Madrigal writes, "No one is saying the police are perfect or that the FBI is always fair, but they have an ethos, a set of rules they're sworn to uphold, and accountability if they make mistakes. And in any case, the way to fix the failings of our law enforcement procedures is not to create an even more flawed system."

I don't think it's a matter of one or the other. Today we have both versions of civil society very much in place. Formal, trained, legally structured systems and informal, voluntary, mobile, connected actors. The former has power, resources, and rules. The second group is quick acting, has cutting-edge tools and skills at its disposal, and loose, mostly unwritten rules of practice. How it can be most helpful - while causing the least collateral damage - is not yet clear. But with every natural and man-made disaster, as well as with every advance in micro-donations, data contributions, hackathons, and mobile organizing, we get closer to needing answers to this question, not just more action. The future is not one system or the other, it will be the blend of the two.

We're reaching a point now where we should anticipate these digital civil actions. Good journalists seem increasingly self-aware of their need to involve the public in news gathering, but not act like the public when it comes to trafficking in credible information rather than rumors. Civil society also needs to adapt to its hybrid analog/digital state.

   Digital Civil Society COF GPF 2013

The Digital Public Library of America

Sometimes, in all our fixation with technologies, we forget that there are people making these things happen. The tragic events in Boston on Monday, continuing through the lockdown on the city and its suburbs this morning, provided me with an all-too stark reminder of the humanity that underlies the most beautiful technologies.

I, like hundreds of others, was scheduled to attend the launch party for the Digital Public Library of America on Thursday, April 18. The events was to be held at the Boston Public Library, which has been, since Monday, closed to as part of the crime scene associated with the marathon bombings.

(Main stairway, McKim Building, Boston Public Library)

It was an idea filled with delicious irony - coming together to celebrate the intangible. Gathering in the gorgeous original McKim building or the newer Philip Johnson addition of the BPL one feels the attendant weight of history. These buildings are monuments to what we treasure - libraries as sanctuaries, preserving the past while people gather in the hushed present. But the DPLA is different - it is today's forward looking effort to connect collections across the country with the purpose of preparing for a future of digital everything. It is an untouchable virtual repository of metadata (and therefore, doesn't have any lion guardians of its own). But it is also, and as importantly, the result of the creativity, commitment, and hard work of hundreds of people from all across the country and their peers around the world.

I've been mostly an eager observer of the effort since reading Robert Darnton's 2010 call in The New York Review of Books. I remember reading that article and tweeting off one small idea on "orphan works."

Soon afterwards someone followed up on my post and pointed me to listservs and wikis I could use. I sent off a "cold email" to Professor Darnton who was kind enough to respond and connect me to the staff at the Berkman Center working on the nascent DPLA. There, several people patiently pointed out to me the (numerous) shortcomings of my idea, linked me to resources where others had been working on this issue for some time, and encouraged me to learn more. With nothing to offer but enthusiasm,  I was welcomed to participate.  In 2012 I attended a DPLA gathering at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, where I could barely understand the jargon of the librarians and information scientists but left with a big smile on my face. The organizers had started with a panel about "stakeholders" - which included a museum curator, bookstore owner, publisher, activist archivist, and an author. I knew, right then, this was an idea for me.

The week's events in Boston forced the postponing of the gathering, though the founders still launched the beta version of the DP.LA website as planned at noon on Thursday. The community of people who made it happen have continued their work, while also reaching out to comfort each other in tragic times. From 3000 miles away I benefit from their work while also missing them, these people I have not yet met, who made this great resource possible.

Digital Action - 2 bits from the Brits, 1 from Boston

Philanthropy Impact - a UK Philanthropy newsletter - has this post asking if digital giving has come of age.

The Guardian UK has this article on How Digital Media is Changing Philanthropy

And Matt Stempeck, a researcher at MIT's Center on Civic Media has this personal account of social media and misinformation during and after the Boston Bombings. He  includes a look at how quickly a Twitter charity scammer got flagged and stopped by other Twitter users.

Carpe Datum

The abundance of video, photos, tweets, text and voice calls from those in Boston on Monday has become a major part of the news story as we shift from the first shock and horror to efforts to solve the mystery and catch the bomber(s).

Newscasters and pundits have been repeating the fact that there is so much more surveillance video, as well as snaps captured by everyone with a cell phone, than in previous events such as the Atlanta Olympics bombing, subway attack in London, and other events.

Of course, making sense of all that data is another story. Professionals and fancy technology have a role to play. And so do distributed communities, such as Reddit users, who've been busy uploading, sorting, and tagging photos - as a volunteer community. The willingness of many to help has to be balanced against the potential for mob justice or vigilantism - and you can see both at work in the discussion boards where volunteers are active.

Individuals also quickly stepped up to aggregate and curate the tweets, texts, blogs, and wikis offering help - by late afternoon Monday this site, which uses RebelMouse to aggregate info from social media, was already busy. Note it had information on everything from formal institutions such as the Red Cross and Boston police to kind Bostonians offering a place to get wifi to airbnb rooms for stranded runners. It also had information on charity scams. It's amazing how quickly services such as Google Person Finder, OpenStreetMap, and Twitter have become part of our collective responses to disasters. Each of these services relies on digital information - data. Our ability to share it, make sense of it, painstakingly tag and search it. We are surrounded by digital data - for both good and bad. It's up to us to use it right.

GoodJobs CodeJam

You've heard of hackathons. These are short, dedicated periods of time in which software coders and data wonks get together and create something new, improve some code, or tweak and complement an existing product. They've become integral parts of corporate culture at places like Facebook, are an important part of the Open Government movement, and increasingly common in the social sector.

They're also ripe for improvement. The "cutting room" floor is littered with apps and tools built in these weekend long events. The need to connect the coders and the techies to the social problem solvers, policy wonks, and potential customers for a new app, website or tech tool is now well understood. Creating ongoing communities of coders and doers is as important a result of these one-off events as the 24 hour apps they produce.

Building on the experience and insights of hackathon leaders, Stanford PACS is excited to host our first CodeJam this coming Saturday, April 20th. In partnership with the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, LinkedIn, Palantir, The Aspen Institute, and several other Silicon Valley firms student teams will be working on a variety of ideas all drawn from the intersection of open data, jobs and job creation, and the social sector. We've got teams working on social enterprise corporate forms to immigration and work issues, 'common applications' and career planning tools. We also have a special challenge focused on jobs for veterans and military families.

The students will get advice from experts from the Foundation Center, Caravan studios, Benetech, SocialCoding4Good, GirlGeeks, Watsi, investors/attorneys, and local foundations involved in the Reporting Commitment. They're joining us help the students ground their ideas in reality and to think about how this type of CodeJam opportunity might be applied to some of their data. We'll highlight the Markets4ForGood effort and the Data Interoperability Grand Challenge as potential "next steps" for some of the ideas, and are thrilled that at least one of the teams is already a Knight News Challenge semifinalist.

As part of the ongoing work of the #ReCodingGood project and Digital Civil Society Lab we're planning to continue events like these in partnership with social sector organizations, government agencies, and tech firms - always looking toward building human connections and ongoing relationships as well as new code or apps. We hope this is a useful addition to the burgeoning network of hackathons - including the NASA SpaceApps Challenge (which also launches on April 20th) and the National Day of Civic Hacking.

Stay tuned - I'll report back on the outcomes of the day.

Thinking harder about taxes and philanthropy

Here's an event worth watching (or attending if you are in DC)

The Charitable Deduction in American Political Thought

"The charitable contribution deduction is in peril, a potential casualty in the looming budget wars of 2013," notes attorney Alex Reid. One reason for that might be our surprisingly superficial understanding of the purposes and effects of the deduction. Most discussion focuses on its place in the tax code, its impact on the federal budget, or its immediate economic effect on giving.

On April 16, the Bradley Center will hold a different conversation about the deduction, one that explores its deepest dimensions as an expression of fundamental American political principles. Two recent essays set the stage wonderfully, and will be our "assigned reading": one, by Alex Reid, entitled "Renegotiating the Charitable Deduction," and the other by Rob Reich, entitled "Toward a Political Theory of Philanthropy." In addition to these authors, one of the nation’s foremost scholars of philanthropy, Stanley Katz of Princeton, will join the panel to provide an historical perspective. Hudson Institute Senior Fellow William Schambra will moderate the discussion.

Tuesday, April 16 - 12:00 to 1:30 p.m.
Hudson Institute - Betsy and Walter Stern Conference Center
1015 15th Street, NW - Suite 600
Washington, DC 20005

Register online - click here.
Registration and a buffet lunch will open at 11:30 a.m.

Bradley Center events are streamed live online.
[You do not need to register to watch the panel discussion online.]
Please watch by clicking here.

Required Reading
Alex Reid, "Renegotiating the Charitable Deduction," Exempt Organizations Tax Review 71 (2013): 21-31.

To request a copy of Rob Reich's "Toward a Political Theory of Philanthropy," please email bradleycenter@hudson.org.

Crowdfunding health care

First, came GlobalGiving, DonorsChoose, and Kiva. These platforms brought crowd giving/lending to new heights. They also represent a trajectory of increasingly narrow area of focus for the platforms - GlobalGiving funds development projects internationally, DonorsChoose focuses on US classroom teachers' needs, and Kiva "kickstarted" the crowdfunding of microloans. More recently, Dave Eggers and the good folks at 826 National launched a platform to fund college aid called ScholarMatch.

2013 may be shaping up as the year of crowdfunding medical needs. There are least three (send me others) new sites that provide access to funding for urgent medical needs. One of them, Watsi, has received a lot of attention for being the first nonprofit included in the Y Combinator accelerator - a badge of honor at least in Silicon Valley. Another, Samahope, which funds surgical procedures, comes from the brains behind SamaSource - a pioneer in digital micro job creation. The third, Kangu, focuses specifically on helping women have healthy pregnancies and births.

I had a chance to meet with Grace Garey of Watsi, so I have a better sense of how that program works than the others. What struck me about Watsi is its commitment to make transparent all the information about the process, the patients, the clinics, the funding. This is a big deal - especially since we are talking about people's health care. It raises issues of what kinds of health information are individuals willing to share? How do you present enough information to attract funding and protect the dignity of the individual? What will happen to all that data as Watsi grows? (It has already served more than 200 people in just a few months.) That's 200+ life changing medical treatments. By virtue of their involvement at Y Combinator you know they're interested in getting big ("scale" being the buzzword you are looking for). Watsi is already working with its medical partners on "informed consent" and patient waivers. These patients may well be more informed than many Americans are about their own medical care. They may also be more in charge of the consent they give. But what rights to their data will they have down the road?

It seems critical to me that these platforms be "patient-centric" by design. These are peoples' lives we're talking about here. Sure, the donor experience is important, but the possibility for horrible power dynamics to emerge between donor and recipient seem that much more magnified in a situation in which a compelling story is key to motivating a donation. Watsi is very attuned to these issues and working hard not to structure a marketplace of sob stories. Being incredibly clear about what's actually being funded (the medical practitioner, not the patient) is part of that. Finding ways to keep the doctors/nurses in control of the timing of any medical action (and not contingent on funding) is another piece of the puzzle (one which Watsi has already addressed).

In addition to the plenitude of intimate issues raised by sites like these, there are also larger policy issues. The growth of microfinance has had positive results and there are significant concerns with how it influences commercial lenders with purely financial motivations or shapes national policies and state investments in functioning financial systems. With any philanthropic activity there is the question (if the holy grail of "scale" is reached) of letting public funders off the hook and leading them to invest less in a social safety net, not more. Which is, given the attention deficit disorder of both individual and institutional funders, a real problem.

Watsi, and I assume Kangu and Samahope, have the potential to become powerful new sources of data. Just by browsing Kangu's website, for example, I can now tell you that prenatal care and an attended birth costs $253 in Uganda. As more and more people are served by these systems, their data on costs, quality, efficiencies, and health outcomes could become quite valuable.

These medical crowdfunding site are fascinating to me. In many ways, they are returning us to the time before national health services and social security, when turning to one's community for financial assistance with medical needs or college costs was the norm. Of course, global connectivity is changing our definition of who constitutes "one's community," but another way of seeing these services is as mutual aid on steroids. (And minus some of the mutuality - will a Ugandan woman ever contribute to the costs of maternal care for an American? I suppose it's possible, Kiva now facilitates many loans between "developing" countries).

What do you think is the next frontier for social sector crowdfunding?

DAF Direct

Donors seem to love DAFs (Donor Advised Funds). Community foundations sell them. Fidelity and Schwab sell them. There are billions of dollars of charitable funds held in these vehicles. Last year, at Fidelity alone, donors authorized 428,000 grants for $1.6 billion from their DAFs, and put another
$3.6 billion into their charitable accounts.

And now the purveyors of these funds, along with a pilot group of nonprofits, have developed a way for donors to move money directly from their DAFs to a nonprofit through a widget on the nonprofits website. It's called DAF Direct - and it is being piloted with ten nonprofits: American Red Cross; Boston Symphony Orchestra; Charity Navigator; Cradles to Crayons; Feeding America; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pan- Massachusetts Challenge; Save the Children; and WGBH.

The plan as announced will make the DAFDirect widget available to nonprofits and other purveyors of donor advised funds. 

 

Money and Life

 "Originally, it was invented as a piece of social technology."

That comment refers to money. It's the lead-in to a new documentary, called Money and Life, that asks some interesting questions. The film opens next week. You can find out when it's playing near you at the website.



I'm looking forward to what the movie has to say - questioning the fundamental role of money in our lives goes even deeper beneath the surface of the "wither philanthropy?" question I've been asking all these years. 

Thanks to @philanthrogeek for telling me about it.