Originally published June 26, 2015 on Inside Philanthropy. Infrastructure. It's not exactly the first word that comes to mind when you think of environmental grantmaking. But as the Surdna Foundation sees it, future metropolitan infrastructure decisions go beyond which bridges and roads to fix; they determine how equitable and sustainable a city is for generations.
Surdna is a medium-sized, national foundation with assets of just over a billion and annual giving of $46 million in 2014, derived from the wealth of the Andrus family (Surdna, get it?).
Helen Chin, Surdna’s Sustainable Environments program director, recently shed some light on the foundation’s green giving in an interview with Inside Philanthropy, including the thinking behind this unique approach to sustainability.
Read MoreOriginally published on Inside Philanthropy on June 22, 2015. Named one of the Five Best Ideas of the Day by The Aspen Institute, cross-posted on Time.
One rabble rouser has been trying to get the IRS to make individual nonprofit tax forms available in an electronic format anyone can easily search. What may seem to a casual observer like a minor battle would actually be revolutionary for the entire sector.
Quick disclosure: I hate 990s. Not the concept of them, of course, as they are the chief method of accountability that nonprofits entities must file annually in exchange for tax exemption. But I hate just about everything else about them.
Read MoreOriginally published in the Worcester Telegram May 31, 2015. BOSTON - About 100 students from Worcester’s South High Community School managed to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill Friday, and they pulled it off before lunch.
Granted, it was just part of a simulation, held at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. But getting that many teenagers to work together on anything, much less one of the most complex and heated political issues in the country, is impressive.
Read MoreOriginally published at Mental Floss, May 15, 2015. Strange things happen in island ecosystems, and occasionally—whether by accident, or design—a population of adorable creatures takes over. They draw tourists, can be a little spooky, and sometimes wreak havoc. But you have to admit: they are pretty cute.
Read MoreOriginally published April 22, 2015 on Inside Philanthropy. A growing mountain of research suggests that climate change is likely to aggravate every problem now confronting humanity: hunger, gender inequality, ethnic conflict, unemployment—you name it. So you'd think, by now, that this existential threat would be a top priority of philanthropy.
You'd be wrong. Less than 2 percent of all philanthropic dollars go to the cause, and much of it comes from just a handful of funders. Where is all the money?
Read MoreOriginally published in American Forests Magazine, Winter 2015.What Boston’s battle with the Asian longhorned beetle can teach us about stopping an invasive pest in its tracks.
Clint McFarland didn’t want to believe the pictures he was looking at on his smartphone.
Late on a Friday afternoon in July 2010, he was at a gathering in Worcester, Mass., to recognize federal and state staff who had been working long, hard hours for two years to wrangle the city’s runaway Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) infestation, the country’s largest by far. By the time a homeowner reported it in 2008, the invasive beetles had already been boring their way across the heavily forested city in the center of the state, frighteningly close to the edge of contiguous forests that span New England and reach into Canada.
Read MoreOriginally published on Mental_Floss, Dec. 24, 2014. For a short window in the 1960s, aluminum Christmas trees gleamed in living rooms nationwide—but this glorious, glittering reign would be all too brief. Within the decade, they were relegated to the curb as aesthetic tastes shifted. But nostalgia has fueled an aluminum tree renaissance in recent years. Here's a brief history.
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