Grantmakers give $725,000 to groups working on D.C. school reform [News, 6/27]

EDUCATION
- Grants Will Aid Groups Working for Education Reform (WaPo, 6/27 | press release) – Led by the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, the Collaborative for Education Organizing (CEO) ”will award $725,000 in grants today to fund five District nonprofit organizations dedicated to the city’s public education restructuring.” WG’s Public Education Working Group has partnered with The Community Foundation to support the launch and on-going work of the Collaborative, with several members investing in the effort.
> Grant recipients: The Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center; the D.C. Alliance of Youth Advocates; Youth Education Alliance; D.C. Voice; Tellin’ Stories.

- County schools get grants to boost performance (Gazette, 6/19) – national funding for Pr. George’s County Public Schools from Dell and Broad Foundations.
- Tranportation rule change could leave D.C. schoolchildren behind (WaPo, 6/27)

PHILANTHROPY
California Foundations Back Compromise to Defeat Diversity-Disclosure Measure (Chronicle, 6/24)

HEALTH
$90 Million Urged to Expand Health Care - “Rand Report Calls for Focus on Residents East of the Anacostia” (WaPo, 6/27)

PROGRAMS
- National Children’s Museum to partner with the Accokeek Foundation on educational programs for kids. (Gazette, 6/26)
- Profile: Marriott Foundation for People with Disabilities’ Bridges school-to-work program (WaPo, 6/26)

$4 per GALLON
IRS raises mileage deductible rate 8 cents (Balitmore Sun, 6/24)

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation supports new elder-care effort [News, 6/25]

AGING
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Supports New Elder-Care Effort (WSJ, via the Chronicle, 6/24) – “effort to replace large nursing homes with small, homelike facilities for 10 to 12 elderly residents”
> Related: WG’s FunderView (June 2008) – The Agua Fund’s Bonita Tindley talks about funding for elderly-care issues

PHILANTHROPY/NONPROFITS
- Washington Area Women’s Foundation Awards $645,500 in New Grants (6/23)
- Nonprofits struggle to keep up with needs (WBJ, 6/20) – Op-ed by the Women Foundation’s Phyllis Caldwell

HOUSING
D.C. Plans To Inspect All Rental Housing – will proactively inspect all buildings as part of crackdown on slumlords (WaPo, 6/25)

HEALTH
- District Sues CareFirst, Says Provider Must Donate Millions (WaPo, 6/25)
CareFirst’s D.C. operation is a federally chartered not-for-profit that must be run as a “charitable and benevolent institution.” But what exactly does “charitable and benevolent” mean? And there’s the problem.
- Doctors Balk at Electronic Records (WaPo, 6/24)

EDUCATION
- Teacher Bonuses Get Unions’ Blessing in Pr. George’s County (WaPo, 6/25)
- Report: Area math, reading scores spike (Examiner, 6/25)

The latest from WG’s Sustainable Communities Working Group

by Mardell Moffett (Cafritz Foundation), Chair

Here are a few major items to report as we move into the summer months:

• After 3 years, Karen FitzGerald is stepping down as chair of the Sustainable Communities Working Group. Under her leadership, SCWG has enjoyed numerous successes, including fostering the development of the Washington Regional Equity Network; and planning, developing, and launching the Partnership for Prince George’s County. Without her bold advocacy at the Meyer Foundation – which included securing $150,000 for its development – the Partnership would not have enjoyed as successful a launch as it had in January. On behalf of Washington Grantmakers, I thank Karen for her dedication, leadership, and hard work.
• Plans are being finalized to launch an office greening competition in September. “Grantmakers Go Green” will challenge all WG members to undertake various environmentally-conscious efforts around the office and measure their outcomes. A planning committee has been hard at work for the past several months mapping out the expectations and details of the competition. Our overarching goal is to educate and motivate WG members around green practices so that they, in turn, can spread their knowledge and habits to their grantees. Details of the competition will be announced soon, and we are very excited about it. Please let us know if you are interested in joining in on the planning!
• On June 16, SCWG, Prince Charitable Trusts, and the Cafritz Foundation hosted a briefing about GreenSPACE – a new state-of-the-art resource center for green building in the metropolitan area. The District’s Green Building Act has sweeping implications for funders and grantees, and both Maryland and Virginia are working towards similar legislation. GreenSPACE will serve as a valuable point of coordination for funders, nonprofits, business leaders, and government officials. We will keep the Working Group informed as the project progresses.
• Finally, we will be bringing the Working Group back together for a Summer Quarterly meeting on July 10th, from 10:00am-noon. At the meeting, we will update each other on activities. You can register here.

We look forward to seeing you soon. If you have any questions about the Working Group, please contact Carolynn Mambu at mambu@washingtongrantmakers.org.

Best,

Mardell Moffett
Chair, Sustainable Communities Working Group

Dental care for D.C. homeless, thanks to CareFirst grant [News, 6/24]

HEALTH
Comprehensive dental care for D.C. homeless (wire, 6/24) – Unity Health Care will open a center at the Federal City Homeless Assistance Center with a grant from WG member CareFirst.

PHILANTHROPY
Rockefeller 2.0: Gates relaunches philanthropy (MSNBC, 6/23) – As Bill Gates leaves Microsoft to go full-time at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (WG member), philanthropy gets a lot of ink. Rick Cohen: “One out of every 10 foundation dollars spent is going to have the Gates name on it” … “an influence that is impossible to calculate.”

FAMILY INCOME
Capital Area Asset Builders celebrates low-income D.C. participants’ savings in 2007 (6/23) - Supporters include WG members Washington Area Women’s Foundation and The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation.

DEVELOPMENT
Green Alliance Takes a Stand at Poplar Point (WaPo, 6/24)

HOUSEKEEPING
- WG Daily won’t be daily from Thursday through Tuesday due to staff travel.
- Nonprofits, foundations, corporate givers–we’re always interested in your press releases and news. Send to grantmakers@gmail.com.
- Email subscribers–the daily news is usually online a couple of hours before it hits your inbox. For the early scoop, visit WashingtonGrantmakers.org.

…and straight from the actual AP wire (via DCeiver) comes the headline: “Everything seemingly is spinning out of control.” (So don’t worry, it’s not just you.) -Nick

Recent postings on the WG Job Board

Post and find jobs here. (WG members post for free–see “30-second Update” page for the code.)

• Program Officer - Samberg Family Foundation (Arlington, Virginia)
• Operations Assistant - Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors (District of Columbia)
• Marketing and Event Manager - Fight For Children, Inc. (District of Columbia)

Private foundation giving up 7 percent in 2007 [News, 6/23]

Despite Economic Dip, Giving Rose in 2007 (WaPo, 6/23) Giving USA survey says: Charitable giving up 1 percent … private foundations, up 7 percent … corporate, down 1 percent … personal bequests, up 4 percent. But even a slight decline next  year could severely hurt nonprofits that are ”chronically undercapitalized anyway,” says the Meyer Foundation’s Julie Rogers. “They may be very well managed, but they live at the financial margins because most of them don’t have much by way of financial reserves or working capital, and they are raising every dollar every year.”
> Increase in Charitable Giving Dampened by Signs of Belt-Tightening (NYTimes, 6/23)

Fenty Consolidates Control Over Youth Nonprofit - ”Millicent Williams, who had been head of Serve DC, the mayoral volunteerism concern, will be the new executive director of the Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp.” (CityPaper, 6/20)

“Britain’s most generous philanthropists” (Guardian, 6/22) “a new kind of philanthropy that includes forging links with governments that have converted projects into national policies.” (Telegraph, 6/22)

DEVELOPMENT
Seeking to prevent development at Poplar Point, the Earth Conversation Corps is “90 percent of the way sure” that they’re going to sue D.C. for failing to clean up toxic waste there. (WBJ, 6/20) This has led several to note that while parks are important, so is dense, mixed-use development.

ENVIRONMENT
“A local nonprofit aims to unveil the first nationally standardized green scorecard for buildings” (WBJ, 6/20)

_____________________________
@WG:
Public Education Working Group - June 25
Children, Youth, and Families Working Group - DYRS Update – July 1
Sustainable Communities Working Group - July 10
Summer Film Series: Part I - July 10

It’s Friday! Here’s some news [News, 6/20]

TRANSIT
- D.C. region to coordinate on traffic, transit information (Examiner, 6/20)
- Prince William County to Add Mass Transit To Plan for Transportation (WaPo, 6/19)
- Transportation leaders travel into future (WTOP, 6/19)

PHILANTHROPY
- “Nonprofit?” Nonsense (WGDaily, 6/19) – WG’s Tamara Copeland on why the “nonprofit” label needs to go.
- Economic downturn takes toll on charitable giving (BizJournals, 6/18)

$4 per GALLON
Metro no longer needs a special event to set records for ridership. (WBJ, 6/18)

EDUCATION
- House bill would give D.C. sole control of charter schools (Examiner, 6/20)
- 2 School Entrepreneurs Lead the Way on Change (NYTimes, 6/19) – I did not know that the founder of Teach for America is married to the guy who runs the Knowledge is Power Program.
- Efforts to close achievement gap may hurt best students, report says (Examiner, 6/19)

PEOPLE
Donna Edwards is sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives – Until recently, she served as executive director of the Arca Foundation (WaPo, 6/20).

“Nonprofit?” Nonsense.

Tamara Lucas Copeland, President, Washington Grantmakers

Last week, I was invited by Chuck Bean to join a panel at the Nonprofit Roundtable’s annual meeting. The topic: how our region’s nonprofit community is perceived and how best to promote its value.

It was a wonderful opportunity to pose a question that has bothered me for years: Why must we keep defining ourselves in terms of what we are not (i.e. nonprofit)? It’s a misleading term and it marginalizes the work that we do.

Dollars and cents aside, here are the remaining definitions of the word profit: “benefit; gain; advantage; to be of service.” “Nonprofit,” then, would describe something that provides no benefit, no gain, no advantage, and no service. Are we really a “nonprofit community?” Let’s see…

We represent almost 10 percent of the country’s workforce, and about the same percentage of the country’s GNP. Along with the government and the business community, we complete a three-legged stool. (If we disappeared tomorrow, they’d notice.)

We help the needy. We fund innovative solutions. We prod government to better serve its citizens. We help America meet its social and moral obligations.” The nonprofit community? Really?

It seems logical that the Greater Washington region could lead the way in discarding this unfortunate label and improving our collective reputation.

Thankfully, no meetings or extended debate would be required. All we need to do is to stop using the term “nonprofit.” The best replacements will, by necessity, rise to the top. I’m ready for a new name, aren’t you?

My best,

Nonprofits working to address the foreclosure crisis in Greater Washington [News, 6/19]

FORECLOSURE CRISIS
D.C. Region’s Foreclosure Rate Soars (WaPo, 6/19) – “Sixfold Increase Surpasses Most Hot Spots in Country”

* From the Nonprofit Roundtable: You Have 10 Days to Move Out – A scan of nonprofits working on the front lines of the foreclosure crisis in Greater Washington–supported by WG member Fannie Mae and released at today’s ‘Regional Housing Foreclosure Summit’, convened by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and sponsored by Freddie Mac (both WG members). The report finds:

Two key areas of need: 1) Nonprofits that provide emergency assistance and 2) Nonprofit homebuyer counseling programs

PEOPLE
Fannie Mae’s Stacey Stewart gives back to the community (WBJ, 6/9) – We missed this one when it first came out. Stewart is a member of Washington Grantmakers’ Board.

Gray asks grantmakers to help shape children’s policy agenda

Members of Washington Grantmakers’ Children, Youth, and Famillies Working Group only expected to hear a few updates from Vincent Gray at their summer quarterly meeting last week. Instead, the DC City Council Chairman made the group an offer – help the Council create a children’s policy agenda for the next five years. “The Council is young,” he said, with many of the council members currently serving their freshman terms. They have a commitment to children’s issues, but they need help learning the landscape.

Coupled with this invitation, Gray discussed his vision for a new baseball academy – in partnership with the Nationals – that would use athletics as a catalyst for learning; a page program for high school juniors, modeled after similar programs in state houses and on Capitol Hill; a commitment to implementing standards for universal “Pre-K” by 2014; and, a commitment to restoring vocational programming.

CYF leadership will follow up with Gray and develop recommendations for moving forward. Recommendations will be discussed at the next CYF quarterly meeting.