When I first visited Chicago in the late 1970s, you couldn’t find a road without a pothole or an alley that wasn’t blocked by someone’s abandoned Pinto. Much of the near southwest side was a mire of unmarked streets and buildings scarred by riots from a decade before. Every complaint you heard was followed up [...]
How did we come to treat “charitable giving” as one homogenous phenomenon? And what’s lost when we gloss over the nuances of a sector as large, complex, and vital as ours? These are important questions in the midst of the largest economic downturn in decades—and they go to the very heart of how well nonprofits [...]
It’s hard to believe that On Philanthropy once asked, “Does Economic Downturn Mean Crisis for Nonprofits?” Eleven months later, there’s a tendency to say, “Uh, got a harder question?” Across higher ed and the nonprofit sector, institutions have taken emergency measures that have worked before. Dartmouth announced sharp cutbacks in the fall. University of Michigan [...]