The first annual World Malaria Day is here.

As a survivor of the particularly nasty Falciparum strain of Malaria I am fully behind this very effective initiative from the UN Foundation:

The UN Foundation has generated great participation from supporters across the country for their Deliver the Net Game:

• More than 10,000 people have played their game, Deliver the Net, and a bed net has been delivered on their behalf by a generous sponsor.
  • Tell 3 friends about our life-saving game now!
• 265+ NETS Challenge Hosts are raising money and awareness for malaria through a fun event of their choice.

And now thanks to a generous donation by Vestergaard, a manufacturer of insecticide-treated bed nets, they are going into overtime and want you and your friends to continue playing long after World Malaria Day is over!

You’ve seen how easy and quick it is to play the game, send a net and save a life -now tell all your friends, family and NETwork how they can join the NBN team and watch the points and nets add up to help eliminate malaria from Africa.

And because the games never stop for NETraisers, sign up to host your own NETS Challenge like Nate Johnson of Michigan who is hosting an NBN Billiards Tournament tomorrow to have fun and raise funds to prevent malaria. Then, send an email to NETSchallenge@nothingbutnets.net and we’ll add you to our interactive Challenge Map!

The UN Foundation Team http://www.unfoundation.org/

New York, NY — April 24, 2008. Giving by corporate foundations increased 6.6 percent in 2007 to an estimated $4.4 billion, according to Key Facts on Corporate Foundations, a new summary report released by the Foundation Center.

“Corporate foundations have long represented an important source of support for the nonprofit sector, and that remained true in 2007,” said Steven Lawrence, senior director of research at the Foundation Center. “While the survey findings suggest that giving by corporate foundations may increase in 2008, the current economic downturn makes the future less predictable.”

Key Facts on Corporate Foundations highlights the Foundation Center’s latest research on the size, scope, and giving interests of the nation’s nearly 2,600 corporate foundations.

Other key findings from the report include:

• Adjusted for inflation, corporate foundation giving has nearly doubled since 1990.
• Education was the top priority of corporate foundations across regions, making up about one-quarter of grant dollars.
• By industry, the banking and finance sector accounted for the largest share of corporate foundation giving, at 23.3 percent.
• The Northeast and Midwest accounted for the largest shares of corporate foundation giving, coming in at 34 percent and 30 percent, respectively.

At the same time, corporate foundation giving continued to grow at a slower rate than giving by other foundations. In 2007, corporate foundations accounted for 10 percent of overall foundation giving, down from 17 percent in 1990.

Findings in Key Facts on Corporate Foundations come from the Foundation Center’s tracking of fiscal and programmatic information on 80,000+ foundations, corporations, and public charities; annual surveys of leading grantmakers; and analyses of the giving patterns of more than 1,200 of the nation’s largest foundations. The report can be downloaded at no charge from the Gain Knowledge area of the Foundation Center’s web site.

VNN recently caught up with Darian Rodriguez Heyman; the Executive Director of Craigslist Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by the creators of the internationally popular social media community Craigslist.org.

The foundation was started in 2000 to be a resource for nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit professionals and those seeking to connect with causes with the purpose of giving back; today this operating foundation has a $2 million budget and an ambitious plan for a Web 2.0 platform which will act as a resources clearinghouse for the social sector.

Working on the principle originally espoused by Bill Clinton of ‘Seek first to collaborate and then lead’, Darian has almost single-handedly assembled more than 150 partner organizations for what will be a Yellow Pages for the social sector and he is just about to head into Beta phase.

Just as Craigslist.org‘s social media communities interact on a range of local needs such as jobs, housing and dating; the new platform will be an invaluable resource, particularly for people in the ‘engaged philanthropy’ movement. Retiring baby-boomers, Gen-Xers and the Millennial generation are no longer satisfied with just giving volunteer time and/or their treasure; they have a powerful psychological need to apply their talent and experience to the causes about which they feel passionate.

Nonprofits that focus solely on fund raising without taking these needs into account by engaging donors in their work will certainly suffer in these tough economic times.

Good examples of engaged philanthropy organizations are the Full Circle Fund that is cultivating the next generation of community leaders and driving lasting social change in the Bay Area—where Darian serves as President of the Community Fellows class—and the Root Cause Institute’s Social Innovation Forum serving the greater Boston area.

To date, the foundation’s activities have mainly centered around their Nonprofit Boot Camps, which this year will be held in New York - 8/16/08 and the SF Bay Area - 10/18/08. These camps are extended online as the Craigslist Foundation’s learning experience delivered through podcasts, PPTs and other course materials. Click here for more.

I asked Darian about the emphasis on nonprofit as opposed to those engaged in for-profit social enterprises and local government agency initiatives. People from other sectors are welcome to sign up for the boot camps based upon the Craigslist operating principle of equal accessibility; the only restriction is a limit on participation to four people per organization.

And how do they measure success?

The original metric was the number of people attending the boot camps. However, a recent grant from the Haas Sr. Fund will now enable them to measure their ongoing effectiveness a year or more after each boot camp.

All along the foundation has asked participants if they would recommend a boot camp to friends and fellow workers. Here Darian was proud to say that this approval rating has never fallen below 96%.

The new Web 2.0 platform will present challenges as the foundation will need to come to terms with being hyper-local and global at the same time.

For example, their Tools for Nonprofit links to Idealist.org a great directory of web sites for individuals starting, managing and funding nonprofits, which is already global in scope.

Whereas the section on Nonprofit Capacity Resources: is a directory of nonprofit capacity links by category with a facility for user ratings and comments –Links to Capaciteria.org — whose tag line is “Serving up Peer-Rated Nonprofit Resources 24/7”— and is largely US focused.

With a mission to transform community some resources will necessarily need to remain local. Imagine local urban hubs offering Support Services and In-Kind donation wish lists which right now only exist around the foundation’s home base in the California’s Bay area:

Bay Area Nonprofit Support Resources: The Nonprofit Support Yellow Pages is a comprehensive directory of nonprofit management support organizations and vendors serving nonprofits throughout the Bay Area. Click here for more

In Kind Donations for Bay Area Nonprofits: iReuse.com enables nonprofits to create free wish lists and automatically get matched up with local businesses and residents who are donating items that meet their needs. Click here for more

This is a daunting task that Darian concedes will require a certain amount of ‘seeding’ as they roll-out to other major metropolitan markets. The know-how certainly resides at Craigslist.org as originally conceived and executed by Craig Newmark and his team.

Collaboration is at the core of Darian’s work and perhaps he will be working with a similar but quite different initiative launched last year, namely Paul Hawken’s Natural Capital Institute’s WiserEarth online; described as ‘an international directory and networking forum that maps, links and empowers the largest movement in the world, the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice and the environment.’ WiserEarth provides tools to help organizations and individuals find each other, collaborate, share resources and build alliances. Its comprehensive taxonomy (described on the site as Areas of Focus) combined with its database of over 100,000 organizations based in 243 countries, territories and sovereign islands, makes it the largest, freely accessible, international directory of non-governmental organizations.

Working together or separately; the great advantage Darian has at his disposal is the secret sauce behind Craigslist.org that has made it the bane of the newspaper industry. This gives him the ability to scale ‘better, cheaper, faster’ as the Silicon Valley VC’s like to say.

Add to this Darian’s vision, energy and extended network, and we could well see his new Web 2.0 platform become the new ‘voice’ for the social sector and the growing number of community-minded engaged philanthropists.

An online campaign has launched at www.humanitariandream.com proposing a solution to all the controversy surrounding the Beijing Olympics this summer. Amidst all the outcries for boycott and the resulting acrimony, businessman Steve Varon proposes a plausible solution.

“With controversy and strife surrounding the Beijing Olympic Torch Relay over the past few months, this proposal is the first publicly announced solution to the dilemma. Imagine the Dalai Lama carrying the Olympic torch along the torch relay route, past the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet - or anywhere else on the relay route. It has the potential to quell the violent protests and return the focus of the torch relay to a celebration of peace through sport, inspiring hope for all people around the world. Corporate, civic and government leaders globally have been encouraged to support this opportunity. The idea has been warmly embraced publicly and privately.”

Source Huffington Post: One image, One moment - On the Road to the Beijing Olympics

Google.org’s course on poverty and development a 10-week course focused on understanding poverty and development taught by Joshua Cohen, director of Stanford’s Program on Global Justice, is now available through YouTube.com. [Details]

Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google and the umbrella for its commitment to devote employee time and one percent of Google’s profits and equity toward philanthropy.

It all began when they ran a TV commercial about people doing things for strangers. The response was overwhelming; with thousands of emails and letters from people all over the country thanking the Insurance company.

They thought; if one TV spot from Liberty Mutual can get people thinking and talking about responsibility, imagine what could happen if we went a step further? So we created a series of short films, and this website, as an exploration of what it means to do the right thing.

They believe that the more people think and talk about responsibility, and even debate what it means, the more it can affect how we live our daily lives. And perhaps, in this small way, together, we can make the world just a little better.

Pass the Project along to your family, friends and colleagues so they can watch, read and tell them what you think.

http://www.responsibilityproject.com

Spurred by such factors as rising institutional investor interest, growing demand for climate-related renewable energy alternatives, concerns about the Sudan humanitarian crisis, and the emergence of new products, socially responsible investing (SRI) in the United States is now growing at a much faster pace than the broader universe of all investment assets under professional management, according to the new edition of the Report on Socially Responsible Investing Trends in the United States published by the nonprofit Social Investment Forum (SIF). The report found that, from 2005 to 2007, SRI assets increased more than 18 percent while all investment assets under management edged up by less than 3 percent.

http://www.socialinvest.org/news/releases/pressrelease.cfm?id=108

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors has published a comprehensive, practical guide that translates the concepts, ideas and philosophy of Mission-Related Investing (MRI) into useable policies and practices for foundation trustees. The monograph adds significantly to a growing body of knowledge and practice areas.

“Foundations in the United States have $600 billion in their endowments and can unleash more of their resources to positively change societies today. As a result, mission-related investing is an idea whose time has come,” said Doug Bauer, senior vice president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisor who co-authored the work with Steve Godeke a leading expert in the field.

A free download is offered at: http://rockpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/MRI.pdf