One of the first instances to arouse public ire about nonprofit executives’ compensation came to an end yesterday when a New York appeals court dismissed the state’s case against Richard Grasso, the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.
Grasso had resigned his post after the news about his bloated 2003 compensation package became public:
According to court documents, Grasso’s base salary from 1995 through 2002 was roughly $1.4 million, with bonuses that escalated from $900,000 in 1995 to $10.6 million in 2002. His 2003 agreement provided a lump sum of $139.5 million, with an additional $48 million payable over four …read more

A recent post by Tracy Kaufman, of the provocatively titled blog Ask the World’s Foremost Expert on Philanthropy, caught my eye for its strongly worded plea to nonprofits to shut up, already, with the corporate jargon. Ms. Kaufman, without naming names, wrote that “some nonprofit bigwig” had published a piece in “one of the many philanthropy-ish magazines that I read at work” that contained this quote:
Leveraging existing knowledge, know-how and relationships with other donors can support achieving desired outcomes. Listening, following one’s intuition and being surrounded by professional philanthropic resources will go a long way to ensuring effective social investment.
Ms. …read more

So you’d think that research into finding early warning signs of pulmonary disease and reducing harmful chemicals that spill into waterways during tobacco processing would be something worth shouting about, right?
But at Virginia Commonwealth University, where scientists are studying just those things, no one wants much to talk about it.
That’s because the work is being funded by Big Tobacco, and under conditions that run counter not only to VCU’s own explicit guidelines but also to generally accepted principles of scholarship. As the New York Times reported last week, the contract for the funding, between Virginia Commonwealth and Philip Morris USA

bars …read more

Forbes is out with a warning that not every nonprofit has a warm and fuzzy back story informing its operations. It seems that home buyers who lack the assets to pony up even the teeniest down payment are finding more and more nonprofits willing to front them the scratch. It’s all legal under a Federal Housing Administration policy that allows family and friends to donate down payments to buyers, but the problem is that these organizations are little more than middlemen between homebuilders and sellers providing the money and mortgage companies receiving it. The problem? For starters, the U.S. Government …read more

Attention, development directors: Your corporate partners may not have as much scratch to donate these days as in more robust years past, but that doesn’t mean they can’t help you. The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating piece on the increasing use of another type of resource — the human kind — by for-profit firms to give back:

Corporate volunteerism often used to mean cleaning up public parks or building homes for the needy. Today, a growing number of companies are lending out skilled employees to nonprofits and struggling small businesses around the world to provide accounting, marketing and other professional …read more

As noted a couple of days ago, this is National Small Business Week, and while the federal Small Business Administration hogs all of the attention, there is, yes, a nonprofit that helps the country’s thousands of entrepreneurs make their case to Washington and the various state capitals. The National Small Business Association was launched in 1937 and included just 160 businesses; today NSBA counts more than 150,000 enterprises among its members.

The organization is proud to have started the small business movement. NSBA also took the lead role in initiating the White House Conference on Small Business in 1980, 1986 and …read more

The good: Corporate foundation giving was up more than 6.5 percent in 2007, to approximately $4.4 billion, according to a new summary report from the Foundation Center. The report also notes that:

Adjusted for inflation, such giving  has nearly doubled since 1990.
Education was the top priority of corporate foundations across regions, comprising about a quarter of grant dollars.
Banking and finance were the most generous funders, combining for 23.3 percent of corporate foundation giving last year.
The Northeast (34 percent) and Midwest (30 percent) accounted for the largest shares of corporate foundation giving. Uh, hello, anybody home on the West Coast? Where’s the …read more

We are smack dab in the middle of National Small Business Week, and I am struck by how similar the for-profit and nonprofit sectors are in this regard. Just as the nonprofit world sees the heavy hitters — Ivy League universities, global charities, national trade associations — get all the attention, on Wall Street it’s the blue chips that get the ink, while many enterprises that are much smaller diligently go about doing terrific work under the radar. In much the same way that their third-sector counterparts try to squeak by, these small businesses are making do — and quite …read more

"Trickle-down economics" was initially coined to describe how tax benefits and other initiatives at the corporate level would eventually work their way down to the middle and lower classes, but the current economic climate seems to be shunting troubles, not advantages, down the drainpipe. According to the Republican-American of Waterbury, Connecticut, with the decades-long exodus of corporations from that region, major sources of funding for large nonprofits are becoming scarce. And that means the smaller nonprofits that the larger organizations fund are suffering, too.

The Naugatuck’s Y’s biggest benefactor, the United Way of Naugatuck and Beacon Falls — which supports 20 …read more

My brother, a D.C.-area resident and Washington Nationals season-ticket holder, has given new Nationals Park the thumbs-up, and as a lover of baseball and cool stadiums, I’m eagerly anticipating my first game there. In the meantime, I have to offer a hearty virtual chest-bump to the Nationals for following through on their commitment to give back to the downtrodden neighborhood in which their opulent palace was raised:

The Lerner family, owner of the Washington Nationals, promised to be a good neighbor when the team moved into the new $611 million stadium in Southeast Washington, an impoverished area of repair shops and …read more