Skip to main content

Everything old is new again

Here's an article from the Sarasota (Florida) Herald Tribune that talks about a "new breed" of philanthropist. It sounds like an awesome program. He is training low-resource people to be medical assistants, which is great, especially given the local context where the job market for medical services is rather good.


A quote from the article
"These are people who have learned to solve problems, and they're now bringing their money and the critical thinking skills to bear in the nonprofit sector," said Leo Arnoult, a fundraising consultant and past chairman of the Giving USA Foundation, which publishes an annual report on giving trends.

Unlike donors of the past, who were content to write a check, knowing that their money was supporting a good cause, entrepreneurial donors take a more hands-on approach.
However, even if rich folks may have taken a hiatus on this style of giving for awhile, the foundations of philanthropy in this country are based on "entrepreneurial" giving, for example Carnegie who very much believed that he should use not only his own money, but also his skillset to tackle society's problems. See here and here for more of this kind of thing.

Note: I'm going to use more pictures on my blog, because a) I like pictures and b) I've been inspired of late by Ben Martin's use of the visual medium, and also I really like the illustrations in Creating Passionate Users. So imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that, now you know.

Popular posts from this blog

We've Always Done it That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change

From what I can tell, the impetus for this book was that the folks who wrote it, Jeff De Cagna , David Gammel , Jamie Notter , Mickie Rops and Amy Smith , were “concerned by the instinctively conservative approach to organizational stewardship that far too many association executives and volunteers continue to pursue in the early years of the 21 st century.” I took notes throughout the book, and now I realize they are far too extensive to make a very good book review. And I am definitely the choir that this book is preaching to. However, I really, really liked the problems these folks addressed and they pretty much slaughtered and butchered several sacred cows. This book is not extensive narrative or heavily footnoted, but it is based on the collective experience of 5 people who together have worked with many different organizations, and the collective themes will be familiar to anyone in the field. On a meta level, this book takes observations of what’s happening in the
Read more

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.
Read more

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of "
Read more