Philanthropy News

Hundreds of millions of dollars donated to major Canadian charities are going to professional fund-raising firms, according to an investigation by the Canadian public broadcaster CBC.

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder and chief executive of the online social network Facebook, is donating $100-million to the troubled Newark, N.J., public school system, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal report.

So few people have applied for aid from a $100-million charity BP set up to aid Gulf Coast oil workers that the organization now plans to expand its grant making to aid a range of other workers, the Associated Press reports.

Advocacy groups are emerging as a major force in this fall’s midterm election, in part because donors like giving to organizations that don't have to disclose their identities, The New York Times and Bloomberg report.

A $72-million commitment made in 2003 to a Duke University fund-raising campaign remains largely unpaid, according to The Chronicle, the student newspaper at the North Carolina campus.

Bloomberg LP has pledged $1-million toward the Hirshhorn Museum’s unusual “bubble” project, which would be named after the financial-services company, The Wall Street Journal says.

A nonprofit Washington day-care center that caters to the kids of lawyers, journalists, and White House aides has won a reprieve after a provision in the nation's new financial-regulation laws threatened its survival, says The Washington Post.

The United Nations Foundation and the charity arm of the energy giant Royal Dutch Shell seek to raise up to $100-million over five years to provide clean-burning cooking stoves to the world’s poor, reports Bloomberg.

A rebound in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s endowment and several cost-cutting moves have freed up $400-million to support new grants by the world’s largest philanthropy, the Puget Sound Business Journal writes.

Oprah Winfrey on Monday announced during her afternoon talk show that a charity supported by her fans would make a $6-million donation to six organizations she called “groundbreaking leaders” in public education, Reuters writes.

Bill Clinton will hold a special session on Haiti’s recovery with the country’s president and prime minister at his annual philanthropy meeting as part of what he called an effort to “shake loose” funds promised by governments to the earthquake-devastated island, Reuters reports.

The Heinz Family Foundation on Tuesday announced the winners of its annual $100,000 cash prizes to 10 environmental leaders.

Beyond the headline-grabbing issues of insolvency and labor unrest, a controversy at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra could redefine the role of musicians at major urban orchestras, writes the Detroit Free Press.

The Archdiocese of New York is mulling plans to close as many as 30 of its 216 schools as part of a broader reorganization that could also end the practice of local parishes financing their own schools, according to The New York Times.

A Russian-American investor has given $117-million to Oxford University, in England, to establish a graduate school that will prepare students from all over the world for careers in government, reports The Independent.

Consumer watchdog groups, state attorneys general, and some nonprofits agree that the deals charities make with the companies they hire to raise money are misleading to donors, who often do not realize that most of their donations are going to the fund-raising firm rather than the charity, writes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Seth Perlman, a New York lawyer, has been hired by the board of the troubled Oklahoma City charity Feed the Children to help the nonprofit continue its work in the face of a contentious legal battle with the group’s founder and an extensive investigation by the state Attorney General, says The Washington Post.

Advocacy groups say without aid from human-service organizations, many more people would have slipped into poverty over the last year than those reported last week by the Census Bureau, according to National Public Radio.

The former clinic director at New Orleans’s Charity Hospital, which was ruined by Hurricane Katrina, talks to PBS’s NewsHour about the network of community health centers that arose in the hospital’s place to provide care for low-income patients.

After seven years that saw the New York City Opera struggle with deficits and gamble on a high-profile European general director who quit before actually taking the job, Susan Baker has resigned as the organization’s chairwoman, writes Bloomberg.