Weekly Reads
“Philanthropy is a two-way street. Donors give but they also receive. It is only habits of oppression that encourage donors to see themselves as givers and others as takers. Receiving a gift does not make the recipient less than the gift giver. Giving isn’t a conquest, it is a relationship of mutuality and of equals. Traditional philanthropy is often a terrible partner. How do we gain the self-awareness that we are receiving at the same time we are giving?” [more]
Crystal Hayling, Libra Foundation, for Stanford Social Innovation Review
“Our society has an aversion to death, aging, suffering, sickness, and disability. What if we acknowledge them as natural parts of the human experience rather than something to be eliminated or avoided at all costs? Life is not binary: healthy or unhealthy, disabled or nondisabled, low or high quality. We can and should embrace vulnerability and interdependence and not see them as weaknesses.” [more]
Alice Wong, Disability Visibility Project, for NPR
“When human rights groups make a call to arms, we don’t usually mean weapons. They are used to suppress dissent, crack down on minorities, and commit a litany of other abuses. By every measure, we prefer diplomacy to war. Conflict is perhaps the ultimate human rights violation, wreaking suffering across generations. Human rights are both the pathway to, and the result of, peace. Yet there are times when an organization like mine, the Open Society Foundations, can see no other way to protect human rights in the immediate term. … And it is the case today in Ukraine, where [we] have worked to advance democratic governance, the rule of law, and human rights for over 30 years, and where Russian aggression now threatens to reverse these hard-won gains.” [more]
Mark Malloch-Brown, Open Society Foundations, for Just Security
“Demographic data in the sector is still hard to come by, and many nonprofits simply do not collect or share demographic data about their board, executive team, or staff members. Because of this, simply focusing on a CEO’s race as a heuristic for “BIPOC-led” is often a necessity in order to have enough data to conduct analyses. In Candid’s own demographic data collection efforts, we’ve found that only about 25% of organizations share racial demographic data about their whole organization, whereas nearly 95% of organizations that share demographic data with Candid include racial information about their CEO.” [more]
Cathleen Clerkin, Candid
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