In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for government-provided student financial aid to somehow be tied to the particular value of education at each college or university. This presents a challenge not only to higher education institutions, but to every nonprofit organization. Who gets to define and...

Nonprofit leaders, as well as those in the corporate world and government, seem unwilling to accept responsibility for their decisions and actions. We got an all too painful reminder of this over the weekend after the Newtown tragedy as officials of the nonprofit National Rifle Association refused invitations to speak...

Charities depend on people's trust and on the public's support for their very existence. That good will is being eroded by the terrible behavior of some other nonprofit organizations in the Obama-Romney presidential race.

First, it's important to understand that there are lots of different kinds of...

Some of the wealthiest Americans have started to contend that paying taxes and making charitable gifts are just about the same thing. Their failure to grasp the profound difference between the two presents a very real problem for nonprofit organizations and our democracy.

Mitt Romney epitomized this thinking last...

With his selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate, Mitt Romney changed the stakes of the 2012 presidential race. Well beyond Republican v. Democrat, the question now before Americans is who we are as a nation and as a people.

We must make decisions about public responsibility...

We are seven months away from what some are calling "taxmageddon" and what others describe as "plunging over the fiscal cliff." And while leaders in the nonprofit sector are narrowly focused on proposed changes to the charitable tax deduction that could reduce charitable donations by about $2 billion a year,...

Although some Republicans label it "class warfare" or "the politics of envy," more Americans are joining with President Obama and the few other elected leaders who have begun to talk about the nation's profound economic inequality. But the topic isn't getting very much attention from charities, this in spite of...

A couple of decades ago, with the nonprofit sector approaching 5 percent of GDP, you didn't need a crystal ball to see that the market would eventually find ways to peel off some of the larger and more profitable parts of charitable activity. First it was nonprofit health care, with...

If one thing is clear from the tea party movement, it is that the power of democratic engagement can have a more profound impact on the causes that grantmaking foundations and charities care about than all of their prized innovations and scaled-up programs. Yet, too many foundations seem to think...

Many of the seemingly divergent problems facing us today have the same fundamental cause: greed.

In both government and corporations -- and even in the nonprofit sector -- the greed of some damages and diminishes all of us while also undermining those very institutions that are supposed to protect us...