Microsoft’s YouthSpark commits to help 300 million youth worldwide

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Late last week, Microsoft announced the launch of YouthSpark, a new worldwide program that seeks to close the “opportunity gap” that is disenfranchising young people across the world. The program is an important first step in solving the rampant unemployment issues that have left young people jaded and discouraged in both the developed and developing world.

The lack of job opportunities are one reason the Arab Spring has flared up across the Middle East. Meanwhile, the dearth of job skills stifles business growth in Latin American nations. And the lack of jobs for high school and college grads in the U.S. has been one of the worst outcomes of the recent global financial crises.

To that end, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, announced the company’s most ambitious philanthropy initiative in its 37 years of existence. At a cost of $500 million spread over the next three years, the program’s goal is to provide training, employment and entrepreneurship opportunities to as many 300 million youths in 100 nations. Children as young as six up to young adults in the mid-twenties, according to the company, will benefit from Microsoft’s partnership with over hundreds of NGOs and non-profits across the globe.

Billionaires aim to make their quick mark via philanthropy

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It’s not often – well ever, really – that 150 of the world’s 400 wealthiest billionaires gather in one place at one time, particularly to talk about how they plan to give all those billions away. But that’s just what philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, Jacqueline Novogratz, Leon Black and Steve Case – and their peers – gathered together to do this past June.

Forbes Insights, together with Credit Suisse, used this unprecedented gathering to better understand how the world’s wealthiest approach giving back. What we found surprised us: yes, legacy is important, but not as important as making an impact as quickly as possible. And billions of dollars can make a tremendous impact — it can truly change the world.

More than half of Summit attendees who participated in the poll said that they expected to see a meaningful return on their philanthropic investment within 10 years, while four in 10 were prepared for an impact that stretched beyond their lifetime.

And they were risk takers, applying the same aggressive approaches in their charitable endeavors that they used in their business activities. Two-thirds invested in either early- or growth-stage philanthropic endeavors, rather than the old tried-and-true established charities with long track records.

In short: they were looking to make their mark, take risks, and solve the world’s most intractable problems – the huge knots that no one had yet been able to untangle.

Gates and Buffett philanthropic investment

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Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are the most philanthropic folks on the planet. To date the men have given away $28 billion and $17.5 billion respectively.

And Buffett’s and Gates’ partnership in generosity is by now well-known. In 2006, Buffett pledged to donate 10 million shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The gift, then valued around $31 billion, is given in annual increments of 5% of the remaining pledged shares. So far, more than $9.5 billion has been transferred—and largely given away.

One of Buffett’s few requirements is that each installment be spent within a year of receipt. So the 2011 payment of about $1.5 billion must be granted out in 2012. His other stipulations are that use of his gift must meet all legal requirements of charity and that Bill or Melinda must be alive and active in the foundation for the pledge to hold.

Buffett’s $1.25 billion contribution in 2009 accounted for slightly more than 50% of the just under $2.5 billion given by the foundation in 2010. So that year, by Forbes estimations, Buffett gave $751 million to global health and $157 million to education, while Gates gave $734 million and $154 million, correspondingly.

In total, Forbes estimates that Gates has given around $8.3 billion toward health and $4.6 billion toward education. Buffett’s health total is about $3.9 billon and his education number is around $1.1 billion.

 

Mobile phones impacting health care in Africa

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A little over a decade ago there were around 100,000 phone lines in Nigeria, mostly landlines run by the state-owned telecoms behemoth, NITEL. Today NITEL is dead, and Nigeria has close to 100 million mobile phone lines, making it Africa’s largest telecoms market.

Across the rest of the continent the trends are similar: between 2000 and 2010, Kenyan mobile phone firm Safaricom saw its subscriber base increase in excess of 500-fold. In 2010 alone the number of mobile phone users in Rwanda grew by 50 per cent, figures from the country’s regulatory agency show.

Amongst the ways lives are changing as a result: A simple text-messaging solution was all 28-year-old Ghanaian doctoral student, Bright Simons needed for his innovative plan to tackle counterfeit medicine in African countries. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 30% of drugs supplied in developing countries are fake. (In 2009, nearly 100 Nigerian babies died after they were given teething medicine that contained a solvent usually found in antifreeze.)

Simons’ pioneering idea was to put unique codes within scratch cards on medicine packaging that buyers can send via SMS to a designated number to find out if the drug is genuine or not. The system is now being used by several countries in Africa and rolled out to places such as Asia where there are similar problems with counterfeit drugs.

In South Africa there’s Impilo, a service that allows people to find healthcare providers anywhere in the country 24 hours a day, using their mobile phones.

Mobile phones are going to play an increasingly important role in mediating the provision of better healthcare to the citizens of African countries. Phone companies are realizing that mobiles are highly effective — and potentially lucrative — for the dissemination of health and lifestyle tips.

 

Millennials move toward impact investing

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Over the next several decades, as baby boomers in the United States age and transfer their wealth to the next generation, an unprecedented $41 trillion will change hands.

These young inheritors are, for the most part, Millennials — the generation born between 1978 and 2000. As it turns out, this group’s attitudes about social responsibility, private capital, and the intersection between the two do indeed appear to differ from those of their parents, perhaps starkly.

“Think back to the great philanthropists of years past who thought of making money in the first half of their lives and giving it away in the second half,” says Justin Rockefeller, a trustee and member of the investment committee at the $739 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund, great-great grandson of John D. Rockefeller, and, at 33, himself a Millennial. “Today, that view is still pretty pervasive, that there’s capitalism and making money on one side, and philanthropy on the other. I think the younger generation is seeing that as a false dichotomy, or at least something that will increasingly become a false dichotomy.”

Data indicates that he’s right: Millennials are more likely to embrace a philosophy that financial interests and social interests ought to directly overlap, thereby ostensibly benefitting both wallet and world.

In late 2011 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu commissioned two surveys: Both surveys asked whether business success should be based on more than just profit — 92 percent of Millennials said it should, and 71 percent of current business leaders agreed. When each group was asked to describe the purpose of business, Millennials most often said “innovation” and “societal development,” while business leaders’ top responses were “profit” and “value.”

Over half of Millennials believed that in the future, more than any other sector of society, business would achieve the greatest impact on solving society’s biggest challenges. These are no longer abstract philosophical schisms for the wealth management firms and advisers who are overseeing the massive transfer of assets from one generation to the next — the schisms are practical, and they’re starting to force changes at firms and family offices from the inside out.

Community foundations gaining respect in Russia and Eastern Europe

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Throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Russia (CEE/Russia) and Western Europe, the same two characteristics are often cited when leaders describe what first attracted them to community foundations — the institutions are non-political and they are owned by the communities they serve.

While community foundations are now operating in more than 15 countries in CEE/Russia, they didn’t start developing until the 1990s — first in Slovakia, Poland and elsewhere. Former Soviet states, including Russia, were moved to develop philanthropic organizations that could support the civil society sector after international donors pulled out.

A common characteristic of community foundations in the region is their operational transparency — something unthinkable during communist rule and still viewed with skepticism, says Natalya Kaminarskaya. She is CEO of the Russian Donors Forum, an organization that represents 128 of the nation’s about 300-plus grantmakers of all kinds, including community foundations. “People still have a lack of trust in their neighbors, businesses, government officials and even non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Russia,” Kaminarskaya said. “But things are slowly improving.”

In addition to residents’ opinions of NGOs moving “from negative to neutral,” she says, the Russian government is also changing the way it interacts with indigenous grantmakers. Five years ago the government made it easier for Russian foundations by allowing them to keep money in reserve from year-to-year for permanent endowments without having that money taxed, as had been done previously.Also, a new national law in Russia became effective in 2012 providing individuals with tax incentives for donations made to community foundations and other NGOs. While these same tax incentives are not yet available for businesses and corporations, Kaminarskaya says, she is hopeful that change also will come.

IKEA & UNICEF partner to provide better lives for Indian children

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The partnership between IKEA and UNICEF has worked towards providing a better live for over 74 million children in India.

The partnership was launched with a campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh to promote children’s welfare, and was expanded to include the state of Andhra Pradesh in 2006, especially targeting the cotton industry to end child labor. In 2008, the partnership expanded to fifteen states with the aim to promote child rights, survival, growth and development. It is estimated that more than 28 million children are engaged in child labor and an estimated 4,700 children under the age of five die every day.

The philanthropic arm of IKEA, the IKEA Foundation, is the largest corporate cash donor to the 65-year-old United Nations humanitarian program, UNICEF. In the past ten years, these are some highlights of the partnership:
• 370,000 children screened for malnourishment, and 56,500 children treated.
• 2.14 million women were taught the benefits of breastfeeding their children.
• 32 million homes now have toilets, and 67 percent of schools have access to toilets, improved drinking water and hand washing facilities.
• Children in 13,120 schools benefit from newly trained teachers and better curriculum.
• 15,000 children in India’s cotton and carpet belts now go to normal schools after being taught basic reading, writing and math skills in bridge schools.
• 600 new Child Protection Committees set up to end child labor practices.
• More than 500,000 leaders, community members and officials trained to protect children

The work of the IKEA Foundation in India is even more remarkable when you consider that they do not yet retail their products in the country, though this might be changing soon.

The real reason the world will remember Bill Gates

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William H. Gates, III, shall ultimately be remembered as the most significant person of his generation. It may not be for the reasons you think.

Bill Gates is eligible for consideration by virtue of founding Microsoft. For fourteen out of the fifteen years from 1995 to 2009 he was the richest person in the world. Such achievements, however, will likely seem small in the scope of history.

Consider the scale of the Gateses’ philanthropy.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through which their philanthropy flows is, according to Wikipedia, the largest “transparently operated private foundation in the world.”  Since inception, the Foundation has made grants of over $26 billion, including $15 billion in global health alone.

The annual giving of just the GlobalHealth program of the Foundation is about $800 million and approaches the scale of the United Nations World Health Organization.

A significant contribution to the Foundation was made by Warren Buffet in 2006, but most of the money in the Foundation has been provided by the Gateses. 

Gates is also famous for asking other billionaires to commit to giving away half their fortunes. Bill and his wife Melinda have committed to giving 95% of their fortune to charity over time; that is an astounding measure of generosity.

 

Do lower taxes for the wealthy result in higher charitable gifts?

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With the U.S. election nearing, some of America’s wealthiest argue that they would give more to charity if they paid lower taxes, as they surely would under proposals put forth by Mitt Romney and in the House-approved budget drafted by his running mate Paul Ryan.

Such an assertion is directly contradicted by scholarly studies. Studies indicate that when taxes go down, people give less generously. Lower taxes mean that what scholars call “the price of giving” goes up; the value of the tax deduction per donated dollar is less.

The notion that the wealthy will pay out in voluntary contributions what they don’t pay in mandatory taxes may seem an attractive proposition to some charities, but it just isn’t so.

While there may be more discretionary money in the pockets of millionaires, it tends to stay there. As a matter of fact, the wealthy give a smaller percentage of their income to charity than do moderate- and low-income people.

The social psychologist Paul Piff, who studies the effects of income on personal behavior, told The Chronicle of Philanthropy last month that “the more wealth you have, the more focused on your own self and your own needs you become and the less attuned to the needs of other people.” He has shown that wealth can make people “more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people.”

Much of this has been known since 1990 when Terry Odendahl published Charity Begins at Home; wealthy Americans tend to support the nonprofit institutions that they themselves use. That includes elite universities, museums, operas, and performing-arts groups as well as other cultural institutions and some hospitals and medical facilities. Few would consider these institutions to be on the frontline of charities dealing with today’s most pressing problems.

Teachers turn to the Internet to fund classroom projects

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Times are tough and teachers need to be creative sometimes when stocking their classrooms for the year.

Meghan Howell, a second-year first-grade teacher turned to the Internet for help. Though a combination of social media and the website Donorschoose.org, she was able to raise the money she needed in two days. Donors Choose is a charity website where teachers can post their needs as projects in the hopes of finding donors.

DonorsChoose was created in 2000 in New York by social-studies teacher Charles Best. Since its launch, the charity has raised more than $120 million to fund almost 300,000 projects for 6 million students. Anyone can donate to any project on the website, and all donations can be made anonymously.