While the energy, connectivity (and media attention) a young activist can generate could be a boon to a nonprofit, the flip side is that many youth are equally content to be clicktivists, limiting their involvement to texting donations or “liking” a cause on Facebook. So how can your nonprofit work effectively with kids and youth? And should you even try?
What better way to brighten the darkest days of winter than by celebrating random acts of kindness? To honour the holidays and combat winter gloom, CharityVillage® is running a Twitter campaign designed to bring smiles to communities everywhere.
A profile of the event Toronto’s Changing Face of Philanthropy.
Thanks to a philanthropic campaign led by two of the world’s most financially blessed — Warren Buffet and Bill Gates — dozens of billionaires pledged recently to give at least half their fortunes to charity. According to estimates by Forbes magazine, that basically means at least $150 billion could potentially be committed to a range of causes.
Pardon the pun, but there’s an age old question asked in almost every era of marketing: how do you capture the imagination, attention and spirit of youth? And for practitioners in the third sector, the question is a burning one, considering that philanthropy is a trait that benefits from modeling examples at an early age.
Late last year, Hamilton’s McMaster University received a rare and welcome boon: a $10,000 grant from the Massachusetts-based Sunshine Lady Foundation to create and administer a philanthropy class, titled the Strategic Philanthropy and Leadership Course, at the university’s DeGroote School of Business.
Once the new kid on the block, venture philanthropy has grown into its own in the past decade. The urge by young and emerging entrepreneurs to spur social change and increase capacity in the charitable sector while still making a profit may have started off small, but it’s gaining a lot of credence.
A growing trend in philanthropy, giving circles occur when a group of donors pool their charitable dollars and make collective decisions about what causes to support. Giving circles can be an informal group of friends who meet in each other’s homes, or they can be quite formal with hundreds of members.
According to recent Ipsos Reid statistics, around 80% of Canadians give to charity every year. That means close to 25 million of us make some sort of philanthropic gesture per annum. It’s an incredible stat.
Giving is giving is giving. Yet, traditionally the term ‘philanthropy’ has been the domain of the wealthy. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.
© 2024 CharityVillage
v.4.5-3-g93dd547