Philanthropy

Tony Blair's donation to British Legion receives mixed response

For the former prime minister it was "a way of marking the enormous sacrifice" of the UK's armed forces. For some others it was little more than an attempt to assuage a guilty conscience.

Like so much else about Tony Blair, today's announcement that he will hand over several million pounds in proceeds from his forthcoming memoir to the Royal British Legion has divided opinion.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/16/tony-blair-british-legion-donation

I vote "guilty conscience"

they have no guilt..

$13M facility for homeless unveiled

Nashville-based charity Room at the Inn debuted a $13 million center on Thursday that is designed to increase the range of services available to the homeless in Nashville. The center has enjoyed substantial support from local foundations, including $1 million from the Cal Turner Family Foundation, $500,000 each from The Ingram Charitable Trust and the HCA Foundation, $300,000 from the Memorial Foundation, and $200,000 from Bank of America. The HCA Foundation also worked with Microsoft to donate $90,000 in computer software, $30,000 in computer hardware and volunteer IT support. The computers are now installed and being used for education, through a new computer lab, and for job searches and job training for the homeless.
http://nashville.bizjournals.com/nashville/stories/2010/08/23/daily34.html

cal turner..hmm..

A Jewish New Year: A New Approach to Philanthropy

As this year comes to a close a new one begins. As we consider our role in the world, we must act as a united community, ready to challenge our traditional approaches to philanthropy. It is our obligation as the Jewish people to give future generations a world more peaceful, more secure and more just than that which we inherited from our parents and grandparents. It is our responsibility to ensure that there is food on every table — enough so we can all enjoy.

Support ThinkImpact and other organizations that are leveraging the market and community assets to reduce global poverty. Join us in making this New Year one that is sweet for our entire human family.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saul-garlick/a-jewish-new-year-a-new-a_b_704849.html

hmmm so do the Jewish checks clear at the same time as the Legatus checks?

See more below…
ThinkImpact
ThinkImpact works to reduce poverty through its unique model of people-powered global development that focuses on the next generation of leaders. ThinkImpact offers college students and recent graduates the ideas, leadership and capital they need to leverage social innovation and local community resources to alleviate poverty.

Saul Garlick
Executive Director
Saul is the founder and executive director of ThinkImpact, an international non-profit organization that connects American students to rural villages in Africa to alleviate poverty through a sustained commitment to social innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship. Saul also serves as ambassador to the United States for The Buffelshoek Trust, an organization committed to the construction of much-needed schools in rural South Africa. Saul served as managing editor of the SAIS Review, as founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Hopkins Donkey and has worked on Capitol Hill for Rep. DeGette (D-CO) and as acting desk officer for Angola in the Bureau of African Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. He is a contributor to Carnegie Council’s online magazine, Policy Innovations. Garlick is a Truman Scholar and has received numerous awards including the William C. Foster Award, the Circles of Change Award, and the Fire Within Social Entrepreneurship Award. Garlick received his BA with honors in 2006 from Johns Hopkins University and his MA in American foreign policy and International Economics at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University

Board
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2681/content.jsp?content_KEY=5044

Advisors
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2681/content.jsp?content_KEY=5044

sponsors and partners
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2681/content.jsp?content_KEY=4458

A lot of SAIS, CSIS, ADB and some serious money!

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates will visit Beijing on Sept. 29, the Economic Observer reported, citing Soho China Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Zhang Xin.

Buffett and Gates will visit the Chinese capital for a charity event, the newspaper reported, citing Zhang.

In a separate report today, the Economic Observer reported that Buffett and Gates would also visit Shanghai and the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. The two billionaires will visit companies in which Buffett has invested in all three locations, the newspaper reported, citing people it didn’t identify.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-03/warren-buffett-bill-gates-to-visit-beijing-this-month-observer-reports.html

Both of them going to Beijing for a charity event?

why is gates going..he dont own stocks like warren..or does he?

Soros Makes $100 Million Rights Gift

George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, plans to announce on Tuesday that he is giving $100 million to Human Rights Watch to expand the organization’s work globally.

It is the largest gift he has made, the largest gift by far that Human Rights Watch has ever received, and only the second gift of $100 million or more made by an individual this year, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. “We’re seeing noticeably fewer charitable gifts at the $100 million level from individuals reported than we did just a few years ago,” said Patrick Rooney, the center’s executive director. “Between 2006 and 2008, an average of about 13 gifts a year of that size by individuals was reported. In 2009, it dropped to six, and this year, we know of only one other.

snip
Mr. Soros put it differently. “I’m afraid the United States has lost the moral high ground under the Bush administration, but the principles that Human Rights Watch promotes have not lost their universal applicability,” he said. “So to be more effective, I think the organization has to be seen as more international, less an American organization.”

He said the gift to the organization was “also from my heart,” an acknowledgment of the training in human rights issues and philanthropy that he received from the group when he was just starting to emerge as a major donor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/business/07gift.html?src=busln

Atheist Hedge Fund Veteran Wilson Gives N.Y. Catholic Schools $5.6 Million

Retired hedge fund titan Robert W. Wilson lost his faith in God years ago, yet he believes in Catholic schools and gave $5.6 million to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York this summer.

It’s the latest of many gifts from Mr. Wilson to the city’s Catholic hierarchy and educators, this one aimed at funding the Catholic Alumni Partnership, a program he founded that helps elementary schools track down their 750,000 alumni and recruit them as donors.

“Most of what the Catholic schools teach are the three Rs,” said Mr. Wilson, 83, in a phone interview, referring to reading, writing and arithmetic. “And they do it better than the union-controlled inner-city schools.”

Wilson, a Detroit native, said he began questioning the existence of God after enrolling in Amherst College in Massachusetts to study economics.

“Religious people say you couldn’t have our surrounding environment without the Creator, but then who created the Creator?” Mr. Wilson said.

snip
His atheism wasn’t an issue with the archdiocese. Rev. Timothy M. Dolan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, said in an e-mail statement to Bloomberg News that he was “grateful” to Wilson “for his vision” and the archdiocese needs to “enlist broad and sustained support from our alumni to secure the future” of the schools.
http://www.thebulletin.us/articles/2010/08/24/news/nation/doc4c6ab8e590878413364816.txt

saw that soros story..posting it soon on blog

Bill Clinton Says His Global Initiative Will Extend Aid to Jobless in U.S.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s campaign against poverty in poor countries is making room this year for programs to aid unemployed Americans.

The Clinton Global Initiative, a forum to connect corporate donors with non-profit groups, will “try to spend more time on the domestic needs,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday. With the nation’s unemployment rate at 9.6 percent, U.S. workers need help “with both jobs and with training,” he said.

The “biggest problem” that stands in the way of boosting employment is a “skills mismatch” in the U.S. economy, Clinton said. This means “the jobs that are being opened don’t have qualified people applying for them,” he said. If job-specific training were provided to 5 million unemployed workers, the jobless rate would fall to around 7 percent, Clinton said.

snip
This year’s initiative will create some “interesting commitments” that affect America, such as how to create jobs in clean energy in the U.S. without involvement from the government, Clinton said yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Terry McAuliffe, chairman of GreenTech Automotive Inc. and the former head of the Democratic National Committee, is bringing two electric cars to the initiative, Clinton said.

Clinton also said the U.S. needs a strategy to revive the middle class, in part by creating jobs in small business, manufacturing and clean energy. On a global basis, Clinton’s initiative will attempt to help girls and women get a “fair share” of education as well as participate in the revival of the economies of their countries, Clinton said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-19/bill-clinton-says-his-global-initiative-will-extend-aid-to-jobless-in-u-s-.html

This year’s initiative will create some “interesting commitments” that affect America, such as how to create jobs in clean energy in the U.S. without involvement from the government,
Interesting commitments…hmmm
So the unemployed are going to be retrained via a nonprofit for green jobs?

Major donation funds new school for ‘leaders of tomorrow’

Europe’s first major academic school of government, which opens today at the University of Oxford, has been bankrolled by one of the largest philanthropic gifts received by the institution in its 900-year history.

Leonard Blavatnik, an American industrialist, has committed £75 million to set up the school and is already considering making additional donations.

The university itself has made £26 million available to help establish the new Blavatnik School of Government, which will support 40 academic posts at Oxford.

snip
World leaders have offered their support for the venture. David Cameron, the British prime minister, said Mr Blavatnik’s major donation marked “a very generous act of philanthropy” to the higher education sector.

Bill Clinton, the former US president, said: “It was at Oxford that the link between smoking and cancer was discovered. Oxford scientists pioneered techniques which enabled us to understand the role greenhouse gases play in climate change. I am confident that Oxford’s Blavatnik School will bring such groundbreaking research closer to the heart of public policy.”

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=413545&c=1

Bill Clinton and Chelsea both attended Oxford (Bill as a Rhodes Scholar)

rhodes scholars become leaders in many places..so the greenhouse shit came from there..

Clinton philanthropy meeting pushes economic growth

Bill Clinton says climate change to increase disasters

* Obama, Microsoft’s Bill Gates due to attend

* Companies say good philanthropy is good for business

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton kicked off his philanthropic summit on Tuesday by pushing corporations and non-profit groups to promote economic growth and prepare for a growing number of natural disasters.

More than 1,300 people including heads of state like U.S. President Barack Obama, business leaders such as Microsoft (MSFT.O) co-founder Bill Gates, humanitarians and celebrities are due to attend the sixth annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York.

snip
Clinton also hoped a better way of responding to and minimizing natural and man-made disasters would be developed.

“There’s every reason to believe that the incidence of economically devastating natural disasters will accelerate around the world with the changing of the climate,” he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2117105720100921

Bill seems to be anticipating a disaster or two.

On September 22, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nicholas Clegg, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, and Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will announce a five-year public-private global alliance to contribute to the goal of reducing the unmet need for family planning by 100 million women, expand skilled birth attendance and facility-based deliveries, and increase the number of women and newborns receiving quality post-natal care by 2015.


The alliance includes the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/09/147528.htm

Family planning?