the colony’s motto, Non sibi sed aliis (Not for themselves, but for others)

It would excite no proper interest there

charity

No, United Way isn’t sitting still—it recently teamed up with Salesforce.org to roll out a new app called Philanthropy Cloud. For now, however, upstart Benevity rules the online workplace giving space.

Since it was founded by longtime charity executive Pierre Barnoti as the international offshoot of a Montreal animal welfare charity, SPCAI has spent little more than 20 percent of its total revenue on actual programs and services that help animals.

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” ― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating it is as blessed to give as to receive.

Foundation finds its grantees 'significantly outperform' similar charities

Whether smiles or frowns work best may depend on what experts call “involvement” with charities – how much someone cares about charitable missions in general, how often they volunteer or participate in fundraising events and whether they regularly donate to nonprofits. Because these people already help people in need, they would like to know their donations make a difference. Sad images remind potential donors of hardships. That may make solving those problems seem insurmountable for people who are already involved with charities, thereby discouraging them from donating. Happy pictures should work better for these people because they affirm the significance of individual action and showcase the positive impact one person’s generosity can make. People who aren’t very involved with charities, on the other hand, are less easily swayed to support a given mission or to believe in its urgency. Because sad images highlight problems and the extent of unmet needs, unhappy faces should do a better job of eliciting donations from these potential donors.

In most universities, alumni relations is a function that is kept distinct from academics and has fund-raising as its primary focus. For alumni/lifelong learners to become an integral part of a university community, we need to better integrate them with all parts of the university.

Charity devoid of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much as a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the glottis or uvula by a tumour in the tongue, or by the introduction of the operator's instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular features were the very same as those which adorned the faces of certain good and pious and slightly withered ladies of Combray whom I used to see at mass, many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces of Injustice. But in later years I understood that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes lay in the great part played in each of them by its symbols, while the fact that these were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed), but as real things, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to their meaning, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they imparted. And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal, intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

Ford Foundation President Darren Walker is among the most outspoken funders calling for a new grantmaking approach. “All of us in the nonprofit ecosystem are party to a charade with terrible consequences—what we might call the ‘overhead fiction,’” says Walker. “The data included in this article along with comparable data for our grantees convinced us that we had to make a change.” Beginning January 1, 2016, Ford doubled its “overhead rate” (the percentage above direct project costs that can be used to pay indirect costs) to 20 percent. In doing so, it hoped “to encourage more honest dialogue about the actual operating costs of nonprofit organizations,” adds Walker.

Whatever our intentions, the truth is that we can inadvertently widen inequality in the course of making money, even though we claim to support equality and justice when giving it away. And while our end-of-year giving might support worthy organizations, we must also ask if these financial donations contribute to larger social change.In other words, “giving back” is necessary, but not sufficient. We should seek to bring about lasting, systemic change, even if that change might adversely affect us. We must bend each act of generosity toward justice.

after revealing his wife, Priscilla Chan, had given birth to their first child, Max, Zuckerberg announced the creation of a charity organization called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The couple have pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares in their lifetime, currently worth about $45bn. The charity, which has “the mission of advancing human potential and promoting equality”, will be administered by the CEO himself and is already on track to be worth a potential $3bn by 2018.

In one version of this experiment, if we gave participants synthetic oxytocin (in the nose, that will reach the brain in an hour), they donated to 57 percent more of the featured charities and donated 56 percent more money than participants given a placebo. Those who received oxytocin also reported more emotional transportation into the world depicted in the ad. Most importantly, these people said they were less likely to engage in the dangerous behaviors shown in the ads. So, go see a movie and laugh and cry. It’s good for your brain, and just might motivate you to make positive changes in your life and in others’ lives as well.

When people watch Ben’s story in the lab—and they both maintain attention to the story and release oxytocin—nearly all of these individuals donate a portion of their earnings from the experiment. They do this even though they don’t have to. This is surprising since this payment is to compensate them for an hour of their time and two needle sticks in their arms to obtain blood from which we measure chemical changes that come from their brains. 

people who felt awe were less likely to feel impatient and more likely to volunteer their time than study participants who felt happiness. However, awe did not make people more likely to donate money, suggesting that awe does not make people more generous in general. Instead, it was the sense that they had more time to spend that seems to have made participants more willing to lend a hand.

It leadsto kind of more prosocial leadership behavior and, in fact, more charitable giving.

So what does this mean if you’re a professional fundraiser? Maybe you should just set up a pretty website and then let people decide whether to donate of their own accord. There’s just one problem with this strategy: You’re not likely to collect much money. One of the most common reasons people report donating to charity is that someone asks them to give. The trick, then, is to craft charitable appeals that encourage people to give—without making them feel forced to comply.

But it’s possible to create a sense of connection even with total strangers.  A particularly strong example of that is the website DonorsChoose.org, which allows donors to purchase supplies or fund projects for a specific group of students. Creating links between a specific donor and a specific classroom enables an emotional connection to emerge from what would otherwise be a cold financial transaction. Teachers send thank-you notes to donors, and students often do so as well. “When we deliver the initial thank-you note to the donor, our first ask is not for money,” says DonorsChoose founder Charles Best. “Instead, we ask the donor to write back to the classroom, and we measure success in the volume of two-way correspondence that we see between donors and classrooms.”

Who was happiest by the end of the day? The people who used the gift card to benefit someone else and spent time with that person at Starbucks. Investing and connecting provided the most happiness.

But not only do gifts make us feel close to others; feeling closer to others makes us feel better about gifts. Research shows that people derive more happiness from spending money on “strong ties” (such as significant others, but also close friends and immediate family members) than on “weak ties” (think a friend of a friend, or a step-uncle).

Across the 136 countries studied, donating to charity had a similar relationship to happiness as doubling household income.

How did their purchases affect them? By the end of the day, individuals who spent money on others—who engaged in what we call “prosocial spending”—were measurably happier than those who spent money on themselves, even though there were no differences between the two groups at the beginning of the day. The amount of money people found in their envelopes—five dollars or 20—had no effect on their happiness. How people spent the money mattered much more than how much of it they got. This experiment suggests that spending as little as five dollars to help someone else can increase your own happiness.

Giving has also been linked to the release of oxytocin, a hormone (also released during sex and breast feeding) that induces feelings of warmth, euphoria, and connection to others. In laboratory studies, Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, has found that a dose of oxytocin will cause people to give more generously and to feel more empathy towards others,

Giving evokes gratitude. Whether you’re on the giving or receiving end of a gift, that gift can elicit feelings of gratitude—it can be a way of expressing gratitude or instilling gratitude in the recipient. And research has found that gratitude is integral to happiness, health, and social bonds.

What’s more, when we give to others, we don’t only make them feel closer to us; we also feel closer to them. “Being kind and generous leads you to perceive others more positively and more charitably,” writes Lyubomirsky in her book The How of Happiness, and this “fosters a heightened sense of interdependence and cooperation in your social community.”

when we givespontaneously, we actually give significantly more, upwards of 65% of our resources comparedto when we deliberate and calculate and think about how much we give, where our giving drops

people who gave money away rose in happiness over the course of the day, people who spentinon themselves showed a slight decrease in happiness, and really impressively, more recentworkis showing by Dunn and others that this finding replicates in dozens and dozens of countries,thatgiving gives you a bigger happiness benefit than spending on the self.