The Power of the Individual

As we start the Jewish New Year, I found it quite fortuitous that I ran across the following article and its implied message in the September 15th Haaretz paper.  The title read “Biker combines altruism, cross-country challenge.” In short, an extreme sports enthusiast named Ronen Medina is traveling cross-country, from Metula (Northern Israel) to Eilat (Southern Israel), on his electric scooter, visiting hospitals and distributing packages of candy to patients.

The NONPROFITBANKER is on Twitter

After months of ridiculing twitter about its uselessness, I realize it may be the perfect solution for when I want to share an observation or piece of news but can’t write a blog post right away.   Twitter, also known as microblogging, only allows for posts up to 140 characters.  It’s possible that I’ll follow up with an expanded blog post, but just as likely that the Twitter update will speak for itself. 

Click here to link to my Twitter page.

Israeli Study Finds that Foundations Are not Effective in Checking Nonprofits

An article was recently posted on Midot’s website highlighting a joint study done by Midot and Sheatufim.   The study was presented at a Sheatufim conference on June 23, 2009.  The many findings of the study include:

• Israeli philanthropic foundations are investing great resources in the grant process and in grant selection before the transferring of funds to nonprofits; however, most foundations lack clear criteria that accompany the process and rely only on the reports from the recipients themselves.
• Even though the processes of the different foundations are similar, there exists little cooperation between the various foundations.
• Most foundations do not rely on external professionals to help check the recipients’ usage of the grants.
• Most foundations do not implement a suitable analysis before the donation is given.
• Foundations reported a lack of evaluation and measurement tools to check recipient organizations.  Foundations also noted a lack of tools to help analyze the financial statements of the organizations.

Defining an Israeli Nonprofit Organization

For those individuals or corporations familiar with nonprofit organizations in the United States, any analysis of the status of an Israeli charity should begin with a comparison.  This contrast will shed light on the many differences that exist in the two countries’ legislation and definition of a nonprofit organization.