Chronicle of Philanthropy Feature Story on

the chronicle of
PHILANTHROPY
®
The Newspaper of the Nonprofit World
Volume XXVII, No. 4 • December 11, 2014 • $5
Intensive Joint Efforts
to Solve Big Problems
Are a Work in Progress
Beyond
Collaboration
By Ben Gose
wenty organizations in the Portland, Ore., area
offer summer programs to help prepare rising
ninth-graders for high school, but their early efforts weren’t reaching enough kids at risk of dropping
out.
That sobering message wasn’t delivered by a school
superintendent but by All Hands Raised, an organization in Portland that aspires to raise educational
achievement in six low-income school districts.
The organizations aimed to have at least 75 percent
of those enrolled in the summer-enrichment program
Ninth Grade Counts consist of students classified by
their schools as at risk of dropping out—the ones most
in need of a summer boost. When All Hands Raised
crunched the enrollment numbers, however, it found
that only 55 percent of students in the program were
so classified.
At monthly meetings, All Hands Raised pushed
the 20 organizations to work more closely with school
counselors to get more students who were struggling
into the program.
“Everyone had to accept that this was a failure,”
says Dan Ryan, chief executive of All Hands Raised.
“It wasn’t about shaming everybody. It was about shining the light on the possibility to improve.”
Since that weak start in 2009, the organizations are
now reaching more of those the program is designed to
help. Today, students at risk of dropping out make up
nearly 80 percent of the program’s enrollment.
All Hands Raised is one of many new organizations
around the country that champion an approach called
Continued on Page 11
T
Charities, foundations,
governments, and local
leaders are joining forces
to solve thorny problems by
using data and focusing
relentlessly on results. Jeff
Edmondson, who led a
successful Cincinnati effort,
is now helping groups in
other cities nationwide, but
he is forcing them to follow
such tough measures that
half of 100 groups failed
to meet the standards.
“This is the hardest
work you could ever do,
and we were at risk
of watering it down. We
had to set a higher bar
for what it means to
take this work on in an
authentic way.”
NATHAN MANDELL, FOR THE CHRONICLE
Advocates of April 15 Deadline for Deducting Gifts
Prepare to Renew Fight With Next Year’s Congress
By Alex Daniels
onprofit advocates will renew their push next
year for legislation that would dramatically
change traditional end-of-the-year fundraising campaigns by extending the deadline for making
a charitable deduction to April 15.
While the shift might boost giving, by allowing people more time to settle their finances before making
gifts, some nonprofit leaders warn that a later deadline could dilute year-end efforts.
The holiday season, when many people give gifts
to their families and loved ones, is a natural time for
charities to remind people that their generosity is
needed elsewhere as well, says Patrick Rooney, associate dean for research at the University of Indiana’s
Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Mr. Rooney says
that extending the deadline to April, from the end of
the year, might benefit people who give larger gifts
N
CAROLYN KUAN, OF THE HARTFORD SYMPHONY
CHARLIE SHAUCK
Fundraising 101
TIPS FOR RELUCTANT EXECUTIVES: SEE PAGE 7
Satellite Images for Good
n
NASA
Planet Labs is seeking to make
pictures taken from outer space
cheaper so charities can use
them to track human-right abuses, provide aid after disasters,
and help farmers in developing
countries know when to plant
crops.
Page 25
#GivingTuesday’s Windfall
n
The third annual day aimed to
spur philanthropy saw more
nonprofits and donors than ever
join in, with donations up 64
percent, according to one
estimate.
Page 9
and tend to itemize their tax returns. Though it could
increase giving over all, he warns that an April deadline would have downsides.
“Surely there would be some transitional disruptions,” he says. “Some of the year-end fundraising
might not be as effective.”
Donors’ Motivations
Such a change, says John Lippincott, president of
the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, would force organizations to get a better understanding of their donors’ motivations. Some donors
might give more in December as a result of holiday
euphoria. Others, who make giving decisions in consultation with their accountants, should be contacted
as the tax-filing deadline approaches.
The result, he says, is that charities would have
Continued on Page 8
DECEMBER 11, 2014
THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY •
11
GIVING
Gifts, Grants, and Good Works
‘Collective Impact’ Uses
Data to Guide Progress
by Many Local Partners
Continued from Page 1
“collective impact,” in which a number of local organizations work together to solve systemic social problems
and use data to chart their progress.
The strides made by Ninth Grade Counts illustrate
why advocates of collective impact hope it can achieve
the nonprofit sector’s holy grail—something often attempted but too seldom accomplished: achieving lasting progress in tackling big systemic problems, in areas such as education and criminal justice.
But even the most ardent advocates of the approach
worry that it is being overhyped, and they acknowledge that many prominent collective-impact efforts
have a long way to go before they can claim success. In
Portland, for example, some schools that have succeeded in getting more at-risk students to enroll in Ninth
Grade Counts have yet to see that participation translate into higher graduation rates.
“It’s a work in progress,” says Jeff Edmondson, managing director of StriveTogether, a network of “cradle
to career” efforts in 26 states that is considered one of
the most expansive and prominent collective-impact
endeavors. “All of the pioneers will tell you that we
have to fail forward, and build this as we go.”
Different Approach
Until recently, grant makers and nonprofit leaders
focused heavily on identifying high-achieving charities—often headed by charismatic chief executives—
and helping them spread their top programs throughout the country.
Collective-impact efforts are different and more
challenging. The focus is distinctly local, and often
involves as many as 100 partners, all corralled by a
“backbone organization”—like All Hands Raised—
Philadelphia’s Project U-Turn helped increase graduation
rates by 12 percentage points, but the city is still far below
the average for schools throughout Pennsylvania.
“How many of you got a little nauseous
when I just put ‘collective’ and ‘impact’
together in the same sentence?”
that keeps the focus on the goal of making steady
progress in fighting a particular problem that is
thorny and persistent. The groups agree up front on
various data points that will guide their progress and
point them toward areas in which changes may be
needed, as in the summer programs for at-risk students in Portland.
“Collective impact is fundamentally different from
the paradigms that we’ve seen for trying to solve social problems in the past 50 years,” says Fay Hanleybrown, a managing director at FSG, a consulting firm
that is perhaps the strategy’s biggest champion. “This
is about having a very structured approach to using
data and course correcting as you go.”
New Buzzword
One of the first, and perhaps the best-known, collective-impact efforts is the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati. Strive was created in 2006, when a diverse
group of leaders—school-district superintendents, early-childhood educators, nonprofit and business leaders, grant makers, city officials, and university presidents—came together to try to improve education.
They agreed on a common set of goals and indicators
to track progress, including readiness for kindergarten, fourth-grade reading and math scores, graduation
rates, and college completion.
FSG drew heavily on the Strive Partnership when,
in late 2010, it adopted the term “collective impact” to
describe broad approaches to social problems that rely
heavily on data to chart progress. Within a short time,
“collective impact” became a buzzword in philanthropy, and since then, excitement about the strategy has
increased.
Today, it’s hard to find a major U.S. city that doesn’t
have some kind of collective-impact effort under way.
In March, FSG and the Aspen Institute’s Forum for
Community Solutions created an online forum devoted
to collective impact. Within six months, 7,000 people
had signed up.
The Obama administration is among the believers
in the approach. In December 2012, the seven school
districts participating in the Road Map Project, a collective-impact effort in South Seattle and surrounding areas to double college completion rates, won a
$40-million Race to the Top grant from the U.S. Department of Education. And the federal Social Innovation Fund, which has given $243-million since 2010,
announced in September that in its latest round of
grants, it gave special consideration to proposals involving collective-impact approaches.
Improving education has been the main goal of
many collective-impact efforts (see article on Page
13), but some successful results have been achieved
in other areas. For example, an effort to overhaul New
York State’s juvenile-justice system significantly reduced the number of juvenile arrests and the number
of youths in state custody two years later.
The approach has also helped Vibrant Communities to significantly reduce poverty rates in 13 cities
in Canada; has enabled Somerville, Mass., to reduce
obesity among its residents; and was effective in reducing binge drinking in Franklin County, Mass. (See
box on Page 12.)
In Name Only
Not surprisingly, some old-school collaborations are
adopting the collective-impact name.
John Kania, an FSG managing director who helped
popularize the use of the term in the nonprofit sector, wrote recently in the Stanford Social Innovation
Review that grant makers are getting proposals from
charities that claim the use of a collective-impact approach but aren’t really practicing that. And conversely, some foundations are pushing grantees to collabContinued on Page 12
12 • THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY
DECEMBER 11, 2014
GIVING
Rallying a Community to Solve a Problem:
5 Local Efforts
OVERHAUL JUVENILE JUSTICE
Goal: Fix New York State’s ineffective juvenile-justice system
Who’s leading the work: Representatives from
nonprofits, state agencies, probation offices,
and others formed a committee to oversee
multiple activities.
Strategy: Get a complex network of public and
private agencies to agree to collaborate and
share data for the first time and to use those
data to drive decision making.
Results: From December 2010 to June 2013,
the number of youths in state custody dropped
45 percent.
CURB POVERTY
Goal: Reduce poverty for 1 million Canadian citizens in 100 cities by 2020
Who’s leading the work: Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement
Strategy: Regional collaboratives bring together businesses, government, nonprofit organizations,
and low-income residents to develop local strategies to reduce poverty in an effort called Vibrant
Communities. Tamarack aggregates the regional data so successful strategies can be shared
throughout the network.
Results: An earlier effort that ended in 2010 improved the lives of 203,000 Canadians by measures like income; access to food, shelter, and transportation; and increased skills and knowledge.
PROVIDE A BETTER EDUCATION
Goal: Improve educational outcomes, ranging from kindergarten readiness to college completion, in
Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky
Who’s leading the work: Strive Partnership
Strategy: Strive is one of the first “cradle to career” education efforts that starts with early education and continues through the time a person enters a job or college. It works with school officials,
early-childhood educators, nonprofit and business leaders, and city officials to identify indicators of
student success and use data to send dollars to programs that work.
Results: 89 percent of indicators, including kindergarten readiness and fourth-grade reading proficiency, have shown signs of improvement, but some measures of progress among older students,
including ACT scores and postsecondary readiness, haven’t improved as much.
PROMOTE COLLEGE AND JOBS SCHOOLING
Goal: Double by the year 2020 the proportion of students in seven low-income school districts in
the Seattle area who are on track to graduate from college or earn a career credential
Who’s leading the work: Community Center for Education Results
Strategy: The Road Map Project is similar to the Strive Partnership and includes schools, philanthropists, housing authorities, health systems, and community-based organizations.
Results: The proportion of students in the region who earn a college degree or credential within six
years has risen from 24 percent to 35 percent since the project started in 2010.
KEEP KIDS IN SCHOOL
Goal: Reduce dropout rates in Philadelphia
Who’s leading the work: Philadelphia Youth Network
Strategy: Project U-Turn works with the mayor’s office, school officials, service providers, court and
welfare systems, and local grant makers to share data and get everybody working toward a common purpose. The effort seeks to provide more support for students in foster care and create more
educational opportunities for students in the juvenile-justice system.
Results: The graduation rate in the School District of Philadelphia now stands at 64 percent—
up 12 percentage points from when Project U-Turn started eight years ago but still far below the
state’s average of 84 percent.
SOURCES: Chronicle reporting, FSG, Bridgespan Group
All Hands Raised, an Oregon project, made changes to
ensure that students most at risk of dropping out were the
ones enrolled in Ninth Grade Counts, a summer program.
Advocates of ‘Collective Impact’
Encouraged by Evolving Models
Continued from Page 11
orate in “collective-impact” efforts that aren’t true to the
strategy.
Steve Patrick is executive director of the Aspen Institute’s
Forum for Community Solutions, which manages a fund
that plans to invest $13-million
over five years in local efforts
that use a collective-impact
approach to help young people
who have either dropped out of
school or are unemployed. When
giving talks about the fund, he
addresses the faddishness of
the approach up front.
“How many of you got a little
nauseous when I just put ‘collective’ and ‘impact’ together in the
same sentence?” he says.
The buzz around the Strive
Partnership has spawned copycat efforts around the country.
The interest is so strong that
Mr. Edmondson, its founding
executive director, left to create and lead the StriveTogether
network.
By 2012, the network had
100 members. Now the number is down to 49. Mr. Edmondson booted more than half the
groups from the network after
determining that they had not
met certain milestones, like
reaching broad consensus on
desired outcomes or identifying
data points as markers of progress.
“This is the hardest work you
could ever do, and we were at
risk of watering it down,” Mr.
Edmondson says. “We had to set
a higher bar for what it means
to take this work on in an authentic way.”
Need for Evidence
As the pretenders fall away,
the more important question
becomes: Does the intensive approach actually work? Despite
all the enthusiasm about it,
there is little evidence demonstrating that a collective-impact
approach can solve intractable
social problems.
One reason for caution is the
weak track record of previous
collective attempts by philanthropists, schools, government
agencies, and political leaders
to tackle persistent systemic
problems.
The language used by the Annie E. Casey Foundation for its
1988 New Futures program—a
$50-million, five-year effort to
aid at-risk children in five cities—sounds a lot like collective
impact today. Strong political
leadership, data-driven decision making, and interagency
collaboration were supposed
to drive down the rates of kids
who dropped out of school and of
teenage girls who became pregnant. By Casey’s own admission, New Futures didn’t work.
The foundation’s mission is
creating a brighter future for
low-income children, so the organization continues to take on
difficult urban challenges.
In May, at a sold-out conference held at the Aspen Institute
for foundations interested in the
collective-impact approach, Patrick McCarthy, Casey’s president, described how it’s being
used by four current foundation
projects, most of them based in
Baltimore.
Mr. McCarthy says that in
spite of the failure of the New
Futures program, he is optimistic about the collective-impact
approach, in part because of all
the energy people are putting
into refining the model.
“The how-to, the implementation approach is much more fully described and documented”
than when Casey unveiled New
Futures, he says.
“I’m not claiming that we’ve
found the magic potion,” Mr.
McCarthy adds. “There’s a lot
more work to do. We need to
be modest in what we claim for
how much the collective-impact
principles are backed up by rigorous evidence.”
DECEMBER 11, 2014
THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY •
GIVING
13
Schools Are Main Focus of Collective Action
but Don’t Account for the Biggest Successes
By Ben Gose
any of the most-ambitious “collective-impact” efforts under
way focus on education. One of
the boldest efforts is in Dallas,
where the Commit! Partnership
aims to double the percentage of
students who earn a college degree or certificate.
The approach known as collective impact—now one of the
hottest concepts in the nonprofit sector—involves many
diverse local organizations
coming together to tackle a
persistent problem, using mutually agreed-upon data points
to guide their progress.
In Dallas, only 14 percent of
high-school graduates countywide are considered “college
ready,” based on standardized-test scores. Commit!, an
effort to help children from early education through the time
M
“The biggest
takeaway for
everybody in this
work is, ‘Wow, this
takes awhile.’ ”
they start careers, began in
2012 and has signed up school
districts that enroll 500,000
students—making it one of the
largest collective-impact efforts in the country. Commit!,
the organization that supports
and coordinates the work of 135
participating groups, tracks 11
data indicators, ranging from
kindergarten readiness to college completion.
Todd Williams, a retired
partner of Goldman Sachs, has
put $500,000 of his foundation’s
money into Commit! and is taking no salary for serving as the
organization’s executive director.
For him, collective impact
isn’t necessarily the answer—
but it is a mandatory starting
point.
“When you take on this work
there are things that are within your control and things that
aren’t,” he says. “We don’t pick
what the school board prioritizes. We don’t get to choose the
type of people who enter education as a career. But if you don’t
bring data to the table, you’re
nowhere.”
Education may be where the
action is with this popular new
approach, but the record of collective impact is mixed, even for
efforts hailed as exemplary.
Project U-Turn is an effort to
solve the drop-out crisis in Philadelphia, led by the Philadelphia Youth Network. School-district leaders, city agencies,
foundations, youth-serving organizations, parents, and students meet regularly to devise
strategies. The effort has at-
tracted $175-million in government and private funds.
The city’s graduation rate
now stands at 64 percent—up
12 percentage points from when
Project U-Turn started eight
years ago but still far below the
state’s average of 84 percent.
“We’ve made remarkable
progress, but we still have quite
a ways to go,” says Chekemma
Fulmore-Townsend, president
of the Philadelphia Youth Network.
Mixed Results
In the Strive Partnership, a
“cradle-to-career” effort in Cincinnati and surrounding areas
that began in 2006, young students are improving on marks
like kindergarten readiness and
early grade-level reading, but
older students aren’t showing
as much improvement on ACT
scores or postsecondary readiness.
“We’re making progress, but
it’s slow,” says Greg Landsman,
the partnership’s executive director. “We’re going to keep going until the system is fundamentally changed.”
The E3Alliance (Education
Equals Economics) in Austin,
Tex., is, like the Strive Partnership, one of the older efforts using collective-impact principles
to improve education.
The alliance has worked with
11 districts, four colleges, and
eight local companies to bolster
interest in engineering and
technology careers.
The effort has led to 500-percent growth in the number of
students taking secondary-level engineering classes. But on
some basic measures that the
alliance tracks, little progress
has been made.
Kindergarten-readiness measures have remained stuck at
about 53 percent since 2010,
and black and Hispanic students haven’t closed the gap on
eighth-grade math scores.
Susan Dawson, the alliance’s
president, says her group often
weighs tradeoffs between expediency and inclusiveness.
Wait to get everyone to the
table and five years may pass
with no action, she says. Move
too quickly and you won’t have
buy-in from the schools and
low-income communities.
What’s more, she points out,
the E3Alliance has no regulatory power.
“We don’t make the decisions—schools boards do,” Ms.
Dawson says. “All we’re doing is
undertaking massive systemic
change, with no authority to do
anything.”
Steve Patrick, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s
Forum for Community Solutions, acknowledges that the
evidence to date is underwhelming.
“The biggest take-away for
everybody in this work, is ‘Wow,
this takes awhile.’ ”
Turnover an Issue
One concern is how collective-impact efforts will survive
amid changes in political and
school leadership. The theory is
that the rigorous focus on data
to guide progress should make
it possible for the efforts to continue even if charismatic champions depart. “It can’t be a personality-driven agenda,” says
Mary Jean Ryan, executive director of the Community Center for Education Results, which
staffs the Road Map Project, a
cradle-to-career effort in South
Seattle and surrounding areas.
Road Map is just four years
Continued on Page 14
Todd Williams donated $500,000 to a Dallas schools
collective-impact project he volunteered to lead: “If you
don’t bring data to the table, you’re nowhere.”
NONPROFIT
TECHNOLOGY
CONFERENCE
2015
“
I LEARN SOMETHING NEW
AT EVERY NTC, AND THE
OPPORTUNITY TO INTERACT WITH
OTHERS WITH THE SAME ISSUES
I MIGHT HAVE IS PRICELESS.
—14 NTC Attendee
”
Nonprofit Technology
Conference (NTC)
March 4-6, 2015 · Austin, TX
CONNECT. LEARN. CHANGE.
Join the largest group of nonprofit professionals that
put tech to work for their causes.
Register now or learn more at: myNTC.nten.org
14 • THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY
Donors Don’t Leap to Aid
Efforts to Change Systems
Continued from Page 13
old, and already the superintendents have changed at six of the
seven participating school districts. The new hires are quickly briefed on the project. “We
haven’t really lost momentum,”
Ms. Ryan insists.
The E3 Alliance, in Austin,
worried from the beginning
that any political involvement
in the effort might set the alliance up for failure when a leader was swept from office. The alliance still prohibits elected officials from serving on its board.
“It’s just something that scares
us,” Ms. Dawson says.
Inherent Tensions
Some collective-impact efforts have stumbled while trying to engage the community
they’re trying to serve. Any effort aimed at eliminating racial
disparities in education needs
to have community-based cultural organizations at the table
early on, say experts.
Dan Ryan, chief executive of
All Hands Raised, an effort to
raise educational achievement
“All that systems
stuff is nice, but I
want to see 25 kids
who were crying last
week not crying.”
in six school districts in the
Portland, Ore., area, says the
process can be difficult because
white people interested in equity work often want to talk about
data, while black and Latino
residents may prefer to focus on
actual stories.
Mr. Ryan says his organization has its hands full trying to keep school superintendents and CEOs of local cultural and ethnic organizations
at the table to discuss how to
remedy Portland’s “discipline
gap.” Black, Latino, and Native-American students in Portland, as elsewhere, are suspended and expelled at much higher
rates than white students.
“There’s tension in every community when doing this work,”
Mr. Ryan says. “The good news
is that we have a system that
is allowing key stakeholders to
have forthright conversations
and move the action forward.”
‘Quick Wins’
Since fully rolling out a collective-impact effort can take
years, FSG, a consulting company that champions the approach, urges communities to
look for “quick wins.”
“It’s important to be both
planning and doing at the same
time,” says Fay Hanleybrown, a
managing director at FSG.
The Road Map Project seized
on such an opportunity, shortly
after its inception, by pushing
school districts to take responsibility for getting their low-income students signed up for a
generous scholarship opportunity. Washington State’s College
Bound Scholarship promises to
cover tuition at in-state public
institutions for students from
low-income families who sign
up during their eighth-grade
year and maintain at least a 2.0
grade-point average through
graduation.
Only
half
of
eligible
eighth-graders were signing
up each year when Road Map
started. Road Map sent weekly sign-up data to mayors, local newspapers, and parent
groups, igniting a friendly competition among the districts to
see who could register the most
students.
Now, 98 percent of eligible
eighth-graders—about 5,500
students—are signing up. Ms.
Ryan says Road Map plans to
push for more support services,
including college advising, for
the students.
Will it be enough to help Road
Map meet is ambitious goal of
doubling the number of students who are on track to graduate from college or earn a career credential by 2020?
Ms. Ryan says she thinks the
project will hit its goal by 2022,
at the latest.
“It takes a little time to build
up that sustained quality of service that will impact a cohort of
kids and get them to this higher level of system performance,”
she says.
The Road Map Project is very
well supported, thanks to the
U.S. Department of Education,
which awarded a $40-million
Race to the Top grant to the
seven districts participating
in the project, and to the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation,
which covers about half of the
operating costs of Ms. Ryan's
organization.
Other collective-impact efforts aren’t so fortunate. In
spite of increasing interest in
the strategy, many donors and
foundations are reluctant to invest in projects for which they
can’t claim credit and that have
no fixed termination date.
Ms. Dawson, of the E3 Alliance, says she has struggled
to get donors and foundations
in the Austin area—a philanthropy market she describes
as “immature”—to help pay for
her team’s work persuading local universities to grant college
credit to high-school students
taking the challenging engineering courses.
“All that systems stuff is
nice,” she says, offering her take
on the perspective of some local
donors. “But I want to see 25
kids who were crying last week
not crying, and I want to say
that I did it.”
DECEMBER 11, 2014
GIVING
NOTABLE GIFTS
U. of N.C. Pharmacy School Gets
$100-Million for Innovation Institute
How much: $100-million
Who got it: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s
Eshelman School of Pharmacy
Who gave it: Fred Eshelman, who founded Pharmaceutical Product Development, a consulting firm he sold in
2011, and Furiex Pharmaceuticals, a drug-development
company he sold this year
Donor’s ties to the university: Mr. Eshelman earned a
bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from the university in 1972.
He previously gave the university a total of $38-million.
The pharmacy school was named for him in 2008, and he
serves as an adjunct faculty member of the institution and
on its Board of Visitors. He earned a doctor of pharmacy
degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1974.
What the money will do: Create the Eshelman Institute
for Innovation, support research, increase the number of
faculty members, and help build programs to develop new
drugs and spin-off pharmaceutical companies
Why he gave: Mr. Eshelman says Robert Blouin, dean of
the pharmacy school, approached him “with a new idea to
supercharge some of the faculty research here, to get it to
a phase where we could possibly commercialize it.”
Fred Eshelman has given
his alma mater a total of
$138-million to date.
A boost for a public university: “It seemed like the right thing to do at the right time, especially with public education under fire all over the country for various reasons,” says Mr. Eshelman. “We need some good news.”
Part of a trend: Mr. Eshelman’s latest donation is the seventh gift of $100-million or more to
a college or university announced this year.
—Maria Di Mento
Estate of Music Publisher Gives $13-Million
to SOS Children’s Villages–USA
How much: $13-million
Who got it: SOS Children’s Villages–USA,
in Washington, a nonprofit organization
supporting orphaned and abandoned children
Who gave it: The Trust of Harry and Carol Goodman. Mr. Goodman was a musician,
founder of Regent Music Corporation, and
the brother of the jazz and swing legend
Benny Goodman. Harry Goodman died in
1997 and his wife in 2012.
Also part of the gift: In addition to the
money, SOS Children’s Villages–USA will
Harry and Carol Goodman’s interest in
receive partial stock ownership in three
SOS Children’s Villages derived from
music-publishing entities: Regent Music
seeing its work in nations like Kenya.
Corporation, Jewel Music Publishing, and
Sunflower Music. Popular songs in those
catalogs, which the charity now co-owns, include holiday favorites such as “I Saw Mommy
Kissing Santa Claus,” “Run Rudolph Run,” and “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
Where the money will go: The gift is unrestricted and the charity’s leadership is evaluating investment proposals abroad and in the United States. The Goodmans’ desire, according to
their trust documents, was that their gift “be devoted to the cure, prevention, and care of children’s illnesses, infirmities, and diseases.”
Why the donor gave: SOS Children’s Villages says it has no record of a previous gift from
the Goodmans. However, the couple visited many of the charity’s facilities and developed an
affinity for the group’s mission during extensive travels in India and Africa. SOS Children’s
Villages was one of four nonprofits the trust document named as potential beneficiaries for the
couple’s fortune. Ultimately, three of those charities—including the social-services group Of
Home, Family and Future and the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital—received contributions
from the trust, with SOS Children’s Villages–USA receiving the majority of the money.
—Brennen Jensen
For details about other new gifts, including a $15-million gift to Network for Good,
go to philanthropy.com/topdonors.
Send gift news to [email protected].