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In The News …

Happy Wednesday, Greater Washington! Are you avoiding the rain? Are you stuck indoors? Just spend some extra time on the Catalogue blog. We have our Mid-Week News today, plus more 7 Questions coming your way tomorrow! We’ve also created a 7 Questions archive. So if you’re like me and enjoy poking through blog histories, you now easily can peruse past interviews.

[ UPDATE: Okay. So I woke up this morning and, lo and behold, gorgeous fall weather. So enjoy the sunshine and then catch up on some non-profit news! ]

Celebrities Hire Philanthropy Consultants to Guide Their Giving — We actually had a blog post about this yesterday, so do check out both that (tell us what you think!) and the LA Times article from this past Sunday. The article examines the “attempt by celebrities to display a deep commitment to issues beyond their next movie or album” and the rising demand for multi-skilled philanthropic advisers who can facilitate just that.

We Need More Research on Nonprofit Boards Over at the Chronicle, “nonprofit-governance wonk” Rick Moyers highlights some interesting and unsettling points in Francie Ostrower’s “Nonprofit Governance in the United States” — including the difficulty of finding new board members and raising current members’ level of activity. Moyers goes on to say that “the performance problems of nonprofit boards are now fairly well documented … a remarkable amount of information has been produced about how boards should do their jobs and what practices are effective,” that information does not have much quantitative backing. So what kind of research should we be doing? If we now know the problems, who is taking the scientific steps towards solutions?

Veterans, Struggling Students Need More College Support — Indiana University recently released the 2010 National Survery of Student Engagement was and, in this afternoon’s post on his Class Struggle blog, the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews highlights that “the kinds of students I thought would be getting the most help — military veterans and new students in trouble — are often getting the least.” Moreover, those same students “rated the importance of academic support services, like tutors and advisors, LOWER than their better prepared and more confident classmates … most in need of help were the least likely to think they needed it.”

I Gain and You Gain — Check out the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s post in response to this podcast on Ted.com. Considering how we might all “work together in the nonprofit sector to produce results that we can all benefit from,” the piece suggests “exercising soft power by creating alliances, partnerships, and mergers between organizations as a strategy to address those chaotic issues that are beyond any single organization’s control.” Right here on GoodWorks, we touched on a similar issue this September, aking whether the relatively-new ethic of collaboration would gain equal traction in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. What do you think?

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