By Mark Miller, Reuters reporter, Minneapolis Star Tribune |
Women who work full-time, year-round, made just 79 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts in 2014, U.S. Census Bureau data show.
But the injustice of the gender pay gap also impacts retirement security.
A woman who works full-time over a 40-year period loses $435,480 in lifetime income (today’s dollars) due to the wage gap, according to the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit legal and advocacy group.
The income gap translates directly to lower income from Social Security and pensions — since those benefits are determined by wage history — and it hampers the capacity of women to save for retirement.
And since women typically live longer than men, savings often must be stretched across more years of retirement.
Paying women less than men for the same work has been illegal since 1963. Seven years ago, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for workers to challenge pay inequality. He announced last month that employers with more than 100 workers will be required to start reporting compensation data by gender to the federal government.
By Walter Frick, senior associate editor, Harvard Business Review |
In October 2000, Jack Welch announced the biggest deal of his 20-year tenure as head of GE: a $45 billion merger with Honeywell. Shortly thereafter he was forced to retire, due to GE’s mandatory retirement policy for CEOs turning 65.
More than a third of S&P 500 firms have a mandatory retirement policy for their CEO. Their aim is to drive out executives who are past their prime. But are such policies a good idea?
By Adrienne Roberts, reporter, Detroit Business Daily News |
The Detroit Police Athletic League announced it raised $12 million and will be able to break ground in April on its new youth sports complex and headquarters at the site of the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.
“For many years, the corner of Michigan and Trumbull and Tiger Stadium was where many young athletes began incredible careers enabling them to give back to their communities,” says Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan. “It’s meaningful that this site will honor many of those individuals while becoming the newest complex for more Detroit kids to receive the kind of mentoring and support through sports programming that Detroit PAL provides.”
By Andrew Keatts, Kinder Institute for Urban Research for The HuffPost Impact |
For all the resources and attention paid to combating poverty, the whole endeavor suffers from relatively limited data.
A new measure that debuted this fall aims to correct that problem.
Researchers at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy partnered with Salvation Army to develop the Human Needs Index, a real-time measure of poverty that they hope will better inform both policy makers and service providers of the true on-the-ground needs of poor Americans.
In 2012, a staggering 46.5 million people were living in poverty in the United States — the largest number in the 54 years the U.S. Census has measured poverty. This figure has increased or held steady for 11 of the past 12 years.
The reasons are varied, but one contributing factor resonates: Over the same period of time, incomes have stagnated or declined. And with more people earning less, the need for human services has increased, while funding for these services has not.
So what’s a hard-working social service agency or nonprofit to do?
Irv Katz, the former president of United Way of Central Indiana, has spent his career in the human service field. He is now interim president of the National Human Service Assembly (NHSA), a Washington, D.C.-based association of more than 80 of the largest national nonprofit human service organizations.
Katz believes nonprofits have to somehow change the narrative, and change the mindset of funders — both government and private — that social services are a “need” instead of simply a “want.”
In recent years, Katz has witnessed the increase in need, but he also realized that the arguments for services were ineffective and falling on deaf ears. As Congress moved to support one program, nonprofits were asked to recommend another to be cut.
“It started happening about five years ago, where the public policy council of the National Assembly recognized that nobody had any positive legislation going forward. We were just fighting to keep funding levels at best, but it was really being cut, time and time again,” said Katz.
“We’re dying a death by a thousand cuts, and we need to do something different. We need to get people’s attention in a way that citizens can go, ‘Wait a second, I believe in this,’” he said.
Katz believes current communication practices were achieving diminishing returns. So the choice was either to change course or become irrelevant. His group chose the former and is now dipping its toes into the waters of science and psychology with a concept called framing.
Katz’s group became aware of framing and the work of neuroscientists’ work to understand the brain’s architecture. What neuroscientists had learned was that new concepts as initially understood are fixed in an individual’s brain and information pertaining to the concept is viewed through that frame. Scientists also have learned that changing that initial frame is difficult.
For example, a widely held view is that funding for human services is charity. Namely, if there is enough money to go around, that’s fine. But if not, such programs are expendable. Katz is working to change that perception.
“We quite frankly thought that reframing might be a pathway out of the issues that human services were facing — the lack of recognition, the lack of attention, the lack of understanding,” said Katz. “We’re not building a frame by consensus, we’re building it based on research. So we actually went out looking for framing experts.”
Enter the Kresge Foundation and a planning grant. The idea resonated with the foundation because it had actually started a similar dialogue with grantees. In 2013, the National Human Services Assembly contracted with The FrameWorks Institute and began by researching the public’s perception.
“The research that the FrameWorks Institute really identified is that there is a huge gap between public perception and the understanding of people in the human services field. The public tended to think the individual was the cause of the problem, and the individual is responsible for addressing the problem. The experts tended to see that there was more of a societal context. These also included the very significant structural aspect, that it was literally not the individual in terms of causes and solutions and responsibility. And that’s just huge,” said Katz.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation joined in supporting this effort and together the foundations have not only supported the NHSA’s work, but helped fund a re-framing tool kit. In November, Building a New Narrative on Human Services was released. It includes a collection of framing research, recommendations, and sample communications designed to help explain the importance of human services.
While the tool kit is new, Katz is hopeful it will change the conversation.
“Hopefully people will realize this is a new and better way to talk about this whole enterprise of humans helping one another thrive,” said Katz. “I’ve been really pleased and amazed that the wonderful and positive reception that we’ve gotten almost everywhere we’ve gone,” said Katz.
NHSA is beginning to share the narrative and tool kit in workshops with state and local human services coalitions and national entities. Marketing and public policy leaders Assembly members will be introduced to the tool kit at scheduled workshops at sessions with their peers.
As researchers have searched for ways to explain the childhood obesity epidemic in the U.S., many have posited that a child’s race or ethnicity alone can put them at greater risk of becoming overweight or obese.
Kim Eagle, a professor of internal medicine and health management and policy at the University of Michigan, was skeptical of this thinking. His hunch was that poverty was a much more important part of the equation.
And he saw an opportunity to parse the connections between childhood obesity, poverty and race in Massachusetts, where public health officials have been collecting race, body mass index and other data on about 112,000 students from about 70 of the state’s school districts. Eagle and colleagues decided to compare those data to students’ eligibility for free school lunch programs, an indicator of poverty, to find out what predicts whether a child might become overweight or obese.
The FrameWorks Institute works with nonprofit groups and philanthropic foundations to document how the American public understands various social issues and how nonprofit communicators can frame the public discourse on those issues to advance policy outcomes.
To do this, it has developed an approach called strategic frame analysis (SFA), a new way of thinking about communications that FrameWorks believes is especially relevant to the types of social issues addressed by workshop participants. These tools are designed to inspire new thinking and new techniques among
policy experts and advocates who seek to resolve social problems – whether for children and families in a particular state or for the global environment.
One of a social advocate’s most critical acts is to frame an issue. In framing, a communicator uses language, metaphor, and other means to bring the community into the issue in a particular way.
So, for instance, tobacco control advocates reframed tobacco from a “personal vice” narrative, in which the public discourse centered around individual choice and behavior, to a “defective product” narrative, in which the role of corporate malfeasance and the need for protective regulations became clear.
Reframing an issue is hard work, as frames are socially shared and persist over time; but it is worth it, because public opinion and policy preferences are frame dependent. The stories nonprofit communicators tell have the power to make the public more or less supportive of positive changes — for instance, in the way we support human health and well-being, distribute society’s resources, and redress long-standing injustices.
Looking for a foundation directory that is Indiana centric? After an eight-year hiatus, the Indiana Philanthropy Alliance is reviving its publication to accomplish just that.
The new directory, available in March, will narrow its focus. Now, as an online publication, it will be limited to foundations based in Indiana that give to in-state nonprofits. In that past, the directory included some regional and national foundations that gave in Indiana.
With over a 1,000 foundation entries, each must have granted at least $25,000 in awards in the past year.
“There definitely are some new foundations that weren’t in there in 2008,” said Sarah Geis, director knowledge management at Indiana Philanthropy Alliance. “Being online it’s a quick and easy way to filter, and then the user can print out the ones that look like a match for their organization’s needs.”
The online publication allows the user to filter in multiple ways. The subscriber can search by terms or interest areas. Once the search is completed, the user has a list foundation matches. Then an individual funder can be selected for a more detailed entry.
Each entry includes information about a foundation’s proposal method, application procedure, geographic preferences, contacts, financials, grant deadlines, interest areas and support type.
“Grantmakers are glad that we are resurrecting the publication, and their grantees are looking forward to having access to again,” said Marissa Manlove, president and CEO of Indiana Philanthropy Alliance.
Geis said there will not be a printed version and the directory does not include past grants or list current grant opportunities. Since there are other sources available, the new edition will not include a scholarship section.
“Hopefully, it will be evergreen. We will be putting together a protocol for when we’ll be periodically going in, evaluating and reviewing the information,” said Manlove. “We have a learning curve and we may find some things that we may need to adjust in proving usability.”
With Manlove’s contact with grantmakers in Indiana, nonprofits often ask her for advice on approaching funders. Here are some of her suggestions.
“Certainly the recession created some challenges for foundations, and for a period of time, there was definitely a pulling back of the assets that were available, in order to do grant making. Everybody’s investment portfolios took a hit.
That’s built back up again to mostly pre-recession levels in terms of assets.
There definitely were some foundations that made some changes to the way that they were doing their grantmaking, limiting any multi-year commitments because they really weren’t in a position to do as much longer-term looking out. Some decided to pull back on certain types of grants, limiting capitol grants or grants from new grantees.
The recession sparked some of the changes, but it wasn’t the only reason why: I think grantmakers began to think a little bit more strategically, more targeted in their grantmaking approaches, how they might more effectively partner or learn about what other sectors, government sectors , the private business sector are they doing. Asking: Are there opportunities for ways to leverage what each other’s doing? You hear more these days about public private partnerships.
Not that those things weren’t happening back in 2008, but I think you’re probably hearing about it now.
What I tell (nonprofits who contact me about grantmaking) is it’s worth your while doing research. There’s some upfront time.
As you well know, nonprofits are lean on their staffing and having the time and luxury to doing that kind of research can be a challenge. But it’s worth it to spend some time researching.
The worst thing that a nonprofit can do is start sending out blanket proposals to foundations without knowing whether or not it’s a fit or not. It is unfortunately a waste of everybody’s time and can have the unintended consequence of putting a bad taste in program officers’ mouths. “This organization isn’t even taking enough time to know, they’re sending us this request for xyz, and we clearly say on our website what we fund and this is it.’
Kathy Souchet-Downey is big on making lists. Lists that nonprofits can use.
As a staff member of Congressman André Carson in Indianapolis, she regularly pulls together a list of recently released federal grants and emails it to organizations. All an organization has to do to receive it is email her at kathy.downey@mail.house.gov and request the publication.
But the grants’ list isn’t the only way Carson’s office supports applicants. He is willing to provide his support by writing a letter to accompany the nonprofit’s grant request. Souchet-Downey can also help field specific grant questions. With the Congressman’s support, over $7 million in federal grant money was secured for nonprofit and community organizations in his district last year.
Kathy Hahn Keiner at Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana, Laura Feldman Miskin at College Mentors for Kids and Gregg Keesling at RecycleForce have first-hand experience applying for federal grants that had Carson’s and other Indiana Congress members’ support.
Since 2009, College Mentors for Kids has applied for five federal grants. In 2013, it was awarded a three-year $1.3 million grant for its work in five states. Feldman Miskin said the application itself created several opportunities.
“Most of my work my work at College Mentors for Kids is with corporations and foundations supporters, but this is a different ballgame,” said the director of corporate and foundation development.
“It created an opportunity to talk with our career staff about ways to improve the programs significantly, where programs could grow and for the staff to think about how the federal government could support this effort. It brought innovations to a new level,” she said.
Carson’s office also provided guidance on building relationships with members of Congress in the other states where College Mentors work.
These three local organizations haven’t applied for the same dollars, but rather from a variety of federal agencies.
For College Mentors the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 provided its first funding, and later grants from the U.S. Department of Justice, specifically the Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJDP) was a fit. The organization has applied for five federal grants. OJJDP has identified mentoring as a strategy for preventing and intervening in juvenile delinquencies, and so it aligned with the organization’s mission.
Keesling, RecycleForce’s executive director, said his agency’s grants come from two federal agencies – the Department of Labor and Department of Health & Human Services’ subdivision, Community Economic Development (CED) Grant Fund. Since 2009, Keesling said RecycleForce has been awarded over $11 million in federal grants, including $2.1 million in the last six months, which is helping the organization add 40 jobs.
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Grants: There are three common types of federal grants: formula, project and matching.
Formula grants are non-competitive and are distributed to state and local governments based on quantifiable variables. For example, X dollars goes to every student in the state. These grants are allocated for broad purposes such as highway programs, education funding and block grants. Please note that although formula grants are initially non-competitive, once funding is received by a federal agency or state and local government, these dollars may be available to eligible organizations through an application or request process.
Project grants fund specific projects and services addressing a specific policy need identified by Congress. Availability of this funding fluctuates year-to-year. Project grants are most often competitive and available to eligible organizations through an application or request process. Examples of project grants include Wetland Protection grants through the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency or Minority Business Development programs through the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Matching grants require that the recipient contribute something towards the project — normally cash services or facilities to match a percentage of the grant. These are used to encourage recipient to efficiently manage the program. Matching grants are most often competitive and available to eligible organizations through an application or request process.
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Writing these proposals, however, is not for the faint of heart. All three said the timeframe is condensed, giving them six weeks to two months from first learning about the grant to the final submission. All three recommended a dedicated internal staff person that keeps everyone on task.
And not all their asks have been successful. Keesling said RecycleForce applied four times before it got its first CED grant.
“You’ve got to understand the rules at the federal level, and then you’ve also got to understand how you adapted those rules to your needs at the local level,” said Keesling.
The system allows the organization to learn, if the grant is not approved.
“People historically chase the money, they fail, they get frustrated, they throw up their hands. It’s a process,” he said. “When you don’t get a grant, you can request feedback from the reviewers about what you did wrong.
Feldman Miskin and Keesling said it is important that this is not the first time your member of Congress has heard from you and that you have established relationships.
“Hey, you never heard of me, but will you write a letter of support? Here’s all the good work we are doing.”
While there is a learning curve to develop strong proposals, using the government’s online grant system also takes time to learn.
Hahn Keiner, Gleaners’ Chief Programs and Agency Relations Officer, was introduced to the federal grant application process this fall. With the closing of the Double 8 stores, Congressman Carson hosted a food insecurity roundtable that Hahn Keiner attended and piqued Gleaner’s proposal idea.
In April, Gleaners will learn if its proposal for a $100,000 Fresh Bucks Indy project will be funded. The pilot-project is modeled on the SNAP incentive program, which is used at Indianapolis area Farmers’ Markets and allows a user’s benefits go further by doubling purchasing power, up to $20, on Indiana-grown specialty crops.
If awarded, Gleaners will partner with Kroger at the 10th and Linwood streets’ store. That particular Kroger has a high SNAP usage. The project would not only expand the SNAP participants access to produce year-round, but partner with a national retail store.
“We are hoping to get the grant because we think it’s a viable project that could be replicated all over the country. We’re really excited about it. There is a lot of opportunity even if we don’t get it. The whole idea was it was successful at the Farmers’ Market, but test driving it at Kroger, and it could go farther than that, if it is successful,” said Hahn Keiner.
According to Keesling, Indiana is at the end of the line when it comes to federal grants.
“We don’t have a culture that understands how to do it. With the work of Congressman Carson’s office, we are starting to grow that. These are our tax dollars, and there is really no reason that they should go to New York or Oklahoma. We should think of the federal government as a partner.”
The three had some general advice for nonprofits that are considering a federal grant submission:
Spend time on the specific federal agency’s website, issuing the request, to understand how it thinks about the world, the language used and how it identifies a problem. That will help determine, if your nonprofit is a good fit, and the project aligns with the organization’s mission and local community goals.
Ask area nonprofits that have received federal grants for tips.
Get comfortable with the government’s structured online grant application system (grant.gov). Carson’s office has a primer on learning to use the online application system.
Identify an internal project manager to help meet the deadline and create a timetable to complete.
Letters of support from members of Congress are a unique aspect of the process, so allow plenty of time to receive the required collaboration and support letters. The more support, the better it speaks to the project.
Get started early on grant elements that will require materials from external sources, like project’s contractor bids and partner memorandums.
Spend time on the budget. Ask: Is it allowable? Expendable? Reasonable? Does it support program objectives?
Allot time to work on it in order to cross every “T” and dot every “I”. Keep your writing clear and clean. It’s not a time for creative writing.
After you receive the grant, keep members of Congress updated. Form collaborative partner committees.
