It is important to express oneself … provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.
My ambition is limited to capturing something transient.
– Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, born today in 1841
Own Experience
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Coming Up: January 11-17
At your local Catalogue nonprofit …
Dance Place (3225 8th Street NE, Washington, DC)
Deep Vision Dance Company & withhart.dance.projects come together for an evening of modern dance ranging from the weighted to the humorous on Saturday at 8:00 PM and Sunday at 4:00 PM. Tickets right this way!
Literacy Council of Montgomery County (Rockville Library, 21 Maryland Avenue, Rockville, MD)
Attend an Adult Literacy Tutor Orientation for volunteers interested in helping adults learn to read, write, or speak English on Monday from 10:30 AM to noon. Learn more right here.
Audubon Naturalist Society (Woodend Sanctuary, 8940 Jones Mill Road, Chevy Chase, MD)
Washington Post environmental writer Juliet Eilperin will speak on “The Outlook for the Environment in the Second Obama Administration” at a members’ meeting on Tuesday from 7:00 PM to 9:30 PM. RSVP here.
Constellation Theatre Company (Source, 1835 14th Street NW, Washington, DC)
On Thursday at 8:30 PM, catch a Pay-What-You-Can Preview of Zorro — the masked avenger, who is born when quiet, bookish Diego must find a way to fight corruption and injustice. More info over here.
Micro-Entrepreneurs
by Marie LeBlanc, Community Partnerships Coordinator
For the past decade or so, microlending and microfinance have been a hot topic in international aid and development — and through microlending organizations like Kiva, an easy way for concerned global citizens from higher income countries to offer a helping hand to their brethren in lower income countries. Kiva is one of many crowd-sourcing organizations that lets donors lend amounts as small as $25 to collectively support micro-entrepreneurs around the world, who pay back those funds (through Kiva) to the original lenders. Nowadays, small business creation and entrepreneurship are very much at the heart of the conversation about kick-starting the United States economy, and Kiva has responded with an interesting solution: bring the international microfinance model to American cities.
This week, Kiva City launched its DC program, in partnership with Capital One Bank and Catalogue-nonprofit Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC). Kiva City DC is a new online portal connecting small business owners in our nation’s capital with Kiva’s global network of over 870,000 lenders. By providing loans to these entrepreneurs, lenders can help them start, sustain and grow their businesses — and even create new jobs. Kiva City DC is the fourth Kiva City site across the country — along with Detroit, New Orleans, and Los Angeles.
Capital One is helping to provide financial heft for the project — matching all loans made to businesses posted by LEDC online through Kiva through 2013. LEDC provides the borrower base, bringing its expertise in financial and small business skill building to the table, as well as its connections to the Latino community in Washington, DC. LEDC’s Community Asset Fund for Entrepreneurs works to identify qualifying borrowers in the D.C. area, administers the loans and posts profiles of each small business owner online at kiva.org. According to the Kiva City DC website, “Kiva lenders’ funds are used to ease the loan requirements for borrowers, including decreasing collateral requirements, interest rates and fees associated with loan disbursement. With Kiva capital, LEDC will reach out to borrowers that may not have met all of LEDC’s existing criteria, allowing the organization to grow its lending program.”
For more information on borrowers currently seeking loans through Kiva and LEDC, check out borrower profiles online here, and for information on recommending the lending process to potential borrowers, check out LEDC’s online application .
In The News …
DC area unemployment rate is unchanged at 5.3 percent (Washington Post: Local): “The Washington area jobless rate hovered at 5.3% in November, according to a Labor Department report released Tuesday that revealed little change in the local employment picture [...] the Washington economy has been steadily adding jobs, but not at a fast enough clip for the recovery to shift into higher gear.” Education and health services posted the largest job gains, with the latter alone adding 11,300 between November 2011 and 2012. Local leisure and hospitality continued to add jobs as well, while manufacturing and construction both subtracted. Overall, the area remains well below the national rate of 7.8%.
The Fiscal Cliff Legislation: A Primer for Nonprofits on Its Provisions (Nonprofit Quarterly): “The short message that should be taken away from the so-called “fiscal cliff” legislation passed last night is that it is no time to relax [...] Here is our scorecard on the fiscal cliff mini-bargain.” At the NPQ website, you can read an overview of the final legislation on charitable deductions, marginal tax rates, and other taxes (such as the payroll tax); that said, “good news for nonprofits and the communities they serve is that a variety of programs that benefit working class and lower income people have been saved — for the time being.”
Dividing Lines
This past weekend, on the City Paper’s Housing Complex blog, Aaron Wiener questioned: “A City Divided — But More Than Most?”
I spent some time this morning playing around with a nifty tool that breaks down American neighborhood incomes by census tract. It’s a great way to see how divided a city is along income lines. So is DC more income-segregated than other major American cities? Let’s take a look. Green = rich, red = poor, yellow/white = somewhere in the middle.
Wake Up Thought
Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
– American author Zora Neale Hurston, born today in 1891
The More Possibilities
The more you write, the more possibilities you see for stories in things that happen to you, that people tell you, that you read about in the paper, or just imagine. In one way, all of these ideas are a blessing. I never have to go searching for something to write about.
[...] The absolutely most favorite thing is the moment a character comes alive for me on paper, or where a place I am writing about suddenly seems real. There are no bands playing, no audience applauding. It’s a very solitary moment, but something akin to giving birth. “I’ve got it!” I say to myself, and from then on, the writing’s a joy.
– Newbery Medal-winner Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, born today in 1933
Fiscal Cliff — Averted?
by Marie LeBlanc, Community Partnerships Coordinator
While many Americans across the county rang in New Year’s Day 2013 with pomp, circumstance, and auld lang syne, the United States Congress was (for once) hard at work — barely scraping through the passage of legislation that averted the dreaded “fiscal cliff.” However, is the danger really past? Various news outlets and media sources have been reporting on the “wins and losses”of the fiscal cliff bill, trying to help citizens make sense of it — and understand the real-world implications on their wallets this month and tax bills come April. Yesterday, the Nonprofit Quarterly’s Rick Cohen offered his take on the implications for nonprofits.
According to Cohen, changes made to charitable deductions and marginal tax rates (increasing only on households with annual incomes above $450,000) “constitutes an absolutely minimal touch on charitable contributions.” Due to various tax provisions, on everything from the expiration of the payroll tax “holiday,” to changes in capital gains and dividend income tax rates, the “fiscal cliff bill not only raises less revenues than the President’s proposal, but even less than Speaker Boehner’s Plan B.” However, many programs serving working class and lower income populations have been saved for now, including unemployment benefits and various tax credits on earned income, children, and renewable energy.
The specter of the cliff itself impacted municipal and county-level spending, even before emergency legislation was passed. According to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, “the impact of the federal budget impasse on the District was felt 10 days before the New Year’s Eve fiscal cliff deal.” Despite signs of growth in the DC economy, instability in the federal budget prevents these signs from being fully recognized and providing the foundation needed for expanding, and even maintaining, levels of social spending. Programs for domestic violence, mental health, and educational enrichment have fallen victim to the budget gridlock.
Ultimately, Cohen offers this perspective on the budget solution, and its potential future impact:
The fiscal cliff isn’t just a matter of “saving” the maximum deductibility of charitable donations or avoiding the reinstatement of the arcane and minimal Pease amendment, but recognizing how dysfunctional the nation has become and how the communities’ nonprofits serve are the primary victims. If the focus of nonprofit advocates leaving shoe leather in the halls of the Capitol is simply on maximizing the value of the charitable deduction or, perhaps more accurately, maximizing the value of the deduction for ultra-wealthy tax itemizers, then the result, reflected in the fiscal cliff legislation and future bills to be addressed in the next couple of months, will be a truly pyrrhic victory for the communities nonprofits serve.
Request for Proposals
Happy New Year, friends!
And on this second day of the year, the application for the the 2013 Catalogue for Philanthropy is live and online:
The mission of the Catalogue is to create strong and vibrant communities by connecting caring citizens with worthy community causes. We do this by raising visibility and resources for the best small community-based nonprofits, and engaging donors in a more meaningful giving experience. To that end we publish an annual print Catalogue that is distributed to 25,000 high net worth individuals, encouraging them to give to vetted, community-based nonprofits. The past few years have seen new channels of distribution open for the Catalogue and its featured nonprofits — through corporate portals and our workplace giving program, a budding school portal program, and partnerships with local media.
Applications are due on February 25, 2013, at midnight. As we did last year, we’ll feature some FAQs a bit later in the month. So if you have any questions about the process, feel free to leave them in the comments and we will be sure to tackle them.
Looking forward to reading your application!
Please Stand With Us
As 2012 turns into 2013, we are particularly grateful to all of you who have helped us raise over $19mm (and counting) for some of the best small charities in the greater Washington DC region.
Your support means:
* 47,639 people served in outdoor education programs each year
* 3,486,841 hours of tutoring/mentoring annually
* 957,570 people served in arts outreach programs
* 99,578 medical exams and referrals
* 1,474,415 meals served to hungry people each year
If you haven’t contributed this year, please take a moment to make your tax-deductible contribution before the year ends Choose the charities that mean the most to you, and please give generously. You can do so with confidence, knowing that Catalogue nonprofits have been vetted in a rigorous review process that takes months to complete.
And consider making a contribution to the Catalogue itself, and helping us help the 330 nonprofits in our network to do what they do best. The Catalogue is a tremendous community resource and we charge no fees for the work we do: generous donors like you make the Catalogue possible.
So stand with us as we work together to make this community a better place to live. And if you’ve already given, please accept our thanks — on behalf of all the great nonprofits that are proud to say they are part of the Catalogue family.