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Tag: Charity fundraising

  • The EV industry is gaining momentum. But public charging is a long way from being accessible to all

    The EV industry is gaining momentum. But public charging is a long way from being accessible to all

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    Electric vehicles will play a critical role in slashing transport-related emissions in the years ahead.

    Momentum behind the industry is building, with a number of big economies gearing up for the mass rollout of EVs and sales of electric cars hitting 6.6 million in 2021, a record, according to the International Energy Agency.

    Not all countries will move at the same pace in the planned transition to low and zero-emission mobility, and the shift away from cars powered by fossil fuels won’t always be smooth.

    There are concerns, for example, that the lower noise levels of EVs may pose a challenge to people with sight problems, while talk of a skills gap is sparking discussions about cost and safety.

    Charging infrastructure is another area to watch, with the construction of vast networks set to be crucial in allaying fears about range anxiety. Equally important is making sure these EV chargers are accessible to all.

    Read more about electric vehicles from CNBC Pro

    According to the charity Motability, it’s estimated the U.K. will have 2.7 million disabled drivers by 2035.

    As many as 1.35 million of this group, it says, “will be at least wholly or partially reliant on public charging infrastructure.”

    The year 2035 is seen as being particularly important because that’s when the U.K. government wants all new cars and vans to have zero tailpipe emissions.

    A disabled person who wants to use an EV charger today faces “inaccessibility at lots of different points throughout the process,” Catherine Marris, Motability’s head of innovation, told CNBC.

    Such challenges begin when one leaves the house to use a public charger, she added.

    “If they want to go on an app, for example, to see where there’s chargers, there isn’t usually information available about which chargers might be more accessible,” Marris said.

    “Then, when they get to a charging site, there might not be clear signage and information about where charging points are located.”

    The built environment around the charging bay could create difficulties too. “There might not be enough space around the charging bay to exit your vehicle,” Marris said.

    “If you’re using a mobility aid, there might be a really high, raised curb that … someone would have to mount to get on the pavement.”

    “The charge point itself might be surrounded with bollards that aren’t adequately spaced, so … if you’re using a mobility aid or wheelchair, you wouldn’t be able to actually get up to the charge point itself.”

    Marris told CNBC that a charging point may also be “too high for a seated user, it might be too low for someone who might have difficulties reaching down.”

    Ensuring EV chargers are accessible to all is a big task, and organizations like Motability are pushing hard to create conditions for change.

    In collaboration with the U.K. government’s Office for Zero Emission Vehicles, it commissioned the British Standards Institution to develop a “national accessible charging standard for EV chargepoints.”

    PAS 1899:2022, as it’s known, was published in October 2022, and covers everything from curb height and location of charging kits, to the spacing of bollards and height of charge points. 

    “There was a yearlong process where industry … accessibility experts and disabled people came together, and they developed the standard through consensus as a group,” Marris said.

    She went on to describe the end product as “a really powerful document that sets out exactly what accessible charging is and how it can be achieved.”

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    Another charity, Designability, was included in a steering group to help inform PAS 1899:2022. Separately, it received funding from Motability to develop design guidance for those involved in the charging industry.

    The guidance covers three main areas: signage and information; the built environment; and the process of charging a vehicle.

    “We did a deep dive into the areas that were really difficult,” Matt Ford, director of design and innovation at Designability, told CNBC.

    “It’s out there, it’s free, it’s there for anybody to use that’s involved in providing vehicle recharging,” he said.

    Having design guidance and a standard like PAS 1899 is one thing. Getting charging stations that actually incorporate accessible features is another.

    ‘Change is required across the industry’

    In February 2023, Tanni Grey-Thompson, a wheelchair user who won multiple gold medals at the Paralympic Games, highlighted the issue when she tweeted a picture of EV chargers from the firm InstaVolt with the caption: “This is why I can’t change to an electric car.”

    Expanding on her point, Grey-Thompson — who sits in the U.K.’s House of Lords — tweeted about a lack of space on either side and how she couldn’t “get close enough to reach.”

    In a statement sent to CNBC, InstaVolt CEO Adrian Keen said it’s “committed to cooperating with the requirements outlined in the PAS1899 consultation, while also taking on board direct feedback from charge point users, to improve accessibility at InstaVolt sites.”

    “We are in contact with Tanni Grey-Thompson to discuss the work we’re doing in the space, challenges that users face, and how this can influence our site designs in future,” he added.

    “We recognise that change is required across the industry as a whole and we are taking steps to ensure we’re providing accessible sites where we can.”  

    “In addition, we have fully redesigned our chargers based on PAS1899 guidance, and these will be installed at new sites from the spring,” Keen said.

    This unit has now incorporated a number of features, such as longer cables, lower screens and payment terminals, as well as what Keen called “an enhanced cable management system, to allow for improved charger accessibility.”

    Creating a standard

    InstaVolt’s plans represent a step in the right direction, but there’s still a lot of work ahead.

    Designability’s Ford explained that a PAS, or publicly available specification, is “not an official standard — it’s not been adopted into legislation. It’s not … regulation.”

    “But by creating a standard, by doing it through a robust process with the British Standards Institute, by having a steering group of stakeholders from across industry and the disabled community … what you have is a standard that is a really good blueprint for making chargepoints accessible.”

    Such a standard became “really powerful” when local authorities started to incorporate it in procurement forms for companies bidding to install charging installations, Ford said.

    “It’s being adopted, from what we can see, really quite quickly, not just by councils [but] … hotel chains, large companies [as well].”

    A global challenge

    U.K.-based organizations like Motability and Designability aren’t alone in looking to develop ideas and designs focused on accessibility.  

    In July 2022, the U.S. Access Board, an independent federal agency, issued design recommendations for accessible charging stations.

    And in December 2022, the Royal Automobile Association of South Australia announced it was launching a trial focused on creating “access standards for people with disabilities seeking to use electric vehicle charging infrastructure.”

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    The IEA, seen by many as an authoritative voice on the energy transition, describes EVs as being “the key technology to decarbonise road transport.”

    To achieve this mass decarbonization, a huge network of public chargers will be required in the years ahead.

    For charities like Designability, that represents a huge chance to put accessibility at the heart of charging networks. “It is a once in a generation opportunity … once an infrastructure goes in, it’s very hard to affect it,” Ford said.

    For her part, Motability’s Marris said she firmly believes that “100% of charge points should be accessible.”

    “Not only because we want disabled people to charge at any charge point they come across — not just only a select few — but also, accessibility is great for everyone.”

    “Whether you’re a disabled person, whether you’re an older person, whether you’re a parent pushing a pram and you need some more space, accessibility really does result in a better consumer experience.”

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  • GivingTuesday raises $3.1B for charities in tough economy

    GivingTuesday raises $3.1B for charities in tough economy

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    NEW YORK — GivingTuesday raised a record $3.1 billion in 24 hours for charitable causes in the U.S. earlier this week, as the event that started as a hashtag in 2012 celebrated its 10th anniversary and its status as a staple of fundraising for nonprofits.

    Despite the difficult economic year that many households have experienced, with inflation in the costs of basic goods, gas and housing, people were still willing to give, said Asha Curran the CEO of GivingTuesday.

    “That’s really what we saw yesterday,” she said Wednesday night. “That whatever it is that people are experiencing, they were as generous as they had the capacity to be.”

    GivingTuesday estimated that giving increased about 15% from 2021′s $2.7 billion, outpacing inflation. Donations were tallied using an array of data sources that includes major community foundations, companies that offer fundraising software, the payment processor PayPal and large grantmakers like Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable. Their methodology for compiling the estimate seeks to eliminate duplicate data points, Curran said.

    In another measure of the resilience of donations, Fidelity Charitable said Tuesday that for the first time since 2018, the value of grants from its donor advised funds exceeds the value of investments going into the funds.

    The organization said this year was the largest amount donated on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving as long as they’ve tracked it.

    The hashtag to promote fundraising on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving started in 2012 as a project of the 92nd Street Y and the organization GivingTuesday became an independent nonprofit in 2020. The organization has also launched a campaign to raise $26 million over five years to expand their database of giving.

    In the tenth year of nonprofits and donors marking the day, Curran said, people continue to show incredible generosity.

    “They give in a multitude of ways. It does not always have to do with money. It often has to do with community. It is very collective. It has a lot to do with people feeling like they are a fractal of a larger whole,” Curran said. “And yesterday was just one more reaffirmation of that.”

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    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • Fidelity Charitable: New grants to surpass deposits in 2022

    Fidelity Charitable: New grants to surpass deposits in 2022

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    Fidelity Charitable, the nation’s largest grantmaker, expects 2022 will be the first year since 2018 that the value of grants from its donor advised funds exceeds the value of investments going into the funds.

    Jacob Pruitt, Fidelity Charitable’s president, told The Associated Press that donations this year are on track to set a record, even before counting gifts from GivingTuesday, which has grown into a major fundraising day for charities since its launch 10 years ago. In 2021, Fidelity Charitable donated more than $10.3 billion in donor-recommended grants to more than 187,000 organizations.

    “It’s kind of amazing when you think about the generosity,” Pruitt said. “Even in spite of inflation and all kinds of noise in the marketplace, our donors are truly engaging and getting money to the right places.”

    Pruitt cautioned that December generally brings plenty of investments into donor advised funds — or DAFs — as people move money around for tax purposes. However, he also expects strong end-of-the-year donations as well.

    “With the situation in Ukraine and all these natural disasters, our donors are ready,” Pruitt said. “That’s what these accounts are designed for. Individuals put money in and they grow. Then, when there’s a scenario where it’s needed, it can flow out in a thoughtful way. And so I think that the platform is doing what it is there to do.”

    The strength of Fidelity Charitable grants comes at a time when donor advised funds are under fire for what critics call loopholes that allow donors to receive tax benefits immediately, while grants can be delayed indefinitely. The bipartisan Accelerating Charitable Efforts Act to require funds invested in donor advised funds to be granted to nonprofits within 15 years is under consideration in Congress.

    Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, said the growth of donor advised funds remains troubling because loopholes in their oversight allow billions of dollars to be parked in the funds instead of going to communities in taxes or directly to charities.

    “It’s great that more money is flowing out,” Collins said. “But we want to know more. We want to know that it’s reaching charities instead of being shuffled around from DAF to DAF.”

    In “ Gilded Giving 2022,” a study Collins co-authored, he found that the popularity of DAFs is speeding a shift in philanthropic donations from community-building to legacy-building gifts to universities and museums.

    However, Pruitt said donor advised funds can help reverse the ongoing drop in the number of individual donors in America. He said Fidelity Charitable removed the $10,000 minimum requirement to open a donor advised fund, making it available to everyone.

    “It’s simple, effective and it allowed individuals from all walks of life to have an opportunity to participate in this amazing product,” he said. “What we’re focusing on next is expanding the education and awareness in the marketplace.”

    Fidelity Charitable recently began offering NFTs in an effort to reach younger investors. And Pruitt said it is also working on improving its smartphone apps.

    “We want to make sure that these tools are where the next generation of investors are,” he said. “We want to continue to make this simple and effective from a digital perspective so people can engage in a comfortable way.”

    However, Collins said the issue with the declining number of individual donors isn’t due to a lack of technology. It’s due to a lack of money.

    “Fewer middle class and lower middle class people are donating and it has nothing to do with tax laws,” he said. “It has to do with economic insecurity. They have less money and less of a cushion for donations.”

    Rather than opening more donor advised funds, Collins suggests that people simply donate directly to charities in their communities, much like many nonprofits on GivingTuesday suggest.

    GivingTuesday CEO Asha Curran said the day raised $2.7 billion in 2021 and offers people many ways to show their generosity.

    “The relatively small act of giving something invests a person in their community in ways that have powerful knock on effects,” she said. “Once a person is a giver and really feels like ‘I have the capacity to make a difference in the world,’ there are many, many wonderful things that happen in terms of their place in their community as a result.”

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    Associated Press reporter Thalia Beaty contributed to this report from New York.

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    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • Fidelity Charitable launches NFT raffle amid crypto downturn

    Fidelity Charitable launches NFT raffle amid crypto downturn

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    NEW YORK — Fidelity Charitable is getting into NFTs, the digital images that are registered on the blockchain, despite a torrent of bad news from the adjacent world of cryptocurrencies.

    The nation’s largest grantmaker is sponsoring a raffle that ends Tuesday, where participants can claim one of the NFTs, which stands for nonfungible token, and 50 will win $1,000 to donate through a donor advised fund at Fidelity.

    “The reason we’re doing this is we really believe there’s a whole new generation of givers and philanthropists out there,” said Amy Pirozzolo, head of donor engagement for Fidelity Charitable. “We want to be where they are and the channels they use and the formats they use and further encourage their generosity.”

    Around 16% of Americans say they invested in cryptocurrencies, according to a poll from Pew Research Center last year. The demographic most likely to invest were men between the ages of 18 and 29, with 43% reporting that they had invested.

    The blockchain is the technology that underlies the trading of cryptocurrencies, but it can also record the ownership of digital items like images, videos or Tweets. Fidelity said that 50,000 different wallets, potentially representing that many individuals, have already registered to create an NFT and potentially win the money to donate.

    Contributions in cryptocurrency to donor advised funds at Fidelity exploded last year, growing from the equivalent of $28 million in 2020 to $331 million in 2021, Fidelity has said.

    Speaking of the NFT project, Jacob Pruitt, president of Fidelity Charitable, said, “I think it’ll be a unique way to engage with next gen investors. It’s another way that I think Fidelity is innovating and leaning into a new space.”

    Donor advised funds allow donors to claim a tax credit for charitable donations, but do not require them to give those funds away within any specific timeframe. Organizations that host DAFs, like Fidelity Charitable, also handle more complex donations, which includes exchanging the assets for cash and producing receipts for donors for tax purposes.

    “Many of the nonprofits either can’t take on these assets or they have to hire outside counsel or people to staff to do it,” Pirozzolo said.

    One reason for the jump in cryptocurrency donations is that until recently, their value had appreciated significantly. The cryptocurrency market saw a huge boom in 2021 with the price of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, rising to an all time high of around $68,000 in November last year.

    But the meltdown of Terra — a stablecoin, or a type of cryptocurrency that tries to peg its value to an asset like the U.S. dollar — in May brought down a series of major cryptocurrency businesses. Then, earlier this month, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX and related entities, suddenly filed for bankruptcy leaving both American and international users unable to access assets they held on the exchange.

    James Lawrence, co-founder and CEO of Engiven, which facilitates cryptocurrency to nonprofits, including Christian ministries, observed that many people giving cryptocurrencies are making major gifts and that often those happen in the last quarter of the year. That means it’s too early to say how the cryptocurrency market’s fluctuations may impact donations this year. He said he doesn’t see people donating cryptocurrencies as that different from other donors.

    “They just have a different asset to give and they’re going to give the most appreciated asset they can,” Lawrence said.

    Of the more than 1.5 million nonprofits registered with the Internal Revenue Service in the U.S., Lawrence estimated that only four or five thousand could receive cryptocurrency donations directly.

    “That’s a huge market that still doesn’t,” he said. He also has observed that many giving large donations in cryptocurrency (they facilitated one donation of $10 million in cryptocurrency assets) are the same types of people who give large donations in general, and not necessarily the younger demographics that are more likely to invest in cryptocurrency.

    “Many of the largest gifts we’ve processed have been from an older demographic who have a tradition of giving large gifts in multiple asset classes,” he said.

    Another organization, Endaoment, also facilitates cryptocurrency donations to nonprofit organizations as well as hosting pooled funds to benefit certain types of nonprofits. Robbie Heeger, the organization’s president and CEO, said besides that fact that nonprofits may receive donations from cryptocurrency donors that they wouldn’t otherwise, cryptocurrency proponents are also eager to draw in new users.

    “This is a leapfrog opportunity for nonprofit organizations to move from paper checks” to cryptocurrency Heeger said. “And the crypto space is very focused on adoption flywheels, on ways to incentivize or encourage the traditional economy to migrate into the crypto economy.”

    He encouraged newcomers to the cryptocurrency space to carefully research projects they might get involved with and to look for ones that have gotten outside audits from professional auditors.

    Pirozzolo argued that the Fidelity Charitable promotion using NFTs is separate from the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

    “This is really about the blockchain and having a fun way to celebrate with digital art the generosity of giving,” she said.

    The company is paying for the cost of creating the NFTs, which includes a “gas” fee that pays for the creation and registration of the item, and also said that it has compensated the artists who made the images.

    People who claim the NFTs will need to sign up for a cryptocurrency wallet that has access to the Polygon blockchain. The Fidelity Charitable NFTs will be hosted on the platform OpenSea.

    Participants will see the NFT in their wallet when they sign up, but the art itself and the winners of the $1,000 tickets won’t be revealed until Giving Tuesday, Nov, 29.

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    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • Buffett donates over $750 million to his family charities

    Buffett donates over $750 million to his family charities

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    OMAHA, Neb. — Billionaire investor Warren Buffett donated more than $750 million in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the four foundations run by his family Wednesday, but unlike his annual gifts to charity each summer, the recipients didn’t include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    Buffett has been making annual donations to the same five charities every year since 2006 when he unveiled a plan to give away his fortune over time, with the Gates Foundation receiving the biggest donations. Wednesday’s donations mark the first time the 92-year-old has made a second major gift within the same year.

    A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed Buffett gave 1.5 million Class B shares in the Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate he leads to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his first wife. He also gave 300,000 Class B shares apiece to the three foundations run by his children: the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation.

    In June, he gave 11 million Class B shares to the Gates Foundation, 1.1 million B shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and 770,218 shares apiece to his children’s three foundations.

    It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the new donations this week, and Buffett didn’t immediately respond Wednesday to questions about them. The Gates Foundation and the Buffett family foundations that received the gifts also didn’t immediately respond to questions.

    The only other major change Buffett has made to his giving plans over the years came a decade ago when he significantly increased the amount pledged to the foundations his children run because he was pleased with what they had done with his money.

    The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation keeps a low profile, but over the years it has been a major supporter of abortion rights, making large gifts to Planned Parenthood and other groups. Buffett hasn’t announced any changes in his giving plans since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.

    Susie Buffett, 69, uses her Sherwood Foundation to strengthen early childhood education and support a number of projects around Buffett’s hometown of Omaha where she also lives. Howard Buffett, 67, is helping farmers in impoverished nations produce more and working to end world hunger with his namesake foundation. Peter Buffett, 64, has dedicated his NoVo Foundation to empowering women and girls worldwide through education, collaboration and economic development to end violence against women.

    Even after these latest gifts, Buffett still controls more than 31% of Berkshire’s voting power.

    Berkshire Hathaway is an eclectic conglomerate that owns more than 90 companies including BNSF railroad, Geico insurance, several major utilities and an assortment of manufacturing and retail firms including Precision Castparts, Dairy Queen and Helzberg Diamonds. In addition to the companies it owns outright, Berkshire owns major investments in Apple, Bank of America, Coca-Cola and other companies.

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  • FTX bankruptcy also endangers founder’s philanthropic gifts

    FTX bankruptcy also endangers founder’s philanthropic gifts

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    NEW YORK — The rapid collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX into bankruptcy last week has also shaken the world of philanthropy, due to the donations and influence of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in the “effective altruism” movement.

    The FTX Foundation — and other related nonprofits mostly funded by Bankman-Fried and other top FTX executives – says it has donated $190 million to numerous causes. Earlier this year, the foundation’s Future Fund announced plans to donate an additional $100 million, with hopes of donating up to $1 billion in 2022. Because of the bankruptcy, that won’t be happening now.

    And donations to numerous nonprofits, even those that have already received money from groups related to Bankman-Fried, are now in doubt.

    FTX, the hedge fund Alameda Research, and dozens of other affiliated companies sought bankruptcy protection in Delaware Friday after the exchange experienced the crypto equivalent of a bank run. Customers tried to remove billions of dollars from the exchange after becoming concerned about whether FTX had sufficient capital.

    Bankman-Fried has resigned from the company. His net worth, estimated earlier this year at $24 billion, has all but evaporated, according to Forbes and Bloomberg, which closely track the net worth of the world’s richest people.

    On Thursday night, FTX Future Fund’s leadership team resigned, warning grantees that they were unlikely to pay out promised funds.

    “We are devastated to say that it looks likely that there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor,” the team wrote in a joint post in the Effective Altruism Forum. “We are so sorry that it has come to this.”

    ProPublica, the investigative journalism nonprofit, said it has been told by Building a Stronger Future, a foundation funded by Bankman-Fried, that the remaining two-thirds of its $5 million grant to report on pandemic preparedness and biothreats is now on hold.

    ProPublica received one-third of the grant in February and expected one-third annually until 2024. The nonprofit said Building a Stronger Future is assessing its finances and that it was talking to other funders about taking on some of its grant portfolio.

    “Regardless of what happens with the remainder of the grant, we are deeply committed to this important work and the team we have assembled to pursue it,” the nonprofit said in a statement. “We will use other resources to make sure that work continues.”

    Bankman-Fried, 30, is the best-known proponent of the “effective altruism” social movement which believes in prioritizing donations to projects that will have the largest impact on the most number of people. Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook and current Asana CEO and co-founder, and his wife Cari Tuna, are also major funders and backers of the movement, which also emphasizes that the lives of all people should be weighted equally, regardless of where they live now or if they will inhabit the earth generations in the future.

    “I wanted to get rich, not because I like money but because I wanted to give that money to charity,” Bankman-Fried told an interviewer in a YouTube video called “ The Most Generous Billionaire,” published in January last year.

    His ability to promote himself and FTX gave the exchange a higher profile than larger companies. FTX purchase the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s home arena last year, though Miami-Dade County decided Friday to terminate its relationship with the company and rename the arena. It purchased a buzzed-about ad during this year’s Super Bowl.

    Bankman-Fried did set up a philanthropic infrastructure through his exchange, FTX, which promised that 1% of its crypto exchange fees would be donated to charities. It also matched user donations made through its platform up to $10,000 a day. In total, the company said more than $24 million was donated through user fees, donations and its matching program before it suspended its services.

    Some “effective altruism” proponents advance the idea that making a lot of money is ethical as long as your goal is ultimately to give it away — sometimes shortened to “earning to give.” Bankman-Fried believed in this, signing The Giving Pledge in June as a promise that he would give away the majority of his wealth.

    However, some now blame Bankman-Fried’s “effective altruism” mindset for FTX’s troubles.

    “Either (‘effective altruism’) encouraged Sam’s unethical behavior, or provided a convenient rationalization for such actions,” tweeted Moskovitz, who has also signed The Giving Pledge. “Either is bad.”

    William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford University and a co-founder of the “effective altruism” movement, condemned Bankman-Fried for allegedly misusing customer funds.

    “Sam and FTX had a lot of goodwill,” MacAskill, who was also an unpaid advisor to the FTX Future Fund, wrote in a thread on Twitter. “And some of that goodwill was the result of association with ideas I have spent my career promoting. If that goodwill laundered fraud, I am ashamed.”

    MacAskill’s book, “What We Owe The Future,” prompted a wave of media coverage of the “effective altruism” movement this summer.

    Requests for comment were sent to the largest grantees listed on the FTX Future Fund’s website, including other “effective altruism” advocates like the Long-Term Future Fund and the Centre for Effective Altruism and Longview.

    In an interview with The Associated Press in May, Nick Beckstead, the CEO of FTX Foundation until he resigned Thursday, said there were about five people working at the foundation and that they were still working out how the various philanthropic projects started by Bankman-Fried would be structured.

    “It’s a bit shoestring,” he said.

    The community grew out of the work of philosophers at Oxford, including MacAskill, and debates of the merits of approaches and proposals on forums reflect the high-flying thinking of its origins.

    Beckstead acknowledged the community can be “strange and intense,” but also that its emphasis on quantifying impact helps decide where to direct donations. Beckstead did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    “What is the cost per life saved or what is the cost per quality adjusted life year from this kind of activity?,” he previously said were some of the questions he likes to try to answer, drawing on input from subject matter experts.

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    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • Small Kansas college announces $500 million anonymous gift

    Small Kansas college announces $500 million anonymous gift

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    MCPHERSON, Kan. — An anonymous donor is pledging up to $500 million to McPherson College, a small liberal arts college in central Kansas, officials announced Friday.

    The anonymous donor will match match every financial gift to McPherson College two to one up to $500 million. The college has until June 30 to raise $250 million. If it does, the school will receive the donor’s entire $500 million, for a total of $750 million.

    The announcement comes just months after California philanthropist couple Melanie and Richard Lundquist announced they were giving $25 million to the school, which has about 800 students.

    Melanie Lundquist said during Friday’s announcement that they would raise their donation to the school’s Building Community Campaign to $50 million.

    With the donations and commitments already raised, plus the Lundquists’ $50 million, McPherson College has already raised $130 million of the $250 million needed.

    McPherson College President Michael Schneider said the donations will be used to fund a project that provides matching funds for students who hold jobs while attending school, and a new campus master plan.

    It will also fund a Kansas Center for Rural & Community Health Science and a National Center for the Future of Engineering, Design & Mobility.

    McPherson College offers more than 30 undergraduate degree programs.

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  • Gates Foundation boosts GivingTuesday with $10M donation

    Gates Foundation boosts GivingTuesday with $10M donation

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    NEW YORK — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $10 million to the organization that grew out of the hashtag #GivingTuesday in part to fund a database of charitable giving and other acts of generosity.

    GivingTuesday, the organization, has helped people realize there is a lot they can give, said foundation co-founder Melinda French Gates in an interview.

    “Whether people are giving their voice, their time, their expertise or their money, and given that it was the ten year anniversary of GivingTuesday, it seemed like the right time to step up with another commitment,” French Gates said.

    Asha Curran, GivingTuesday’s CEO, described the foundation as a thought partner in addition to being a funder.

    “It’s a really wonderful thing to see the partnering of big philanthropy and grassroots generosity, that those things don’t have to live in separate worlds and be viewed as totally separate things,” Curran said.

    The new gift announced Tuesday also represents the Gates Foundation’s ongoing efforts encouraging people to give. The Giving Pledge, which the Gates’ founded with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, asks billionaires to donate more than half of their wealth to charitable causes within their lifetimes, while GivingTuesday seeks to mobilize everyone else.

    “We believe philanthropy is the right thing to do and that anybody can do it,” said French Gates in an interview. “And so, it’s more making it a societal norm, quite frankly, that you give something back.”

    GivingTuesday started in 2012 as a project of the 92nd Street Y and became an independent nonprofit in 2020. It now convenes a network of people who run campaigns for communities around the world, adapted to relevant holidays and giving traditions.

    Most people still associate the organization with the now-familiar flood of emails and other solicitations for charitable donations that pour in on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the U.S., which Curran said she doesn’t mind.

    “I just wish they also associated it with grassroots leadership and young people leading the way in philanthropy,” she said.

    Last year, the organization said donors gave more than $2.7 billion on Giving Tuesday, despite many fundraisers and organizations professing exhaustion with trying to design campaigns that breakthrough.

    The Gates Foundation has previously given the organization $10.5 million since its founding. GivingTuesday also received $7 million from novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in 2021.

    Curran said the gift will accelerate the organization’s plans to expand a database that includes information about giving from a range of sources including the payment processor PayPal, Charity Navigator, crowdfunding sites GoFundMe, DonorsChoose and Tiltify as well as major institutions that offer donor-advised funds like Fidelity Charitable and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

    GivingTuesday said they aim to raise $26 million over five years to fund the data project and already have 40% of that amount committed.

    The software company Blackbaud, which works with nonprofits, universities and foundations, said they do not share their raw donation data with third parties. though they do provide GivingTuesday the total amount of donations they process on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

    Other organizations also track philanthropic giving — including Candid, which collects giving data from philanthropic foundations, governments and nonprofits, as well as major academic studies like one at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy that has surveyed the giving behavior of the same American households for decades. The Giving USA Foundation also releases an annual analysis of giving trends, that includes many datasets but doesn’t capture person to person giving or mutual aid.

    GivingTuesday aims to collect data about individual donations, which Jake Garcia, vice president of data at Candid, said could complement these other projects and help answer questions about giving trends.

    “The stock market’s down, do donations go up or down?” Garcia said. “Number of donations, amount for donations, the type of donations they make. . . Those trends, I think, are the kinds of things that could be really revelatory if they can get a good enough body of data.”

    ———

    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • Gates Foundation pledges $1.2B to eradicate polio globally

    Gates Foundation pledges $1.2B to eradicate polio globally

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    BERLIN — The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says it will commit $1.2 billion to the effort to end polio worldwide.

    The money will be used to help implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s strategy through 2026. The initiative is trying to end the polio virus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two endemic countries, the foundation said in a statement Sunday.

    The money also will be used to stop outbreaks of new variants of the virus. The announcement was made Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin.

    The foundation says in a statement on its website that it has contributed nearly $5 billion to the polio eradication initiative. The initiative is trying to integrate polio campaigns into broader health services, while it scales up use of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2.

    The group also is working to make national health systems stronger so countries are better prepared for future health threats, the statement said.

    “The last steps to eradication are by far the toughest. But our foundation remains dedicated to a polio-free future, and we’re optimistic that we will see it soon,” said foundation CEO Mark Suzman.

    Pakistan has reported 20 polio cases so far this year, all in the north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

    Afghanistan, which has registered two cases this year, previously lacked access to vaccines because of violence and the Taliban banning polio teams in areas under its control. However last year, a few months after they took over Afghanistan, the Taliban agreed to allow United Nations health workers to begin a national campaign.

    Pakistan has long struggled with Islamic militants targeting polio workers and the police protecting them, falsely claiming that vaccinations are a Western campaign to sterilize children. This year, it has the added challenge of unprecedented rainfall destroying road networks and health facilities, limiting vaccination drives, and displacing communities.

    Despite the billions of dollars that have gone into the effort to eradicate polio since 1988 — the program costs about $1 billion every year — the World Health Organization and partners have missed repeated deadlines to wipe out the disease and have come under sustained criticism for failing to adapt to challenges. In recent years, for example, there have been more cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine used in eradication efforts than those caused by the wild virus.

    Numerous experts have also questioned whether more money is what’s needed to eradicate polio, as the initiative is already one of the best funded in global public health and has rarely faced any funding gaps. Although WHO and partners have reduced the incidence of polio by more than 99%, that progress was largely made in the first 10 years. The disease remains stubbornly entrenched in war-torn regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan and there have been dozens of vaccine-triggered outbreaks in Africa and elsewhere in recent years, including the U.S. and Israel.

    An independent panel formed to evaluate the eradication effort’s progress has repeatedly identified significant strategic mistakes made by countries, WHO and their donors, warning that their reluctance to change course, among other issues, may ultimately allow polio to resurge.

    The eradication initiative is a public-private partnership led by a group of national governments that includes the Gates Foundation, Rotary International, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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