Six billion dollars.
In and out of philanthropic circles, MacKenzie Scott’s $6 billion gift in 2020 has caused quite a stir — and that’s putting it mildly. Divided among a reported 500 organizations, the novelist and philanthropist’s generosity in 2020 was directed to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), tribal and community colleges, as well as organizations committed to social and human services, equity, climate change, and democracy.
My name is Tyler Stahl, and I am a Front End Web Developer at Charity Navigator. In tech jargon, “front end” refers to everything viewable by you, the user of Charity Navigator’s web services, while “back end” refers to the databases, rating calculations and infrastructure that power the front end. This means that I manage our website, from star rating pages, to the Giving Basket, to charity search results. Over the past year, I am proud to have helped bring the vision of the new Encompass Rating System to your screens, extending ratings to tens of thousands of previously unrated organizations.
The recently proposed “For the 99.5% Act” would bring dramatic changes to gift and estate taxes while proposals in both houses of Congress and the White House would impose immediate income taxation on gifted and inherited gains.
As a small nonprofit organization, you’re already doing good work to help your surrounding community. But sometimes the financial resources you need for continued success aren’t readily available.
Raising the funds you need to continue your programs, cover overhead costs, and serve your constituents and mission isn’t always easy. But there’s one source of revenue that you might not have already tapped into: corporate matching gifts.
As someone who believes in giving back to my community, I’ve spent many years building meaningful connections with the nonprofits working in the causes I care deeply about. Through this effort, my wife and I have focused on supporting charities through three key areas, commonly known as time, talent, and treasure. As I shared before in my previous Charity Navigator blog, I prefer to invest deeply in organizations to compound my impact. Below, you’ll find some of the reasons I choose to invest my time and talent in addition to my treasure, and why you should consider this as well.
At Charity Navigator, we recognize the importance of Constituent Feedback, a practice whereby a nonprofit collects feedback from its beneficiaries and then utilizes what it learns in its decision-making process. In February 2021, we shared in a co-authored blog post, our intent to showcase nonprofits and their constituent feedback practices within their Charity Navigator profiles.
Today, we are pleased to feature one such organization -- the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, an Encompass rated organization with an overall 100 out of 100 score, which includes a perfect score of 100 within the Culture & Community
beacon where Constituent Feedback resides.
The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans (NCHV) is the only nationally-based organization solely focused on finding effective solutions for ending veteran homelessness and plays the role of convener and advocate for member organizations. Our membership consists of a variety of organizations, from large multi-state agencies all the way down to smaller community-based providers.
As we dive deeper into 2021, you’re probably still working toward those ambitious goals you set at the beginning of the year. You may have even kept your New Year's resolution thus far! However, there’s one upcoming event that very few people look forward to during a new year, and that’s tax season.
On Thursday March 12, 2020, as the world around us was coming to a grinding halt, National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) NYC made the decision to close our offices, for an indefinite period of time. For nearly 40 years, our doors have remained open, through snowstorms and hurricane aftermaths, on Saturdays and even on Christmas Day, but this was different.
