Lucy Bernholz

Nonprofits and political influence: it's not about golf

Screenshot from Candid.org You know that the PGA Tour is a nonprofit, don't you?* I'm also sure you've heard the news that the Saudi government (via its public investment fund, with $600+ billion in assets) launched a new tour (called LIV) which has

A predictable problem with predictions

Photo from Possessed Photography on Unsplash Dateline: May, 2027 Location: Pretty much anywhere on earth “Miriam was one of those rare people who could remember reading about her cause of death                                                                         before it happened. It wasn’t the reading that was rare - the warning had been printed in The

Transitional philanthropy

We're in an incredible moment. After decades of research and advocacy and warnings we are now living through the weather and natural disaster effects of climate collapse. We're also more than a few meters down the pitch of living with pervasive artificial intelligent systems. Ways of

Deepfake nonprofits

Eileen Pan on Unsplash There's been a lot of writing over the last three decades about the blurring of boundaries between nonprofits, governments, and markets. These analyses usually focus on the use of profit-generating tactics by nonprofits (blurring them with market institutions), the growing involvement of nonprofits in

Who will hack whom?

Nonprofits and foundations have been slow to realize that they live in a world of dirty tricks, bad faith messaging, trolls, DDOS attacks, and data breaches. In other words, they inhabit the same internet the rest of us do - one where determining what information to trust is almost a

X, Tw*tter, and nonprofits

Today, reporters tell us that staff at X Corp. (the company now responsible for Tw*tter) are going through its database and removing - one by one - emergency services that subscribe to the platform's API - thereby cutting off these departments (fire, emergency services) from using the

dataphilantrhopy

Nonprofits and privacy laws

Photo by Mike Scheid on Unsplash Colorado privacy law INCLUDES nonprofits - https://thenonprofittimes.com/regulation/countdown-to-colorado-privacy-law-npos-not-exempt/ This is as it should be. Nonprofits gather, hold, and rarely protect an enormous amount of very sensitive data of very high value. Think about it - your donations to, volunteer time at,

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Nonprofits, campaign finance and more blows to democracy

Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash I changed my job in response to the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). I was convinced at the time (2010) that the Court's decision would lead to the transformation of many nonprofits from advocacy organizations

Civil society and the splitting of the US

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash Civil society organizations are on the front lines of advocating for or against the most divisive issues in the United States. The following list is organized by rights. The links are almost entirely to civil society organizations fighting to protect the rights to free

SVB, GPT, and the social sector

Photo by Bram Van Oost on Unsplash If you’ve been reading the news you know that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a bank that heavily caters to VC firms and start ups, collapsed and its depositors are being saved by the US Treasury. You know that hearings are being called

Digital Public Policy: New Priorities for Nonprofits

Photo by Kier in Sight on Unsplash Proud to say this article, "Digital Public Policy: New Priorities for Nonprofits" has just been published. It is derived from lessons learned preparing the Integrated Advocacy report and this article on media coverage of civil society and covid. My co-authors, Toussaint

Philanthropy's asterisked hall of fame

Photo by Jordan Rowland on Unsplash   Earn to give. Make as much money as you can to give it away. Why are we surprised that messages like this would provide incentives for people (or be used as justification by people) who just want to make lots of money? This story

Philanthropy AdvisoryGPT

Photo by Edge2Edge Media on Unsplash You knew I was going to have to do it. So here it is (Courtesy of ChatGPT Feb 17, 2023) The first line is the "prompt" I typed into ChatGPT. The rest of the text are the answers it provided to me

Civil Society Signal and Noise?

Photo by @chairulfajar_ on Unsplash   Today's New York Times features an article on how tech companies are dismantling their Trust and Safety Teams (free article). This strikes me as akin to price gouging by oil companies during the inflationary moment we're in - taking advantage of

Grift Giving, buzzwords and Blueprint 2023

I wrote about Grift - Gifts here. I didn't think of the term soon enough to include it in the Buzzwords list for Blueprint 2023 - which is now available. Get your free copy here. In The New York Times print edition, December 15, 2022, the following ad

Grift-gifts

It's beginning to look like SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried) and FTX (crypto currency exchange) are going to go down in history as the biggest case of "philanthropy-washing" in history. So big and important, I've coined a new word, Philanthro-grift.* The U.S. Department of Justice

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Blueprint 2023

Download for free: https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/publication/philanthropy-and-digital-civil-society-blueprint-2023/ For the 14th year in a row, I've written a Blueprint on Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society. This year's version - which covers 2023 - will go live on December 15, 2022. You can get your free

Fraud for Good

Palm trees on campus*. Photo by Lucy Bernholz I've always doubted the effective altruism (EA) approach. Making as much money as you can so you can give it away is 1) an individual approach to societal problems, 2) a fancy way of alleviating rich people's guilty

Digital civil society rises amid commercial turmoil

NOTE About this post: I'm trying to make sense of something happening around me rapidly. Will be back to revise my thinking and (I hope) improve the text. The following post is about the chaos that is now Twitter, the growth in the #fediverse, the damage being done

Digital dependencies in civil society, November 2022 edition

[Photo by Lars Kienle on Unsplash. ALT - picture of red computer cables running                                     from a server]. We founded the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford in 2014 to examine and act on the ways digital dependencies effect civil society. How does a global exoskeleton of corporatized infrastructure and government/

Paths from systems failure

I'm pleased to say I'm working on the Blueprint 2023. This will be the 14th annual edition. I wasn't sure what would happen this year, given how sick I've been. Thanks to a small group of critical collaborators, there will be a

Back where I started

Well, I guess there's a lot I could say through the lens of digital civil society about why I'm back here instead of running my mouth in a long twitter thread. I'll sum it up this way - our information spaces being controlled by

Suppressing Civil Society not by Money but by Data

Civil society suppression...the digital way On August 13, 2021, AlgorithmWatch, a German nonprofit focused on algorithmic accountability, shut down its work on Instagram because Facebook (owner of Instagram) threatened to sue the group for violations of its Terms of Service. This followed in the footsteps of Facebook kicking NYU

#StopAsianHate

I walked by this on a San Francisco street on March 16. Then I heard of the murders in Georgia.

Blueprint 2021 and Buzzwords

My newest Blueprint is here: Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society: Blueprint 2021. The buzzword list is here: Buzzwords 2021 May 2021 be safer, more humane, more just.