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Fairfax County Bans Homemade Homeless Help
Posted by Daniel Rothschild - Nov 29, 2006 8:00am The Washington Post reports that Fairfax County, Virginia has banned people from serving food to the homeless that has not been prepared in county-certified kitchens. This is justified, they claim, by the medical needs of the homeless: "We're dealing with a medically fragile population... so they're more susceptible to food-borne illnesses than the general population," said Tom Crowe, the county Health Department's director of environmental health. "We're trying to protect those people."Food poisoning from grandma's chicken casserole is probably the least health worry of most homless people, about a third of whom suffer from severe mental illness and who suffer from health problems at two to three times the general population. Of course, policy interventions tend t...
Milton Friedman, R.I.P.
Posted by Lenore Ealy - Nov 16, 2006 3:33pm Sadly, Milton Friedman passed away today, November 16, 2006. Having had the honor and pleasure to work for the Friedman Foundation during its first year, I have struggled this afternoon with how best to articulate my appreciation to and for Dr. Friedman and his wife, Rose. It put a smile on my face to come across this statement that Milton made during the Nobel Banquet which followed his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1976. In classic Friedman-esque manner, he suggested that even philanthropy has its costs and that it might benefit from the forces of competition: Delighted as I am with the award, I must confess that the past eight weeks have impressed on me that not only is there no free lunch, there is no free prize. It is a tribute to the worldwide repute of the Nobel awards that the announcement of an award converts its recipient into an instant expert on all and sundry, and unleashes hordes of ravenous ...
Philanthropy and Technology
Posted by Lenore Ealy - Aug 30, 2006 8:59am This is an interesting piece from Michael Gilbert about the potential of RSS technology in making grant information more "real-time." It's interesting that it's not only grant recipients but also grant makers who have a strong interest in the possibilities of better aggregation of grant-making data. Michael Polanyi introduced us to the concept of "polycentricity" decades ago. Such aggregation capabilities would seem a positive way to counterbalance the likely gorilla-in-the-room influence on grantmaking trends of foundation giants such as Gates, Ford, Carnegie, Lilly, etc.. What do others think? Lenore http://news.gilbert.org/RSSGrantsSurvey2006...
Blogging Disasters
Posted by Lenore Ealy - Dec 27, 2005 8:16pm Phil Cubeta wistfully asks "where have all the bloggers gone?" I confess that I have been rather remiss in posting here these past few months. I have invited Bill Schambra to consider this his blog home if he would like, but so far he's not nibbled. I will try to be more diligent in the coming year about stepping up the pace here, meaning that I need to find a handful of others to join me in this space regularly. I'll get on that! Phil must really eat his Wheaties every day to keep up his pace. He must certainly not a)work from a disastrous home office, b) have recently started a 501c3 disaster relief organization, and/or c) have a young child who tends to find the quickest path to disaster if unsupervised for very long. I'm beginning to think that blogging is a more natural venue for 20-somethings without family or empty nesters who've already juggled the demands of...
Top Down, Bottom Up, OR.....
Posted by Lenore Ealy - Oct 06, 2005 11:42pm Chris Corrigan asks some provocative questions about "how we should do things." He wonders whether the language of top-down versus bottom-up might help us recharacterize and reframe our political conversations and approaches to getting things done. I wonder, though, whether even the top-down or bottom-up paradigm isn't too polarizing. It seems more productive to me in the end to think less about a universal prevailing rule--there are times when I think each approach may appropriately apply-- and to pose the question more flexible terms. What if in our political, social, commercial and philanthropic practices we asked the question for any given end: what means of coordinating human action would yield the optimum outcomes while preserving conditions of human freedom, trust, intimacy and love? Politics, markets, voluntary association and philanthropy at bo...
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