For homeless single dad, nothing’s easy, even when it’s good (Washington Post: Local): “Hours later, after he produced his ID with no fixed address, his Social Security card, his medical records, the paperwork for Kai, the letters from readers, two tellers still wouldn’t cash it. Finally, a branch manager took him into her office, closed the door behind them and listened to his story. […] If this is the process to simply cash a check when you’re without an anchor, imagine how hard it is to find work, housing and child care when your address is a shelter and a 1-year-old is clinging to your neck.” Juan Jordan, who recently received a place at the former DC General Hospital with help from the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, daily faces a specific array of challenges in securing food and shelter for himself and his daughter — precisely because it is just the two of them.
Program That Sends Urban Students to Elite Colleges Comes to Houston This Fall (New York Times via the Texas Tribune): Catalogue nonprofit the Posse Foundation is now expanding to the Houston Independent School District! “Teachers, principals and community leaders will get to nominate students to become members of the city’s inaugural “posses” — groups of students from large, urban districts organized by the Posse Foundation, which sends them to elite colleges and universities as a unit to serve as a pre-established peer support network.” Since its inception in 1989, Posse has grown “grown tremendously, sending more than 4,000 students from eight of the country?s largest cities to about 40 universities. Those students have netted nearly $500 million in scholarships […] and have a graduation rate of 90 percent.”
How Do Your Nonprofit’s Online Numbers Compare? (Huffington Post): “The 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study showed nonprofit online fundraising grew for a second year in a row, driven largely by an increase in gifts to rights-based nonprofits. While the response rates to fundraising email messages stayed fairly consistent for nonprofits in 2011, the average rates of new Facebook fans, mobile subscribers, and people who took action from an advocacy email soared.” Among the notable results? By December 2011, “nonprofits on average had 70 percent more Facebook fans than they did at the start of the year” and “the number of email subscribers responding to calls to action online [… had] increased 28 percent.” M+R principal Bill Wasserman suggests taking similar stock of your own numbers and brainstorming how to improve them in 2012.
