You are browsing: Rick Cohen
Lucky 7: The Casino Industry and Philanthropy
In some states, casinos are required by law to give a portion of their profits to community foundations which, in turn, are required to grant it out as well as allowed to put a portion into their endowments . . . just one of the overlooked fundraising …
Grantseeker’s Guide to Foundation Affinity Groups
Like the mysterious Freemasons and their Grand Lodges, foundation affinity groups feel open and warm to insiders, but to outsiders they appear to be secretive, cloistered societies with their own coded languages, titles, and hierarchies. Rick Cohen fir …
How Did This Happen? Part 2 of the Vanguard Foundation Story
In Part 1 of this story on the decline and fall of the Vanguard Public Foundation, we reported on how Vanguard’s leadership became involved with apparent conman Samuel “Mouli” Cohen, and how millions of dollars disappeared into a get-rich-quick s …
Decline and Fall of the Vanguard Foundation
Once acclaimed as a pioneer in philanthropy and an important force for social justice, the Vanguard Foundation is no more. The full story will take years to emerge, but we report here in Part I on some of the clues to its sorry demise. A link to …
Volunteerism Public Policies Can Hurt Nonprofits
Amidst the predictable praise for volunteerism and the Serve America Act, we at Blue Avocado detect the mooing of a sacred cow. Cow hunter and policy analyst Rick Cohen lets us know the four things we should be worried about with public pol …
Amaze Your Friends with these Nonprofit Factoids
When we believe something to be true but don’t have the data to support that idea, what happens when we do find the hard evidence? Two things: either we find out we were wrong after all or . . . we were right and now we have the facts to put into a gra …
L3C: Pot of Gold or Space Invader?
For-profit companies continue to seek ways to obtain two benefits that are usually reserved for nonprofits: foundation grants and government tax exemptions. These efforts are led by both well-meaning individuals as well as those that simply want fundin …
