With Charity For All: Why Charities Are Failing and a Better Way to Give

Author: Stern, Ken

Brand: ANCHOR BOOKS

Color: White

Binding: paperback

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 272

Release Date: 05-11-2013

Details: Product Description


Each year, the average American household donates almost $2700 to charity.  Yet, most donors know little about the American charitable sector and the nonprofit organizations they support.  In
With Charity For All, former NPR CEO Ken Stern exposes a field that few know: 1.1 million organizations, 10% of the national workforce, and $1.5 trillion in annual revenues.  He chronicles the many flaws in the charity system, from tax-exempt charities such as bowl games,  roller derby leagues, and beer festivals, to charitable hospitals that pay their executives into the millions, to--worst of all--organizations that raise millions of dollars without ever cracking the problem they have pledged to solve.
 

With Charity For All provides an unflinching look at the philathropic sector but also offers an inspiring prescription for individual giving and widespread reform.


Review


“Smart and scathing.”
     —Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer Prize–winning
New York Times columnist and co-author of
Half the Sky

“An eye-popping—and devastatingly detailed—critique.”
     —
San Francisco Chronicle
“Stern makes a strong case that the average American donor has become a sucker. . . . A good guide to what makes an effective charity.”
     —
Los Angeles Times

“Eye-opening. . . . Stern is calling for donors to . . . rethink the way they give in order to be the impetus for change.”
     —
The Washington Post
“Informative. . . . Stern covers an enormous amount of non-profit ground . . . Feisty.”

     —Los Angeles Review of Books
“[
With Charity for All is] more exasperated than mean, more provocative than shrill, and counterintuitive instead of purveying stale conventional wisdom. Stern’s advice is consequential, because if followed it will alter the charitable realm.”
     —
USA Today
“[
With Charity for All]
will be particularly beneficial to those conservatives whose reflexive answer to every question about how to limit government is ‘civil society’. . . .  [We] must therefore devote serious attention to the health of the charitable sector. . . . Ken Stern offers essential guidance on where to start."
     —
The Wall Street Journal
 “Stern is an engaging storyteller, and his catalog of venality and graft in the charitable sector borders on farce. . . . His insistence on this fundamental question about the purpose of American charity is the great and original strength of this book.”
     —
Washington Monthly
“[A] devastatingly detailed critique. . . .
With Charity for All makes a compelling case that philanthropic organizations are rife with theft—both grand and petty—grotesquely high salaries, waste and incompetence, and subject to virtually no oversight.”
     —
Tulsa World

 
“[Stern] fills the text with insightful, vivid examples. . . . A trove of useful insider wisdom.”
     —
Kirkus Reviews
“[A] provocative exposé. . . .  For anyone who has given time or money to not-for-profits, Stern’s critique will prove both disturbing and thought-provoking.”
     —
Publishers Weekly


About the Author


Ken Stern is a media and nonprofit executive best known for helping to build National Public Radio into a global news and information power. He is currently the CEO of Palisades Media Ventures, a Washington D.C.-based public affairs company.



Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition


Introduction   
When the Frenchman Pierre L’Enfant laid out his plans for the new District of Columbia in 1791, he designed Sixteenth
Street to be one of the grand avenues of the new capital. Two hundred and twenty years later, his vision has been mostly realized. Sixteenth Street rises from the foot of the White House, runs north past luxury hotels, rows of embassies, the blank façade of the national headquarters of the Freemasons, through parks and the prosperous leafy neighborhoods of Washington’s Gold Coast, up past Walter Reed Hospital, before reaching a tired ending among the down-market strip ma

EAN: 9780307743817

Package Dimensions: 8.0 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches

Languages: English