Celebrate Independence Day with a Visit to a National Trust Historic Site

Several events are taking place at National Trust Historic Sites to celebrate the Fourth of July.The East Side Tenement Museum, located on New York City’s Manhattan Island is hosting tours of their historic tenement building from 11:00 am to 4:30pm on July 4, 2008. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum preserves and interprets an historic tenement house in an area of New York City that traditionally served as the first stop for many new immigrants arriving in America. The Tenement Museum presents

Better Boards Workshops exclusively for Historic Sites

Esther Hall will lead a Better Boards workshop for historic sites at the Inn at Woodlake in Kohler,  Wisconsin on November 6-8, 2008.

This workshop is limited to six Sites and each Site will need to send six people: the Site Director and five carefully selected Boardmembers (e.g., Chair, rising chair, etc). Thanks to a generous $5000 grant, we are offering the workshop for $500 per Site and $350 per participant.

Registration deadline: Friday, September 12, 2008. Participation is on a first come,

The Classics at Brucemore reinvented for 2008

Instead of the scheduled Classics performance of Lysistrata, Brucemore (a National Trust Historic Site in Iowa) is partnering with Liar’s Theater, Theatre Cedar Rapids, SPT Theatre, Urban Theater Project of Iowa, and Legion Arts to create one of the largest collaborative productions the area has ever experienced. The new Classics production is Moving Home and features music and stories inspired by Cedar Rapid’s epic experience. All proceeds will be donated to the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation’s Flood 2008 Fund.

Moving Home is a collaboration of the finest professional performance organizations in the area. The stellar production team includes:

Charitable Giving Reaches New Record in 2007

U.S. charitable giving reached an estimated $306.4 billion in 2007, exceeding $300 billion for the first time, a new report from the Giving USA Foundation finds.

According to Giving USA 2008, which is researched and written by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, every type of public charity saw gains in donations received during 2007, while giving to foundations decreased. The report attributes the increase in giving to charity largely to the strong stock market performance in the first half of the year, overall growth in the economy as measured by gross domestic product, and increases in corporate and personal income as reported at the end of the year.

Although giving to foundations decreased in 2007, grantmaking by foundations increased, to $38.5 billion, according to data provided by the Foundation Center. In recent years, a growing number of households and individual donors have established foundations and are using them as vehicles for their charitable giving; indeed, foundations now account for more than 12 percent of all giving. At the same time, giving by corporations in 2007 increased by an estimated 1.9 percent, to $15.7 billion.

The report found that giving by living individuals, the largest source of charitable giving, increased 2.7 percent, to an estimated $229 billion (a decrease of 0.1 percent when adjusted for inflation); the figure represents nearly three-quarters of all giving in the U.S. The report also estimated charitable bequests at $23.15 billion, an increase of 6.9 percent before adjusting for inflation.

In terms of giving by recipient, religious congregations retained the top spot among the nine subsectors of charitable recipients examined in the report, receiving an estimated 33.4 percent of the total and exceeding $100 billion for the first time.

“Giving USA 2008 shows that a strong start to the economy in 2007 helped lift giving despite worries at year’s end from gasoline prices or the housing and mortgage crisis,” said George C. Ruotolo, chair of the Giving Institute. “Just as important as the 3.9 percent overall increase is the finding that every subsector (except private foundations) is projected to have seen increases in 2007. This last occurred in 2001.”

The entire report is available for $70.  More details at the Foundation Center.

Reasons to hate (and love) I.T.

Susan Cramm has recently posted a couple articles on her blog at Harvard Business Publishing that help put words to the subtle reasons so many of us are struggling with computers, the Internet, and information technology (and perhaps PreservationNation). Admittedly it’s a bit provocative, but it helps categorize so many of the issues I often hear discussed at Historic Sites but no one wants to mention out of the fear their Ethernet lines will be cut or their email will be scrambled by their IT staff. You’ll want to read her entire posts, but to get you started, here are her:

Eight Reasons to Hate IT

1. IT Limits Managers’ Authority
2. They’re Missing Adult Supervision
3. They’re Financial Extortionists
4. Their Projects Never End
5. The Help Desk is Helpless
6. They Let Outsourcers Run Amok
7. IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks
8. IT Never Has Good News

You’ll need to read her post to discover why these are also the reasons you should love IT. If you want to stay posted on these ideas, subscribe to her RSS feed or listen to the Harvard Business Idea Cast via iTunes.