Superman At The ATM, originally uploaded by lickyoats.

I describe it here. Lots of interesting stuff re licensing copyright & where all the dollars go.

What does it have to do with social enterprise? And what does all this have to do with Michael Jackson?

Ah, just wait, mes freres & frerettes!

Michael Jackson's Heal the World Foundation did a considerable amount of good in its heyday in the mid-1990s, but it suspended operations in 2002 after failing to file several years worth of required annual reports with the state of California. The charity's New York offshoot, Heal the Kids, also faced a similar crisis in 2003, after which time it seems to have disappeared.

Last year brought news that that Jackson had not really stopped supporting his charity. Instead, the Heal the World Foundation had been reorganized. According to HTWF's website,

People are now remembering his music legacy, but behind the scenes, unknown to all but a small handful of people, during these last 7 years he authorized that tens of thousands be spent on preserving his charity organization Heal the World Foundation (HTWF).

Jackson started HTWF in 1992 and was designed to leverage his name, adding to the many millions Michael Jackson had personally given to charity. With Michael Jackson not happy at turning 50 years old, he stepped up his efforts for a multifaceted comeback.

Following these final performances, it was believed that Mr. Jackson would live a long and full life, devoted to HTWF and serving his God and his fellow man, with his fans leading the way.

Instead, the Heal the World Foundation announced that it would host a memorial benefit at a property bordering Jackson's Neverland Ranch--an event that ended up being canceled when local authorities objected that the event lacked the requisite permits.

I don't want to get in the way of a good thing, and I certainly wish the organizers well with whatever good deeds they have planned for the future. However, the more I go over my files on this Foundation, the more I've begun to wonder whether the relaunched charity was connected to Jackson in any way besides the name.

That the memorial PR came from an event management company with no evident coordination with the Jackson estate raised a red flag for me, but that's not the only odd thing. There's also the array of Michael Jackson domain names associated with the Foundation's president, Melissa Johnson, and the charity itself. For example, while Michael has been known to inspire quasi-religious devotion among his fans, would he have authorized the use of the domain name prophetmichael.com?

Somewhat more troubling, the Foundation is named in the WHOIS listing for http://mjplay.com, but the link itself takes you to Johnson's personal home health care service. Even more curiously, the home health service lists HTWF as a partner in providing elder care assistance--with no mention of Jackson. I was willing to view the Jackson-related domain names as a bit of strategic cybersquatting, but commingling charitable enterprise with a manager's own commercial private business is not something a charity should do.

Then there's this intriguing Craiglist post from mid-June:

The nature of the problem isn't at all clear--another charity named "Heal the World" filed a "Heal the World" trademark application for charitable fundraising, so perhaps HtWF is looking for help to deal with that. Or could there be another problem here--namely, a challenge to the Foundation's repeated mention of Michael Jackson in connection with its site & fundraising activity? Either way, if Michael Jackson were really funding this charity, wouldn't he be connecting it to his legal team as well?

Which leads me to the next and last curious piece of evidence. Johnson claims in a recent interview that "it is NOT true, that HTWF stopped functioning as a charity at any point since its inception in 1992." But if that's the case, why do both the California Attorney General and the IRS treat Jackson's HTWF and Johnson's HTWF as two legally distinct organizations?

California AG:

IRS:

Putting together the above facts with various statements made by Foundation President Johnson, one reasonably wonders whether the Heal the World Foundation's supposed support from Jackson actually existed. Instead, the Foundation would appear to be an independent effort by fans who have scooped up the Foundation's dead trademarks and around (reportedly) 2,000 Jackson-themed domain names.

On its website, the Foundation continues to promote its "behind the scenes" connections to Jackson & indicates that after his scheduled "final performances" Jackson would have been "devoted to HTWF." Judging from the Foundation's discussion board, such statements have created the impression that Jackson really did support this charity. If the Foundation cannot provide documented proof of an actual connection to Jackson, donors--and regulators--have good reason to question whether this charity is really an improvement on its failed predecessor.

Breakfast with Barack, originally uploaded by jurvetson.

Cross-published on JustMeans:

Recently President Obama signed into law the Serve America Act, which, among other things, established a Social Innovation Fund. The aim: to identify innovative & effective nonprofit social ventures and to take them to scale. As set forth in the statute, the Fund will accomplish this by giving money to "eligible entities" (i.e., existing grantmaking institutions or government partnerships) that will then in turn make grants to suitable "community organizations," provided the subgrantee is able to secure the requisite matching funds from government, nonprofit or commercial sources.

The initiative has generated considerable excitement in the social enterprise community. Judging from the language, I can see why: the new law speaks of "national leveraging capital," "investments," "institutional capacity," "measurable outcomes" and a host of other things that pretty much spell "win" for anyone playing social enterprise buzzword bingo.

Yet for the life of me, I don't see how any of this is innovative.

At its core, the program follows a model that's all too familiar from comparative administrative law--a government program that gives money to subgrantees who in turn give money to other subgrantees, managed through the relentless documentation of how stated program goals were met. For example, Russia moved to precisely this model recently, channeling social funds through grantmaking intermediaries, and USAID has been doing it for years.

Yes, I know that on the surface this is different--SIF isn't just making grants to grantmaking subgrantees for nonprofit subgrantees under the rubric of statutorily mandated reporting standards, it's leveraging investment in social entrepreneurs and building capacity for measured outcomes. However, this is not a distinction I could repeat with a straight face. When it comes to interpreting a statute I'm a stone cold pragmatist, and it seems to me that when you cut through all the jargon the two structures are essentially the same.

I don't say this merely to be contrary--studying existing institutions can provide invaluable insight into how SIF could spin out. If you have experience, say, with USAID, you know the culture that tends to grow up around such programs. The reality tends not to match the rhetoric--lift the rock of civil society & social change and you'll find a swarming mass of professional intermediaries, stultifying standardization and the awarding of spoils to the usual suspects with marginal scraps for unorthodox unconnected outsiders.

The potential for this in SIF is quite real--the requirement of matching funds alone will skew the grants to nonprofits that are already established, particularly groups that have substantial support from governments and major funders. Moreover, the statutory requirements for measured effectiveness, evidence-based decision-making and so forth may sound good, but in practice this provides an institutional mandate for centralized regulation and extensive paperwork.

I know the people who promoted SIF had a much more enthralling vision, but that train has left the station--the new law puts us on the cross-country Amtrak. In the immortal words of T.S. Eliot, "this is the way the world ends/not with a bang, but Corporation Monitoring Planning Assessments."

Day 48 :: Thin Mints, originally uploaded by Danarah.

Just another day in social enterprise.

madoff / quote, originally uploaded by hulk4598.

The tales of woe from charities bankrupted by Bernie Madoff has understandably been a focus of attention, but now that he's in prison questions are arising as to the ethical & legal obligations of charities that benefited from his fund.

This post & comment thread on the New York Times DealBook blog are must-reads for anyone in the charity biz. Given the symbiotic relationship between charities and people who obtained their wealth through questionable means, getting insurance to cover the risks inherent in large donations may not be a bad idea.

Second Life, originally uploaded by Paul Arciphel.

ClothingCollection.org is a website dedicated to exposing fake clothing donation charities. From a news article quoted on the site:

They claim to be supporting families living in poverty, but many so-called charities are collecting old clothes from households around the country before shipping them to Eastern Europe and Russia and selling them on for profit.

A Sunday Tribune investigation into leaflets and stickers that are left into people’s houses found the vast majority are not registered charities and don’t have waste collection permits. Each ‘charity’ consists of one or two individuals who are making vast profits out of the free goods and clothing received from home-owners. Meanwhile, legitimate charities are losing money as a result.

Forget The Philanthropist. This is where I go for hard-hitting depictions of how do-gooders save the world . . . by volunteering for the local senior center to help his buddy score!

Torn Michael Jackson wheatpaste in Lower Manhattan by MBW, originally uploaded by Elisha Cook Jr..

UPDATE: Is Michael Jackson's charity a fake?

Originally posted on JustMeans:

I had at least three posts I was considering to put up today, but when I ducked into the nearest library while on a research quest the guards were heatedly discussing Michael Jackson. Their somber intonations that this is a historic day got me curious, so instead of jumping right to JustMeans--a great site, but like your typical social business hub admittedly not the best place to catch the latest celebrity gossip--I hit the usual suspects to discover that Michael Jackson had just died.

Since we live a culture pretty much defined by the cult of personality (Josef Stalin, social innovator!), I've decided to set aside my thoughts on The Philanthropist, American Apparel and social censorship for a day when most of us aren't fervently Twittering "Michael Jackson is dead" just in case someone hasn't noticed the other 50,000 tweets about the news.

Instead, I want to offer a few brief memorial reflections about Michael Jackson and social enterprise.

Jackson, as this book documents, was quite active in charity, at one point breaking the Guinness record for most charities supported by a pop star. And whatever one thinks of his various activities at Neverland Ranch, it's pretty clear that he saw his life there as a way of giving back to the community. Jackson also was involved in high profile benefit singles--and therein lies another less well known controversy.

As Jackson testified in a business-related trial, the donation of proceeds from the sale of a charity song did not mean, for Jackson, donating all of the profits. The money from the sale of CDs went to charity, but Jackson retained the song's copyright & personally kept the royalties. This caused a bit of dustup when the news media learned that a any time "We Are the World" or the 9/11 charity song "What More Can I Give?" get played on the radio, the proceeds go to not to charity but to the copyright holders, including Jackson himself.

The dustup over Jackson's alleged charitable profiteering provides an instructive example about social business for those of us in the social enterprise community. In our world, as in the music industry more generally, the idea of getting some personal returns from a charitable enterprise is not inherently problematic----musicians need to earn a living just like anyone else, even professional nonprofiteers. Besides Michael Jackson, John Lennon had some rather pointed things to say about this, astutely observing how various promoters & benefit workers profit from charitable work but expect musicians to give all their labor for free. Nonetheless, there's a popular impression that a charitable benefit should be wholly outside the realm of exchange, to the point that no one in the endeavor--not even the grunts--should get paid.

The fact that this expectation exists does not, of course, mean that we have abide by it, but for those of us who don't have the luxury of being international superstars this perspective can pose some difficult problems, from loss of needed donor support to the occasional legislative crackdown.

But more about that another day. For now, a moment of silence for a man who, like so many of us, gave as much as he felt that he could.

Tonight's the premier of NBC's The Philanthropist. Longtime readers of this site know how I react to do-gooder shots such as the one above--my mind whirls back through the 1960s into the late nineteenth century like some an imperialist version of Time Tunnel, swarming with images of white people bringing civilization and Pampers to the uncivilized primitives who desperately look to us to raise them from the depths of their corruption and incompetence.

Sure, as the New York Times reports the show reportedly includes the obligatory scene where The Philanthropist is chided for

playing the role of the charming rich businessman who travels the world, getting his hands just dirty enough to go back home and tell his American friends how meaningful his life is compared to theirs.

But that's an old rhetorical ruse, at once allowing viewers to assure themselves that they are not That Guy while reinforcing the more systemic problem. See, the show tells us, you're not just a dilettante. You really are leading them out of darkness, you really are their savior--in short, you are the master on whom they depend.

It's empire. It's racial supremacy. And it's something we should not indulge.

I know the show hasn't aired yet, but you could write enough to get tenure at Duke based on just the scenes described in the reviews and the obligatory white-guy-gives-hope-to-black-children photos released to promote the show.

Unless, of course, the scene depicted in the above PR photo ends with The Philanthropist blown up by an old British landmine.

Reserved for teens, originally uploaded by trexfiles23.

The teen room at the New York Public Library, Mulberry St. branch. in NoLita.

Empty.

Lots of adults in the grown-up room, though.

Perhaps it's just the summer, though in MY day, during school vacation I walked five miles through six feet of snow every day to read at the library. Even in July, because back then, things were so tough we had blizzards in 90 degree weather.

And let's face it--I had no life!

Iranians have reportedly starting protesting the Ahmadinejad regime by going to bazaars and not shopping.

However, that doesn't mean the rest of the revolution is noncommercial.

One popular item: t-shirts featuring Neda Agha-Soltan, the Iranian woman whose murder by Iranian security forces, caught on this YouTube video (more about which here), has made her an icon of the protest movement.

Pictured above: a Neda t-shirt sold on Facebook by an Iranian who pledges to give the proceeds to Neda's family if 400 shirts are sold, though judging from the comments not everyone is on board with this enterprise:

The CafePress blog has also noted Neda tee phenomenon, highlighting a link between commerce and political speech:

While the Iranian government prohibits Neda’s family and friends from having memorials in her honor and tries to locally silence the voices mourning her, the world is talking. And from our end, a T-shirt is worth 1,000 words.

In other words, let a thousand Neda t-shirts bloom!

And yes, the last one really is a "Remembering Neda (Iran) Dog T-Shirt." The photo proclaims "Made in the USA", and y'know, I don't doubt it.

UPDATE:

Here's the PrestijFashion shirt mentioned in the comments!

For Sale Stickers, originally uploaded by - Ahoura -.

It's been a rather intense few days here at Chez Uncivil, as late-night translating on the latest Russian legal changes spun into a broader policy oriented piece for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. All rather fascinating, for me at least, and I'm already thinking about other possibilities. More on that when the CofP op-ed is up.

I've also been keeping up with regular social-enterprise-related reflections for JustMeans, the latest of which ties together some interesting articles on Iran, fashion & hybrid social ventures.

The photo above, by the by, is a cool bit of charitable ephemera from Iran that illustrates how protesting against the government did not just spring up fully formed ex nihilo. The sticker covers up the slot in a charity donation box--and I'll let Ahoura, an Iranian street artist, explain the rest:

These stickers are designed to be stuck on charity money boxes, which are somehow fake in IRAN, it means government takes the money and it wont be spent for homeless people or stuff, a tribute to the stupid government.

No, not that Social Enterprise Alliance, the organization that brings together social entrepreneurs. Microsoft's new Social Enterprise Alliance is a social networking "partnership centered on the customization and integration of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007."

A search of the U.S. trademark database indicates that "social enterprise alliance" isn't registered yet to anyone, though SEA could try to assert common law trademark rights if it wanted to try to get Microsoft not to use the name.

Of course, SEA may be OK with another SEA roaming around, but if Microsoft successfully registers the mark things could eventually interesting. My personal favorite example in this regard is the original Burger King, which got a state trademark for its restaurant but failed to consider federal trademark until after the national Burger King chain had registered it. A judge carved out a 20-mile bubble for the original to operate free from competition from the federally trademarked Burger King, but the original cannot go to scale under its own name.

Microsoft's social enterprise announcements got me thinking about social enterprise & trademark more generally, and a federal trademark search reveals another interesting development: Live Elements, a Virginia technology firm, has recently filed to register "social enterprise" as a proprietary mark for its own online networking platform.

Last week on JustMeans I noted that the legal situation for nonprofits in Russia is more complex than the conventional wisdom would have us believe.

There was, of course, a method to my rhetorical madness. Here's an update on one important aspect of the Russian nonprofit world: reforms aimed at encouraging the formation of independent and financially sustainable nongovernmental NPOs.

A few months ago the Russian government formed a working group with a stated goal of facilitating the formation of nongovernmental nonprofit associations, which became a particularly pressing issue after restrictive measures enacted under Vladimir Putin a few years ago. Anyone familiar with Soviet rhetoric knows that sometimes words can have two meanings, and a leading governmental official promised that we'll soon see "many truly innovative proposals" for liberalizing current law, there was ample reason to be skeptical.

However, the first proposed set of amendments to the Russian law "On Nonprofit Organizations" finally went live a few hours ago, and it actually does lighten the regulatory burden in several significant ways.

A major focus of the proposed reforms is to rein in what some see as the unbridled authority of the Ministry of Justice--the state body that incorporates nonprofit organizations--to obstruct the formation and activity of nonprofit NGOs. The bill seeks to accomplish this in several ways, such as

• limiting the organizational documents the Ministry has the right to request,
• limiting the number of audits to once in a three years (as opposed to annually),
• limiting the grounds for the denial of registration,
• adding the option of suspending registration (as opposed to merely providing for denial), and
• requiring the government to explain reasons for refusal within a specific period of time.

The bill also has provides for the publication--in the mass media or online--of an annual report, with a simplified statement of ongoing activity for smaller organizations. This is also in keeping with the bill's announced purpose of "lightening but not eliminating accountability for NPOs."

Although the proposed reforms apply for the most part to Russian nonprofits--a subsequent bill is reported to be in the works in regard to foreign groups--the bill does include a welcome amendment in regard to branch offices of foreign NGOs: it would eliminate the current prohibition on foreign affiliates or representative offices deemed to be a "threat . . . to national uniqueness and identity [or] to [Russia's] cultural heritage."

Moreover, in a separate and equally significant legal development, a Russian appeals court recently held that grants made by foreign organizations to Russian nonprofits are exempt from the profits tax. This precedent could, if not overturned, put an end to questions as to whether tax exemption for foreign grants is limited to grants received from just a few charities specified on a list issued by the Russian government.

As Human Rights Watch indicated when the scope of the proposed liberalizations was initially announced, additional changes would be useful, but the proposed bill, if enacted, appears to be a welcome "first step for reform."

In a post-9/11 compromise, the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority allows uniform workers to have religious headwear provided that it is colored blue and bears the MTA logo.

Despite a discrimination lawsuit brought against it by the U.S. government back in 2004, the MTA insists that the policy is appropriate, on the grounds that "standardized uniforms assist our customers in quickly identifying employees if they need emergency assistance or just travel directions." The department does not see any problem in requiring believers to brand their religious garb, so it continues to cite Sikh and Muslim employees for failing to follow the policy.

The Sikh Coalition has protested, and a majority of the New York City Council has come out in support of forcing the MTA to end what is truly a stunning example of bureaucratic ignorance.