A couple quick updates:

For those who checked out the cryptocurrency presentation from a couple of weeks back, and wanted to spend more time hearing me talk about charitable giving and tax rules, in collaboration with the excellent attorneys at Gassman, Crotty & Denicolo, there are two new presentations to check out. One, on Selecting a Philanthropic Vehicle, took place last week and you can find the video here. (I’ll fully admit that I moved too fast because there was far more material than we could hope to cover). The second part of that presentation: “Charitable Solutions for Wealthy Clients of Caring CPAs: UBIT and Tax Reporting” will actually take place on Wednesday (2/23/22) at 1pm. Both are free, so feel free to check them out and judge my presentation style and content. In the spirit of sharing information, I’m embedding some of the slides that I contributed to the presentation. We’ll be adding more fine-tuned versions of these to the Resources page soon.

We have added a new location: Los Angeles! In terms of our office address for meetings and days where the Southern California-based employee(s) (as of 2 weeks ago, just me) deign to venture into the office, that is 445 S. Figueroa Street, Suite 3100, Los Angeles, CA 90071. San Francisco will continue to be our headquarters, and I’ll be traveling back and forth regularly (without charge to clients) for client and networking meetings. And, we should have another attorney starting in a few weeks that can help us ‘hold down the fort’ up there. But, we are very excited to be expanding into Southern California and getting to know more of the non-profits and philanthropists down here doing great work, especially those aligned with our mission. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if there is anything we can do to support the Los Angeles nonprofit community!

What exactly are we supposed to do?  And how do non-profits fit into it?

There have been many days that I considered writing this post.  Apparently, Texas’ two latest blows against the autonomy of women and voting rights were enough, especially when cast against a backdrop of a pandemic and displacement around the globe from war and climate-caused disasters.  Horrendous injustice and suffering are not new, of course. The dominant forces in this country have always actively fought to disenfranchise and inflict cruelty upon women and people of color.  

But I’d argue that the way we experience these tragedies is new.  Technology may have increased our capacity to solve problems.  But, that increase is exponentially outpaced by the increase in our awareness of the full extent of misfortune.  Even when we manage to put our phone down and try to enjoy the relative privilege of our lives, it still rattles against our table, reminding us of its portal back to a situation that feels hopeless.

The answer to the questions at the top?  I have no idea, truly.  I default to pessimism, which may have a high degree of accuracy but is not always constructive when it comes to pushing the rock back up the hill.  

Still, if you think you know what to do and you want to leverage the non-profit sector to push back against these developments, I can at least offer a few thoughts on some tools to think about.