We are thrilled to present you with this year’s edition of The Giving List Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a wonderfully diverse tapestry of people and communities and locations and causes. In many ways it’s a microcosm of everything that is both great and complex about our country. And nothing creates a more important safety net for the pieces of the complicated puzzle that is L.A. than the region’s nonprofit sector. The Giving List was created out of the belief that storytelling, one of the most powerful tools we have as humans, is vastly underutilized in educating donors on the [...more...]

Philanthropy, incorporated for the public good, can and should make all its investments accordingly. In 2021, Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced a bill to more tightly regulate donor-advised funds, commonly referred to as DAFs. While the Accelerating Charitable Giving (ACE) Act’s reforms were far from sweeping, the bill set off a bitter debate over who controls charitable funds: the donor or the public. The Act’s supporters plausibly argued that wealthy donors could use the increasingly popular philanthropic instruments for personal gain, and that DAFs allow them to hoard and perpetually control what becomes public money once [...more...]

(Editor’s note: This story is being co-published with Impact Alpha.) As a parting challenge to his successor, outgoing Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced in April the settlement of a longstanding lawsuit over homeless housing. Their responses to the homelessness crisis may well determine the winner of next week’s primary election for mayor of the nation’s second-largest city. The frontrunners are Rick Caruso, a successful developer, and U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, who made Joe Biden’s short list for vice president. The legal agreement, if ratified by the City Council and the presiding judge, will compel the city to move 60% of its nearly 29,000 [...more...]

Redeploying charitable foundation investments could be the needed difference in stemming a homegrown humanitarian crisis. Ricardo Barron just started his shift at the “tiny home village” on a traffic-choked Alvarado Street in Echo Park.  He is sitting at a steel table, an umbrella shielding the already hot L.A. sun. Behind him are 38 neatly spaced 64-square foot shelters. Inside each is a man or woman who has found succor from the ravages of the street. Most are sleeping, it’s early yet.  Nearly three decades before, and about a mile south of here, a then-21-year-old Barron got into an altercation outside [...more...]