Announcements

Blue Avocado launches ‘prestigious’ Just Awards

Jan Masaoka, editor of the Blue Avocado newsletter for nonprofits and keynote speaker at HANO’s December mini-conference, has announced “a new prestigious, nonprofit sector award series that has been created jointly by Blue Avocado and Nonprofit Online News: the Just Awards.”

The awards will be “the IgNobel Prizes of civil society,” Masaoka said. With tongue in cheek, the Just Awards will highlight the irrational, the irresponsible and the irrelevant organizational behaviors that impact the work of social service and social change.

“With a particular emphasis on the world of philanthropy and with the support of respected judges, we will bestow awards each year to those organizations who best exemplify the foibles of our sector,” she said.

Some awards of this nature are just for fun, Masaoka said. Others are intended to help make change. Just Awards will be both. In the case of philanthropy, this means looking sharply at how funders behave in ways that distance them from the public and the people they serve, damage the nonprofit organizations they support, and subvert the missions of their grantees.

  • The first "Justie" will be awarded to a foundation for displaying amazing narcissism in 2009. The award will be announced during the week of April 19, immediately preceding the annual conference of the Council on Foundations.
  • The second "Justie" will be awarded to a news organization – print, online, or other media – for most abominable coverage of the nonprofit sector in 2009.

Full information and nomination forms are available at the new Just Awards website: www.justawards.org. Anyone can submit nominations and names of nominators will be kept confidential.

Judges selecting the winners include: Priscilla Hung of Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training; Rick Cohen of The Nonprofit Quarterly; Omowale Satterwhite of the National Community Development Institute; Robert Egger of the DC Central Kitchen; Ted Lord of Philanthropy Sherpas; Ruth McCambridge of Nonprofit Quarterly; Ami Dar of Idealist.org; Pablo Eisenberg of Georgetown University and Masaoka.