The economic prosperity of the 1990s, along with the coming of age of the US baby boom generation, led to new types of philanthropy at the turn of the new millennium. This case tells the story of The Hestia Fund, a "women's giving circle" based on innovative philanthropic concepts. Hestia was not a registered nonprofit, nor a private foundation; its 40 members held that all funds donated should be on a "pass-through" basis. Each year the fund spent all it took in and passed the funds on to nonprofit organizations-with decisions as to recipients based on a collective decision-making process.

In November 2001, an Indian non-governmental organization dedicated to improving the lives and housing of the slum-dwellers of Bombay (Mumbai) learned that there were potential financial problems with a major new housing project in which it had invested and had convinced others to invest. The Society for the Protection of Area Resources Centres (SPARC) had, over the previous four years, repeatedly used its good name and contacts to bring together a group of private and nonprofit investors to construct a three-building, 268-unit development in the middle of Dharavi, generally considered Asia's largest slum. It had convinced one of the world's largest financial institutions, Citibank, to loan funds to India's National Slum Dwellers Federation, the organization that would build the Dharavi project; it had convinced an international nonprofit organization, the London-based Homeless International, to finance the loan, and had advanced its own funds to get the project started. But when Citbank warns that it has doubts about the likelihood of private, higher-income buyers being willing to move into a slum area-even into a new apartment building-SPARC finds it must decide whether and how to respond. Its options range from the pragmatic-simply scaling back the three-tower project-to organizing pressure and protest against Citibank, which appeared to have agreed to invest in part to burnish its image as it sought to expand its branch operations in Bombay. The case highlights some of the unexpected ways in which commercial globalization affects the potential for philanthropy and the tactics and strategy of community activists intent on extra-market measures to improve the lives of the poor. It raises both strategic issues for the nonprofit activists at the center of the narrative and questions about housing policy, as well-among them, the question of the extent of the role which philanthropically-financed "model housing" can play in ameliorating slum conditions.

This nonprofit strategic planning case tells the story of the Phoenix-based National Family Legal Foundation, an anti-pornography advocacy group which, after attaining national influence during the 1980s, finds itself, in 1995, nearly bankrupt and without a clear mission. When Charles Dunlap, a local real estate developer, agrees to join the board of directors, he unknowingly takes the first step toward a central role in deciding the fate of NFLF. With little left to work with but a skeleton staff and a small group of committed board members, Dunlap, thrust into a central role, must decide whether there is any way the organization can be effective, given its now-limited resources, or whether the time has come to close up shop.

At first glance, Greater Boston Rehabilitation Services appeared to be in excellent financial shape in the spring of 1991, when Terry Ann Lunt was named its new executive director. A mix of government grants and work contracts with local businesses seemed to protect this 20-year-old organization, based in the hope that work could be a form of therapy for the mildly mentally ill, from the vagaries of public budget changes. Soon after her arrival, however, Lunt found that, unknown to the board that had hired her, three of the group's four sources of income were in jeopardy, that accounting records were, at best, haphazard, and employees were deeply confused as to the mission of the organization.