Journalist and author Eyal Press’ book Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America examines the morally troubling jobs that are done in our name, and shines a light on the workers who do them. Press argues that these workers are hidden by the powerful in society who want to keep the violence of prisons, slaughterhouses, and battlefields out of the public eye.

As the federal government pours billions of dollars into private detention facilities, new research shows political donations from these for-profit companies are influencing policymakers to support legislation criminalizing undocumented immigrants. University of New Mexico associate professor Loren Collingwood talks about his findings, and emotionally shares why they matter.

‘There have been so many important critiques of the nude in art history,’ writer and art curator Macushla Robinson tells us, and she’s added her own critique in the form of an upcoming book project. Every Rape at the Met Museum digs into the way sexual violence has been publicly displayed and even artistically praised in exhibition and catalogues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In this candid conversation, Robinson explains how the images of women on art museum walls, and the bodies of women in the art world today, are still subject to misogyny and sexual violence.

As the U.S. deals with a severe crisis with up to 600,000 people experiencing homelessness each night, we tour the Community First! village in Austin. This unique community was established to provide affordable, permanent housing for the chronically homeless in Central Texas. Why do the residents think it works? 

We speak to the authors of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong, and How We Can Reboot. The trio of Stanford professors use a cross-disciplinary approach to critique technologists and the outsized power they wield in society. By weaving together philosophy, engineering and social science disciplines, the authors make a compelling case that we need ethics and an active democracy to ensure tech serves the public interest above shareholder’s interests.

Broadway has returned after closing eighteen months ago. We speak to actors, writers and directors about what the break meant for their lives and work. One prepares to make his Broadway debut, another looks beyond the stage, and all tell us that they hope the future improves representation and equity in the theater.

In light of troubling events in Afghanistan, we speak to collaborating artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani on threats to the country's archives, the ‘radical archivists’ who have preserved them to date, and how this pair of artists practice radical archiving as way to confront and surface government erasures.

For Nora Kenworthy, GoFundMe is “the research topic that I can't escape.” She recently studied 175,000 GoFundMe campaigns from the COVID era and discovered nearly half didn’t receive a single donation. We discuss the stark inequities around these platforms and ask whether crowdfunding can offer equitable relief during a complex public health disaster.

Are women and girls forgotten in crises and conflicts in Myanmar, Ethiopia and Afghanistan? We speak to women's rights activists about what drives them, and ask whether they feel women & girls are sidelined in these kinds of conflicts. TW: This podcast discusses sexual violence.

The Pillars fund, run by young Muslim philanthropists, has teamed up with academics and Hollywood actors to gather data proving what they’ve long suspected: Muslims are poorly represented on screen. Pillars’ Arij Mikati and Kalia Abiade lay out the problem, and share their solutions to shift the narrative in order to pave a more inclusive path forward. NB: This podcast contains explicit language and words of a derogatory nature.

We speak to Dr. Sophia Yen, entrepreneur and outspoken advocate for women’s reproductive health and empowerment. Dr. Yen founded a birth control startup to “just ship women birth control and keep shipping it until they tell us to stop.” She speaks frankly about sexual health, health justice, and the sexism she has experienced in her career. 

In his new book The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, Chuck Collins unmasks how billionaires protect their wealth, power, and privilege.

Half a century ago, billionaire philanthropist Doris Duke funded universities to record Native American oral histories. Today, her foundation is supporting an effort to digitize the recordings and return them to the tribes. Alyce Sadongei is leading the project and says while it is meaningful, it also raises concerns about how archives are conceived and created in the first place.

The People's Kitchen Collective uses food and art to address racial and social justice issues. Co-founder Jocelyn Jackson talks to us about their large-scale meals, which offer time and nourishment for communities to heal.  

Food Rescue Hero gets volunteers to pick up excess food from restaurants and grocers and deliver it to people who need it. Founder and CEO Leah Lizarondo shares her journey creating a tech tool that says it has rescued some 50 million pounds of food.

Climate scientist Ndoni Mcunu and climate activist Evelyn Acham celebrate the African scientists and activists fighting for the planet. We speak to the pair about the difficulty of this work, and learn what inspires them to keep going.

Found in Translation, a Boston-based nonprofit, trains bilingual women as medical interpreters. In this podcast, founder Maria Vertkin and three graduates who speak Vietnamese, Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, explain why this life-changing work is so necessary.

Independent art curator Kelli Morgan shares personal, painful experiences of institutional racism and says it’s time to call out the art world’s toxic white supremacist culture.

Physician and anthropologist Eugene Richardson’s book ‘Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health’ critiques practices that perpetuate inequality. In this podcast, he argues that global health equity requires not just medicine, but reparations that undo Western colonial harms.  

A diverse group of women discuss the power of giving circles as a way to build community, democratize philanthropy, and support local grassroots organizations.

At the end of a year dominated by COVID-19, race, and social justice, three African feminists with ties to development tell us why they are exhausted and what needs to change.

Black women are up to four times more likely to die during pregnancy in the US than white women. We dig into the racist structures behind this and speak to a pair of powerful women working to fix it.

Working in a field where one in four women experience sexual harassment, nonprofit fundraisers Liz LeClair and Heather Hill describe the personal and professional costs of sexual abuse and explain why frontline fundraisers need more protection from donors.

Tania Culver-Humphrey's father, co-founder of Mercy Corps, abused her when she was a child. A year after going public, she charts the journey from “institutional betrayal” to being embraced by employees as a brave whistleblower. Content warning: This podcast contains descriptions of child sexual abuse. 

Award-winning Zambian writer Namwali Serpell digs into publishing’s problems with race and colonialism, as well as the enduring legacy of white saviorism in literature.

Three generations of Black women in Baltimore share their perspectives on the significance of today’s protests, reflecting on what has - and has not - changed in the past fifty years.

Education expert Diane Ravitch documents the corrupting influence of major philanthropists in “school reform” efforts and celebrates the educators who resist.

With nursing homes leading as COVID-19 hotspots, frontline nurses speak to us about unsafe working conditions and reject the notion that they are “heroes.”

Having led the CDC during the deadly H1N1 influenza pandemic, Dr. Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, shares the lessons he learned as we deal with COVID-19.

Nonprofit leaders share their hopes and fears about the challenges facing their organizations during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.

Writer and blogger Vu Le describes how the COVID-19 crisis is overwhelming nonprofit leaders and why it should cause philanthropy to rethink its funding practices.

Nonprofit workers do it for the cause, but they also want to pay their bills. Artist Samantha Fein explains why she feels that the nonprofit art world is broken, and says that if it doesn’t change the art world could implode.

How are Black women redefining what it means to be philanthropists? We sit down with four leaders in philanthropy and impact investing to discuss how their race and gender affect and inspire their work. 

We meet the people involved in grassroots movements to culturally and economically empower the Oglala Lakota Nation living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, one of the most impoverished and neglected regions in the country.

Criminal defense lawyer Abbe Smith is often asked how she defends people accused of committing terrible crimes. Hear her moving reply, and learn why she believes the guilty deserve a spirited defense.

Innocence Project attorneys and law students in Texas take on an enormous pile of cases every year, tackling legal and moral challenges as they work to free the wrongfully convicted from prison.

Pastor and activist, Rev. Mariama White-Hammond describes how her experience of racial and economic injustice led her to fight for the planet as a whole and explains why it is time to “live differently.”

Two climate change advocates discuss the need to understand the destruction of the environment through a racial lens, and the promising and powerful future of inclusive climate action.

We speak with multimillionaire Nick Hanauer, who calls on the nation’s wealthiest to pay more tax and for all of us to pay more attention to righting the economy’s systemic wrongs.

Appalling conditions in the ‘Jungle’ migrant camp in France drew people from across Europe to help. A volunteer shares her experience and explains how rising anti-immigrant policies are turning ordinary citizens into humanitarians.

We explore ways to decrease wealth inequality in the US with economist Darrick Hamilton who proposes giving every newborn thousands of dollars in a ‘baby bond’ account which they can access when they turn 18.

As inequality grows, we look at look at ideas for narrowing the economic gap between the races, from reparations to raising the minimum wage.

Using fiery Instagram posts, and uncomfortable tweets, the social media campaign No White Saviors challenges white people to examine race, power, and their own roles when attempting to 'help' in communities and countries not their own. Its co-founders explain why their motto is: "If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not listening."

Is it possible for charity to worsen the lives of those they purport to help? We investigate how a global surge in one form of “voluntourism” exploits vulnerable children and contributes to child trafficking

We explore nonprofits’ propensity to create “survivor porn” and the ways in which the sector trades in “parading trauma".

Megan Ming Francis explains how philanthropists—even well-intentioned ones—can “capture” the social movements they fund and, in doing so, steer grassroots organizations and activists away from their original missions.

On International Women’s Day, we speak to the founders of #VisibleWikiWomen about their efforts to decolonize the Internet, and to “make all of the wonderful women in the world visible” on one of the world’s most popular websites: Wikipedia.

The co-directors of GrantAdvisor, a Yelp-like site that rates the nation's charitable foundations, describe how fears of retribution in the field inspired them to launch the platform, and why honest dialogue between nonprofits and foundations can help make philanthropy better.

Whether vocally critiquing the sector on his blog Nonprofit AF, or working to develop leaders of color at his nonprofit in Seattle, Vu Le’s frustrations fuel his drive to make the industry do better.

Hoping to diversify the next generation of doctors and deal with a drastic decrease in the number of primary care physicians in the US, New York University is now offering free tuition to its medical school students. But will it work? And is free tuition enough to choose primary care over higher paying specialties?

In their new book, Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic, Dr. Pardis Sabeti and journalist Lara Salahi argue that epidemics don’t just spread deadly diseases, they can also breed a toxic culture among those who are helping.

This Giving Season, we look at the growing phenomenon of online crowdfunding for medical bills. Who is winning on these platforms, and who is falling short? And what does the rise of sites like GoFundMe say about our fraying social safety net?

In the face of growing political polarization, spaces for thoughtful dialogue across ideologies have all but disappeared. Spaceship Media seeks to fill this void by bringing people together to talk about contentious issues. In this conversation, an NRA member and an anti-violence activist both discover that they are not as different as they think.

Stanford professor Rob Reich’s new book Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better investigates how charity can undermine democratic values, and explores the ways federal policies help to facilitate greater inequality.

Following the 2016 election, there was a spike in charitable giving, especially among female donors. We hear how women are wielding their financial and political muscle ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

A viral video of an American missionary abusing local hotel staff in Uganda exposed the ongoing racism and colonialism that continues to infuse global aid and development. Through voices with deep experience in the sector, we hear how the white savior complex continues to harm those receiving and giving aid around the world, and think about ways to help it become a more equal space.

In his new book, Gay, Inc: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics, Myrl Beam argues that as many of the largest queer nonprofits have accepted millions from wealthy donors and foundations, the LGBT movement has become less radical.  

There is a profound lack of diversity in America’s finest cultural institutions. We examine the scope of the problem, why it matters, and highlight innovative programs aimed at growing more diverse leadership across the nation’s arts and cultural institutions.

From rural Wisconsin to the Bronx, there’s a crisis in home healthcare. It may be one of America’s fastest growing industries, but there aren’t enough workers to meet this demand. We spend time with home care workers and their clients, and learn why it will be hard to age in the comfort of our own homes without wide-scale reform.

Global elites have been credited for using their power and privilege to ‘change the world’ whether through apps that purport to tackle poverty or by making large donations to charity. In his new book, Winners Take All, former New York Times correspondent Anand Giridharadas offers a searing indictment of the notion that America’s wealthy are fixing our social problems

In an updated podcast, two years after being sexually assaulted by South Sudanese soldiers, an Italian aid worker remembers the attack, explains why she testified in court, and is relieved by recent news that they have been given jail terms. “I won. We won. Women won,” she tells us.

As the leader of a second chance program for young people, YouthBuild USA’s John Valverde describes what it means to live out his own second chance.

Many artists are asked to donate their work to charity auctions. The nonprofit raises money for a good cause, the buyer gets a beautiful piece of work, but what does the artist gain?

Nearly a decade after being violently assaulted while working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Sri Lanka, Shannon Mouillesseaux has tough words for her former employer.

Want to give to the homeless this holiday season? Three insights into the benefits and the harm of giving money directly to people on the street.

Nonprofits, tech companies and even NFL players have raised millions to help after recent natural disasters. But giving may be the easy part. Having an impact is harder.

In an increasingly unequal world, where money and power are closely linked, sociology professor Linsey McGoey says philanthropy is part of the problem.

We discuss fifteen successful social change campaigns that have had major impact, from South Africa's anti-apartheid campaign to the legislative success of marriage equality in the US. We learn what made them successful and why lasting social change requires patience and audacity.

Human smuggling has grown into a multibillion dollar industry. We explore the complex relationships between migrants, refugees, and the myriad players involved in smuggling them across borders.

There are over 900 hate groups operating across the US right now. Ryan Lenz monitors them, and former skinhead Angela King works to deradicalize those who want to leave them. They discuss their work and why they do it.

As aware citizens, it might feel good to check our privilege and that of others, but writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy says that privilege awareness has its problems.

Instead of feeling gratitude towards billionaire philanthropists, Stanford professor Rob Reich says we should scrutinize the power they wield.

Forty years after making his name with a famous psychological experiment about what makes good people do bad things, Philip Zimbardo has decided to flip the script. He tells us about his project that teaches people how to act heroically and describes his journey from studying evil to inspiring hope.

We explore the growing influence that private donors are exerting in national and local politics and why the power the wealthy are wielding today is likely to intensify in the years ahead. An interview with David Callahan, author of The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age.

At the nation’s top universities and colleges, children of privilege are taking spots away from straight A students without the same connections, and the problem is only getting worse.

Whether you’re a professional aid worker or just an engaged citizen, doing good for others requires that you to take time to be good to yourself, too. We speak to a veteran aid worker along with the author of a new book, The Idealist’s Survival Kit.

Some were surprised to see Silicon Valley tech workers protest Trump’s new immigration policies, but one civic tech leader tells us they are fighting for the fundamental values of openness and connection that made the internet itself great.

When you're eating out, tipping might seem like a good thing. But, on this Valentine's Day, we explore the many problems that America's tipping culture creates for restaurant workers.

Maaza Mengiste came to the US as a child, after her family fled Ethiopia’s civil war. Even so, the New York based writer explains why she feels strongly about not calling herself a refugee, why activists need to take breaks from Twitter, and reflects on the stubborn endurance of art in times of upheaval.

Do you think a little more empathy would help in our increasingly divided and unequal world? Not so, says Yale professor Paul Bloom. In his book ‘Against Empathy,’ he argues that empathy is short-sighted, prejudiced and often makes the world a worse place. He offers more effective ways forward.

Chuck Collins inherited a half million dollar trust fund from his parents but decided to give it all away, allowing him to "unflinchingly look at the growing income and wealth inequalities that have opened up over the last 30 years." This one-percenter shares his concerns about the rise of the mega donor, the limits of philanthropy to create social change, and explains why we ought to support to the only institution that's ever offered wide swaths of the population a shot at the American dream.

Silicon Valley is celebrated as a bastion of innovation. But it now suffers from one of the greatest income gaps in the country. Nonprofits are struggling to meet the demands caused by rising inequality. We explore the disconnect between the immense wealth in the valley, and why so many residents and nonprofits remain cash-strapped and in need.

A new kind of cruise gives travelers the chance to experience the culture of the Dominican Republic while volunteering in activities like planting trees, building water filters and teaching English. We speak to travel agent Julie Schear, who says she gained a lot from the cruise but journalist Jacob Kushner discovers the volunteers were not helping locals as much as they had hoped.

Midnight Basketball was a popular program to get young men from high crime areas off the streets and into gyms. But did the program live up to its promise?  Author and sociologist Douglas Hartmann describes the underside of Midnight Basketball and what it says about race, criminal justice, and how it became a form of policing and containment for young African American men.

This month the charity GiveDirectly will start giving thousands of Kenyans about a month’s salary, every month, for a decade or more --- with no strings attached. GiveDirectly co-founder Paul Niehaus discusses the sustainability of this project, why he chooses to give cash to poor people abroad rather than in the US, and the role of humility in aid work.

One year after the Flint water crisis, we look at how philanthropy responded, how it can better serve its communities, and what it needs to know about Flint in the decades ahead. Isaiah Oliver of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint joins us.

In the early 2000s, prominent philanthropists saw a big problem in America: a broken school system. They set out to fix it by funding in a charter school movement on a massive  scale. Megan Tompkins-Stange has looked at the initiative and has uncovered myriad concerns and problems. She discusses this and her new book Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform and the Politics of Influence.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is proposing free tuition at in-state public colleges and universities. But many of these schools already serve a number of wealthy students, and many low-income students of color attend small, private institutions that won't benefit from Clinton's plan. We explore the important role of private colleges in educating the nation's poor with Trinity Washington University president Patricia McGuire and former Vassar College president Catharine Hill.

Global health volunteering is a growing, multibillion dollar industry. But is it effective? “It seems like an awful lot of resources to invest in something for which there’s practically no evidence of its impact,” says Lehigh Professor Judith Lasker. She discusses her new book Hoping to Help: The Promises and Pitfalls of Global Health Volunteering.

An African-American leader of one of the nation’s largest foundations speaks about racial tensions, philanthropy’s diversity problem, and why these times require philanthropists to be courageous. We talk with W.K. Kellogg Foundation CEO La June Montgomery Tabron.

Is philanthropy doing enough to address racism and inequity in the U.S.? We speak to Heinz Endowments President Grant Oliphant. He’s among the few philanthropic leaders who has spoken up about the shooting deaths of two black men by white police and the sniper attacks of five Dallas police officers. He says it’s a problem that philanthropy shies away from these contentious issues. “Our silence is damning,” he tells us.

Criticism of wealthy donors who give to their alma maters instead of the poor; concerns about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s effort to get billionaires to donate more than half their wealth to charity. We speak to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s Aaron Dorfman.

NPR investigative correspondent Laura Sullivan discusses why aid organizations are not completely transparent about how they spend donor dollars. “I think that the numbers aren’t pretty, and I think they know that Americans would be frustrated by them,” she tells us. 

Alex Barnard spent eight years researching food waste, which included regular dives into dumpsters and foraging in trash bags of major retail chains across New York City. He chronicles his experience in the new book Freegans: Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America. We talk to Barnard about why we throw out so much edible food, why food pantries are a poor solution for hungry families, and why nonprofits that distribute leftovers may actually be perpetuating food waste.

The first ever World Humanitarian Summit is underway, but one of the world’s most respected humanitarian organizations will not be there. Doctors Without Borders decided to pull out.  The organization acknowledged that the gathering has “never been more needed,” but also noted that shocking violations of international humanitarian law and refugee rights continue daily. They say the summit has become a “fig leaf of good intentions." We speak to Sandrine Tiller from Doctors Without Borders UK.

Rahama Wright was working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali when she saw firsthand the challenges women faced, trying to take care of themselves and their children. So in her early twenties, she founded a company to empower women in West Africa who picked shea fruit for a living. A decade on, Shea Yeleen now employs hundreds of women in Ghana, and its products are sold in more than 100 Whole Foods stores. Wright speaks with Tiny Spark about her personal journey and why she believes giving Africans business opportunities is often a more effective way to help than traditional forms of aid.

Charline Burton and her baby hid in a bathroom for two hours as terrorists struck a beach resort in Ivory Coast. We speak to the Belgian national about her near-death experience, how she managed to keep her baby quiet, and why she plans to remain in West Africa, continuing her work against conflict and violent extremism.

We speak to Pablo Eisenberg, a long-time observer and outspoken critic of American philanthropy. “The same people get the benefits, the same people serve on boards, and the foundations have the same priorities they had a hundred years ago,” he says. In fact, Eisenberg makes the case that philanthropy is fueling, rather than alleviating, income inequality.

In the wake of this week’s terrorist bombings in Brussels and heated anti-Muslim rhetoric in the U.S. presidential race, we read with interest Beenish Ahmed’s NPR essay, Learning — And Unlearning — To Be An 'Ambassador' For Islam. We invited Ahmed to speak more about her experience as a Muslim in America, trying to appear nonthreatening to an increasingly anxious American public.

When it comes to promises made by social movements, human rights scholar Rebecca Hamilton has heard it all. “Share this Facebook link and you can save the life of a child in Uganda. Wear this bracelet and you can bring peace to Darfur,” she recalls. “The problem is most of the time, it’s simply not true that doing a low-cost action can be very high value to somebody somewhere else.”

MacArthur “genius” award winner Corinne Dufka was a photojournalist for Reuters, covering armed conflicts in 17 nations. But inside a hotel room in Rwanda, she had an “epiphany” that compelled her to leave photojournalism at the height of her career. Dufka discusses what drives her to champion the rights of the marginalized, whether inside a psych ward in San Francisco, at a rain-soaked refugee crossing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or in a Bosnian battlefield, where Dufka herself was severely injured by a landmine. Dufka is now a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Foreign aid reached its highest point in 2014 but less has been going to the poorest nations. Development economist Owen Barder gives reasons for this trend and explains why he won’t sit on panels that exclude women.

It turns out that one of America's fiercest aid critics is just a soft-spoken guy from Ohio. "A lot of people start characterizing your work who really haven’t read you very closely, or even at all. And they paint you as more extreme than you really are. And I think that has happened to me," Bill Easterly tells us. (Photo Credit: Jerry Bauer)

Promo: Economist Bill Easterly talks about the challenges of doing good in repressive regimes.

Until recently, Ken Berger led the world’s largest charity evaluator. He found that money wasn't necessarily flowing to the best charities. “I don’t see a correlation between where the dollars are going and impact. The brand that is most well known wins." (Photo Credit: Brian Sims, Flickr)

Former CEO of nation's largest charity evaluator says few nonprofits know if they're having impact.

U.S. laws allow billions of dollars in charitable assets to sit in bank accounts and private foundations. Ray Madoff says it’s time to change those laws so that charitiable dollars are put to work tackling society's most pressing problems.

Next time on Tiny Spark: The case for releasing billions of dollars in charitable assets now sitting in banks and private foundations.

In the final segment of Tiny Spark's Guide to Good Giving, Columbia University professor Doug White says before giving to charity, donors should ask key questions of certain people there.

How do you vet solicitors calling on behalf of big name charities? Should we rate charities based on overhead costs? Why is it important to give year-round and not just this holiday? In Part Two of Tiny Spark's Guide to Good Giving, we hear from The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s editor Stacy Palmer.

We explore effective altruism, which urges donors to stretch their charitable dollars as far as possible by giving to the world's extreme poor. But aren't families living in our local homeless shelters equally deserving? We dive into the local versus global debate with Charlie Bresler of the nonprofit The Life You Can Save, which guides donors on fighting extreme poverty.

Think people in developing nations are worse off than ever? Steven Radelet says it isn't so. “The biggest misperception is that people are stuck in poverty. That might have been true up until 25 years ago, but the situation has dramatically changed since then.” Radlet's new book details the promising news in the fight to end extreme poverty across the globe.

Would you consider giving most of your money to charity? Donate your kidney to a stranger? New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar talks extreme altruists.

Quick update to let you know what we're up to.

Anthropologist Amy Brown gives a behind-the-scenes look at the sometimes troubling ways a NYC public school markets its low-income students of color to donors.

Author and anthropologist Amy Brown goes inside a NYC public school and emerges with tough questions about marketing, race and philanthropy.

A Yale and Harvard-trained computer scientist worked for Microsoft in India for several years, trying to see how tech could improve the lives of the world's poor. His conclusion? Computers and smart phones will never solve the world’s problems. This former tech evangelist offers some old school ideas for helping us have greater impact.

American communities are still reeling and healing from recent gun violence, including the June mass shooting at a church in Charleston, S.C., and the gang violence that killed 10 people over July 4th weekend in Chicago. But our guests say there is something we can do about gun violence. To get there, we have to stop looking at the problem through a victim/perpetrator lens and begin tackling it at its root, like an infectious disease.

Ugandan-born writer and entrepreneur TMS Ruge challenges the current model of aid intervention. “Just because you're doing something for the poor doesn't mean you're doing it right.”

We hear your advice on a moral dilemma involving aid work, plus your reactions to John Paulson's $400M gift to Harvard.

Politico reporter Ken Vogel discovered that the Clinton Foundation has collected as much as $11.7 million in speaker fees from nonprofits. Some argue that celebrity appearances create buzz and more donations for nonprofits, but critics say the high price tags don’t produce worthwhile, measurable returns. Do big-name speakers add value to a charity's bottom line or are they just an “empty calorie high?”

A listener poses a moral dilemma regarding aid work; another weighs in on whether the business mindset can improve philanthropy.

Billionaire John Paulson recently gave $400 million to Harvard University. Critics say the money could have done more good elsewhere. Should large donations be scrutinized and debated? Or should we all just be thankful that Paulson is parting with $400 million at all?

How do you figure out exactly what people suffer and die from in every part of the world? Christopher Murray decided to try. His resulting Global Burden of Disease initiative ended up causing controversy among aid groups and large institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations.

Billions of aid dollars were devoted to reconstructing post-earthquake Haiti and fighting Ebola in West Africa. Economist Vijaya Ramachandran and journalist Amy Maxmen tried to track that spending. They found more questions and a lack of transparency.

Graduation season is here, but not all high school seniors are taking the direct route to college. In recent years, some 350 seniors have chosen to put higher education on hold for Global Citizen Year, which offers them year-long apprenticeships in Africa and Latin America. Founder Abby Falik says for most kids in America, college needs to wait.

Abby Falik says high school graduates should immerse themselves in year-long apprenticeships abroad before going to college; Falik's Global Citizen Year is their ticket.

Nepal continues to mourn the thousands who died after a massive earthquake. A global relief effort is now underway to assist more than a million people in need food assistance and other forms of relief. Our guest, Brian Tucker, says responding to crises in this way is shortsighted, costly and poor policy.

Seismologist Brian Tucker says we need to do more than help the victims of natural disasters; we need to prepare vulnerable communities before disaster strikes.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy's Phil Buchanan says nonprofits should push back when the business world says it has the answers to our big social problems.

“Folks sometimes forget that philanthropy is addressing the very problems that have defied market solutions or in some cases are the result of market failure," says Phil Buchanan, President of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. But sometimes that is overlooked or underestimated by the start-up world, according to Buchanan. “There's way too much ignorance about the sector," Buchanan tells us. "Particularly given what an important role it has played in this country, and the fact that our nonprofit sector, with all its flaws and all its faults, and all the ways it could be better, is the envy of the world."

A small percentage of the second-hand clothes we donate to charity actually end up on the store shelves of our local Salvation Army or Goodwill, according to our guest Andrew Brooks. Eventually the clothes end up in the hands of for-profit companies, which sell our old t-shirts and jeans to poor people halfway across the globe. Brooks' new book, Clothing Poverty - The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes, describes a multi-billion dollar industry rife with complications and even deceit.

Emily Troutman photographs and writes about people living in poverty across the globe. She's a freelancer and to help pay the bills, Troutman sometimes took lucrative commissions - up to a thousand dollars a day - photographing the work of aid groups. Her two years in post-quake Haiti were no exception. "For most of the freelancers I knew in Port-au-Prince, nonprofit gigs were a lifeline," Troutman writes in her blog Aid.Works. "I never wrote about the organizations I worked for and tried to keep a wall between those two parts of my life." That wall came crashing down earlier this year when USAID announced that it had suspended one of its biggest nonprofit contractors, International Relief and Development, from receiving additional federal contracts. USAID said investigators found “serious misconduct” in IRD's performance and the way it managed taxpayer funds. Troutman was especially disturbed by the allegations because IRD twice paid her to photograph its work in Haiti. "When the IRD scandal blew up, I was looking at my Facebook, I was looking at my Twitter feed, I knew a lot of people who had worked for IRD and nobody said anything," Troutman tells us. She says that silence reflects a larger culture of reticence among aid workers. "Nobody wants to say anything about it because nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them. That's the problem. These organizations make a lot of money for a lot of people."

Nonprofit advisor Caroline Fiennes has a lot to say about how we assess charities. She used to run one herself. In those days, Fiennes tried figuring out whether her organization was achieving its goals but admits she wasn't always forthcoming about the findings. "When the results were good, we would share them," she tells us. "And when they weren't, we didn't." Fiennes suspects many charities do the same. Fiennes has now made it her mission to improve the quality of data produced by and about nonprofits. "Charities vary markedly in how good they are, so wouldn't it be a good idea if we could figure out which are the good ones, and get people to fund the good ones and to not fund the bad ones? It's hard to make evidence-based decisions if loads of the evidence is either missing, or bad quality, or you can't find it."

Adia Benton spent two years looking at HIV support groups in West Africa. What she saw unsettled her. "It calls into question what international programs like this do to people," she tells us. Benton is an assistant professor of medical anthropology at Brown University and author of the new book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone. Internationally funded HIV support groups often urge people to disclose their status. But Benton cautions that not everyone is comfortable going public with their illness. "A lot of it is about fundamental assumptions people make about Africa, which is that it's a community-oriented place where people do everything in the collective and for the collective good. But in fact there are people who are very private, and discretion is very much prized." The public health benefits of disclosure are clear: it reduces stigma and rates of transmission and can help HIV positive people to feel less alone. Even so, Benton found many HIV positive people had mixed feelings about disclosing or did not understand why they had to speak out. "People are very ambivalent about this because they want to contribute to public health but they also want to protect themselves," she says. "It's a difficult juggling act. I heard a lot of people, or leaders, pressuring others to be 'good activists'. They wanted everybody to be a good activist and they wanted everybody to be a good advocate, and not everyone can do that."

Carrboro High School in Carrboro North Carolina is an unlikely meeting place for leaders from the world of international aid and development. But over the years, global studies teacher Matt Cone has given his students face time with an impressive list of guests: from former USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah to Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Mohammed Yunus to First Lady Laura Bush. Most meetings between students and guests have taken place by Skype and speaker phone but last year, Cone's students flew to New York to meet with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. Cone says his students, steeped in issues of economic development and international aid, were "thrilled" to meet Kim, as you can see from this selfie. "I wanted to teach a course where students had access to people who were trying to make a difference in the world," Cone said. "And I thought that if they got something that was different from a fairytale version they might actually become interested in being engaged citizens." It seems to be working. Carrboro students have gone on to work in rural Africa; another, inspired by the work of Paul Farmer, is now pursuing a career in global medicine; a couple more headed off to the Peace Corps. Cone says he feels good about the world when he’s with his students. "I feel like they're going to push this thing forward far more than my generation did."

“It's confounding for doctors, for me, when you see that your idea of how a patient is doing is completely wrong, and deadly wrong,” says physician Joel Selanikio about his time treating Ebola patients in Lunsar, Sierra Leone. Looking to the future, he is optimistic about bringing down Ebola in West Africa but remains concerned about the bigger picture in the developing world – the broken systems such as government and healthcare. He describes his experiences with Tiny Spark.

Dayo Olopade discusses her new book The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa. The Nigerian-American journalist spent two years traveling across 17 nations in Sub-Saharan Africa. She comes away with a promising view of the continent. "I invite the world to reimagine all of the challenges that you hear about in Africa as an opportunity to innovate."

Nigerian-American journalist Dayo Olopade discusses her new book, The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa.

Diana Jue and Jackie Stenson wanted to figure out a way to bring high-quality products to the world's poor. So, they founded Essmart, a for-profit company that uses India's network of ubiquitous mom-and-pop shops to reach rural consumers.

A veteran humanitarian aid worker offers candid insights into the lessons he's learned - and the personal dilemmas he's faced - during a long career trying to do good across the globe.

Promo: Lessons from an Aid Worker by Tiny Spark

I recently watched a new documentary about inventor Dean Kamen. He's the guy who invented the Segway, that impressive but only moderately successful people mover. Well, Kamen is back with a new invention called the Slingshot; a high tech solution that promises to turn even the dirtiest water into clean drinking water. Given the world's water crisis, you'd think there would be enormous potential for this sort of device. But in the film, Kamen's technology is repeatedly rejected by potential partners, which include the World Bank and United Nations, according to the film's director. Frustrated and out of options, Kamen ends up turning to Coca Cola; a decision that has been met with some criticism. Kamen is quick to defend his partnership with the company, which, he explains in the film, has bottling operations is 206 nations. "That's more than the number of countries that are admitted into the United Nations!" Kamen explains. "We realized if we could partner with them, they could be the link that takes our technology everywhere it needs to be."

We speak to Dean Karlan, Yale economist and co-author of the book More Than Good Intentions. Karlan advocates evidence-based aid and has devoted his career to figuring out which programs work and why.

What Works? The Case for Evidence Based Aid by Tiny Spark

The Soccket: A Follow-Up Investigation by Tiny Spark

This story was originally broadcast on PRI's The World. In the latest installment of our Tracking Charity series, I travel to Senegal to spend time with some community health workers who have been working for a decade without pay. Our story explores the ethics and complexities about payment for volunteers who live in poverty.

Vanity Fair contributing editor, Nina Munk, decided to document a high-profile campaign to end extreme poverty. For six years, she followed celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project; a five-year campaign designed to eradicate poverty from a dozen African villages. "I thought to myself, if one of the most admired, most respected macro economists in the world believes that we can end poverty in our lifetime, I'm willing to follow him and watch what happens." Munk, a former Fortune magazine writer and Forbes editor, followed Sachs on his official trips to Africa. She visited and revisited two of the Millennium Villages sites, living among the people there, to see how the project was panning out on the ground. At first Munk saw real progress as the cash began flowing in to the villages. But later, she says all kinds of problems began to emerge. "In some ways," she told us, "everything that could go wrong, did go wrong." An interview with Nina Munk about her new book, The Idealist - Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty.

Here's what's up next on Tiny Spark.

Here's the first installment in a new series I'm producing with the public radio program The World. It's a global investigative project called Tracking Charity. In this story, we investigate a promising new technology designed to combat malaria. I visit the Africa nation of Malawi where, a decade on, serious problems are beginning to arise; ones that may have been avoidable. After the story, I speak with The World's host, Marco Werman, about the Tracking Charity series.

Promo of Tiny Spark's story on TOMS Shoes and whether giving away free shoes is good aid.

In this holiday edition of Tiny Spark, we explore what happens when someone refuses to accept the idea of a "lost cause" and instead gets down to the work of transforming a troubled life.

Jennifer Hemsley and her husband wanted to adopt a girl from Guatemala but they immediately suspected fraud. Jennifer feared the worst: that the infant might have been kidnapped. “We were very concerned that her mother might be looking for her,” Jennifer tells us. What ensued was a years-long quest in which Jennifer sought to uncover the truth about the origins of the girl she wanted to adopt. Tiny Spark looks at a seemingly good idea - international adoption - and its underside: fraud, corruption and child trafficking.

In our latest episode, Tiny Spark takes a look at the quality of care medical volunteers have provided in crisis zones. We discover that many volunteers who deployed to Haiti after the earthquake had never before worked in international humanitarian emergencies. Many had never practiced medicine in low-income nations. While these volunteers may have been well-intentioned, their lack of specialized training would sometimes have severe repercussions for patients.

TOMS founder, Blake Mycoskie, says there are millions of children around the world who are in need of shoes. He's based his entire business model on this premise. His for-profit company has enjoyed handsome gains by getting consumers to buy into his idea. In our story, we question whether Blake's assumption is accurate and if it is, whether giving children free shoes is the best solution. "It starts with a solution that we, or the donor, or the giver, thinks is appropriate," Laura Freschi of New York University tells us. "That is, 'We would like to give people shoes,' which, in my opinion, is backwards because the way it should really start is with the person receiving to say, 'Well, what is your priority? What is it that you need?'" We also look at TOMS' Giving Partners; non-profits the company works with to distribute its shoes to children around the globe. As I started to compile a spreadsheet on TOMS Giving Partners, I was surprised to see the number of Christian Evangelical groups that kept cropping up. This got us looking into Blake Mycoskie's particular brand of Christian faith and how it may be informing the groups his company partners with and how they distribute TOMS shoes.

When an earthquake struck Haiti, medical volunteers from around the globe flew in to try and help. Many arrived having worked in crisis zones before, others had received training in disaster medicine. But it appears that a number of well-intentioned medical volunteers arrived in Haiti having never worked outside their home countries. They had no training in disaster medicine nor experience working in so-called "low resource" settings. This caused problems. In our next installment of Tiny Spark, we look at the challenges medical volunteers faced in Haiti, the repercussions of poor medical decisions, and what the medical community is doing now to promote disaster training so that volunteers are better prepared the next time crisis strikes.