Benjamin Barber, CUNY senior research scholar at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, talks with Brian Lehrer about how cities are responding to global issues.

Carol Reich and Joe Reich talk about their role in the education reform movement. Getting to Bartlett Street: Our 25-Year Quest to Level the Playing Field in Education is the story of how they started one of the first charter schools in the country in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The Takeaway speaks with the former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, at the eighth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.

Philanthropist Eli Broad discusses his new book, The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking, and what he’s learned starting businesses and cultural institutions.

EVENT: Eli Broad will be speaking at the 92nd Street Y May 6 at 8PM. Ticket information is available here.

Mara Einstein, associate professor of media studies at Queens College - CUNY and author of Compassion, Inc.: How Corporate America Blurs the Line between What We Buy, Who We Are, and Those We Help,examines how corporate America teams up with major brands to turn charities into commodities.

Billions of dollars in arts funding serves a mostly wealthy, white and shrinking audience, says a new study.

Policy experts, social service providers and others say the Mayor's efforts to improve the lives of black and Latino young men have been badly needed in low-income communities for a long time. High unemployment rates, low educational levels and the revolving door of the prison system are among the problems the Bloomberg Administration plans to tackle.

The two-year, $627,000 grant will be used to expand the center's staff and to undertake new projects in public health, philanthropies and the arts.

Why the Sierra Club?

They were the lucky environmental group to get $50 million pledged from Bloomberg Philanthropies Thursday. Turns out that Mayor  Bloomberg, who was the nation's second largest donor in 2010, has been chummy with the senior leadership of the Sierra Club since 2007. Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Cub, was present at the launch of the city's Greener Greater Buildings Plan in 2009, one of the mayor's signature environmental achievements.

From well-known designers including Tory Birch and Anna Sui, to thousands of lesser-known artists at Web sites like cafepress.com, New Yorkers are creating products and donating portions of the profits to Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief.

The mayor's recommendations come on the heels of President Obama's proposed cuts to the nation's leading arts endowments on Monday.

At 57 years old, computer consultant Harry Kiernan is one of the few living people to have donated multiple organs. So far he’s donated one kidney, part of his liver, and is currently waiting to become a bone marrow donor. What’s more, Harry has given each of his organs to complete strangers. Harry tells us how being with his wife Denise as she died of chronic progressive multiple sclerosis 12 years ago motivated him to give all that he could to improve the lives anyone he could: even people he didn't know.

Several arts executives make a new list of the top-paid CEOs running America's non-profit organizations.

Later today, a philanthropic collaborative called Living Cities will announce $80 million in grants, loans and investments that it will split among five cities: Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Considering the size of major American city budgets, an average of $15 million isn't actually a ton of money, considering some of the systemic problems facing each of those cities. Living Cities hopes to use the cash as seed money, aiming to to stimulate self-sustaining urban renewal projects that will help each area for years to come.  

So has Living Cities found a way to get the most ameliorative bang for their philanthropic buck?

Can one man's charitable donations help turn around the nation's unemployment numbers? Philanthropist Gene Epstein thinks so. The 71 year old Philadelphia resident is using $250,000 of his own money to create Hire Just One, an initiative that encourages businesses to hire again by making a $1,000 donation to charity when a business hires an unemployed person and keeps him or her on the payroll for six months. Epstein joins the program to talk about his ambitious program.

Newark Public Schools, which have been rated the worst in the country, have been given an infusion of $100 million from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.  The gift is a bonanza, but it is also highlights a school system in dire need. 

Tomorrow, Oliver Stone releases "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps," the follow-up to his 1987 morality tale about the corrupting power of greed. The irony of the original film's most memorable line, "Greed is good," was never absorbed by a generation of corporate raiders, who seemingly took the character Gordon Gekko's advice sincerely. Gekko's line got us thinking, what is greed good for? America has a long tradition of wealthy individuals giving away large sums of money to good causes, just look at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark, New Jersey public schools.

What good can come of greed? What examples do you see of it in your own life? Read through responses and leave a comment here.

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On a conference call today on increasing major charitable giving, Mayor Bloomberg and Investor Warren Buffett were asked what they thought about New York's new law reducing tax deductions on donations made by wealthy philanthropists.