Do the Word

I flew to Orange County last week to teach a Mission Increase workshop. Ended up sitting next to a guy who saw the book I was reading, which led to a conversation in which we discovered we both were involved with charitable foundations–me with MIF, and him as a board member on three family foundations in Long Beach.

When I learned that his family foundations were interested and involved in giving money to alleviate homelessness, the conversation leaped to an even higher level of engagement. I told him about my time with the Los Angeles Mission and how that led to helping rescue missions across the United States.

“Well, then, maybe you know,” he ventured. “What is the solution to homelessness?”

He explained how in his day job as a Long Beach-based lobbyist he personally encountered a large number of homeless people, and how for years he had been personally and deeply vexed over the question, “How can we really–really–solve this problem?”

“So the homeless shelters that you fund,” I replied. “What do they tell you is the solution?”

He chuckled. “They always tell me that the solution is their particular program…and then the next year they tell me how the problem is getting worse!”

The longer we talked, the more passionate and adamant the man became about how he wanted to do more than just write a check to pay for a program. “I have no doubt these programs do good,” he admitted. “But I want to do more than just good. Good is just a drop in the bucket. You mean to tell me that no one knows what it’s going to take to solve this problem?”

Kevin Salwen, author of The Power of Half, makes a similar point. You’ll recall that this is the book I keep pestering you to read about the Atlanta family that sold its home and then gave half the proceeds to alleviate hunger in Africa.

There’s a great section in the book about when the family goes to New York City to hear proposals from four nonprofits on how to spend the money. Salwen describes each of the nonprofits’ approaches in detail, and it’s truly mandatory reading for nonprofits, as we really have no idea how we come across to donors most of the time.

Salwen is particularly intrigued by The Hunger Project and its executive director, Joan Holmes. As he narrates Holmes’ own personal journey and how she became involved in the issue of hunger, he shares a paragraph that is electrifying in light of this discussion we’ve been having about donors and their new adventures in giving:

As Holmes probed [the approaches to hunger alleviation used by the United Nations and the other NGOs that existed before The Hunger Project was founded], she became even more aghast at the way the developed world approached poverty in the less developed world. First, there was no belief that hunger could be ended; it was seen as a problem that could be relieved in some places, but not ended. When the Hunger Project announced that it believed world hunger could be defeated, even other aid organizations objected, Holmes recalls.

Several points here:

• Donors want to think, reflect, discuss, and hash through the thorny cause-related problems that we nonprofits think, reflect, discuss, and hash through, too. They do not want us to hand them the problem and the solution…especially when the solution is, “Send us more money to fund our program!”
• It’s sad and sobering that nonprofits become more and more driven to fund our programs at the same time that donors are the ones who are becoming more and more driven to actually want to understand and solve the problems that our programs are supposed to address.
• Lest this sound like silly idealism and naivete on the part of donors (in contrast to nonprofits’ superior understanding and steely-eyed hard-nosed pragmatism), consider this quote from Kevin Salwen and then let me know how superior and pragmatic our approach is:

I was born in 1958. In my lifetime the Western world has shelled out over $2.3 trillion to aid less-developed countries–with about one third of the funds going to Africa, health, and education. Two point three trillion dollars. A two, a three, and eleven zeroes. That works out to about a hundred years of Kenya’s total domestic product. Or, taking [his daughter] Hannah’s concept of flying hamburgers over there, the West could have fed Africa’s nearly 1 billion people a McDonald’s double cheeseburger each day for more than six and a half years (assuming the sandwich was on the dollar menu).

It would be laughable if human lives and serious money weren’t at stake. Listen to this: despite the breathtaking flow of funds for clean water, health care, and food, a United Nations study shows that the average poor person in sub-Saharan Africa now lives on seventy-three cents a day–less than in 1973. All that aid, and people are actually worse off. The conclusion is unassailable: we have poured most, if not all, of that $2.3 trillion down the (nonflushable) toilet.

Here’s the great thing about donors: They don’t have to be–and don’t want to be–shills for organizations or programs. They’re just passionate to solve problems. And they’re ready to think, research, and hope.

Great partners…if we just permit them to be.

It seems like daily I’m running across blog posts, articles, and books that tell stories about ordinary people committing to give to charity in unusual ways.

• George Crankovic turned me on to the story of Toby Ord, the philosophy prof at Oxford who has created quite a stir in England–though as I previously wrote, I think I’m far more excited about this than George is. Here’s an article about Professor Ord that describes how (and why) he is planning to give away “more than a third of his £33,000 salary this year (leaving him with £20,000) and then 10 per cent of his income for the rest of his working life, which should tot up to around £1 million” to combat poverty worldwide.
• I’m just about done reading The Power of Half, the story of the Salwens, the Atlanta family who sold their upscale home and gave half the proceeds to aid villages in Ghana, discovering along the way the power of giving away half of just about anything. I’m actively campaigning to get you to read the book.
• At Change.org, one of my perennial favorite bloggers Nathaniel Whittemore recently wrote about Betty Londergan’s pledge to give away $100 a day every day for a year. She writes about each day’s gift on her blog, Whatgives365.

A range of thoughts are percolating around in my brain as I read this ever-growing pile of similar stories:

• Wow do we nonprofits not make giving an adventure for donors! Our fundraising focus is far more typically on issues like urgency, need, and our organization’s credibility (and need; and, um, did I mention the urgency of our organization’s need)? How little creativity we put into thinking about how we can facilitate giving adventures for donors.
• Can you imagine a story about someone who makes a donation to a nonprofit every time the nonprofit asks? We’d (rightly, in my view) consider the nonprofit an exploitative bully…and we’d (rightly) consider such a giver a pitiful shill. We’d say, “Back off, you greedy nonprofit! Get a life, you weak-kneed donor!”
• It’s sad to think how most nonprofit fundraisers would think about the giving of Prof. Ord, the Salwens, and Betty Londergan: namely, as a curiosity largely irrelevant to our organizational development strategies…unless we could get each of the aforementioned three to be directing their extraordinary gifts to our nonprofits.
• Why do we fail to see the growing trend of donors wanting to do more than to react to our formulation of need? They clearly want to give through us nonprofits to meet important needs…but they (rightly) want to be more than responders to our formulations. They want to be thinkers actively processing how to solve the very same issues that vex us.
• If a church contained members who actually all tithed, I suspect a moving and powerful news story or book could be written about all they accomplished through their giving–and how their giving changed them both individually and corporately.
• Hmm… What about yours and my own “giving adventures”? Is our giving adventurous? In the words of Tom Peters, “Are you placing enough interesting, freakish, long-shot, weirdo bets?”

One thing is for certain: Ordinary people are a whole lot more interested in talking about the adventure of giving than we nonprofits give them credit for. It’s not adventures in giving that they find distasteful to talk about with us. It’s boring giving solicited to serve as fuel for our nonprofit’s tank (as we head to the moon while they are supposed to stand and wave on the launching pad) that they rightly find so objectionable.

That became exceedingly apparent to me in an airplane conversation I had with a guy who sat on the board of three family foundations in Long Beach. Brother is fairly begging to give money away…to any Long Beach organization who cares at least as much about helping him think through and process the social issues that are vexing him as they do about funding their own organization.

More on this man–and the growing army of donors that is exactly like him–in our next post. 

As a Christian development guy, one of my regular regrets and deepest pains is that Christian nonprofits are so intimated by immediate concerns of institutional insolvency that they rarely take the time to seriously consider–and implement, on the courage of their convictions–the radical ramifications of what the Bible  teaches about giving. “I’m definitely looking forward to exploring Transformational Giving,” they insist, “right after I get a couple of big gifts in here to get us back on an even keel.”

This they call “being practical”.

As a result, it is inevitably secular development professionals who are happening onto the concepts we Christian development professionals should already know and be championing and teaching, as Christian development officers are too busy feverishly applying the traditional transactional fundraising practices that the secular world is, um, now abandoning.

Case in point:

Great post by Dan Pallotta on Breaking The Least-You-Can-Do Cycle. Writes Pallotta:

Just 10% of the $300 billion given to charity each year comes from major institutional funders — the Fords, the Gateses, the MacArthurs, and the Rockefellers. Yet those funders have a monopoly on the term “philanthropy.” The billionaire who spends 99% of his time building his own wealth and 1% of his time thinking about charity is elevated to the status of “philanthropist,” while the poor bastard who spends 100% of her time serving as the executive director of a homeless charity and 0% of her time amassing wealth is called, at best, “staff.”

This narrow interpretation has infected more than our language. It has infected our imaginations.

“Philanthropy” comes from the Greek for “love of humanity.” Anyone who cares deeply about others and who demonstrates it in an important way has a right to the title. The bank teller who gives 5% of her relatively small income to charity every month is a philanthropist. The child who gives his allowance and collects money from his neighbors for Haiti is taking meaningful philanthropic action. But by applying the term “philanthropist” only to the rarified few who make outsize donations, we rob the average person of an important aspiration. Worse, we rob civil society of the potential of that aspiration.

“Infected our imaginations”–what a great phrase! Pallotta’s perspective reminds me of a parallel sentiment in James 2:1-6:

¹My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism. ²Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. ³If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” ⁴have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?⁵Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? ⁶But you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court?

Note that here the “regular donors” are viewed as subjects of real purpose–not objects of pity–and the “major donors” are revealed as having exploitative, litigious tendencies. It ought to color the way we approach the development enterprise…but does it?

Pallotta suggests it’s coloring our thinking in all the wrong ways:

Most charities approach individuals with a two-pronged fundraising operations: a “major gifts” group to service the wealthy stratosphere and annual campaigns to capture the $25 to $50 donor. The big space in the middle gets little attention. By and large, we don’t invest in making the $25 casual donor a $2,500 philanthropist. We don’t even think about it. We’re wired to think that philanthropy is the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Instead of asking the $25 donors to aspire to a life and lifestyle of more significant giving, we demean them with cheap prizes and the chance to vote on how Pepsi will make its charitable grants. Internet fundraising is exacerbating the problem. We’ve reduced activism to clicking. “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10.” We ask people to do the least they can do, and we make it insultingly easy.

Sum it up and say, as Pallotta does:

People want their lives to matter. They want to make a difference — a big difference. We must rid ourselves of the patriarchal idea that the wealthy are the only ones who can change the world, and launch a new age of citizen philanthropy.

Sadly, as Christians, we ought to know that reality better than anyone–by chapter and verse, even. But we don’t. So our fundraising strategies still owe more to the world than to the Bible.

That’s why most of the fundraising books I recommend are written by secular authors. Christian fundraising authors are too busy spreading evangelical goofer dust over worn out traditional transactional fundraising (ttf) strategies and calling it “stewardship”.

So while the goofer dust settles, let me commend Pallotta’s article to you as the most truly transformational reading a Christian development professional can undertake this week (even though we are advocating very different causes), and let me draw your attention to Kathy LeMay’s The Generosity Plan: Sharing Your Time, Treasure, and Talent to Shape the World. It’s a great book designed to equip “regular donors”–the very ones we Christian development officers often aren’t addressing personally because it wouldn’t be good “stewardship” of our time–to put together a comprehensive (time/talent/treasure) generosity plan to impact the causes about which they are moved to care.

I can’t wait until 20 years from now, should the Lord tarry, when Christian development practices catch up with what LeMay writes, namely:

Don’t worry about adding more zeroes to your check; philanthropy is not about how much. Philanthropy is intention combined with focus and action. What makes a difference in one person’s life or in hundreds of lives is not merely a stack of checks; what makes a difference is you contributing your many gifts at your level and your capacity. The Generosity Plan will help you make the most of what you have to offer. It will not ask you to contribute more than you can, rather to contribute in a way that works for you and your life and, in doing so, benefits the causes you care about most.

I’m grateful that someone is taking the philanthropy of small givers seriously. I just wish it was us who were leading the way in doing so.