Do the Word

I flat-out love the concept of Adventures in Mission’s The World Race:

The World Race is an 11-month Christian mission trip to 11 different countries around the world, and it’s not your typical missions experience.  It’s a way for young adults to abandon a traditional lifestyle in exchange for a dramatic paradigm shift. Through adventure, ministry, community, and self-discovery, World Racers develop broken hearts that propel their hands to act for God’s kingdom around the globe.  The best part of the World Race is it’s merely the beginning of a life-long journey.

Now that is a nice P to E move.

But here’s my question: Why can’t the adventure be missions and giving?

Here’s how The World Race site describes “support raising”, under the page entitled Support Raising 101:

Support-raising is the process of getting financial support so that you can go on the mission trip of your choice.

Hm.

Fortunately, the site does quickly add the next paragraph which at least begins to steer away from the traditional transactional fundraising (ttf) approach:

Sometimes, it’s easier for support raising to be understood as ministry partnering, because it’s not just about getting the finances to go on your mission trip. We want to empower your donors in the ministry, as well, whether through giving, prayer, or hands-on service.

Good step, good step. But why not create a giving process that not only empowers the donors but transforms the person going on the trip?

Take the example of Toby Ord, the Oxford philosophy prof about whom we previously wrote. Ord has pledged to give away a third of his salary this year, plus ten percent every year thereafter in an effort to donate one million pounds.

Why not set up the “support raising” this way:

Hi. My name is [Mission trip participant]. I recently found out that if I make a salary of $38,500, that puts me in the top one percent of the richest people on Planet Earth, earning more than 35 times what the typical earth dweller makes in a year.

You’ve probably heard of people taking a vow of poverty? Well, I’ve decided to take a vow of wealth: I’ve decided to be in the top 1% of the richest people on earth…but not the top 0.9%, since that might be a bit too much. So I’m committing to give away 10 percent of my income until I earn $38,500 a year, and then once I reach that income level I’m committing to give away two thirds of everything I earn above that, with the remaining third going into savings.

Given the degree I’m pursuing, I estimate that means I’ll be able to give away approximately $2 million in my lifetime, as the Lord permits.

I’ll soon be taking a trip around the world with a group of other young people who have made a similar vow, so that we can scout out firsthand the best ways and places where we can give the money. Given the eleven places we’re visiting, I imagine we’ll be profoundly changed in that process, and if you’d find it to be helpful for me to share with you what I see, I’d be delighted to be changed by the experience simultaneously with you.

The total cost of the trip is $14,300. I’m seeking 143 people to contribute $100 each. You put up the $100, I’ll put up the vow of wealth. I’m projecting that combination will turn your $100 into $20,000 in giving over the next forty years.

Would you like to participate?    

That seems to me to sure beat “Please give me money so that I can go on the mission trip of my choice.”

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.