Do the Word

AP’s Rachel Zoll provides us with Religious life won’t be the same after downturn, the latest mass media update on how we Christian orgs are all faring amidst this recession:

• Faith Communities Today’s David Roozen is projecting 320,000 to 350,000 congregations in economic distress in 2010. That’s around 1 in every 7.
• The Association for Christian Schools International reports the closure or merger of 200 Christian schools, up 50 from last year.
• 80 seminaries who are members of the Association of Theological Schools have seen their endowments drop by 20%.

My question: Was this something done to us…or something we did to ourselves?

Bishop Noel Jones, pastor of City of Refuge in Los Angeles, in MinistryToday:

We have endured 25 years of health, wealth and prosperity preaching, and the prophets should have told us that we were going to be in this kind of situation and circumstance since they have such ‘prophetic’ words. What happened is the church has capitalized the gospel and we have preached Americanism for gospel, and ultimately we ended up crashing because there is no credulity and authenticity in the whole presentation. The only people who were making any real money were those who were expostulating the theology that left the psychology that debilitated the minds of those who were involved. The debilitation is that everybody expected to bring an offering in church and just get rich though nobody participated and partnered with God. Because at the end of the day nobody receives a check in an envelope postmarked from heaven. It’s your participation that makes it happen. … The ministry and the preachers have taken so much money from the church and lived lavish lifestyles. We need to put something back. We need to equip our people. As James puts it, very explicitly, ‘Faith without works is dead.’ We co-create, we perpetuate God’s creation by functioning responsibly. So what everybody was talking about as God’s blessing was people living on credit. And the Bible says that the borrower is subject to the lender. So Christian America simply joined the capitalistic bandwagon and-in the name of God-articulated a theology that has no credulity.

Ring the bell. School’s now in session.

Give and Take points the way to Paul Lamb’s editorial last week in the Christian Science Monitor entitled Are there too many charities?

Lamb notes that there is now one nonprofit for every 300 Americans. His question:

Is there a more efficient way to, you know, do this?

He proffers eBay as a philosophical measuring stick.

With eBay, buyers and sellers interact directly. Cut out the middleman and you can snag that classic Superfriends lunchbox for an unbeatable price.

Why not, asks Lamb, apply the same logic to nonprofits, connecting givers more efficiently with recipients?

Rather surprisingly, Lamb makes no mention of Kiva, which would seem to be the poster child for his idea.

Instead, Lamb proposes replacing rescue missions with vending machines:

Instead of giving money to the United Way to support food banks, why not give the money directly to the hungry?

Because tossing money in a cup or handing cash to someone on the street is impractical on many levels, food stamp-like vouchers, for example, could be made available through existing ATM machines. This way the money that might go to pay for the distribution organization could be saved and used to buy more food, and the hungry could claim their vouchers anywhere there is an ATM and a food store.

Obviously, this peer-to-peer model doesn’t work for direct-service organizations such as hospitals and workforce training groups. But it could mean significant savings and more efficient programs elsewhere.

It’s an interesting idea–that what homeless people need are homes and what hungry people need is food, and that the inefficiency in the system can be reduced by replacing the human beings with ATM machines.

Funny–I always joke that one of the core problems with traditional transactional fundraising (ttf) is that it views donors as human ATM machines. This is the first time that I’ve encountered anyone proposing that nonprofits themselves should be replaced with ATM machines.

Frankly, though, I think we deserve what Lamb is leveling at us here. If the purpose of nonprofit organizations is program delivery, then why not explore every way to increase efficiency? All Lamb does is to take that idea to its extreme conclusion–that program delivery may be at its most efficient when there is no nonprofit organization at all:

Beyond cost savings, another idea is to put the care back in the hands of local communities themselves. Instead of relying on outside agencies to provide services, neighborhood care councils composed of volunteer citizens and experts could be responsible for determining local need and distributing resources to address those needs.

We nonprofits deserve to be “efficiencied” out of existence, because we have taught donors to prize efficiency above darn near everything. Even child sponsorship is appealing because saving the life of a child can be done so efficiently, “for the price of just a cup of coffee a day”.

In Transformational Giving (TG), efficiency takes a deep back seat to proficiency. That is, our goal is not to get food to the hungry but rather to be shaped comprehensively in the image of Christ so that we are the kind of people who share our food. The end “product” of our work is not distributed resources but rather resourceful distributors.

Ironically, Lamb is right for the wrong reasons: a nonprofit that provides services efficiently is a middleman that should be removed, but not because an ATM is more efficient–in fact, in TG, an ATM is less efficient than a nonprofit. Instead, it should be removed because it is a middleman that obstructs direct connection of human beings who in any given encounter both give and receive.

Sean Stannard-Stockton’s post entitled  The 2010 Crisis in Philanthropy details what  has to be the most underreported 800-pound fundraising gorilla patiently awaiting your attention in 2010.

In the words of SSS:

Private foundations are required to give away 5% of their investment assets each year (the average amount given is about 6%). The 5% is based on the average value of their investment assets from the previous year. That means that foundation giving in 2009 is based on 2008 asset levels and 2010 giving will be based on 2009 asset values.

In other words: Uh oh.

But SSS saves his biggest bad news bomb for last:

This year, many foundations decided to keep giving levels constant with last year or at least gave more than the required 5%. It was clear that the need for charitable giving was higher than normal and many foundations stepped up with additional giving. To the extent their giving exceeded 5%, they can count it towards next year’s required giving.

An example: A 2009 payout of 7% means that the 2% that exceeded the 5% minimum can count towards 2010 and so the foundation can legally distribute only 3% next year.

In other words, from the standpoint of foundation giving, more than half of the impact of the stock market crash has yet to be felt.

That’s a projected 40% drop in foundation giving in 2010 for those who are keeping score.

SSS sees a silver lining in the cloud: “With their grantmaking budget decimated in 2010, forward thinking foundations are going to look for ways to leverage other sources of charitable assets. Encouraging other foundations to support their grantees is the easy path.”

Hm.

Continues SSS:

The big opportunity, the real lifeboat that can significantly offset the effects of collapsing asset values, is for foundations to extend their due diligence to major donors. Individual donors give $6.30 for every dollar foundations give. Helping these charitable dollars flow towards high performing, well vetted nonprofits is the most dramatic way that foundations can leverage their own giving.

My own take:

Given that the percentage of income the average American (and the average Christian) gives to charity has remained unchanged for the last fifty years, were foundations to implement his recommendation (and he readily admits that most will not), it would certainly have the effect of moving money around…

…but it would not create new dollars.

Perhaps in SSS’ view this is still A Great Good–eliminate the charities that foundations consider the dead wood and all that.

But what if…

But what if, instead of foundation officers trying to convince major donors to give more (to the charities foundations believe should receive more), what if foundations themselves went beyond the five percent they are required to give…not just for one emergency year but as a regular practice?

SSS notes that the average US foundation gives away 6% of its assets. What would happen if a foundation upped that to 10% annually?

Possible response: “Why, then the foundation would go out of business and that would be…irresponsible!”

Or might it be that foundations can lead the way not only because of their extensive due diligence but because of the example of their increased generosity.

I would argue that major donors need the latter even more than the former.

And who’s to say that a foundation giving away 10% of its income wouldn’t draw a Warren Buffet-type gift from a major donor seeking to make twice the immediate impact of a gift to any other foundation?