Do the Word

Because of my role as co-founder of Seoul USA, I typically receive quite a few inquiries from people asking me, ‘How can I help North Koreans?’

• One inquirer asked about painting the churches of NK defectors in South Korea
• Another wanted to know if it was possible to sponsor underground NK churches in NK and China
• Another wanted to raise money to buy a truck for the NK folks who do our Gospel balloon flyer launches

These are all seemingly laudable intentions, and I know with certainty that they were offered with unmixed motives. The NKs are sorely oppressed. Who wouldn’t want to help?

Interesting thing, help.

As a general rule, we help those who were perceive to be less fortunate than we are. And because we perceive the individuals we seek to help to be less fortunate than we are, it colors the way we offer help and the types of help we offer.

The following questions would lead to two very different answers and courses of action:

1. How can I help the North Koreans?
2. How can I help impact the things North Koreans care about?

Transformational Giving (TG) is first and foremost a submission to what the Scriptures teach us about being shaped in the image of Christ. One of the coolest things about TG (and, more completely, the Scriptures) is that giving is grounded in identification with the recipient, not pity. For example:

• Leviticus 19:34 says, ‘The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt.’
• Hebrews 13:3 says, ‘Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who were mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.’

Were modern fundraising letter writers to pen Leviticus 19:34, I suspect they would have written something like this:

Treat the alien well. After all, you’ve got a lot to be grateful for, and it’s tough being an alien. Here’s a tear-jerking story of an alien that will cause you to say, ‘Man, compared to this alien, I have no troubles.’ Your gift of $15.70 can provide education and shelter for one alien for a week.

And who wants to be a persecuted Christian? Modern fundraising moves us to help the poor persecuted folks. Interestingly, however, the call in Hebrews is to remember them as if you were there with them.

Identification. Not sympathy prompting help.

(And if you find yourself asking, ‘So you’re saying we shouldn’t help these folks???’, please scroll back up to the two numbered questions noted about a dozen lines back.)

Fundraising today is largely an effort to drive people to help, based on sympathy. Transformational Giving can be fairly thought of as an effort to encourage us to bear one another’s burdens, based on identification.

Eikenberry reminds us of one of the progenitors of such an approach in the nonprofit world:

Jane Addams, founder of Hull House.

Hull House was a settlement house in one of Chicago’s most menacing neighborhoods. Addams (who came from quite an affluent background) didn’t commute in to Hull House from the suburbs. She moved there. And she called others to as well, bringing ‘the affluent and the poor in contact with one another by attracting idealistic, college-aged, upper middle-class youths to settle in por neighborhoods or, at least, to volunteer some time.’

Addams believed that ‘social ethical action should be done through people working together cooperatively, rather than through individual action.’

How did that happen?

‘To move from an individual ethics to a social ethics, Addams believed, one must immerse oneself in the direct experience of life as lived by people of all backgrounds.’

In other words, the more we know people, the more we move from ‘helping’ them…to helping impact the things that are important to them, and to us, because they are important to God.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that your champions have to move into the neighborhood your ministry is seeking to impact (though it doesn’t necessarily not mean that, either.)

When I served simultaneously as pastor of an urban church in Houston, Texas and director of men’s ministry at a local rescue mission, I brought five graduates from the mission’s rehab program to live next to the church and become members of the congregation. (Interesting term, members.) I should have written a book about what happened as a result of that experience–what happened to the five guys, what happened to the church, what happened to my wife’s Mercedes (her sole remembrance of her affluent pre-Eric life as a fashion designer in LA), and what happened to me, too.

Or when I served as President of the Los Angeles Mission, identification meant shifting from serving a meal to the homeless (who, in such a situation, can only respond with a kind of bowing, scraping, obsequious gratitude) to preparing, serving, and eating a meal with homeless men, women, and children.

See, when we invite speakers to share their testimonies, when we send out direct mail letters with tear-jerking stories, we encourage people to sympathize…and to offer help accordingly.

But when we help the ‘helper’ and the ‘helpee’ to work together cooperatively on issues of joint concern, passion, and calling, we encourage people to identify…and to be transformed accordingly.

In what ways can your ministry help its champions work together cooperatively with the subject of your ministry’s cause on things that are important to God?

P.S. Check out this page of Hull House champions. From Leo Tolstoy to HG Wells, individuals were challenged and changed by partnering with rather than pitying the subjects of Hull House’s focus.

Proverbs 29:18 is famously quoted as saying, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’

For today’s post I want to adjust that to say, ‘Where there is no vision, efficiency reigns.’

The vision to which I’m referring is your vision for what it looks like when your organization is successfully relating to its champions:

• In what ways are they experiencing growth as a result of that relationship?
• In what ways are you experiencing growth as a result of that relationship?
• In what ways is the church experiencing growth as a result of that relationship?
• In what ways is the cause being impacted as a result of that relationship?

I’m still happily trundling through Angela Eikenberry’s Giving Circles. It’s a slim volume, but very dense and not given to casual airplane reading.

I just finished Chapter 2 on The Modernization and Marketization of Voluntarism. Among the gold nuggets in the chapter are the following:

Emerging from the modernist context, and still dominant in society today, is the rational-bureaucratic model of organization. This model is built on the machine metaphor of organizations that draws an analogy between the instrumental relationship among the parts of a mechanical device and the relationship among positions in an organization. These parts and positions are designed to complete the job–whatever it may be–as efficiently as possible.

Eikenberry notes that nonprofits became infected with this thinking in the 1840s as part of the ‘scientific charity’ movement, which had as its aim the seemingly laudable goal of ‘promot[ing] cooperation and higher standards of efficiency among relief-dispensing voluntary societies’.

An interesting thing happens, however, when efficiency rules the roost, namely:

Relationships with volunteers/donors/champions become instrumental–a means to an end, able to be trimmed, packaged, and reshaped in the name of efficiency:

• Staff are more efficienct and proficient than volunteers in the short term; ergo,
• ‘Many of us take for granted today a specialized, task-oriented, time-limited volunteer role, the duties of which are defined by social service professionals’, and
• ‘Thus volunteerism is now viewed less as a duty of the citizen in a democratic society and more as a privelege granted by philanthropic agencies to those who accepted [sic] their discipline’. Ouch!
• ‘Volunteers and donors have moved from a role of civic stewardship to one of money giver, with this giving often described as an ‘investment’ describing much thought and care.’ [Editor’s note: My main complaint about the so-called ‘Stewardship movement’ making its rounds in Christian circles these days.]

Eikenberry cites the example of an arts program that ditched its volunteer program as a cost-cutting move. Lest that sound extreme, can you think of many examples in the nonprofit world today of robust volunteer programs that are not primarily designed to save money (‘it’s less expensive for volunteers to do this’)?

When efficiency rules the roost (and, by the way, ROI–Return on Investment–can be an uncomfortably close cousin to efficiency if we’re not careful), the implied vision of the individual-organization relationship is one where:

• There are ‘less opportunities for individuals to come together in a face-to-face setting and do anything more than read a newsletter or write a check to their charitable cause of choice’ [Editor’s note: I would add, ‘and pray for their charitable cause of choice’].
• Fundraising is irrevocably shaped to favor big givers (since big gifts are more ‘efficient’ than little ones) and mass, impersonal methods of solicitation (much more ‘efficient’ than personal, heart-to-heart connections designed to promote accountable growth).
• A focus on demonstrating to ‘donors’ and other funders ‘efficiency and short-term effectiveness’, i.e., Look at what your gift did this time!
• There arises ‘a marketlike model that stresses the values of strategy development, risk taking, and competitive positioning [which] seems to be incompatible with a voluntary model that should stress the values of community participation, due process, and stewardship’.

Where does it all lead?

There is now a drive for nonprofits in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere to be operationally autonomous, free to ‘formulate and pursue [a] self-determined agenda without undue external pressures, wherever the pressures come from.’

Sadly, that is the implied vision of many Christian nonprofits: a vision wherein they are free to formulate and pursue a self-determined agenda without ‘pressure’ (also known as ‘input’ and ‘participation’) from their supporters.

(In such a setting, by the way, there is a drive ‘to replace community volunteers with entrepreneurial business representatives on their board of directors’. After all, entrepreneurial business people can bring in more money to help free us to formulate and pursue our self-determined agenda!)

What is your vision for the individual-organization relationship?

Tomorrow we’ll examine one of the most fascinating and forgotten alternatives to genuflecting at the altar of efficiency–a turn-of-the-century antecedent to Transformational Giving.

I finally decided to pull Jeff Brooks’ Donor Power Blog off my list of recommended blogs.

It’s not that I don’t like any of Jeff’s posts. I do. It’s just that more and more of his posts remind me of anti-smoking sites run by tobacco companies; that is, even the phrase ‘donor power’ smacks of the way a marketing exec would put the best possible face on an industry that purports to help people find self-actualization through checkbook charity.

(The link in the preceding paragraph is to Jeff’s post entitled Donors are figuring out how to shut you up, in which Jeff criticizes Charity Navigator for its YouTube video, which shares tips for reducing unwanted solicitations. Jeff calls Charity Navigator’s approach ‘more than a little irresponsible’.)

While I still enjoy Jeff’s posts generally and will continue to read the blog, I simply can’t recommend it in general any more because of my disagreement with the basic relational premise Jeff implies between nonprofits and individuals. The question, ‘What is the relationship between the nonprofit and the individual?’ really is the key question of the hour in our corner of the vineyward.

In Jeff’s Three Laws Of Fundraising post/Fundraising Success Mag column this past week, Jeff posits the following relationship equation:

Here’s the deal: Your donors don’t support you because you’re the coolest organization on the block. They support you because they are cool. And you are just cool enough for them to consider inviting you into their circles. You are the trembling, grateful newcomer hoping to be allowed to hang out with the cool donor.

In Jeff’s relationship equation, the cool donor supports you because they are cool. And you, the trembling, grateful newcomer, are aw-shucks grateful for their vote of confidence, not to mention hopeful that they might introduce you to more of their cool friends who can support you because they’re cool, too.

That’s a far cry from our contention in Transformational Giving that the relationship between individual and nonprofit is a mutual accountability relationship, not a friendship or a support relationship. (That’sTG principle # 5, if you’re keeping score.)

We’re going to be devoting this week on the blog to talking further about the relationship between individual and nonprofit. I’ve been doing a little detective work on the subject and discovered some absolutely fascinating clues historically as to why the relationship has taken the shape it has, and how things weren’t always this way…including an early 20th century antecedent to Transformational Giving whose approach was wiped out by the rise of the modern fundraising era.

Stay tuned.

But for today we de-list Donor Power Blog from our list of recommended sites. But we do have a new site to add:

Make It Transformational–the new daily blog by the Giving and Training Officers of Mission Increase Foundation.

Take a sec to click over to this second daily TG multivitamin. I’ve previewed the posts that will appear in the blog’s inaugural week. As you read daily, you’ll see that these aren’t trembling newcomers happy that you’re cool enough to invite them to your RSS feed.

They’re mutual accountability change agents, ready to urge you on–and be urged on by you–to replace Donor Power with real Transformation.