Interview with Ronnie McClure, CPA, PhD.

Listening for buying signals, listening for a chance to talk, listening to win a debate - yes. But listening so we can hear client aspirations and the emerging story of a life wending towards a distant goal? Why listen when what the client says might only get us off track. 

My sense is that since we don't listen, and since it is not in our best interest to listen (we are persuaders and managers of a track process) donors should make it a point to clarify their objectives before meeting with us. They should bring a little  memo stating their objectives. They might then slide it across the desk for us to initial. "By initialling, you indicate that the plan you create will support these objectives." What do you think of that, my fellow advisers? Crazy! Are you qualified to diagnose that? Who you calling insane?

For Interfaith Worker Justice, I put together this Pop Quiz and Final Take Home Exam. We may use the Quiz with the Board, most of whom are religious leaders. The suggestion is that they share the Take Home Final with their wealthy congregants. Answers to the quiz are provided. The Final, a high stakes exam, is scored at death by a higher power. No retakes, unless you believe in Reincarnation. 

How much longer will USians indulge the polite fiction that the wealthy -- who seize the best assets of nature, of art, of time -- make it all good by sending accountants, lawyers and pony boys to tend the altars of philanthropy.

So, why, Tom, my Learned Fellow Colleague in the Dumpster of History, did John Dryden, Poet Laureate, and also an extrordinary satirist, write such Panegryrics as, Astraea Redux?

Oh Happy Age!

Oh times like those alone

By Fate reserv'd for Great Augustus Throne!

When the joint growth of Armes and Arts foreshew T

he World a Monarch, and that Monarch You

Did he actually believe that the licentious King Charles II was another Augustus, a demi-god returned from heaven? I am more of the opinion that even in those days a poet, indeed all scribblers, best served Justice by serving those who could offer social order, and preferment up some kind of Great Chain of Being, whether secular, ecclesiastical, military, or corporate. My problem is that having served our nation's Wealthiest with countless free and unsolicited no obligation or your money back Morals Tutorials, based on all the best models, from Antquity to the present, I have nothing more to show for it than the friendship of a few men and women driven as insane as I have been. Or maybe we, Tom, are sane and the press, Congress, Council on Foundations, and Philanthropy Round Table, just to name a few are morally insane? Come, come, Tom! We are as mad Lear's Fool without even a pony's hay to butter. Our very lives point the proper moral: Respect your Betters or Live Precariously!

"Does this so-called wisdom you teach, Sir, pay?,I am often asked by my Philanthropy Advisory Students. To which I truthfully answer, "Nay, it is the pearl of great price for which you must suffer greatly strewing it before swine." To which they respond incredulously, What swine? Soon fisticuffs follow and my training in that field is limited to bleeding.

So, it says that they try to educate themselves, but it’s basically a bunch of rich people sitting in a room deciding that the little nonprofits and the people they serve do not know how to solve their issues. So instead, people with no experience in the field will solve their problem for them. They will make “high impact” giving a priority, giving in one particular area, to solve something they deem a priority.

It occurs to me that instead of letting a bunch of people removed from the problem take their theory of giving into their own hands, we might be better served if people receiving services, nonprofits and government worked more hand in hand, forging collaborations and best practices across the nation, sharing ideas, and forging goals collectively, instead of donors forging the goals.

My sense, Wildwoman, is that it is better, from a major gift fundraising perspective, to insult the intelligence of the poor than to offend the amour propre of the rich. The poor will take what they get, and show their gratitude, and get "results," or they will be passed over in the next funding cycle for a higher performing group of poor people. The rich have options. As a donor centered philanthropic coach my role is to be of service to those who matter most. Through High Impact Philanthropy through High Performing Nonprofits, my Hyperagent clients can dramatize their genius, posit and create the world we want (according to them), and save capitalism. Who am I to begrudge them their obscene fantasy? I work in Wealth Bondage laundering whatever they tell me to launder. The things I have seen! As I often tell the girls (of all ages, races, creeds and genders) when they complain of the systemic and ongoing abuse of power, The customer is always right, Honey. They pay for High Performing, give them High Performing. Maybe it is demeaning, but it sure beats working on the Supreme Court, or in Congress, or for the Ford Foundation Project on Social Justice and World Peace. If we are going to save Capitalism, we all have to bend over, frontwards and backwards, or there's others who will.

Yes, my version is satirical, but the reality is not much different, as depicted by Bridgespan in a paper about Best Practices of Strategic Grantmaking.

• The younger will have a hard time understanding the developmental and financial needs of clients at an age and stage beyond that of the planner, unless the planner has moral imagination (the chances of which are slim given the state of the liberals arts).
• A planner age 35-55, say, may be himself (or herself) planning for needs and wants in a condition of felt scarcity. The range of effective sympathy are self and family, with a nod towards God and Country. The criterion of success is more.
• A client or donor age 55-70 may have that stage of life (generativity, having kids, building a career, getting more) successfully and conclusively wrapped up. He or she may have moved on to the stage at which we look back on life to make sense of what has been accomplished so that we may look forward in hope, for ourselves, family and mankind. Erickson calls this final life work, "Integrity vs Despair" and sees its finest fruit as Wisdom, or what a Catholic might call "the discernment of spirits." Reminiscence and story telling, or today building a Facebook page, or putting together a video of oneself, or hiring a ghostwriter, are ways to create this sense of closure, of what Frank Kermode, the great literary critic, called, "The Sense of an Ending."
• For the self-seeking planner, who considers himself or herself a fiduciary of the client's self (defined by the planner as the economic self-seeking self) a plan can only be successful if it has benefits for the client that outweigh the costs. That is what the planner would want for himself. And the planner has no intution that anything lies beyond self-seeking in his or her own development. That recognition will come later, in its own crisis of identify. So philanthropy, at this stage, when the planner is still building his or her own success, is seen as an indirect and generally unsuccessful attempt to come out ahead. The planner is stuck and bewildered because he cannot figure out a) how he comes out ahead and b) how the client does. Beyond that he sees only confusion and sentiment. Giving will result in less!
• For the older and more spiritually mature client or donor who is seeking an Hegelian synthesis of Despair and Integrity, who wants his or her life to turn out whole, to have a happy ending, to have been lived as if on purpose, who wants to return to the world of love and spirit what was drawn from love and spirit, as the flesh must return to dust, drawn from the dust; for such a client self seeking outcomes proposed by the planner cause only Despair. These false solutions, no matter how technically brilliant, retard the growth of the client and pull (dare I say this?) the client or donor down to the planner's own level, an earlier - one might say more rudimentary - age and stage of the life cycle. Less is more, but the planner does not see it.
• Philanthropy in the final phase is service: letting go the isolate ego, welcoming the loss of control, as control passes to those the giver has mentored, to whom he or she she has passed on the virtues of wealth, as genes are passed on, as literary and spiritual traditions are passed on, as communities live in us and through us. Identify like lanaguage is social. Identity is negotiated and must pass current or it is counterfeit. We live on by dying to our isolate selves. Unless we die to ourselves during our lives our ultimate death is final and is rightly approached in fear, despair, and denial. The fruit falls and rots. The seeds may live on. Though they too can shrivel, dying long before the fruit falls. He who would find himself must lose himself.

So there is the soul. So where is the sale? I can tell you - actually in great detail. But until you find the soul of it, the sale of it will never follow. The first sale is always to yourself. You cannot sell what you have not bought, and if your soul has not been formed, you can't make the soul/soul, the ultimate gift or sale, to another. In giving, it is always, "You go first." And, "Physician heal thyself," or "Salesman sell thyself." Erikson calls this integrity or congruence, or one might call it authenticity or alignment.

On another note, I am impressed that Erikson quotes George Bernard Shaw to the effect that "the clown is often the best part of the circus." Laughter, Fred, is the best medicine, which is why a good Christian always laughs uncontrollably in church. I am serious. I do it all the time. Or did until they barred the door.

Dr. Paul Shervish from Boston College is a former Jesuit, whose first book was entitled, Gospels of Wealth: How the Rich Portray their Lives. He suggests that we all need to connect "moral compass" and "financial capacity" in how we portray our lives. As we tell our life story, he says, we are seeking to make sense of what we have lived, to see how it orients to a value, a moral quest, a "due north." It is not just that we were successful, the wealthy say, we deserved to be so, it was God's will, God's grace, his guiding hand.

I was raised Catholic. In a child's reading of the Gospels Jesus was not a success. He was born poor and went down from there, to the most abject and shameful death. He said if we wanted to find him we would find him among the poor. If faith does not shake us awake and make us ashamed of what we have been, at how we lived our lives, then how can we repent, reform, and be forgiven? That, I am told by my Protestant theologian friends, is so Catholic as to pitiful. I should be reading Bunyon's Pilgrims Progress, not the Purgatorio.

But I am wondering, if God Revealed is a Gospel of Wealth, and if all good stories have a moral, and some even have a turning point, and a moment of recognition, what is the moral? What is the central recognition? And what was the turning point?

Fred Sievert at New York Life had gravitas. A tall deep voiced man, "good with numbers," and a head as bald a Kojack, he could strike fear into a room full of executives with one word, "results?" As in where are they? Yet while he took the role and his responsibilities seriously, he did not take himself seriously. When it comes to faith, I wonder, if God Revealed will be funny at all? (Serio ludere, serious play?) If Fred could chop carrots in a chef's toque at New York Life, and run along the beach at a life insurance convention in a black suit, in what get up could be proclaim his next revelation? OK, a black suit, but with what kind of hat?