Easiest blog post ever.

The gang at GiveWell released it’s recommendations for the very bestestest charities to give to this holiday season. The top two are:

 (1) the Against Malaria Foundation, which fights malaria using insecticide-treated bednets, and (2) the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which treats children for intestinal worms.

Plus!

We also have identified five other standout organizations for donors interested in other causes. These are GiveDirectly (cash grants to poor households in Kenya), Innovations for Poverty Action(research on how to fight poverty and promote development), Nyaya Health (healthcare in rural Nepal), Pratham (primary education in India), and Small Enterprise Foundation (microfinance in South Africa).

If you are giving because you are a super-generous sweet kind of dude (though the tax break doesn’t hurt) but don’t know where, just pick one of these places and you’re set.

(And to be helpful to the folk who freely give away this research, do it through their site so they know how many people take their recommendations.)

(And also to be helpful to them, make a contribution to GiveWell too so they can keep providing this info to us, which in itself is a gift.)

But this time of year isn’t just always just about punching in your credit card number. We are asked to participate in food drives/non-perishables drives/work-related drives/school-related drives/looking-at–Christmas-lights drives. Perhaps the last one isn’t important. (Important sidenote: Best. Christmas. Lights. Ever. h/t @geneweingarten). But the others are. And doing them in a way that isn’t unintentially hurtful or harmful is Absolutely Manditorially Crucial. 

Thankfully, Saundra at Good Intentions Are Not Enough has published an extraordinantabulous guide to all these quandries and questions. It is available to you for less cash than a Starbucks grande gingerbread latte. Also you can get it on Amazon or via PayPal. Remember when you set up your PayPal account just to sell those old tea light holders on eBay and you got 4 bucks and the money’s been sitting in that account ever since? Well. Here’s you’re opportunity to spend it.

You’re welcome.

Thanks for being here, thanks for being part of the giving conversation, and above all, thanks for being generous.

It’s been a persistent yet odd feeling. Like most Americans, I experienced 9/11 as a profound national tragedy, but not a specific personal one.  I refused to pay much attention in previous anniversaries, deflecting conversation or switching the channel. But this one has been nagging at me. Maybe because I now live in a city that was part of the attacks. Maybe because I now have kids. Maybe because, however arbitrarily, numbers ending in zero mean something in this culture of ours and so, subconsciously, it means something to me. Maybe because I am a lifetime away from who I was in 2001, yet the events of those day are still very present.

Regardless.

It’s distracting, distressing, dismaying me: the ongoing coverage, the co-workers stories, the mentions even in the most innocuous of places. It’s eating me up. I have to do something about it.

I think, cautiously, crazily, that what I hafta do about it is, cautiously, crazily, begin the path to forgiveness.

The Prep Stuff

First, let’s address all these vacuous connotations of the word “forgive.” It’s frequently synonymous with the phrase “let go,” an act defined not with a strong grip but an open shrug. Separate “forgive” into its two syllables, keep the “give,” swap out “for” for another preposition, switch the order, and you get: “Give Up.”

An act of weakness, of last resort: this is the reputation of forgiveness.

So the first thing to realize is that, in order to achieve forgiveness, it actually takes quite a bit of very hard, very active work. Forgiveness is the most difficult emotional act a person can take.  It is the Ironman of the Soul.  And it takes just as much work to do it.

Seek Stability.

It’s difficult to train for a triathalon if you don’t have the stable structure elsewhere in your life that allows you to nourish yourself, stay medically healthy, get proper rest time.  Same is true for forgiveness, but here you have to nourish your psyche.

Eat well. Go to the gym. Go to church. Meditate. See a counselor. Be kind to your family. Plant a garden. Harvest a garden.  Make art. Do the things that have been shown time and again to make us happier. Build up your confidence and sense of self-peace so that you have a stable emotional platform to stand on when you begin the hard emotional journey of forgiveness.

Seek Space

An extension of the above: sometimes you need the time to put all that good structure into place before you can tackle forgiveness. Go ahead and do it. You’ll know when it’s time to come back to it all.

Seek Possibility

The first action toward forgiveness is just imaginging that it’s an option to begin with.

The idea of forgiving the hijackers who have struck deep blows to our collective identity, to our personal understanding of life, to our economic reality, is, quite frankly, crazy-talk.  It’s impossible. It’s inconceivable. It’s nutso.

But having said it, having written it down, it’s already out there.  The mere act of recognizing it’s a potential action, however far down the road, moves forgiveness from the land of impossible to merely improbable.

The Jumping-In Stuff

Seek Your Relief. 

Forgiveness isn’t about letting the other guy get away with it. It’s about relieving your own pain. Yes, “Making it better for ME” is a selfish reason to forgive. But this is a marathon we’re running plus five miles we’re swimming plus a jillion miles we’re sitting on an uncomfortable seat that gives new meaning to the phrase “riding up.” At the beginning, let’s go easy on ourselves. We have to start somewhere.

Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else. No one else even has to know about your decision. –Cancer Supportive Care

Seek Your Power

None of us can control the acts of aggression or pain or violence committed against us. We can’t force people to act gently toward us. They will act as they will.

What is in our power, what is in our control, is how we respond. Choose to hold to the anger or choose to let it go. Whichever way, recognize that this decision is not up to the perpetrator. It’s up to you.

Seek Your Beauty

What’s more impossible to conceive than the idea of forgiveness is that fact that, while we reel in anguish, around us the flowers still bloom, babies still coo, lovers still kiss.

But all these things do still happen.

Look for them:

Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you. –Cancer Supportive Care

(Special tip: Dance parties wherein one joins an under-5 age group in getting on the floor and rolling around, and occasionally right over each other, has been proven to be particularly helpful. I have done extensive empirical experiments and can vouch for the effectiveness of this technique.)

The Hard Stuff

Seek to Know: Part 1

Often the word “forgive” is paired with the word “forget”, as if the absence of knowledge is what enables a person to actively let go of pain. In fact it can be just the opposite. Knowing builds understanding, understanding builds empathy, empathy builds the desire to connect to our humanity. And the strongest way to connect to our humanity is to forgive.

For eight years, I have been avoiding Tom Junod’s award winning article “Falling Man” about a heart-rending picture that I don’t have the strength to post here on my own, personal blog (though it is in the above link).  But I finally read the article. Junod writes about the victims who chose their own path to death on 9/11 by leaping from the highest floors of the World Trade Center. Junod writes about how they hurtled down so fast that their shoes ripped off and their clothes tore to shreds. Junod writes about the families of victims, who refused to believe their loved ones could have made a suicidal choice.  And Junod writes that the rest of us, unable to acknowledge these jumpers, to learn about them or even look at their pictures, did both them and us a disservice:

[W]e, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at [pictures of the 9/11 jumpers]. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness — because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.

Our desire to move past the pain is not helped by pushing aside the most awful aspects of the day. Nor is seeking that knowledge a morbid can’t-look-away type of quest. It’s bearing witness.  It’s acknowledging what was, and what is.

Seek to Know: Part 2

Actual knowledge of the jumpers has been dismissed with furious whispers, but no such censurious response has been prompted with another group, for the simple fact that no one has even imagined their stories deserve to be told: the hijackers themselves.

Repeatedly in the last several days, we have heard many personalized stories: dozens, hundreds, thousands of stories featuring a named victim, a named hero, a named survivor.  Each of them are individuals, with back-stories and missed-chances and loved-ones.

The hijackers are lumped together: one homogeneous group of evil. In our remembrances, our exhibitions, our documentaries, they are not named. For, one could argue, very good reason. Myself, I barely have the emotional strength to hear the thousands of stories of the victims. I can’t begin to conceptualize learning about the criminals themselves.

This was, however, precisely what Bud Welch did.  His daughter, Julie, died in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. And Bud, purposefully, deliberately, sought information about Timothy McVeigh. He sought knowledge that could lead him to forgiveness. From Michael McCullough, author of lots of forgiveness books, in an interview with Krista Tippett:

[Bud Welch] actually sought out Timothy McVeigh’s father and visited him one day at the McVeigh home and had this moment he describes when he saw Timothy’s picture on the mantle. It was a high school graduation picture. And they were just making small talk and Bud said to McVeigh’s father, he said, “God, that’s a good-looking kid.” And the tears just began pouring out of the elder McVeigh. And what he realized then was that here was another father on the verge of losing a son, of losing a child. And that immediate experience of sympathy and compassion went a tremendous way in facilitating the forgiveness process for Bud.

To gain that knowledge, to know the back-stories and missed-chances and loved-ones of the hijackers, that might not bring any reduction of pain. But it just might bring a way to move beyond it.

Seek Acceptance.

When the fear and the anger and the fury and the sadness and the shame and the horror well up in our guts, there are three courses of action to deal with all this emotion.  Like all of us, I usually fall into one of the first two:

Bury — Completely squash down the emotion. What emotion? I don’t see any of that silly stuff here. No way. No how. No bugging me about it because then it might EXPLODE OUT OF ME AND THEN YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU PUSHED ME HERE.

At which point you:

Clutch — Hold fiercely on to my emotion, the emotion that justifies the tantrums and the tears. Hold on to the identity of victim. Hold on to the identity of being more hurt than anyone else. Hold on to the identity of being pitied and prayed for.

But there’s a third way:

Acknowledge – As far as I understand, this is what the Soul Triathletes among us do when that emotion wells up: Pause. Look at it. Do nothing more than say: Oh. Hey there.

Look, but don’t define, don’t analyze, don’t resist. Even attempting to name the emotion can spiral off: This is Anger, or this is Sadness, or this is Some Mix of Anger and Sadness; and suddenly giving it a name has changed the nature of the emotion itself, and changed how you handle it: “I’m pushing aside this anger.” “I just need to be sad.” The objective word in those sentences is “I.” The only thing served in those thoughts is the ego.

For me, I have only accomplished this rarely, and only in the most mild of circumstances. But I’ve glimpsed enough to know that it’s possible.

The question is whether it’s possible with 9/11.

Seek Non-Hate.

An extension of acceptance, but an important one. After riding through the waves of fury and sadness, the forgiver can actively seek to feel neutral.  James Altucher calls this Non-Hate, which only goes to show how rarely we all ever pursue this course of action:  we don’t even have a positive word for it.  My college drama professor would rank Non-Hate up with other completely unactable pursuits, like Non-Staying and Non-Studying and Non-Surfing. It’s extremely difficult to non-act. So much so that, as of now, we don’t even have a word to describe that neutral course, that calming down, that stabilizing of emotion that we want to achieve:

Everytime you are thinking about someone on your list, try to catch yourself. This is the hard part. Stop yourself for just a second in the middle of your mental maze of anguish. Label the thought you were thinking “useful” or “not useful”. If someone shat on my face and now I’m thinking about my mental argument wth him or her. This is “not useful”. If you label enough thoughts “not useful” then “Intense” anger might turn into “Moderate” anger. “Moderate” anger might turn into “Mild” anger.  This is how you cultivate non-hate instead of compassion.     –James Altucher

 

Act Negately. Negately Act.It sounds so difficult as to be rather silly. And yet there is one final path, one final stage of forgiveness that far surpasses even the most conceptually difficult Non Act.

The Impossible Stuff

Seek Love.

I can think of a handful of folks who could probably see the events of 9/11, look at those 19 men, and not merely Non-Hate, but actively Love. Not coincidently, all are considered, in some part of the world, to be divine.

Jesus, say, who’d turn his cheek. Muhammed, who was among the first, in the midst of war, to  practice nonviolence. Or Buddha, who’d accept the hijackers with the deepest of love. But then Buddha is a god.

I most definitely am not a god.

Look, I can easily forgive my toddler when I get an accidental elbow to the nose. I can slightly-less-easily forgive my baby when I get a deliberate whack to the shins.  I can grudgingly forgive the stranger who accidentally blows cigarette smoke in my face. But I cannot yet forgive the hijackers. I cannot begin to think that I would look at them and possibly feel anything remotely close to “love.”

I think this just makes me human.

It definitely makes me normal.

Still, all through this week, all through this weekend, we have heard and will continue to hear questions of time: When’s it gonna be time to have the memorial open? When’s it gonna be time to leave Afghanistan? When’s it gonna be time to completely rebuild?

For me, and maybe for all of us, perhaps it’s time to also ask:

When’s it gonna be time to forgive?

Remember when folks used to say: well, if you don’t want to read the email all you have to do is delete it? And ‘member how we smirked when they themselves promptly became buried under college newsletters/bank statements/sale notices/PTA reminders/listserv summaries/social media updates/weird requests from hangers-on. And that’s even without reply-alls/Nigerian spam/Great-Aunt Mary’s forwards.

This is why I was super-duper excited to learn of Chris Anderson’s Email Charter. Here’s a couple good points:

…Respect Recipients’ Time
This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

…Celebrate Clarity
Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

The Email Charter urges us to take steps from “drowning in email” and “generating ever more work for our friends and our colleagues” (a charmingly indirect way of saying “you’re making it worse for ME, people.”)

I am totally, utterly for email tips that will make my life easier.

Also! I am totally, utterly unable to make it work.

For example:

Unsubscribe now!

In an attempt to clean out the morass of an inbox that my email has become, I’ve begun unsubscribing to nonprofits’ newsletters run by my friends. Which is hard.

And is even harder when I get a follow up email: Did you really intend to unsubscribe, Ms. Slipka Who Was My Junior Year Roommate? I know these are really automated, but I still open them imagining that it’s personally sent by my friend who’s theater company I’m sure is awesome and if I lived in New York I would totally go see it. But I don’t. So I don’t. And now that I’ve unsubscribed, likely-former-friend prolly doesn’t want me to come, anyway.

Moral of the story: An easy way to not clog up your inbox with friends’ newsletters is to not have friends.

Say thanks except when you shouldn’t!

Here’s another problematic one: Don’t reply just to say “thanks.”

Yikes! This appalls both the fundraiser in me and my learned-at-the-knee-of-my-mother impulses. There must always be thank yous! Proliferately! Multiplicitly! Multi-media-tely!

I tried recently to adhere to this rule. I emailed Sasha Dichter to say: I’d like to be part of the 2012 Generosity Day planning team (which you can do too)!  And he wrote back to say: Glad you’re in!

And I wanted to write back again to say: Thanks! Yay!

But the Email Charter would say: No Contentless Responses! Plus I learned of the Email Charter from Sasha to begin with, plus he’s always writing on his blog about his own email problems. So I sent nothing.

Moral of the story: When something you didn’t do keeps gnawing at you, you may wish to write a note to the other party and explain how you feel silly about the whole episode and wishing you’d been less wishy-washy. Don’t. Instead, post that story on the Internet.

Never reply all!

I got a work request, sent to me and two other people, asking the three of us to participate in a work group. I wrote back just to the sender saying “sure.” Then one of the other women replied all, saying “sure.” The third woman replied all, saying “sure.” So now, from the information in their inboxes, everyone had proof that these two women were happy to help out but that fundraiser with the blog was a bad team player.

Moral of the story: Ban work groups.

Have separate email accounts – Part One!

I used to have an email account specifically for this blog, in order to be organized and save time.

To open the email account, I had to open my regular email, find the special password for the server’s website (what’s with all these *&%$#@ required characters?), click through to the blog server’s site, enter password, click through a bunch of pages to get to the email log-in page, log-in, and finally I’d see my one new message: A spam comment.

Moral of the story: Never store passwords in your email. (Yes, this is a real moral. No, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the problem above. Yes, you should go to that link for helpful password tips. No, this will not explain why those *&%#@ characters are required.)

Have separate email accounts – Part Two!

I’ve had another email address for over fifteen years that I’ve kept strictly to enter into retail sites or news sites or restaurant sites, the kind that require you to sign away the integrity of your online identity in order to gain access to that one bit of information that ends up not helping you anyway. And for that, said company will cheerfully sell your email address to anyone with a dial-up connection and a smidge of homemade snake oil.

Which is why that inbox is chock full of spam.

Which is why I only check it every two months.

Which is why it took me two months to realize it had been hacked.

Thankfully, the email addresses in my contact list were as old as my own address itself, so the vast majority of them were long defunct. Except for professors still teaching at my college, who kindly wrote back to say: Did you get spammed, and hey how’ve you been the last ten years?

And except for parents of friends, because back when I first used this address, folks had one email address for the whole family and when you wrote you had to put the name of your friend in the subject line so her parents’ wouldn’t accidentally open it and learn that their daughter’s college friend was going to bring back from Winter Break for the dorm room a surreptitiously-gotten bottle of Pathmark-brand vodka.

Moral of the story: People still actually use aol.com email addresses. Seriously.

The Outlook is Grim.

At work, I am forced to use the Worst. Email. Software. Ever: Outlook.

Let’s say I’m looking for a specific email. I enter a term into the search box. I see Outlook scroll through my messages, including the specific one I want whiz right by. Then it reports to me: “No messages found.”

So instead, I have to spend time creating little folders and then spend time putting messages into little  folders and then spend time trying to remember which little folder a message was put into and then spend time clicking through all the little folders trying to find it and then spend time trying to make “Search” work Just This Once and then spend time taking deep breaths when the following appears:

“No messages found.”

Also: it always writes in blue.

Moral of the story: Bill Gates is a better philanthropist.

**

I’m trying to figure out how to use all of this to explain why an entire month went by without a post to this blog. I think that it’s something like:

(Email) * (Twitter) * (Google+) * (blog) = (distracted + overwhelmed) * August

but I think I’m missing a division sign in there and besides I was told there would be no math.

So here’s the final moral:

I’m back. I’m back on the webs (not consistently) and back in DC (mostly consistently) and am reconnecting with the world (definitely consistently). But I love it best when I reconnect in person. So let’s set that up. Just email me.

1. To make money.

It doesn’t happen.

2. To get famous.

(Variations: to get a book deal, to get on the lecture circuit, to change the world.)

(Here’s that same link again.)

And the good reasons:

1. To change your own behavior.

I began this blog in order to force myself to begin giving. I was a fundraiser asking everyone else to give and not doing it myself, and that had to change. Sure, I’d have been somewhat likely to start giving if I’d confided in a friend what I wanted to do. But I was certain to change for the better by plastering my failures on the internet.

(And I did.)

2. To push creativity.

The worst way to create that beautiful art or build that amazing project or make that transcendant work is to sit back and wait for inspiration. You’ll be sitting until just before you die, at which point you look back and realize you did nuthin’, and that will be the thought that dominates your brain as it expires.

Cheerful, eh?

So instead you do it, whatever “it” is, every day. Me, I am trying to figure out what role giving plays in our world, globally and personally, and whether this is a tool that can make us all a little kinder and gentler. I have a tendency to just want to sit around and think about it, which does absolutely no good whatsoever.

So I jumble out a bunch of stuff on a regular-ish basis, knowing sheer volume will help when it comes to picking out the couple ideas that might be worthwhile.

(I should probably now link to the couple posts here that I do think are most worthwhile, but I don’t know what they are. Do you? Please let me know.)

3. To explore ideas.

With the rise of the Internet, printing on paper has become the modern equivalent of engraving on stone: expensive and permanent. On the web, ideas can be put out, shared, discussed, revised, and yes, taken down. A blog is a place to throw out a bunch of stuff (especially if doing it regularly, see above) and see what sticks. Rethinking is ok. Playing is mandatory.

4. To clear the brain.

Despite the fact that I spend a great deal of time doing it, I am confident in saying: I’m not a writer. Rather, I am an obsessive thinker. And it is impossible to flip the off-switch on the ol’ noggin. A niggling idea will take hold and burrow and twist and fester and invade and burn until I finally write the damn thing down.  Only then does the brain quiet.

(Until the next idea takes hold.)

5. To sleep better.

Probably this is an extension of point 4, but it happens for me, so it’s on the list.

Hm. Began this post as a way to potentially to explain why I’d be blogging less, but I might have convinced myself otherwise.

(Sidenote: This is also a side effect of a career in fundraising. You spend so much time convincing others why they should give that you inevitably convince yourself and give, too.  Or you don’t and you hate yourself for being a hypocite. At which point you start a blog. See how nicely that came together?)

These are good reasons to blog, and good reasons why you should start a blog, and good reasons why this blog serves me so well. But recently, some other projects have let me achieve the same 5 things above, too. One of which, in particular, is a Must Do Before I Die kinda thing. (Yes, it’s a novel. Yes, I am a writing cliche.)

The social economy sectors of philanthropy and fundraising assume that the most precious resource that everyone must plan for and decide around and use thoughtfully is money. Money is definitely a scarce resource. But you can always (potentially) make more.

What you can never make more of is time.

We will all die, likely sooner than any of us would like. Even if we knew when, there’d be nothing we could do to change the ultimate fact. This time on earth is all the time we got, so best use it wisely.

And that means using time in ways that let you become a better person, let you be creative, let you play, let you sleep well at night.

For me, when I can best be those things from blogging, you’ll find me here. But sometimes I’ll be elsewhere. And, as always, the best way to know which is which and where is where is to subscribe (here’s how to do that) or follow me on Twitter.

And email or @reply me on Twitter with your blog so I can follow you, as well. Your behavior-changing creativity-inducing idea-exploring brain-clearing thoughts are so valuable, and it’s an honor when you share them with all of us.

It’s not the IRS. It’s not your pastor. It’s not your tax advisor or your wealth advisor or your philanthropy advisor. It’s not your blog readers. It’s not Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, even if you are a billionaire.

The only person who really knows how much you give is you.

And you are the only person who knows if that amount is enough.

So.

Is it?

Here’s an example of a paragraph in last week’s post that’s characteristic:

Self-discipline and self-accountability are needed for funders to actually create impact on the lives of beneficiaries. Being a high performing nonprofit is a means to create impact. Being a disciplined funder that subjects yourself to self-accountability is a means to create impact.

Discipline. Accountability. Performance. Impact. Critical elements of an increasingly rigorous field.

BUT THEN:

Philanthropy means “the love of humankind”. All the great philosophers say that the most important thing in life is to love others. But they also agree that actually doing this is hard. “Learning how to love” is the broad mission of all major religions and quite frankly is probably the best way to think about the process of becoming a great philanthropist. In order to practice “the love of humankind” you must “learn how to love.”

My point in writing about self-discipline, self-accountability and high performance is not to elevate those characteristics to ends unto themselves, but to highlight them as means to achieve the ends we seek: learning how to love.

Yep. All this blathering on about philanthropy that we do just comes down to: love.

I had two immediate reactions.

1. This was the most exciting thing in philanthropy writing I’d read in months.

2. Sean was getting mushy.

The first reaction stands on its own. The second says more about me than anything else.

What is it with me and the word “love”? I see the word and hear it in my head in a sing-songy voice: Luu-uu-uuv! I can handle discussing love only through fairy tales and 1950′s ditties.

“I know!” said Harry impatiently. “I can love!” It was only with great difficulty that he stopped himself adding, “Big deal!”
– Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I love you, a bushel and a peck!
You bet your pretty neck I do!
Doodle-oodle-oodle, doodle-oodle-oodle, doodle oodle oodle oo!
- Guys and Dolls, “Bushel and a Peck”

I don’t think I’m alone here in responding to any serious mention of love like a child.  The inestimably kind and thoughtful Christine Egger left a comment on Tactical Philanthropy in response to the above post. Then she left another one:

I’m feeling very sheepish about my comment above. Not about what I wrote but about what I didn’t write. I completely chickened out, acknowledging but not really responding to your key point about love, about what’s behind all of the euphemisms we layer on top of the word philanthropy.

I toss that word around alot. I think about it alot. But I haven’t yet learned how to have a public conversation about love in philanthropic circles that doesn’t either 1) quickly end, 2) switch from the original line of inquiry to “but what is love really?”, or 3) result in brief awkward (or appreciative) silence followed by a change of subject.

We use euphemisms: fundraising is all about relationships, gifts are about personal connection, philanthropy is about our shared humanity. Relationship, connection, shared humanity: it all boils down to love.

Parting with your money is hard. But the hardest thing of all may be acknowledging what giving truly is, without scorn or eye-rolling or uncomfortable silences.

Giving is love.

First, you give yourself:

The University of Connecticut’s new president and her husband are donating $100,000 of their own money to launch a scholarship program, saying they want to help needy UConn students and hope to highlight how important philanthropy is to the school’s future.

UConn officials announced Wednesday that Susan Herbst and her husband, marketing consultant Douglas Hughes, are giving the gift as part of UConn’s campaign to raise $600 million by 2014. It has raised about $277 million so far.

Multi-year campaigns have long been successful approaches to elevating the amount of giving toward an organization. But this is the first time I’ve seen the leader of that organization herself pledging to do exactly what she will spend so much of her future years asking others to do: give, and give generously.

What happens after the president gives to her own organization? Donors view her as an equal peer instead of just another nonprofit with its hat out. The current recipients, the students, see how to be a leader in philanthropy, inspiring them to give later on after they graduate. And all the press from this newsworthy event doesn’t hurt, either.

This is a tremendous example of generosity and leadership that should be an example to any nonprofit exec.

(It was the second most inspirational thing that happened last week while I was on break from the blog. Come back tomorrow for the first most inspirational thing.)

**

Related posts

How To Be A Leader In Philanthropy

Nonprofits and Donors are Equal Partners (and Givers)

Should Nonprofit Staff Give?

A lot of fundraising is done from a transactional lens, that is the grantee is looking to the donor for money and the focus is getting that money in the door.  Within this exchange and relationship are power dynamics that are unequal and problematic.

(h/t Deep Social Impact)

Sasha Dichter likewise urges nonprofits not to act the “supplicant, tin cup in hand.” Instead he writes:

[A]ct like an equal partner in the endeavor, because you have so much to offer.

How do we keep from falling into the trap of vaulted donor and lowly recipient? How do we get to equal partnership? As always, language is important. From Jennifer:

Helping is a word I dislike. It is based on inequality and not a relationship between equals. I suggest to my [fundraising] clients to scrub the word ‘help’ from their lexicon.  Philanthropy, like all of life, is about partnership, about collaboration, about working together on something meaningful and important. Not about helping.

Language is critical but at the end of the day, talk is just talk. We all need the action to back it up.

We all need to give.

Fundraisers, nonprofit staff, donors: we become equals when we all stretch to make a gift that’s significant to us, when we match our words with our dollars. In my fundraising work, I tell my donors why I’ve given to the organization myself, why they should join me in this endeavor, and any pretense of inequality falls away.

To all be equals we all must give.

The next step? Viewing the beneficiaries of nonprofit work as equals, too.

I am an enormous fan of many international aid writers: Tales From the Hood, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, Tom Murphy. As a donor, my eyes have been wide-opened by their discussion of how aid works. Or doesn’t. Or makes things much, much worse.

My RSS reader is neatly categorized into funny writers and philanthropy-related writers, but sometimes this division blurs. For example, like now:

Dooce went to Bangladesh.

I am nervous about what she is going to say. I am nervous that one of my favorite writers could fall into one of these patronizing traps:

Staring at others for one’s own enlightenment. What’s interesting for Westerners to come from afar and observe can be intrusive to the folks there. Being watched for the watcher’s educational purposes can be demoralizing. If not outright offensive.

Whites in shining armor. This is the terrible assumption that residents of developing countries are incapable of working to fix their lives and that Westerners must come in with their superior intelligence (or design) and do it for them.

How it will all pan out will depend on the answer to one question, and one question alone:

Will Dooce’s trip ultimately help or harm the beneficiaries?

And this will be worked out according to three factors, in increasing importance:

Amount of cash raised. Will Dooce’s audience give? Will they give more than they’d have done without her reporting back to us? Will they balk at cash gifts in favor of well-intentioned-but-ill-effective Gifts In Kind?

Where the cash goes.  It doesn’t matter how much money readers give if it goes to an NGO that’s ineffective. Or harmful. Folks often assume that of course the nonprofit is doing good work, but there’s so many examples of when things get inadvertantly worse that we have to reverse the burden of proof. At least from what’s available on the website, none of the NGOs mentioned through Every Mother Counts has demonstrated proof that their programs make lives better.

(Which doesn’t mean don’t give. It means just give somewhere else that has proven their impact.)

The perspectives of the beneficiaries. Yes, I know it’s circular logic to have one component of the question of beneficiaries be a question of beneficiaries. But the question of beneficiaries is so fundamental to everything charitable/philanthropic/human that we do. Do the beneficiaries have their dignity and our respect? Do they participate in implementing the programs? Do they participate in designing the programs? Do they ever get to say what they want?

Multiply all this by the fact that Dooce is widestream media, which amplifies everything.

I am worried that one of these things will happen:

• Dooce’s readers don’t give cash.  The trip will end up not helping the beneficiaries.
• Dooce’s readers give but to a place that’s ineffective. The trip will still end up not helping the beneficiaries.
• Dooce’s readers give but to a place that inadvertantly makes it all worse.  The trip will now be harmful to the beneficiaries.

But most of all, I’m worried that readers will give, and even give to a place that has proven impact on the Bangladesh women & children, and while they give, they will only be thinking: “Oh those poor people.”

If Dooce’s readers view the Bangladeshis as pathetic, or sad, or incapable, or anything other than equal to their own selves, the trip will be harmful to those very people. The chance for monetary help will be overshadowed by the loss of global connection.

I see the humanity in Armstrong’s writing (even when doused in vast swathes of poop-related humor) enough to believe that she will personally get this.  And I see the skill in her writing enough to believe that she can communicate that to the rest of us. And, if by god she can can pull it off, I see the power in her writing to convince all of us to see this global community, see ourselves in these women, and see that we must all work together to make this small world of ours a better one.

UPDATE: Heather’s posted and Yahoo! has offered to make a gift to the charity of Armstrong’s choice. Folks in the Dooce Community can suggest charities here. I’ve put in a plug for a GiveWell recommendation

1. Think about Writing
2. Whine about Writing
3. Prepare for Writing
4. Rest up for Writing
5. Envision yourself Writing
6. Daydream about Writing
7. Talk about Writing
8. Drink & Talk about Writing

The list of things to do to Write is, thankfully, much shorter. Just one thing on it. That one thing is lots harder to do, though.

Bonus! This list is also helpful in describing How To Not: Get In Shape, Learn Mandarin, Play the Cello, Golf, Surf, Explore, Design, Build, Create, or Give.