Monthly Archives: March 2017

Site Visits

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By: Jake Bartlett, Business Fellow 2017

Big things are happening this week as we begin our site visits!  The weeks following Pitch Day entailed a great deal of communication within our groups and with other groups along with many hard decisions but also a great deal of rewarding aspects.  The decision to move forward with a site visit for a given organization was determined, in its simplest form, on a percentage scale.  Looking at each organization individually, we had to ask ourselves, “Is the chance of us giving to this organization 50% or higher?” If the answer was yes then we moved forward and scheduled a site visit; however, if we felt that there was a smaller chance we would give to an organization then we decided to not move forward.  At this point, you might be asking yourself, “well, how did you decide if your chances were greater or less then 50%?”  and this was the exact same question we as a group had to ask ourselves on a frequent basis.

Our decisions were made after we outlined our goals and mission in giving to an organization as well as looking at the future goals of the individual organizations.  My group came to the consensus that we wanted to give to something that would generate growth in an organization and take them to the next level.  Deciding which organizations we would move forward with and which ones we would send letters of decline to was extremely difficult.  Throughout this process, I felt a sense of frustration but also excitement, a feeling of sadness when sending letters of decline but then an overwhelming feeling of warmth and joy when sending a letter to schedule a site visit.  In many cases, we were torn between groups and wished we could visit everyone we had previously met with; however, looking back at our goals and the growth we wanted to spur in an organization we were able to refine our number from eight organizations to four.

Tuesday, March 28th was our first day of site visits!  My group met with one out of four organizations at a local coffee shop, Common Grounds, as the organization is run out of one of its leader’s homes.  This organization is focused on helping women in homelessness to access feminine hygiene products, establishing relationships between these women and local churches. They distribute Love Totes, which are bags that include one month’s supply of various products.  Their proposal was for a trailer measuring around 7ft by 12ft to assist in the transport of the totes to various places of distribution.  During the visit, we asked further questions such as the cost of the trailers they were looking at, their means of transporting totes now without a trailer, and how a trailer would take them to the next level in reaching out to women in the community.  We also proposed the possibility of having the trailer wrapped with their logo as another means of reaching people and advertising their work.

Although our visit was an informational meeting, I didn’t feel as if it was business or solely informational; I got the sense of partners working together, exchanging ideas, collaborating and all working towards a common goal to enrich the lives of others and promote growth.

I look forward to meeting with the remaining organizations in the next few days as well as getting closer to making some very difficult but fulfilling decisions with my team members and possibly collaborating with other groups!

The (not-so) Golden Rule

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By: Hallie Hillebrand, BBA/MAcc 2018

This past week we have been intently focused on decision-making. These are very important decisions because they will determine the organizations that we will be moving forward to perform site visits with. Our group has narrowed down our pool of 11 to 4 and to do so, we had to make a lot of tough choices. There are so many great organizations doing such great work in Waco and other places but we know we only have a limited amount to allocate. In making our decisions, we focused on a number of key concepts, detailed below.

The first thing we were looking for in an organization was passion. If the person running the organization doesn’t have a passion and a drive for their organization/cause and the energy to ensure it runs smoothly, how can we except it to be very effective? A second critical item is determining whether they are an effective leader and if they are able to clearly communicate their mission and vision for the organization/project. Again, if they cannot do this, it’s a sign that they might not be very effective. A third thing was how permanent the project is. We were still very open to proposals that were temporary in nature, but the projects we all seemed to be most drawn to were ones that will have a more long-lasting effect for the population they serve and the community as whole, along with a proven track record of success in this area. Keeping this in mind, we still had to eliminate some that met all of these criteria due to our limited funds.

This week we also turned in the next chapter of our Briefing Book, in which we provided information on the organizations we met with on Pitch Day as well as an answer to the topic of what obligations are implied in a grant giver/receiver relationship. Our answer drew heavily from readings that demonstrated both positive as well as negative obligations/relationships. A quote that kept coming up in these readings was “He who has the gold makes the rules”, also known as the “Golden Rule of Grantsmanship” according to some. This is in stark contrast with what our team views as the type of relationship we are seeking with the organizations we are moving forward with. We are interested in eliminating any sort of power dynamic that is common in this type of relationship, and instead desire to have an intentional partnership in which both our team as well as the organizations are clear on each other’s focuses and desires. We plan to dedicate ourselves fully to the partnership, whether we are able to fund their project or not, and hope that they will do the same. We don’t want to be the ones making the rules, rather, we hope to collaboratively eliminate any “rules” and go at it together, with passion and a clear vision for their project.

We will be going to our site visits this week with this in mind and hope to learn more about each organization’s passion and vision as well as their goals for our partnership.

Building Anticipation

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By: Kendall Wood, BBA, Psychology 2020

As a class, we are entering into one of the most thought-intensive portions of the semester. If I could liken this process to a train ride, what felt like a slow chug up the mountain of learning, peaking at Pitch Day, has turned into a nose-dive into the exciting but serious process of decision-making. With goals in mind and concrete options before us, we are more certain and yet uncertain than we have ever been, so team-cooperation is vital. This is site-visit time.  Next week, we will meet with the organizations with which we have chosen to move forward at their facility for about an hour each.

At this point, we have done a considerable amount of research on these nonprofits, so the purpose of these site visits is to dig deeper and gain better perspective as to what our grant would be funding and the impact it would make on the organizations’ efforts.  My team specifically hopes to receive tours of each organizations’ facilities because we believe there is a depth of understanding that comes from observing operations rather than just talking about them.

Dr. Hogue provided us with a couple of informative articles that would guide us in these meetings—the “Quick Guide to Conducting a Nonprofit Site Visit” and the “Guide to Interviewing a Nonprofit’s CEO,” both written by The Bridgespan Group.  Fortunately, much of the instruction given to us in the “CEO” article was already a part of our Pitch Day meetings, meaning we were able to ask the representatives in-depth questions about the organization on that day.  This has put us in a good place for these site visits because it allows us to go further in our discussions, taking advantage of each minute on-site.

The “Quick Guide to Conducting a Nonprofit Site Visit” gave us four important items to consider before we arrive to the site visit:

  • “Share your goals in advance”—We are accomplishing this by e-mailing each organization the topics we intend to discuss and what operations we hope to observe while on-site.
  • “Bring other decision-makers”—In a perfect world, this would be our professor Dr. Hogue, since he will be assisting us in our future decisions and we value his opinion. However, it is not feasible for him to attend each site visit, so we will rely on each other as a team to obtain all the necessary information and offer educated opinions in our post-meeting discussions.
  • “Be prepared”—This one may seem obvious, but it is too important not to mention. We will have our questions prepared in advance so that we can reach the core of every issue about which we want to know.  There may be aspects of the organization that we might not be exposed to or understand fully if they are not questioned.
  • “Know how close you are to a decision”—This is for the sake of the organization to understand our position. We will be prepared to answer questions regarding our own process of decision-making and where we find ourselves at the present time.  All of which will be done with both candidness and respect.

 

Overall, despite the decisiveness we have to exercise on a daily basis, we are excited by the intentionality with which we get to speak to these organizations.  The anticipation is building and the determination to make mindful, strategic grants is ever-rising!

Not Easier, but More Exciting

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to a technical glitch, this is posting a week after it was written]

By: Julia Stricklin

We are now in the middle of the semester, and entering the time period when our job gets real. Up to this point, we have been speaking in theoretical terms and studying broad ideas. Yes, we have discussed their applications to this class, but now we are working with real life projects that can and will make an impact on this community. Which is a big thing to step back and think about. At only 19, 20, 21 years old, we have the power to make change in our community. And boy, are we eager to do so.

We had our first Board Meeting yesterday; an informal, but very informative, meeting of our class where we presented the organizations and projects we have chosen to move forward with from Pitch Day. The decisions behind this were by no means easy – most of our groups cut their prospective grantee pool nearly in half, from about eight organizations per group on Pitch Day to four or five organizations each group will pay a visit to. A common theme around this decision was “it’s not that we don’t like ABC organization, just that we’re more excited about the project we could work on with XYZ.” Excitement was indeed in the air during our board meeting. Each group that presented was only allotted 25 minutes to present and discuss with the class, and I know everyone would have gladly gone over their limit if they could have. There are so many things happening in so many different areas in the social sector of Waco, and we probably could have spent at least another day telling each other about what we had found, the organizations we were moving forward with, and the extra time and money we wish we had in order to pursue all of the possibilities presented to us.

Perhaps the most significant thing to reflect upon now is the position we, as a class, are in. Andy brought it to our attention that our group of seventeen – 15 students, one graduate assistant, and one professor – now know more about the broad reaches of the social sector in Waco than anyone else. We have a unique “bird’s eye” perspective on everything going on in Waco due to our wide range of interests we’ve investigated. Now, not only do we have the money and motivation to create change in Waco, but an excellent vantage point from which to do so. We have the ability to think about collaborative grants, to pass an organization one group may have met with on to another group whose interests better align with that organization. Personally, I’m very excited to see what we can do to bring our interests together.

In the next week and half, we will be making our site visits. Everyone is very eager to move into this stage of the semester and get an inside view of organizations we’ve been looking into. I think the title of this post best sums up the kind of work we are beginning to do: not easier, but more exciting. It will not be easy to tackle wicked problems head-on, but we are excited to dive in. It will not be easy to narrow down our choice of projects, but we are excited to get closer with the organizations we will ultimately give a grant to.

Stay tuned for more updates and news about our on-site visits!

Strategic Next Steps

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Jacq Kasemsri, BBA 2018.

As the excitement from Pitch Day wears off, our class is now faced with the difficult next step: narrowing the organizations down. My group met with eight wonderful organizations and that’s not even counting the people that the other three groups met with. Each meeting on Pitch Day made us realize how many great philanthropies there are in Waco, but unfortunately our class has a finite amount of money to give.

In order to narrow our options down, our current readings are emphasizing the importance of making sure our contribution is impactful. One of our most recent readings from Peter Frumkins’s book, The Essence of Strategic Giving, focused on the task of the donor to know the ultimate goal of their giving. Each organization we talked to on pitch day came into the meeting with definitive projects that had end goals. However, it’s our job as donors to assess whether the donation they are asking for will contribute to them getting to their end goal. Not only do we have to analyze which contributions will be help an organization meet their end goal, but we must assess the end goal itself. There are many aspects of an ultimate goal that we have to consider. One is the feasibility of the objective; whether or not it can actually be achieved. There are many factors that can help or hinder the goals that were presented to us. One organization we talked to has been successful in 22 other countries and the Waco location will be their first site in the US. However, they face the obstacle of not having government programs here, which is how other locations have reached their target group. Another aspect we as donors must consider, is the effectiveness of the organization’s objective. A big theme we’ve talked about in class is generativity. Philanthropy emphasizes that we must not give to simply satisfy a need, but instead give to build a better community. A proverb that helps illustrate the concept of generativity is “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. As donors we are faced with the task of assessing the feasibility and generativity of each organizations mission.
In addition to discussing the importance of the organizations’ goals, we also have harped on the fact that we ourselves must have goals we want to achieve to through giving. Supposedly if we do both, we will be able to narrow down the organizations we want to donate to. I hope this will be the case, but after pitch day it seems like it’s going to be a hard process. It’s amazing how many philanthropies are doing great work for the Waco community. Regardless, with our budget we cannot help every organization. And so our task of narrowing them down begins.

Next Steps

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to a technical glitch, this is posting 10 days after it was written]

Ana O’Quin, BSW 2020

This week of class has been the hardest yet, not because of workload but because of our goal to start narrowing down organizations that we have decided to move forward with in our grant giving. “Chapter 2” of our Briefing Book is due this Sunday, and by then we hope to start visiting the sites of social sector organizations that we have chosen to give to. Yet choosing which organizations to visit has proven to be extremely challenging. When choosing, we use this algorithm: if we have a 50 percent or more chance of moving forward with them, we conduct a site visit.

Everything in me wants to say that I have a 100 percent chance of moving forward with every organization we have encountered. But I know that with 10,000 dollars, or with any amount of money for that matter, it is impossible to say yes to everyone. Yet these difficult discussions are the heart of philanthropy; as philanthropists, this semester, we are challenged to take the resources we have, no matter how big or small, and make the greatest amount of impact we can with them. My group has realized that no matter where we give our money, all these organizations are working towards the same goal: the bettering of the Waco community and in the process our greater society.

To try and start to make a seemingly impossible decision possible, my group operated on a few guidelines while making our decisions.

  • First, we ensured that we had collected as much knowledge as we could. We meticulously and thoroughly researched the issues we had chosen to focus on: sex trafficking, failures within the foster care system, and lack of education readiness. We learned as much as we could about their implications in Waco, Texas, and worldwide. Next we spent large amounts of time learning about the organizations that are working within these spheres. We spent time during “pitch-day” asking the heads of these organizations prepared questions to try to understand them even better.
  • Next we accepted the fact that no organization can permanently “fix” the issues that we are trying to tackle. As wicked problems, they are deeply rooted and intertwined, and will take years of collaboration to fix. These social sector organizations, can, however, move the needle on issues. Our eyes were out for organizations that were aiming to prevent, not simply reduce, needs.
  • Innovation was another key factor as we looked for organizations. These organizations don’t just “give a man a fish”, but “teach a man to fish.” More so, they are revolutionizing the whole fishing industry.
  • We looked for organizations that matched our passions with the needs of the community. Philanthropy is not about the grantee and the recipient, but about recognizing that both grant giver and receiver can learn and gain from each other.
  • Within the organizations, we looked for a few key factors: clear mission and vision, passion and organization within the executive director, skilled decision making, diverse board members, and financial sustainability.

The Dirty Work

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to a technical glitch, this is posting 10 days after it was written]

Katie Yarbro, SWO, 2017

From the beginning our class has known the task at hand and end goal–to financially gift a local non-profit with the purpose of assisting the good and hard work they are doing. With this in mind, we all began the semester with excitement to jump in and get our hands dirty! But before we could do this we spent weeks reading materials related to grant-making in order to be best prepared for the decisions we would make. While this was not the most enjoyable, it was definitely necessary prior to Pitch Day interviews.

Pitch Day was a great success that allowed us to hear first-hand from passionate experts about the work being done to eradicate the wicked problems that permeate our city and society at large. My group in particular is most interested in food insecurity.  It was fascinating to hear each grant proposal because it allowed us to learn more about the lens through which each organization sees the problem and also their particular approach to solving the problem.

As you can imagine, following Pitch Day came multiple lengthy discussions among our class about the intricacies of doing the most good with our allotted money. The challenge really began when it came down to sifting through the various organizations with our groups. The difficulty resided in the fact that we enjoyed and support every group we had the opportunity to meet, however, we realize we do not have the capacity to meet the needs of all.

Since our grouping, my group’s highest priority has been generativity. We desire for our grant(s) to not only impact us and our grantees, but also future generations from both sides of the relationship. We believe the most good is exemplified when a gift is granted and then expanded on through other resources to create something bigger and thus, more effective and impactful. We have identified several organizations who align with our group values and we are excited to take the next step in site visits, so stay tuned!

Pitch Day Reflections

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By: Abby Callison, BA 2018

Wow. Yesterday was a very exciting, somewhat overwhelming day. Yesterday was Pitch Day, in which, as a class, we met with about 32 nonprofit organizations. Each group had 8 or 9 meetings with organizations, each lasting 15 minutes, to learn more about each organization and ask questions about potential project proposals.

After the marathon of meetings, I now understand why we spent time thoughtfully preparing. The readings we’ve completed throughout the semester helped tremendously to narrow our focus in what kinds of questions we should spend our short 15 minutes asking. We also researched each organization beforehand, allowing us to tailor our questions to be more specific in order to more effectively use our time together. I’ve always been taught that “prior preparation prevents poor performance,” but yesterday was a clear example of the need for preparation to make the most meaningful use of the short time we had with each organization.

I left Pitch Day with a feeling of amazement at the number of organizations in Waco working tirelessly to address deep needs throughout the community. I also left with a feeling of gratitude, because each organization does so much more than what I originally thought. It’s easy to look at an organization and label it as a food pantry or a farm, for example, but each group contained so many different dimensions in the ways they work to meet the needs of Waco. They are involved in numerous projects and programs that I wasn’t aware existed. My eyes were opened not only to the vast range of needs in Waco, but also to the number of people working to meet those needs. I sincerely appreciated the representatives from each organization taking time to come share with us about their work, and I was inspired by seeing people who live out their calling. I love the quote by Frederick Buechner, in which he says, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Yesterday I was able to see multiple examples of people called to work to meet the deep needs of Waco.

Along with the feeling of amazement however, I also feel overwhelmed by how we can best give our resources to help the work of the organizations. It’s difficult because so many of them need resources to help them continue their work. I am grateful again for the preparation we have done so far and the time we will continue to spend in thoughtfully making this decision. We’ve spent time this semester looking at strategic giving. We must consider how our resources can be used most effectively to help further the mission of these nonprofit organizations, while keeping in mind our own values and goals of what we would like to accomplish in giving. I look forward to seeing how we can work together with these organizations to continue to meet important needs and strengthen the Waco community.