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.