By: Lucy Bray
This week was a crucial one for our class, as we completed the process of visiting organizations at their sites. We learned more about the mission and purpose each organization seeks to fulfill, and we experienced the atmosphere their work creates. We also began to more concretely envision how our grants could make a difference in the Waco community.
It was a meaningful week, but a difficult one; our team has started to realize what a monumental task we have before us. Though we have yet to break down all the logistics, there doesn’t yet seem to be a way to make our grant stretch far enough to accomplish all the good we’d like to do, and to meet all the needs of the incredible organizations we’ve had the privilege of visiting.
The earlier part of the semester has prepared us for this moment; we knew that there would be tough calls to make. There was no way, however, that our discussions could have prepared us for how personal our grant-making journey would become. We’ve started to see Waco through the eyes of our organizations. We see its potential, its movement, its struggles and triumphs. An alignment has developed, and our optimistic visions are now more unified with their projects.
Our reality has set in: that more money, time, resources, people would still not meet all of the demands of a growing community and a necessitous world. There will always be someone else we could help and more good we could do. Taken in a negative light, this deficit would be quite discouraging; it would run philanthropists in a race against need that never ends. If taken in a positive, better light, the continuous room for improvement means that there will always be ways in which people can form new connections through mutual effort to make things better.
The incredible impact this class is supposed to have is not intended to be limited to one semester alone, or to one team and one grant. As fledgling philanthropists, the inspiration we receive from this course should be carried forward into our lives and careers. We can continue to be change-makers and grant-givers, but only if we continue to be dissatisfied with the problems we encounter.
Knowing that our work does not stop at the end of this class, we will make our grants at the end of this semester with peace of heart and mind. Even if we cannot do all the good we’d like, we can be confident that the good we’ll do is deliberate, strategic, and thoughtful. We will each plan to accomplish more with our lives, and we will hold each other accountable for our commitments. We will watch as our grants make tangible change in their recipient organizations and in the Waco community, and it will be the first evidence that we can carry with us that our altruism makes a difference.
Our reality will be then be changed; the amount that we can give in time, talent, or treasure may not address all of the world’s problems, but it will seem sufficient.