Harper McGee, BBA 2018
At the beginning of the semester, each student wrote a paper around the issues that he or she felt passionate about and wanted to focus on this semester. The focus of my paper was that many children were not receiving full opportunities to succeed and lead a fulfilling life. Although my overarching theme was opportunities for children, it involved the topics of education, poverty, and intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Based on these papers, Professor Hogue divided the class into different teams comprised of students with common interests. My team quickly realized that we all wanted to focus on helping children. However, some members of my team also emphasized the importance of arts and culture. Although before this course, I had never fully understood the importance of arts and culture, through research, I soon realized just how important arts and culture in a child’s life could be. A lack of arts education could lead to lower performance in school, and poor education could lead to an increase risk of poverty, but poverty could lead to a lack of arts education. This vicious cycle is important and is a reality in Waco. Once everyone on my team discovered this importance, we decided that our focus would be on arts and culture.
Next, my team met many incredible organizations that were changing the arts and culture scene in Waco. Yet because there were so many incredible organizations and because we only had a limited amount of money to grant, this created a problem. Each organization was doing good in the community in very unique ways, and it seemed impossible to narrow it down.
Since all of the organizations seemed worthy of a grant, my team decided to narrow in on the organizations whose goals we felt best aligned with our original goal of not only developing arts and culture in Waco, but also helping children in poverty. We went forward with the organizations that were actively working to help expand arts education to children in poverty in Waco.
Now that my team narrowed our focus based on the organization’s goals, we are trying to learn more about the specific projects that each organization is proposing. We are doing this by following the logic model described in The Essence of Strategic Giving by Peter Frumkin. Through the logic model my team is able to think through the outputs, or logistics, and the long-term outcomes of the project we are granting. Even though the organizations seem to align with my team’s goals, we need to make sure that each of the project’s potential outcomes also align.
Although we still have many unanswered questions about the specific projects being proposed, I am confident that we will learn all that we need to learn in the next couple of weeks in order to be strategic in our giving. I am very excited to see where this process takes us.