Author Archives: justin_pittman

A Simple Message

Date
Posted by
Comments0

By: Justin Pittman, BBA 2017

Thanksgiving has always been a time of reflection for me. Momentarily, the busy machinery of life seemingly comes to a halt, giving me an opportunity to remember the blessings that have built and sustained me. These include my family, great food, the roof over my head, and much more. This time of the year always comes and goes quicker than I would like, and I am already lamenting the inevitable finals season during which recognition of all these gifts is usually sacrificed to a single-minded focus on the task at hand.

However, I have a feeling that the spirit of thankfulness during this year’s holiday was a little more prevalent not only for myself but for everyone that has benefited from this class this semester. Just knowing that I was a small part of a process that will end up allocating $60,000 to 11 very deserving and admirable organizations has changed my outlook considerably, and I imagine it has done the same for many of my classmates. Notifying our recipient organizations and hearing their overjoyed responses was also something I know my team and I relished, and doing this furthered our belief that the work we did all semester was more meaningful than we could have ever understood at the beginning.

These past few months have probably been some of the most contentious, hostile, and challenging times that this nation has faced in quite a while. The election season helped awaken my awareness of the political and social realities of our country like never before, and I largely do not like what I’ve seen. With this in mind, I don’t think taking this class could have come at a better time for me. Being allowed to develop my self-awareness and philosophy of giving while working towards making a real-world difference on our community has helped me overlook the pettiness and ugliness that this election has shown me that humanity is capable of. Everyone I have met and worked with throughout this process has been a paradigm of what it means to be a loving, hopeful, and compassionate person. Regardless of what your opinions are on what’s been happening on a macro level in the United States, there is no doubt that amazing things are happening on a micro level within our own community.

Before I started writing this post, I struggled trying to frame my thoughts within an overarching universal takeaway that was both inspiring and revelatory. I wanted some grand truth to pop into my mind and pinpoint exactly what I’ve learned from this experience. However, in my current state of mind, there is just a simple message that I wanted to express through what you’re reading now. This message is nothing more than “thank you.” To everyone who made and will continue to make this program such a success, thank you for having faith in students like me to make such difficult and impactful decisions. Never doubt the power of philanthropy to change lives; I know it has changed mine.

Process of Illumination

Date
Posted by
Comments0

By: Justin Pittman, BBA 2017

While learning about eight wonderful nonprofit organizations recently, it was easy to get carried away in imagining endless possibilities for philanthropy with all of them. Each project we were presented with had merit and contributed towards causes my team and I believed were important and compelling. Every individual we met spoke directly from the heart, conveying a captivating passion for their work, the city of Waco, and humanity in general. Regardless of the manner in which each organization I heard from chooses to bring about positive change in Waco, I am sincerely impressed with all of them and saw direct links between the money we could potentially contribute and the benefits the organization and Waco at large would receive.

Last Thursday, however, reality struck. $50,000 is a great deal of money, but it’s not nearly enough to fulfill all the funding needs that the nonprofits we have corresponded with are requesting. Although the trees that adorn our campus are quite lovely, money certainly doesn’t grow on them. Therefore, we have begun the process of moving from receptiveness to all the options presented to us towards considering how to allocate our resources as strategically and mindfully as possible. This involves making some difficult decisions in order to narrow our list of possible organizations with the eventual goal of making sizable impacts on each organization we end up giving to.

With every organization being perfectly worthy of grants to support their mission, how are these decisions supposed to be made? After all, we are all newcomers to grantmaking and don’t have experience with weighing criteria between different grant proposals. What we do have to offer is a group consensus of how we’re hoping to transform Waco through our monetary gifts. Because we were given ample opportunities for self-examination of our values and beliefs from the beginning, we all entered this process with a solid sense of personal identity. I was fortunate enough to be placed in a team in which it was immediately apparent what our mutual areas of interest were. By examining how well each organization’s ambitions align with my team’s collective vision, the screening process we used to shrink our list of potential grant recipients was much less painful than I anticipated.

An exciting development took place towards the end of Thursday’s session when three of our class’s four teams, including my own, discovered we all had mutual interest in the same organization. It was amazing seeing the classroom suddenly transform from four isolated pods into two groups, one large and one small. Before we even knew what hit us, the money on the table tripled from $10,000 in each group to $30,000. However, I know this may come at a price. With each team possessing their own set of philanthropic goals, the distribution of my team’s funds would no longer exclusively be in our hands if we decide to pursue this. If my team does undertake the opportunity to collaborate with other teams, we will need to ensure that our priorities are reflected in the grant that is written alongside the other teams’ priorities in an equitable fashion.

As we continue moving towards the ultimate goal of granting real money to deserving organizations, I hope to confront challenging decisions not as a roadblock to be overcome but as a passageway into better opportunities. Choosing from a pool of qualified organizations isn’t easy, but we’re already starting to generate new ideas for giving that weren’t visible to us when the range of possibilities was so expansive. Because of this, I think the next few weeks will feel less like an excruciating process of elimination and more like a process of illumination that sparks our creativity and leads us towards using our gifts as wisely and effectively as possible.