By: Reed Cooper, MTA 2018
As I sit here to write this I have just finished watching Villanova win the National Championship over Michigan. Personally, I am a huge basketball fan so I get wrapped up in the spirit of March Madness every year. I get completely invested in teams and storylines I have never heard of and probably won’t think about again once the tournament is over (Sister Jean at Loyola-Marymount, the UMBC Retrievers). I fill out a bracket and cheer fervently for teams I discovered days ago, ready to defend them to any doubter.
In our philanthropy course, we experienced our own sort of March Madness. The last class of February was pitch day, where over the course of two hours I quickly became familiar with 6 organizations, many of which I knew very little about going into the meetings. Then, just like my bracket, we had to begin a decision making process to narrow down these organizations and figure out who would move on to the next round. This first round became immediately tough. Each organization we met with had some great ideas and a mission that fit within the issues we were looking for.
When beginning to narrow things down to decide who we wanted to do site visits with, we came up with a few criteria for each organization to meet. First, we wanted to make sure that each proposal fit within one of the original issues our group sought to address (legal advocacy, cultural development, and food/water security). Once we determined that a proposal fit within the umbrella of our issues, we began to look to see if we believed our grant would go toward a project that met the goals we had for our grant. We wanted the money to go toward a new project and to something that would make a long-term sustainable impact. Using these criteria, we were able to decide on 3 organizations to continue this process with by making site visits. Continuing with the March Madness metaphor, this would be our “final four” (although we only had three groups).
Last week the NCAA Final Four occurred, as did our site visits. Our group was able to learn a lot more about these organizations and see exactly how the grant would be used. While this was extremely useful, in our case it just made the final decision even harder. While the NCAA tournament is now done, our final decision making process is just getting started. Every single group we have met with from the start had a great mission, so the metaphor somewhat falls apart here, because I definitely would not consider any of them a loser. However, we are definitely feeling the stress and now “April madness” that comes along with this tough selection process. I look forward to seeing the excitement at the end, and just like the basketball tournament, I am so thankful for everything I learned about each group along the way.