How To Be Great At Doing Good. Cooney Nick
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individual donors or volunteers – fail to set a “bottom line” for our work. Setting a bottom line can bring increased focus to our charity work and enable us to do more.
In Chapter Five we'll talk about the importance of efficiency, or doing the most good for the least amount of money. For donors and non-profit staffers alike, efficiency is everything if we want to change the world.
In Chapter Six we'll consider why the amount of money a non-profit receives has virtually no relationship to how much good it does. We'll look at how we as donors can incentivize non-profits to become great and the barriers we face in trying to make smart donor decisions.
In Chapter Seven we'll discuss some of the ways in which our brains seem to hardwire us to make poor charity choices. We'll identify the biases that threaten to steer us off course and show how we can outsmart our brains and achieve our charitable goals.
In Chapter Eight we'll put the advice we've been given about charity our whole lives under the microscope. Being able to identify and weed out advice that sounds good but isn't true can help pave the way for intelligent charity decisions.
In Chapter Nine we'll explore our unwillingness to admit what we don't know, and our tendency to let assumptions guide our charity decisions. Testing those assumptions can help non-profits become a lot more successful.
In Chapter Ten, the final chapter, we'll review how to be great at doing good. We'll outline nine steps for making smart charity decisions and empowering ourselves to do far more good with the time, money, and energy that each of us has.
The Challenge of “Why?”
Why donate to this charity and not that one? Why carry out this program and not that one? Why work in this charitable field and not another one?
When it comes to talking about charity, “Why?” is often the elephant in the room. Politeness and hesitancy to critique the seemingly well-intentioned actions of others often prevents the question from even reaching our lips. Asking it seems to go against the spirit of charity. It could lead to hurt feelings. It could also lead to our own charitable actions being called into question, and if that happens, we might find ourselves at a loss for answers. If we are serious about making the world a better place though, there is nothing more important than asking that fundamental question of all charitable decisions: “Why?”
This little book is intended as a challenge. It is a challenge to get serious about charity. The challenge rests on two premises:
1. The first premise is that the goal of charity is to make the world a better place. It is to help those who are suffering and to increase well-being.
2. The second premise is that in whatever capacity you carry out charity – as a donor, a volunteer, or a non-profit worker – you want to succeed as much as possible.
If you disagree – if you think that the goal of charity is to benefit yourself or if you don't care how much your charity work actually improves the world – then this book won't be of use to you.
But if you do agree, then the challenge of this book, and the challenge of charity, is simple: keep those two premises in mind at all times, ask “Why?” of all charitable decisions, and follow that path where it leads you. It's a path that's sometimes uncomfortable and often surprising, but it's well worth the effort. The further along the path we go, the more power we'll have to truly change the world for the better.
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Doing Good or Doing Great?
A Tale of Two Charities
In 1953, a former U.S. Naval Reserve officer and newspaper editor named W. McNeil Lowery took a job at the Ford Foundation. Launched by Ford Motor Company founders Edsel and Henry Ford, the Foundation's noteworthy achievements have included providing initial funding for the creation of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), helping launch the microloan movement of providing small loans to the global poor, helping launch civil rights groups like the Mexican American Legal Education and Defense Fund and the National Council of La Raza, and playing a major role in funding research to fight the AIDS epidemic.
But Lowery, whose personal background included contributing to and editing literary and theater journals, is credited with helping steer a portion of Ford Foundation funding toward a new area: the arts. After providing initial modest funding to orchestras and operas in the late 1950s, the Foundation distributed $6 million in grants to repertory theatres in 1962 and nearly $8 million in grants to major ballet organizations in 1963, with major gifts to support the performing arts continuing in the following years. By the time Lowery passed away in 1993, the Ford Foundation had become the largest non-governmental supporter of the arts in the United States. So crucial was Lowery's role in this shift that Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, called Lowery “the single most influential patron of the performing arts that the American democratic system has produced” (Anderson, 1993).
At the same time as Lowery began to direct millions of dollars toward theater, dance, and other performing arts organizations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he became concerned about what he saw as a lack of cooperation and communication among such organizations. So in 1961 the Ford Foundation made a commitment to spend a quarter of a million dollars over the next four years helping to establish and launch a new non-profit called the Theatre Communications Group (TCG). The goal of TCG would be to improve communication between theaters and theater workers around the country so that they could learn from one another and bring the entire field of non-profit theater to greater levels of professionalism and success.
Fifty years later, the Theatre Communications Group still carries on that mission. Today TCG's operating budget hovers near the $10 million mark, and it has expanded its work into a range of areas: hosting national conferences and conducting research studies, providing $2 million in grants each year to individuals and theaters, publishing the works of hundreds of playwrights and other theater professionals, producing magazines and bulletins that serve as essential reading for those who work in or want to work in the theater industry, and advocating on Capitol Hill for increased federal funding of the theater arts.
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