At the start of the semester, I thought I had an idea of the organization we would donate to. It had to be an “everything” organization, with a low budget, great results, transparent and organized. I thought that it would be easy to pick one if not two organizations, to receive funding. Not only was I wrong but I was far from understanding what is important to me and what is it I value. It is difficult to choose based on objectiveness because each organization means different things to everyone. It is not a matter of what non-profit is more important but what is the most needed in the community. Philanthropy means supporting an organization that would do the best job getting to the root of the problem. I went into discussion already set in my ways, having already voted for Family Planning and VINES but halfway in I started to become conflicted.
People brought up really good points in favor of RISE, which in my opinion I felt was not as needed as Family Planning’s health care plan. Arguments such as the trauma and damage staying with an abuser can do to a child or that the few moments a victim has to talk to a counselor could save their life. I wanted Family Planning to win but who was I to deny that mental health is just as important as physical health, if not more? The invisible scars can permanently damage a person and without funding, I was afraid the organization would not survive past the pandemic. That would be robbing the community of a haven for survivors and that did not seem right to me.
VINES, in my opinion, was an essential organization during this pandemic. As I have stated before, the Coronavirus weighed heavily in my decision, and VINES’ reaction to the pandemic made me immediately pick them. One thing people need to live aside from healthcare was access to real food. During this pandemic where everyone is being laid off from their jobs, it would be tough to afford healthy food to feed one’s children. Especially since they started to deliver food to people’s doorsteps to make sure they have the food they need. Their budget was only about 7 grand and the storage container that they’d buy could afford to store more food for longer. VINES also teaches the community how to grow their own food which is imperative in terms of social distancing. It was clear to me why this would be a finalist in my opinion therefore I was not surprised others shared my sentiment.
In conclusion, I had a lot of fun learning about philanthropy and non-profit organizations. Although I am a little disappointed, I think RISE and VINES are both very important organizations in the community and I know they’ll do great work in the future. I hope through funding them they continue to make a difference in the lives of those they help and I wish to support them further in the future.
Zaria Miller
People brought up really good points in favor of RISE, which in my opinion I felt was not as needed as Family Planning’s health care plan. Arguments such as the trauma and damage staying with an abuser can do to a child or that the few moments a victim has to talk to a counselor could save their life. I wanted Family Planning to win but who was I to deny that mental health is just as important as physical health, if not more? The invisible scars can permanently damage a person and without funding, I was afraid the organization would not survive past the pandemic. That would be robbing the community of a haven for survivors and that did not seem right to me.
VINES, in my opinion, was an essential organization during this pandemic. As I have stated before, the Coronavirus weighed heavily in my decision, and VINES’ reaction to the pandemic made me immediately pick them. One thing people need to live aside from healthcare was access to real food. During this pandemic where everyone is being laid off from their jobs, it would be tough to afford healthy food to feed one’s children. Especially since they started to deliver food to people’s doorsteps to make sure they have the food they need. Their budget was only about 7 grand and the storage container that they’d buy could afford to store more food for longer. VINES also teaches the community how to grow their own food which is imperative in terms of social distancing. It was clear to me why this would be a finalist in my opinion therefore I was not surprised others shared my sentiment.
In conclusion, I had a lot of fun learning about philanthropy and non-profit organizations. Although I am a little disappointed, I think RISE and VINES are both very important organizations in the community and I know they’ll do great work in the future. I hope through funding them they continue to make a difference in the lives of those they help and I wish to support them further in the future.
Zaria Miller
Thank you Zaria!
ReplyDeleteThis was a great way to help sum up the course, as well as a part of my own dilemma in decision-making. I never doubted that we would choose to support an organization that was doing the right things, and providing for the community, however I will still say that I am a little disappointed.
I knew that the class had intended on supporting VINES, and I was all for that. VINES is providing life-saving resources to the members of the community that people would normally never be able to afford, but Family Planning does the same thing. I disagree when some people say that reproductive health is less of a concern than others. RISE is an amazing organization that also provides necessary services, but I simply believe that increasing people's access to healthcare will have a longer-term impact on more people than RISE's "Write it Out" program. I would never suggest that it is not effective, but in my opinion, there are immediate needs in the COVID situation, and I am disappointed that Family Planning was cut out by such a close percentage.
I really appreciate that you were able to convey that you were conflicted, but were able to see the benefits of supporting RISE over Family Planning. I have no doubt that they will use the donations well and I hope that it supports as many people as possible.
Hey Zaria! I really enjoyed reading your reflection because I feel exactly the same way. When we first started with this course, I had the same viewpoint that the organization we decided to donate to needed to be this "perfect" organization that was super effective, small and transparent, but that changed over the course of our class discussions. I too was pretty dead set on voting for Family Planning before our final discussions, but people made such convincing arguments that I actually ended up supporting RISE in the end. As Brendan mentioned it's really tough to say that one is more important than the other, but after hearing everyone's points I felt that they were addressing more pressing problems with everything going on with COVID. VINES, as pretty much everyone agreed, is definitely providing an essential service that is saving lives, without them who knows how those families would feed themselves. I too hope they make good use of our donation, and continue to help those in need as they have been.
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ReplyDeleteHi Zaria! It was very interesting to get an insight into how the decision-making process went for you and how similar our experiences were. I am also very much a strong supporter of Family Planning both in and out of the classroom. You had mentioned in your post that you wanted to support RISE as well because you felt as if you were robbing domestic abuse victims of their safe haven. I completely understand why you might’ve felt this way because it’s easy to become attached to organizations and their impact on the community, however, there are consequences to thinking that it’s your sole responsibility. As a donor, you’re forced to weigh the costs and benefits of choosing to donate to one charity over another. The way I thought about it in making my final decision is that all these organizations are going to continue helping the community with or without our funding. There is the fear that some organizations will have budget cuts because they rely on a number of participants to receive certain funding, however, its important to note that your personal preference is an outcome of your values and experiences. Which is why donors formulate personal connections with the charities they choose to donate to. Given the opportunity to evolve into philanthropists outside of the classroom, we’ll come to understand that we can’t fight all of the world’s battles so we should start with the ones that hit close to home(yourself).
ReplyDeleteHi Zaria! I appreciated your comments on the final decision-making. It was shocking to see how the class was completely divided over the two organizations. At the end, we had drifted away from the idea of an "everything" organization and to one that most served COVID-19. I wonder what it would have been like during normal times to make the grant decision. I think that we would have considered Camp Awhaga and Urban League more. I hope that future classes consider organizations that provide aid to the well being of the community members by supporting arts, enjoyment, etc like Diana Brown had suggested in the beginning of class.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I am happy with our decision. Family Planning (FP) and RISE are both organizations that do a significant amount of good for the community. FP provides sexual healthcare to those without insurance. RISE will aid in the anticipated surge in domestic violence victims. That does seem to be the pressing issue right now. I found it to be difficult to decide myself considering all of the great points raised in class. It feels strange that I don't feel as sure of my decision as I thought I would at the beginning of the class. The fact that it was so divided makes it feel unresolved. If we had more time and money I would considered all 3 organizations.
-Bridget
This is a nice summary of the shift in perspectives we saw over the course of the semester! I agree with you, at the beginning of the semester I thought that there would be clear and obvious answers as to who would be best to donate to, and we could get these answers just by gathering information and data on them and looking at them objectively. And while this was true to some extent, in that we were able to reject some organizations from our original list of grant applicants because of things like how efficiently they used our money based on financial data, there turned out to be a lot more nuance for evaluating the rest of the organizations. We learned in this class, especially by practicing every week with voting for charity pitches, that there are many organizations that are financially efficient and transparent, and that often one of the most impactful factors in deciding who to donate to is just personal preference. This can be based on things like emotional connection and personal experience. As a result, our decision between VINES, RISE and Family Planning was largely based on how important we thought the issues they addressed were. This is why our discussion about who would receive the second largest donation often came back to the importance of mental health versus physical health.
ReplyDeleteThe other big thing that changed our approach to the donation was, as you said, the coronavirus pandemic. Organizations that were otherwise great but were not helping to address problems that were being worsened by the pandemic, or were losing their ability function due to things like social distancing, ended up being rejected from our donation decision. Camp Ahwaga was widely popular in the class before the pandemic, and if it wasn't for the pandemic Camp Ahwaga could've definitely been one of our top two and received a donation from us. However, since it was forced to close for the summer because of COVID, it became one of our least favorite finalist choices. This shows that the class values immediate use of the money by the organization to address this crisis, rather than donating money that would be used in a year once the pandemic is over. At the end of the day, I'm sad that Family Planning didn't win the second-place vote but I agree with you that VINES and RISE are very valuable organizations and will use the money to do great things.
Hey Zaria! Thank you so much for sharing, I like knowing that I am not the only one who had a major change in the perspective I took in choosing an organization. I know for me, I had kind of a close-minded, almost pompous attitude that we absolutely HAD to donate to a single organization, I remember I kept saying it would be a "cop out" if we had split up the money, because then it wouldn't be a real conclusion to our decision. In the end, I could not have been more wrong, after the whole pandemic crisis began, I realized that splitting up the money would do much more good than if we were to only choose one organization, I know feel foolish knowing how gung-ho I was about only choosing a single organization. Also, that ties in well with my "everything" organization, I really had thought I would choose one and stick to it but yet again I was proven wrong. It had seemed though as for the class, VINES was the closest thing to our "everything" organization simply based on how well it fit the needs of the community in this unprecedented situation. As for RISE and Family Planning, I do agree that health care is more important and I had chosen Family Planning as second but even though it wasn't chosen, at least it went to another amazing organization. Thank you again for sharing!
ReplyDeleteHey Zaria! I like how you note what your expectations were for our "perfect" organization. I think that throughout the semester, we saw a lot of emphasis be put on a few criteria, and it seems that philanthropic organizations are held to a much higher standard than most other programs. We briefly discussed how organizations are expected to have low overhead costs, which may be one of the reasons why employees in the public sector are often underpaid, but we never really discussed how to change this. For our class, the big categories of complete transparency and low budget eventually fell away as we continued to have discussions with those who run our finalist organizations. This goes to show that philanthropy is, at its core, a human interaction, and as we grew to know the leadership and the missions of our finalists, we were able to put more trust in them and be confident that our donations would be in good hands. I hope that we can all have peace of mind in knowing that, in some ways, our decision did go to "everything' organizations, because it went to people who are passionate and deliberate with their cause. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThis was a really great summary of the transformation my thoughts underwent throughout the course. In the beginning it seemed like we were all hoping for the ‘best’ organization to just appear in our application submissions, but there truly is no such thing as a perfect organization. Charity Navigator rates charities based on two criteria: financial health and accountability and transparency (https://www.charitynavigator.org/). Even with intense evaluation of those criteria, there are still over one hundred charities with a four star rating, many of which have a perfect score of 100 (https://www.charitynavigator.org/). If there was such thing as a perfect organization, it would be amongst these amazing charities—but this actually supports the fact that there is truly no such thing as a perfect organization.
ReplyDeleteIf there was one perfect organization, there would only be one 100-scoring charity, but instead there’s dozens. It could be argued that there is one perfect organization per type of charity, but there are multiple 100’s that combat the same issues. Plus, even if there was one perfect organization per charity type then how could one weigh each issue against each other? That was the issue our class faced—as you pointed out, going into the final decision making it was clear that VINES would receive the bulk of our funding, but it was unclear if RISE or Family Planning would receive the remainder of the funds. As Zaria did, I also voted for Family Planning over RISE, a decision that took a lot out of me as it felt like I was weighing the right for medical care over the right to have an abuse free environment. Both are equally worthy causes and are very necessary to have in Broome County, but there was no true way to weigh the organizations unobjectively because there is no such thing as the perfect organization. I had to look into how I felt about their program funding requests rather than the organizations themselves because there was no way I could value one of the causes above the other. I am almost glad there is no such thing as a perfect organization, because it simply proves how amazing the nonprofit work being done in Broome County truly is.
Sabrina Reba
Hi Zaria, I really enjoyed reading your post and agree with your sentiments. I felt the same way about Family Planning and VINES. Throughout the class, I was starting to see why people voted for RISE but I still wanted to vote for Family Planning. It was so interesting to see how close the votes were. It was insightful when different students spoke up and we debated between RISE and Family Planning. However, I thought that we'd have heated debates way earlier in the semester! I am excited that we were able to support the Hoop House for VINES and excited to see how they operate over the next few years. I'm so glad that we were able to learn about these organizations and help people in the community.
ReplyDeleteHi Zaria,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that coming into this course, I had thought that there had to be an “everything” organization, with a low budget, great results, transparent and organized. I had thought that making a decision to choose one organization would have been obvious because it would be "calling" to us. However, through the course of this semester, I realized there is so much more to philanthropy than just assessing the organization. We had to take into account the current situation, the needs of the community, and compare organizations with each other to decide whether we wanted to support larger or smaller organizations. I have come to realize the importance of so many other aspects in philanthropy during this course. I also wanted Family Planning to be one of the finalists because I truly believe that reproductive health is an issue that is widely overlooked even in today's society. The occurrence of the pandemic truly affected the decision of the class, because I remember the avid support for Camp Ahwaga in the beginning of the semester, yet after they had reported due to the situation this year they would not be able to hold their camp, a lot of us reconsidered our choices. That is not to say that we didn't love what each organization did, because clearly we all had a difficult time choosing between them, but it was unfortunately due to the fact that we had to consider the impact of the grant on each organization, and giving it to an organization which would not be able to utilize it fully this year was something we had to pay attention to. This goes for the last minute increase in support for RISE as well. The current situation with social isolation will no doubt lead to more domestic violence victims being unable to find help and escape their perpetrators, and therefore this strongly influenced our class' decision to fund RISE as well as VINES, both of which were incredible organizations which would directly help address the issues that would drastically increase with the effects of this pandemic. I have to admit I was also slightly disappointed that Urban League was not chosen as one of the finalists, as it also addresses the needs of the local community, but I am glad to know that our grant money is still making a significant and positive difference through two, well-put together organizations.
Hey Zaria I thought this was a great post! What you said in the beginning about thinking that we would find the "perfect" organization really resonated with me. I thought too that we would find an organization that met all of our requirements, however I also quickly learned that a lot of my ideas about philanthropy were misguided. I too was in favor of doing both VINES and Family Planning, but what you said about RISE and making sure people are mentally healthy is a great point. Sometimes we, myself included, put physical health ahead of mental well being while both are equally important and connected. I was also worried that RISE would not survive the pandemic but what we heard from the site visit as well as the follow up session was encouraging. I agree as well that VINES is an essential program to support during the pandemic, especially in Broome county with its high numbers of food insecurity. Overall, I really enjoyed your post and relate to a lot of what you said!
ReplyDeleteHey Zaria! I think your post reflects what a lot of us felt during the class. Although, unlike you, I did not have any idea of how I was going to make a decision, or any idea of what kind of organization I would prefer, before the class started. As a freshman, I felt like I really did not know much about Broome yet, and of course I did not know anything about philanthropy. I was worried that I wasn't informed enough to choose. Like you, my understanding of community needs and charity evaluation grew. I like that, although we all took the same class, everyone still has somewhat different views on philanthropy. As you said, it is hard to be objective. Our decisions were shaped by the strategies we learned as well as our core values.
ReplyDeleteThat is what made our final decision discussions so interesting. We were not all 100% on the same page. There wasn't one clear, right answer about who to give the money to. I really liked hearing everyone's ideas and I think we did a good job of actually listening to each other and taking things into fair consideration. A lot of people, myself included, went back and forth on our top choices. However, I know that, like you, everyone can be satisfied with the final result. The collaborative nature of the class meant that we also reached a fair consensus on what the top five would be earlier in the semester, so we knew they were all good choices. Even if VINES and RISE weren't someone's top pick we know they will both do a lot of good for the community.