Philanthropy 101: Classes Hit Campus

By Shikha Dalal

College students in New England are quickly learning that giving money away is no easy task; a new grantmaking initiative focused on the education sector is making sure of that. According to a recent Boston Globe article, corporate and family foundations have begun investing in philanthropy education at more than 10 New England colleges including Brandeis, Holy Cross, Boston College, Wheelock and Lesley.  This investment has allowed focused classes to be offered at these institutions, response to a surging interest in social responsibility among college students.  Courses are designed specifically for professors to teach financial morality in the realm of philanthropy – instructing students to give away money responsibly and having them actively engage in and experience the process of managing public-private relationships. 

Here’s how it started: The Sunshine Lady Foundation (established by Doris Buffett – that’s Warren’s sister) has granted colleges $10,000 a year to disperse since 2003.  The Foundation’s Learning by Giving program allows students to practice the creation of mission statements for makeshift foundations and research nonprofits in local communities.  Throughout the course students spend about two months engaged in the work, debating the priorities of the community, and ultimately decide upon how to allocate the pot of money.

Now the program is expanding into academic institutions for graduate and undergraduate programs, supporting the notion that the ever-growing field of philanthropy continues to professionalize.  The growing interest of Generation Y searching for employers who are socially conscious has translated into the academic environment.  It is in this environment where they seek to learn these relevant skills that will help build the foundations, no pun intended, of their knowledge about the foundations, philanthropies, and nonprofits in their communities. 

The proactive experience of creating and following a project from inception to completion has left students feeling accountable for the work they are investing in the community.  In addition to the preparation for careers in the field, the tangible exercise of giving away real money added to the students’ awareness and gave each a socially conscious perspective of the concerns in the areas where they live and study.
Keep us posted on any interesting academic courses that have left you feeling more than inspired!

Impersonal Education?

By Adrienne Villani

Re-posted with permission from http://beyondprofitmag.com/

Ed. Note: Adrienne Villani from Beyond Profit is back with a fascinating post about the growing trend of "paraskilling" in emerging markets.  Enjoy the post, and tell us what you think about paraskilling - by commenting below, or by contacting Adrienne at adrienne.villani@intellecap.net. 

I think we can all agree on the merits of market-based solutions. They have attracted strong interest in the campaign against global poverty. They give low-income people better access to socially beneficial products and services. These services genuinely and directly improve the quality of life and livelihood for the poor. And the list could continue...

After recently reading Monitor’s "Emerging Markets, Emerging Models" Report , I was particularly taken by the concept of paraskilling. It was new to me, and it really struck a chord!

Essentially, paraskilling is when a service or a process is reengineered such that it can be performed by much lower-skilled workers. Tasks are disaggregated, simplified, standardized, and broken into discreet parts. Workers without specialized qualification can perform these tasks on a high-volume basis many times per shift or per day.

My initial reaction was, “oh yeah, you go get ‘em” paraskilling.  I thought it a savior, that which we had all been waiting for. It could easily be applicable to healthcare, education, financial services.

In the main example cited in the Monitor Report, Gyan Shala, an Ahmedabad-based NGO provider of primary education to the poor, has started 330 one-room schools, located primarily in slum districts, that cater to 8,000 children whose households earn between INR 2,000 and INR 6,000 ($40-$120) per month. Gyan Shala schools teach children in grades 1-3 at a monthly cost of $3, roughly a quarter of the cost of a government school and about a sixth of the cost of a recognized private school.  Most parents pay INR 30 ($0.60) per month per student because school budgets are often subsidized by third-party funds to ensure affordability.

Gyan Shala teachers follow a standardized curriculum and lesson plans, which are supplemented by extensive learning aids and continuous monitoring of classroom processes for regular staff feedback. Junior teachers, who teach for just 3 hours a day, deliver lessons out of highly-structured workbooks.
These junior teachers are recruited from the community in which the school is located, which is incredibly advantageous. They can relate well to their students, increasing children’s willingness to learn.

They are provided with formal employment and a steady income. Their status increases in their community. Since they only work for 3 hours each day, time remains for them to accomplish their other household tasks.

The employer benefits because, generally, wage rates for skilled workers are the greatest fixed cost. With lower-skilled workers, wages are lower.

At first glance, particularly for me, paraskilling looks like a panacea!

But upon further thought, I have one main concern. You all may completely rebut me, and, in fact, I hope you do.  But doesn’t this model lose sight of the bond that forms between student and teacher, especially in younger age groups?  I still remember that bond with my first and second grade teachers, Mrs. Scharf and Mrs. Stevens. And that was almost 20 years ago!  They taught me to read and to write in cursive script - but most of all, even from that young age, they made me want to always learn more.

Admittedly, I am probably being nit-picky and losing sight of the larger goal, which is educating children in order to pull them out of poverty.   But, I’m just not sure about the efficacy of giving students 20 minute lessons - each taught by a different teacher - multiple times a day.  A strong rapport is just not built between student and teacher.

And you may say, “Yes, Adrienne, but having multiple teachers is better than not having one at all.  Look at all the other good coming from this concept. The positive far outweighs the negative.” And you are probably right, but I still worry. Education - at every level, in every grade - is about relationship-building.
I also worry about the passion of these lower-skilled teachers. They are teaching to earn an income, not because of a passion for pedagogy. A child becomes passionate about something when a teacher is passionate.

I am probably jumping the gun here on education in India because, first we need to get the basics right. The needs are different in low-income markets. We need to increase literacy, we need to keep kids in school, we need to make sure that teachers show up. But I do think it is worth a thought.

United We Serve: What Will You Do?

First Lady Michelle Obama officially launched the “United We Serve” American summer service campaign yesterday at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in San Francisco.  The Chronicle of Philanthropy quotes her as sharing that “This new Obama administration doesn’t view service as something separate from our national priorities.  We have an administration that understands that service is the key to achieving our national priorities.”   

FLiPs: How do you plan to harness the energy of the campaign – and that stemming from the passage of the Serve America Act – to meet the social goals of your foundations, companies, and nonprofits?  We want to hear from you!

Background on the campaign: The “United We Serve” initiative will run from June 22 to September 11.  A  government website, serve.gov, has allied with All for Good, a new online volunteer-recruiting tool designed by technology and nonprofit representatives from Google, the Craigslist Foundation, and YouTube; it’s hosted by Google.  Volunteer activities can be found on the site, which is operated by the Corporation for National and Community Service.  The project is governed by Our Good Works, a new nonprofit.  Open-source technology is utilized, so that groups or individuals can develop new ways to use the data.  Tool kits will be housed on serve.gov too, to guide people in project creation and execution.

NYC Fundraising Event Helps Make Dreams a Reality

By Jordan Walker

 

As all FLiPs know, we face a unique set of challenges as young professionals in the workforce.  Inspired to make a difference in the world, we are sometimes limited by a lack of tools to do so early in our careers.

Kerry Powers can relate.  A recent graduate of Bucknell University, she came up with the concept for a cocktail party benefiting Right to Dream, an organization that trains youth in Ghana to become competitive soccer players in the U.S. and abroad while also providing them with the opportunity to get great educations at U.S. prep schools and colleges.  The event was designed as a parent-child cocktail party through which more seasoned professionals were incentivized to bring along their young adult children for multi-generational networking.  In turn, all proceeds were donated to the Right to Dream Academy, whose beneficiary students peppered the crowd and talked about their experiences and opportunities as a result of the organization’s impact in their lives.  Right to Dream Academy has achieved much, and the more than $65,000 raised will help the organization continue to go far: Right to Dream is looking to develop new facilities in Ghana as well as expand to a women’s program or add additional sports.

The event committee was comprised of fifteen young men and women who were able to mobilize their energy around professional aspirations to develop their philanthropic ones as well.  Each member was charged with a role that tied a career track with its philanthropic equivalent; for example, an aspiring lawyer headed up the Child Sponsorship program and a fundraising consultant served as Board Liaison.  These young professionals, who before the Right to Dream event knew little about the organization and even less about philanthropy, now find themselves engaged and knowledgeable.

In all, the event was a sure success: it reached maximum capacity of over 250 attendees, raised more than $65,000, and empowered a set of Millennials to better understand and utilize philanthropy to achieve good.

For more information about Right to Dream or to see additional pictures from the event, please visit: www.righttodream.com

A Third Way

By Adrienne Villani

Re-posted with permission from http://beyondprofitmag.com/

Ed. Note: FLiP is pleased to bring you the first post in what we hope will be a continued guest-posting relationship with our new friends at Beyond Profit.  This new social enterprise magazine seeks to bring readers the most interesting and unique stories, people and ideas from the social enterprise sector.  As a special offer in celebration of its launch, Beyond Profit is currently extending free one-year subscriptions to those who subscribe before June 30th; after that date, the regular USD 20 rate will apply.  Subscribe here, enjoy Beyond Profit, and enjoy the post below!  You may contact author Adrienne Villani at adrienne.villani@intellecap.net.  

If you are at all interested in the “development conversation,” you could not have missed the Canadian doubles match that was played last week between Dambisa Moyo and William Easterly on one side versus Jeffrey Sachs on the other. It has been more exciting than watching Roger Federer win his first French Open (albeit without defeating Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros) and tie Pete Sampras’s record of 14 majors. What started out as a critique of Dambisa Moyo and her new book “Dead Aid” by Jeffrey Sachs morphed into a full-on war - Jeffrey Sachs and the pro-aid establishment vs. William Easterly and the aid skeptics. (Somehow, Moyo and her book have been lost in the fray.) It started on the Huffington Post but crept into mainstream media and even Twitter!

These two scholars have tried to make the aid debate black and white.  If you are pro-aid, you are somehow painted as a rent-seeking idealist (ironic, I know). If you are against it, you somehow want Africa to starve, both literally and metaphorically. But the debate around aid needs to be viewed on a spectrum: there is more to this than meets the eye. In fact, although aid has its obvious shortfalls, it broadly works: poverty would be higher in the absence of aid. We must look beyond reasons why aid has failed to reasons why aid has not worked better.

(I also happen to believe that Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly are not diametrically opposed, but often, for shock value, purposely “misinterpret” each other’s arguments to make themselves appear as formidable foes. Jeffrey Sachs advocates a “Big Push” to get countries out of “poverty traps.” For Sachs, aid IS the solution. But even Easterly never finds that aid is BAD, it just simply has not been THAT good.  They may even get along at a cocktail party!)

But this post is not about the merits and pitfalls of aid. While I respect both Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly immensely, I wonder if they should not take the lead in moving the debate forward, to concentrate on constructive solutions.

We need a new approach.  If our primary motive is to lift the “bottom billion” out of poverty, social enterprise is a way forward. It is a proven approach through which we can make lasting improvements in the lives of the poor, which is critical for the world, critical for the world economy, and critical for humanity. Why it has not even been touched upon in this debate (with what seems to be the “world” watching) confounds me.

Dambisa Moyo briefly touches on the topic in her May 26 blog entry on the Huffington Post. “Finally, with respect to Mr. Sachs’ remark that I would see nothing wrong with denying US$10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malarial bed net — even labeling me as cruel; I say, if working towards a sustainable solution where Africans can make their own anti-malaria bed-nets (thereby creating jobs for Africans and a real chance for continents economic prospects) rather than encouraging all and sundry to dump malaria nets across the continent (which incidentally, put Africans out of business), then I am guilty as charged. Don’t forget that the over 60 percent of Africans that are under the age of 24 need jobs not sympathy.”

Why has this not been jumped on?  There is a way forward! Social enterprise gives people jobs. It empowers local communities. It builds skills and capacity. It creates mechanisms of ownership. And, perhaps most importantly, it gives people a sense of control over their own destinies. For example, the Acumen Fund Investee, A to Z Textile Mills, which has decreased the cost of production of their long lasting anti-malarial bednets from $7 to $5, has also raised the standards of living for their workers and their families through the creation of better paying jobs. Everyone benefits!

The good thing about this debate is it is getting people to think about these issues. It is putting a face on poverty. It is mobilizing interest. But instead of tearing each other’s views of aid apart, can’t we find a common ground because at the end of the day, we all want the same thing - for there to be less suffering in this world. Isn’t the concept of social enterprise and the constructive role it can play in local job creation and public good, something that we can all appreciate and agree on?

To follow this debate as it unfolded:

May 24, 2009 - Jeffrey Sachs  “Aid Ironies”

May 25, 2009 - William Easterly  “Sachs Ironies: Why Critics are Better for Foreign Aid than Apologists”

May 26, 2009 - Dambisa Moyo  “Aid Ironies: A Response to Jeffrey Sachs”

May 27, 2009 - Jeffrey Sachs and John W. McArthur  “Moyo’s Confused Attack on Aid for Africa”

May 29, 2009 - William Easterly  “Geography Lessons: Correcting Sachs on African Economic Development”

May 29, 2009 - William Easterly  “Stop Me Before I Sachs Again”

June 1, 2009 - Jeffrey Sachs  “No Need to Oversimplify Poverty”

June 2, 2009 - William Easterly “Back to Sachs: Astrology, Despotism, and Africa”