Giving Circles-More to Come |
Aug 5, 2010 |
Next week is MIF’s webinar titled Giving Circles: One of the Most Important Trends in Fundraising You’ve Never Heard Of.
I can say with assurance that you won’t be disappointed by this webinar. Our great Matt Bates is a tremendous presenter and an incredibly insightful practitioner of Transformational Giving. He’s seizing the opportunity with this webinar to take on one of the most distasteful fundraising trends you’ve certainly heard of or witnessed firsthand-the professionalization of ministry. This disturbing trend is evident in philanthropy as well as churches and is arguably at least partially to blame for the anemia of today’s Christians.
But there’s hope for overcoming that anemia. Of course we have hope because we know God designed us for the robust living described in Ephesians 4. But there’s also encouragement in new trends like the emergence of giving circles. I trust you’ll tune in on August 11th to reap the rewards of Matt’s study but until then I have some homework for you. Check out the book The Power of Half written by Kevin and Hannah Salwen about their very own giving circle. It was started when Hannah, the Salwen’s teenage daughter, set out to do something about homelessness in their hometown of Atlanta. The book chronicles their family’s journey beginning with downsizing their home and culminating with a trip to Ghana in their effort to fight global hunger. They walked through an incredibly transformational experience and the story is both inspiring and intriguing. While most of us won’t sell our homes in order to give half the proceeds to charity (yes, that’s what they did) the Salwen’s story is a great example of ordinary people seeking a greater level involvement in the causes they care about. The Salwens eschewed today’s thinking that ministry is best left to the professionals and “took matters into their own hands.” Only it wasn’t only their own hands; they collaborated with The Hunger Project- a non-profit organization who understands the importance of giving their champions the reigns in the form of direct involvement in the cause. Reading the book will give you eyes to see the giving circles emerging all around you and whet your appetite for next week’s webinar.
Which brings me to another way you can prepare for next week’s webinar; consider your own giving circle experience. Chances are you’ve participated in a giving circle even if you didn’t call it a giving circle. I’ve thought of several I’ve been a part of. First; there’s our home fellowship. We began to collect spare change with the expectation that God would eventually show us what to do with the funds. Soon we learned that one of the young women in our group was bound for Uganda and while God had supplied the necessary funding, she still needed several hundred dollars to pay for the required vaccinations. Everyone agreed that God was calling us to participate with Mikeah on her journey to Africa. Or there was our family’s summer beach week five years ago. Not long before we were scheduled to leave our then five year old daughter came to me while I was preparing dinner to report that she was “staaaarrrrvingg”. This hyperbolic expression happened to land on a day when our newspaper ran a front page story about famine in Africa. I promptly responded to Sophie saying that she while she may be hungry she wasn’t starving and showed her the picture of the truly starving African child complete with bugs in his ears. A little while later she came to me and asked what we could do to help the starving boy. I explained that some people send money to help. A bit more time passed and she proudly came to me with a hand crafted, folded, stapled and taped paper container created for collecting money for the starving boy. She wanted to ask others to join her. So we replaced her creation with a Ziploc bag, took it to the beach, set it in the window sill and watched while other family members added to the collection. Her action prompted many meaningful discussions about our extended family’s giving experiences including how and why they chose to give where they did. Not long after we returned from our vacation, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. We felt led to send our money to New Orleans and asked our newly formed giving circle for permission to redirect the money. While it wasn’t the monetary equivalent of half the proceeds of a home sale, the process our family went through was not dissimilar from the Salwen’s in that we operated as a group and were transformed in the process.
Consider Hannah Salwen’s words, “One night at dinner I brought up a school assembly speaker who had described the genocide in Darfur. My parents didn’t try to educate me immediately on what was going on there; instead, my mom quickly grabbed a story about Darfur that she had seen in the newspaper that morning and read a bit to all of us. Joe threw in what he knew about Darfur, and suddenly we were talking-really talking. I think we stayed at the table at least fifteen minutes longer than usual that night because we felt connected.” Or Kevin Salwen’s thoughts, “The result was a remarkable family adventure. Around our dinner table, we spent hours discussing the world’s problems and how we might help. We made very decision in our two-year journey collectively, with kids having just as much say as parents. But this book is more than just the tale of a family trying to turn the good life into a life of good. It’s about unintended consequences, like the way inventors stumbled across penicillin or Post-it notes or Flubber. Yes, we’re helping the world a bit. But in the process we are transforming our relationships with one another.”
That’s our real message about giving circles. They are emerging as an expression of ordinary people’s desire to collaboratively participate in making a difference in the world. If your organization reserves that right for the “ministry professionals” you are denying your champions the adventure of engaging with you and your cause and limiting potential transformation for all of you.
Tune in next week for more on Giving Circles and consider reading The Power of Half by Kevin and Hannah Salwen.
