In order to solicit gifts and ensure the most
generous donations possible, nonprofits aim to make potential donors feel
welcomed and valued. Toward that end, development workers often encourage
funders to talk with them about their most deeply held values. Will
organizations most likely understand this accommodation of donors strictly as a
means of attracting generous gifts? Or, will accommodating the personal visions
and missions expressed by donors come to be seen as a good that is worth
advancing in itself? How eager will most nonprofits be to serve as conduits for
women and men of means wishing to speak as well as give? Will most nonprofits
worry that indulging donors’ deep self-expression might risk compromising the
organization’s primary mission?
Clearly, organizations need individual funders. Funders
also need organizations. As advocates for relationship-based development point
out, donating gives people the chance to fulfill themselves spiritually, to
enact their highest vision. In providing such opportunities, a not-for-profit
does far more than indulge the whims of its benefactors. Helping donors fulfill
themselves spiritually is as crucial as any other work done by the organization
because it enables donors to become their best selves. It heightens their moral
and ethical motives. It increases their energy. It expands their capacity to
trust. It redoubles their confidence in the organization’s mission. It serves
them and the organization. Organizations must commit themselves to carrying out
this work with passion, confidence, and love.
Benefactors’ spiritual fulfillment may seem
irrelevant to the many social activists who prioritize grassroots empowerment
over donor empowerment. Although empowering donors is a worthy pursuit, it will
inevitably be scoffed at by some organizational staffers, especially those with
a progressive bent. To convince skeptical staff members, proponents of donor
empowerment would need to demonstrate a link between donors’ spiritual and
ethical fulfillment and the organization’s instigation of meaningful social
change. Indeed, proponents would need to show that people of means are
attentive and open to ideas generated by and for less affluent stakeholders.
John Bloom, Vice President for Organizational
Culture at RSF (Rudolf Steiner Foundation) Social Finance, makes a compelling
case that organizations should prioritize the self-actualization of their funders.
Any such commitment, according to Bloom, tends to fall victim to organizations’
inadequate support for fundraising. Bloom laments, as an example, what he sees
as a “wealth-resistant” attitude and an anti-development bias plaguing Waldorf
schools. Faculty, in particular, look down on development work as sordid—as foreign
to the institution’s high ideals. Their objection, Bloom suggests, is that
development accommodates and celebrates a group hardly deserving of the
school’s foremost attention: wealthy, powerful individuals. Because of their
wealth resistance, Waldorf schools dedicate insufficient resources to
development. Indeed, they sometimes leave advancement work to volunteers.
Bloom contends that such wealth resistance harms
the institution. It does so not only by diminishing the institution’s capacity to raise money,
but also by limiting the service work that the institution does on behalf of the
wider community. When fundraisers are not supported from within, they cannot
serve as conduits for donors’ self-expression. The institution is then
inhibited from serving one of its most important, core constituencies. Donors
need and deserve better.
Bloom maintains that development workers need to be fully equipped to
build trusting relationships with donors—relationships that nurture communication
about donors’ intended spiritual and social activism. If those relationships
suffer, then so does the activism of donors. And so does the public, which
would benefit from their activism.
Insofar as a nonprofit serves its donors, it helps enable a key
democratic function. Donors generally are educated individuals of means.
Frequently, they are well traveled. Their affluence may provide them vast
opportunity to acquire the insight and tools crucial for far-reaching
leadership. By nurturing and even catalyzing their leadership, the nonprofit
acts as an NGO of sorts, a civil-society organ enacting a kind of leadership
more flexible and innovative than what public officials can provide. In an age
when the state is often dismissed as unresponsive to the citizenry, there exists
a heightened need for ethical and enlightened civic activism. A nonprofit can
help fill this need, not only through its provision of vital services but also
through its support for experienced leaders leveraging their resources to serve
the common good.
An organizational staff, including teachers, would be most likely to champion
the empowerment of donors if the donor-activists were guided by ideals akin to
those expressly informing the work of the organization. Such a match might at
times exist. In the case of Waldorf schools, donors seeking to advance the faculty’s
liberal mission might attract the faculty’s support. But even those donors
would face a formidable hurdle. As Bloom points out, Waldorf faculty are
resistant both to wealth and “to the people who have it.” To the faculty, donors
represent a privileged class likely unattuned to the needs and values of
ordinary people. Faculty—the soldiers on the ground—doubt whether the
higher-ups really “get it.”
My point here is not to argue either that wealthy donors make good
leaders or that they do not. My point is that nonprofits will sometimes remain
unwilling to give development specialists all the backing they need to build
relationships conducive to realizing donors’ full range of desires.
Undoubtedly, some wealthy philanthropists question the efficacy of empowering
non-elites. Such an attitude may well reveal itself and thereby paint
philanthropists generally in a light unattractive to many nonprofit workers.
Organizational “foot soldiers” may become confirmed in their belief that elites
influence the institution differently from how the foot soldiers themselves
would wish. They may conclude that efforts to serve donors’ personal
“development” will clash with the institution’s stated function, especially
when that function is to meet the needs and wishes of society’s less fortunate.
Even liberal philanthropists—consciously or unconsciously—may subscribe
to the conception of stewardship put forth by Andrew Carnegie in his 1889
essay, “Wealth.” Carnegie saw personal fortune as the product of virtue. Men (always
men) of means had the exclusive ability as well as the opportunity to create a
good society. It was incumbent on them to use their fortunes to fund whatever
causes they considered worthy. Simply to disperse money among poorer citizens
would be to throw money down a black hole; money could nurture society’s
wellbeing only when it was invested purposefully and wisely by those who
accumulated it. Men of privilege were uniquely suited, and specially obligated,
to lead.
Is it reasonable for an organization’s foot soldiers to mistrust donors
who think as Carnegie did? Do generous elitists threaten broad-based democracy?
Are progressive staffers destined to support the cultivation of wealthy donors
only as a sordid means to a necessary end?
To avoid such a clash in interests, it is incumbent on foot soldiers and
wealthy donors alike to challenge their preconceptions about class interests
and their impact on staff or donor behavior. And this asks all parties to step
back, remember the high calling of nonprofit work, and allow themselves to
trust that all involved parties will bring wisdom to the process.
Staff, board, and donors already care enough to do this. All are guided
by more than benevolent motives and more than the wish to realize themselves ethically
and spiritually. All parties take the organization’s mission seriously. Why
else would they care enough to mistrust in the first place? Caring parties are
likely to care about the organization’s success at carrying out its mission. Such
success depends on all contributors rising up and becoming their best selves—on
their moral, emotional, and intellectual growth. Contributors’ trust in their fellow
contributors is necessary if the organization is to achieve its highest goals.
Perhaps this requires a leap of faith by those who remain skeptical. No
matter. Leaps of faith are central to contribution. All parties arrive at the
work with the desire and the capacity to trust and dream, and it is these
faculties that must expand. Staff and board need to risk trusting that even the
wealthiest of donors will seek to empower the organization’s constituents.
Donors must, even for a moment, believe that the poor, uneducated, and
frequently untrained recipients of their beneficence are capable of developing
in all kinds of necessary ways. Trust in the human capacity to love and grow needs
to inform everyone’s contribution.
