Donor Choices
Pic from Hiking Artist
Below are my top six areas for Donors to consider to fund. Relax and dream a little. Rushing the decision does not necessarily create the best results.
Education: Choose a local public or charter school. Require parent involvement and matching programs for funds. Let volunteer time equal the same matching as funds. Even incentives and make the volunteer hours worth more. Make sure the match is at least the living wage of a family in the area being served. Student enrichment programs are shown to increase the success of students.
Environment: Choose to become Carbon imprint neutral. “A Penny A Mile” is a new nonprofit established to have an individual or company reduce their impact by funding the conversion of government and nonprofit facilities to green environments. Use their roofs for solar electrical and heating and geothermal for cooling.
Choose to adopt a Park: Reduce the use of government funds and its inconsistency to private funding and endowments to make a difference. Once endowment is reached for ongoing maintenance then capital campaigns could be next.
Food: Choose the creation of programs that show individuals how to meet their nutrition needs that are healthy, and teach individuals skills to maximize their budget and preservation of foodstuffs. One said manner is the skill of preparing foods in a manner that allows them to be canned, jarred, or stored in the environment where a person lives. Very few programs process food to preserve it. Thereby, the shelf life of many items is deteriorating as the food nonprofit waits to distribute it. Looks good on paper that they distributed so much in food stuffs, but was the person able to use it before it perished?
Affordable Housing: Choose environmentally sound choices to use the environment to cool the house from heat. For instance, build a house where the cooler part built under ground is cool all summer such as finished walkout basements. Make affordable housing based on a living wage of the geographic area the funding initiative choice.
Transportation: Choose the reduction of gasoline costs and increase the use of inefficient vehicles. These increased costs adversely hurt those just making the living wage than those above the living wage.
Utilities: Choose the reduction of fuel costs for heating or electrical costs for staying cool. Family day care providers are a good place to start since they are self employed and many serve government funded childcare recipients especially in poverty based areas. The utility costs are a factor that any donor has the choice to affect many lives and improve the environment.
In the selection of a nonprofit for the funding initiative you as the donor have chosen, plan on completing a full financial assessment of any non-profit before approaching them. From the public records of a nonprofit you can already determine the nonprofit’s financial well-being and how you wish to have the nonprofit participate. This helps the donor in two ways. First, the donor choices avoid potential pitfalls, those being agreements with organizations that could not possibly succeed under any possible scenario. Secondly, the donor focuses their energy into developing a specialized plan geared toward each nonprofit.
