Couple with small budget gives smart

This Sunday I was fortunate to catch Human Kind on my local NPR station. The program has been doing a stand-up job exploring the spiritual, emotional, and social aspects of charity and giving for a radio audience. This Sunday's broadcast, "Giving Back," features interviews with a number of people of various mean who dedicate a percentage of their income to help others.

I was especially touched by the story of a Boston couple who decided to plan to give 10% of their income to help improve early childhood education. These people don't make tons of money, and their annual gift amounted to about $5,000. Without any intermediary or support from an organization, the couple put together an application and distributed it to elementary school teachers and started doling out small grants for specific items that teachers needed to improve their teaching. Together they reviewed the applications and decided where to put their money. (Find a link to a free audio excerpt here)

This is precisely the kind of giving I'd love to foster with the "Two Cents Movement." Not everyone has the bandwidth or means to create a foundation. These people were under the average median income for the area, but they sat down, articulated what was important to them and why. They made up a budget, found out how much they could afford to give, and put together a plan for how to do it. They reached out to the group they wanted to target, solicited feedback and requests, and put their money to work in a way that was immediate and meaningful. They met the people they were helping, they could see their money at work, and their gift fit into their larger vision for making change. Bravo!

Your two cents matter

Two cents won't get you to far in an age when gas costs over $5.00 a gallon. But I want to challenge people to think about their pennies and where they go. That's why I'm going to work on the idea of a personal philanthropy plan based on the idea that people should vote with their dollars, and plan to plan how they'll donate 2 percent of their annual income to issues that they care about. Two cents on the dollar multiplied by over 300 million Americans can buy a lot of rice for the proverbial starving children in China, not to mention help support sustainable technology research, plant trees, help low-income youth go to college, house the homeless, pay the rent for non-commercial media organizations who educate us on issues we vote on, and much, much more.

So this will be the journal of this process of building a "two cents" movement. Along the way, I'll also make observations on how non-profits can reach out to their constituents and build sustainable impact through best practices in fundraising, communications, and non-profit management.

This is an experiment, so... here we go.