Gift Hub

Conservatives reflect on our future

In covering the 2013 Bradley Symposium earlier this month Rick Cohen was struck by the muted response conservative activist Robert Woodson received from his fellow conservatives to this impassioned plea: “The greatest challenge facing the nation is how we treat the least of God’s children,” Woodson said. “The challenge we face as conservatives is what is our solution to this problem.” While he condemned the approach of the left and the “professional service industry” as picking problems that are “fundable” rather than “solvable” and viewing people in need as “a sea of victims,” he decried the right’s view of “the least of God’s children” as “a sea of aliens.”

Pathological Altruism

I asked for a gift, a kind word, a pat on the back, or maybe even a raise, or a tip, or even a crumb from her table.  Instead, my boss, and generous patron, she who rules us all gave me a free weblink to this WSJ article, Pathological Altruism, about a new book taking undue kindness to task. "Given a choice of erring on the side of keeping my money for myself, Phil, and encouraging your pathetic dependency, I choose to do what is right for us both."  I am deeply grateful for her Leadership by example. I cannot deprive others of my gifts, since I am broke, but I did kick a stray dog for its own benefit. And so the good passes on.  The dog bit a cat, and the cat is now toying with a mouse. So, the world is constituted as a moral order.

Wage Theft Comic Book

Download WageTheft

I am on the Board of Interfaith Worker Justice. The ED, Kim Bobo, has written the book on Wage Theft. A fellow Board member reduced the gist to a comic book, in English and Spanish. Read even one page and your insight and outrage will be awakened. Feel free to spread it virally. If you want to sell or distribute print copies they are available from IWJ for about $.50 each in bulk. Or you can sell copies at list price ($2.99) to your gardener or maid, for them to share with their friends. This is what Worker Centers are all about in the age where organized labor represents less than 7% of the work force. Workers without unions have rights that are abused with impunity. What is easier than chiseling the powerless, particularly if they are undocumented? What would you suggest they do? Worker wage theft claims pile up in DC like letters to Santa. On a more positive note, times are good, the markets are up. 

Fundraising in service to others (or, building Pharaoh's Tomb)

In my prior life I went from teaching William Blake on Friday, to teaching Induction Training for Life Insurance Sales three weeks later. I learned that one of the largest impediments to sales success was call reluctance, or, essentially, shame. The new, hardly trained, life insurance agent was often ashamed to approach family, friends, former colleagues, in his or her new mis-fitting identity. I also found for myself a ladder up: courses from The American College. Once again, I could rise, one page at a time, until I was once again a professional. In my current role, I teach very high level tax, legal, and financial advisors about philanthropy in the context of estate planning, financial planning, and business transition planning. But in these same courses, we have new fundraisers from places like Villanova, or Salvation Army. One of the testimonials I have received that meant most to me came from a twenty-something fundraiser at a liberal arts college. He wrote, in effect, "Many people see fundraisers as little better than used car salesmen. Now I see that what I do is a high calling. I help people connect money and meaning. For our school that makes sense because here people have made connections, found their calling, and created an identity."

When Hildy Gottlieb (with whom I and Alexandra Peters were interviewed yesterday) speaks about raising money, you can see how awkward she feels about putting herself and her organization at the center of the picture. She lives in service to community. She wishes to treat all donors as peers, friends, citizens, as human souls, not as a means to an end to managed, processed, handled. And why should we treat rich people as special? Aren't we all special?

Progressive organizers, pastors, college professors, artistic types and feelings about money! There is a topic.  Businesslike people have no issues with it. Social entrepreneurs glory in it. But progressives and artsy types so often wish that money followed a spiritual course, that it was attracted to unsung virtue, that in perfecting ourselves gifts would find us magnetically. It don't. Water runs down hill. Steam rises. We have to generate the heat. Generally, that heat is already latent in the donor, as in wood or coal, or a burning ember. We begin with their passion, their community, their sense of calling, and connect it to service. How we can jointly serve the high and noble ends the funder burns to achieve, with us and through us.  Of course, the funder may also see us a vendor, or go-fer, as a dubious and slacking thing to be managed, rated, and compared with other things, to insure optimum return on donor dollars within the constricted vision of the counting house. Perhaps the hardest part of philanthropic fundraising is the servant leadership of those who would enslave us with extrinsic metrics. It can be done, Moses. But it may take a miracle or two. Meanwhile, if we all pull on the rope, we can add one more block to Pharaoh's tomb by nightfall. That in itself would be remarkable. We will in our own way last forever, as Pharaoh will, our sweat mixed with the lime. It sure motivates the heck out of me. (Pass the word: we break for it at dawn.)

Funders Partnering with Grassroots Nonprofits

Will participate on June 12 in an online conversation with Hildy Gottlieb and Alexandra Peters on how social investors and grassroots nonprofits might actually partner to create a better future. 

Two Conversations of gift planning

The client of an advisor I know is worth north of $100 mil. His net worth is tied up in a string of successful car dealerships and the land on which they sit. He has two kids who may or may not take over the business. He gives generously and impulsively to faith-based charities.  The advisor conversation goes like this:

Sam, of that $100 million how much do you want to go to your kids, how much to IRS and how much to charity?"

The answers framed as percentages may end us as 10% to each of the two children, none to IRS, and the balance to charity. That would be $80 million now and growing each year.

Now compare this with a "major gift" solicitation.

Sam, you are giving generously to us at $1,000 a year. Today, we would like to ask you to join us in advancing a very important initiative. We would like you to consider a gift of $10,000.

This becomes a "planned gift" if the fundraiser suggests $10,000 gift into a gift annuity.

The contrast between these dialogues (I teach both and work with those who do this one or that one) is jarring. The advisors plan for fractions of net worth. Gift planners start with annual gifts and multiply by ten to get a major gift, or consider any nickle and dime gift via trusts, wills, or benefiary designation, a "planned gift."

Planning really means starting with goals, considering all financial resources, and coming up with the best possible ensemble of tools and techniques, some of which are philanthropic when the client's goals and circumstances call for them. Gift planners need advisors because advsiors have access to financial data. To get to informed and effective philanthropy, though, the advisors need the gift planners because the advisor has no way to connect, in this case, $80 million to specific programs and projects that would advance the donor's ideals. Nor has the donor thought it through from the standpoint of impact. We (gift planners and advisors) need each other, is the moral. Our mutal clients need us to work better together.  To do that requires mutual respect, but also requires shared language, and a shared process. In CAP study groups we hope to evolve that.

CAP Study Groups Spreading Virally

Spoke yesterday to ten members of K2 (Knowledge Squared) the highest level group in Legacy, a membership organization of financial, tax and legal advisors, taking an enlightened approach to planning for a wealthy client's family, wealth, and legacy. Ten out of ten committed to forming local CAP study groups. We will then meet nationally to facilitate these facilitators quarterly.  What may come out of this is the integration of gift planners (planned and major gifts) into an elite financial advisory network. That is how advisors learn, and how they pass on their traditions. Getting fundraisers into these convivial circles so that we can learn from each other at the highest level, as we serve our mutual donors and clients for the benefit of our families and communities - wouldn't that be a step forward?

B-Corps and the Mythos of Spring

Long ago, in another life, I studied Northrop Frye on archetypal analysis of drama. He spoke of Comedy and the mythos of spring, and of tradgedy as the mythos of fall, and of Romance as the mythos of summer, and irony as the mythos of winter. I was reminded of that reading this post from Catherine Austin Fitts on B-Corps. If B-Corps are a youthful mythos of hope and joy, a Song of Innocence, Catherine's is the counterpoint, the Song of Experience. 

Catherine Austin Fitts: Oversimplified, a B corporation is a corporate structure where you commit to additional standards of environmentally and ethically correct. Okay, you commit to a whole bunch of increased criteria and legal liability that means you’re going to be a highly ethical organization in a variety of ways. And the reality is this is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard in my life. Because what it says is this is a solution to the fact that we have a group of people who’ve just stolen $40 trillion. To me, if you said to me, “Let’s bring transparency to that and figure out how we get our $40 trillion back.” I’d say, “You know something? Now we’re going at real problems and real solutions.”

If you say to me, “You know something? These evil people have just stolen $40 trillion. And so our solution is we’re going to take the people who just lost $40 trillion and we’re going to add more legal liabilities and more requirements for them to be harder working and even more ethical than they are.”

And my attitude is let’s say we create a B corporation and we load up far more requirements and legal liabilities and everything else to that organization. Well you know something? That board of directors is still going to do whatever the guys who can kill with impunity tell them to do because they don’t want to get killed; they don’t want their kids to be killed. So it doesn’t matter.

What it just does is it makes their life that much harder, and that much more expensive. It’s completely nuts. If you look at the people who’ve been promoting the B corporations, from everything I can tell, the people who just stole $40 trillion are financing them.

Bonnie Faulkner: So do we have these B corporations?

Catherine Austin Fitts: I’m not saying that the people promoting them are not goodhearted people because we have a whole world of goodhearted people being financed by the people who control $40 trillion to come up what “solutions.”

One of my theories is you have all these people who feel terrible about what’s
going on and this is a way to give them a socially satisfying experience, or to come up with solutions which are pure fashion and don’t mess with the real power lines. It’s a way that they can process their grief. They feel like they’re doing something positive.

It’s interesting, when we had our little debate in Petaluma I said, “Look, we have people who are running around killing with impunity who are acting above the law. They’re a breakawaycivilization. That’s our problem.” And they said, “Yes, but we can’t solve that. So we want to do something positive.” I said, “Well great, but making the financial system more complex and cumbersome I realize it makes you feel good but it creates a regulatory burden for the rest of us, and we have enough problems dealing with these psychos over here without you loading on more.” They just looked at me like, “Well I know but we’d much rather pretend; we don’t want to think about that.”

The goodhearted people can get cycled into dead end solutions that are very, very dangerous.

 How the promoters of B-Corps see themselves, the drama in which they act as heroes, the curtain call where they take a bow is a Romance (a quest myth) or a comedy, the audience enthralled at a heightened image of themselves, where evil has never appeared or has been handily slain, and goodness has prevailed through the heroic quests of a young man or woman, through whose love civilization continues. The lion beds down with the lamb, the marriage guests dance all in a ring.  As we get older, though, we see are at risk of seeing more than Romance and Comedy can convey. And we may see that "do no evil" is not a naive dorm room motto any more, but a sinister board room dodge, when the firm in question is Creating Social Value through surreptitious surveillance and conniving with the security apparatus in countries Free and Un-Free. When I was a child I spoke as a child, now that I am a man I speak as a child because it is safer, more profitable, and goes over better.  Catherine's story is tragic - and cautionary. Vision achieved through redemptive suffering  (more divine comedy). Few would willingly pay the price she bore for her freedom. (Freedom as parrhesia, free spokenness, alignment of word, self, and world, sometimes call poetic license, or as I try to embody it, the voice of the "all-licensed Fool," to cite Lear. The martyr or scapegoat is another drama and how we often preserve the integrity of our civic illusions - burn the scapegoat at the cross roads that our purity remain unspotted.)

Legacy Advisors networking outward into communities

On Wednesday in Chicago, I will address 18 member  of K2, the leadership cadre of Legacy, drawn from top financial advisors in the US and Canada. We will discuss forming a "study group of study groups," where each K2 Legacy member will form a local Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy study group, bringing fundraisers and advisors together to learn in biweekly sessions for nine months,  with the Legacy members themselves meeting quarterly in a central location to share emerging best practices.  

The Legacy Companies were formed by Scott Fithian and his brother, Todd. Though Scott died at a tragically young age, his own legacy lives on. He had hoped to bring advisors and planned gift officers together in a collaborative "virtual planning team." (See the Fithian's book, The Right Side of the Table: Where do you Sit in the Minds of the Affluent?) Now, nearly twenty years later, that dream is becoming a reality.  This is not glamorous philanthropy. It is not covered in Stanford Social Enterprise Review. It will not make the pages of Harvard Business Review. It is not covered at Council on Foundations. It will not make the social pages of any national paper. The clients and donors of those I cross train are what some have called "the silent middle," or the millionaire next door, or ordinary people who have often started a closely held business and now in later life want to pass on the business, their values, and their money consistent with their own commitments to family, faith, community, and country.

Proof of Moral Impact: A Methodological Inquiry

My immediate superior, Candidia Cruikshanks, she who rules us all, some call her the goddess of the Free Market, others the soul of the new social economy, the founder and president of Wealth Bondage, the Future of Virtue 2.0, is instituting Metrics to assess the impact of my work. My role (a sorry joke though it may be) is to Tutor the Wealthy on their Ethical Obligations, to pass those Virtues on to heirs, and so to produce a more just society for everyone, ultimately. 

My metrics are as follows:

• 243 moral biographies produced in 2012 for 243 hyperagents and heads of Great Families
• A bank of boilerplate installed to produce biographies more efficiently and effectively based on market-tested archetypes (rags to riches, virtue rewarded, success to significance, once was lost now and found, disruption and innovation as the work of the world historical Leader)

What I am struggling with now is the impact part. How can I show that Great Families are more virtuous and the world more just? I have decided on a survey of ToP (Tip of Pyramid) families. I suspect it will show resoundingly that the world is even more just now than it was a few years ago and that their own Virtues have continued to compound nicely. 

I will then have to deal with causality. Sure, the rich are ever more virtuous, and the world is more just, but is this due to my efforts in particular or to the overall impact of Wealth Bondage: The Future of Virtue 2.0,  generally? 

It seems a lot of work to justify my meager existence. A bowl of gruel and a cup of water a day, a pallet of straw in an unused dungeon. How much proof of impact do I need? More! More, more, more!  Yes, Mistress.