Alan Veeck is a good friend, former colleague and a Who To Know of the Pittsburgh community and the VC world. Alan and I had a great follow up conversation on Twitter to my last post about The Problem With Charitable Giving, and it sparked Alan into action writing his own thoughts. I enjoyed his words and I'm sure you will too. If you are not following Alan on Twitter or his Blog Pittsburgh Ventures, I highly recommend you do. In the meantime here are Alan's thoughts on Charitable Giving.
By Alan Veeck
One of my friends wrote a very thoughtful post the other day, The Problem With Charitable Giving. Actually, I think he should have entitled it The Solution to Charitable Giving, because he presents as many solutions as problems in his post.
I want to expand more on the largest point he makes – the notion of individual giving as the best way to manage charitable giving. The individual can choose their charity and likely drive success – by making more direct human contact, monitoring/driving for results, keeping overhead low, etc.
Step back a moment: charity comes from the Latin word caritas, which translates as love, one of the three theological virtues. I believe most people think of charity as giving money, but it is really much more than that. It is giving of your time. And the best charitable giving is composed of giving of your time in two ways.
Way #1: Money is nothing more than a unit of exchange for your work, and by giving your money you are giving of your work, your time (see idiom, time is money). This is the very impersonal, mechanical (but often very important!) side of charitable giving.
Way #2: Giving of your person. I would argue that only when you give your money with your personal time does it meet the true definition of charity, the non-mechanical definition of charity – caritas. This is the hard bit.
Most human problems need real people’s time, not just the work component of their money, to find a solution. If you write a check to a large, impersonal organization, you will likely be doing some good, but you are also likely diluting the goodness you do. If you meet the person who needs the charity (zeroth degree) or meet the people directly providing the charitable services to the person who needs charity (first degree), you can get involved in helping to think through solving the problem. When you are close to the problem, you can better help find the solution.
To take an example, I think very specifically of the natural unit of organization in our society – the family. My wife and I provide our money (our work – Charity, Way #1) to feed, clothe, and shelter our kids. But we charitably give our time (our love, our person – Charity, Way #2) to rear our kids to grow into capable adults able to lead happy, fulfilling lives. Trust me, this is the hard part – this is the expensive part. This is real, grass-roots charity; it is the core of that other idiom, “charity begins at home.”
It is the same with “fixing” homelessness or preventing child abuse – throwing money at the problem might fix some aspects of it, but at its core it is a human behavior problem, and the solution to that is not just in money, but in the human component of personal time. That is why individual giving is so important and so much more effective than organizational giving – it involves real people who can give some amount of their time along with their money.
I don’t think the “problem” of poverty ever goes away, even if you get the world’s best organizer/organization on it. A wise philosopher once said, “The poor you will always have with you” and I have learned over the first half of my life that this is very true.
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