South Africa is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, but it also has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world, as measured by the Gini coefficient. In a country with so much potential, millions of people remain trapped in poverty, the result of politics, greed and history.
It was this disparity that drove me from the corporate world into the arms of the non-profit sector. I wanted to “make a difference”, “change the world”, “help people” and all those other phrases you hear from people working for charities.
In the years that followed, I worked with some of the world’s best social entrepreneurs, people who were literally changing lives. From Dr Garth Japhet at Heartlines, whose campaigns on values, money and fatherhood have impacted millions of lives, to Dr Taddy Blecher, the founder of the Maharishi Institute, who provides tertiary education opportunities to young people who would never otherwise have been able to afford it.
While I learnt from some of the best, it was only when I moved to a significantly smaller, community-based organisation in one of South Africa’s townships that I learnt the difference between good and great philanthropy.
I learnt that there can be a win-win scenario for businesses. While they might be compelled by South African law to find a charity to donate to, their employees can also feel better about the long hours they work, knowing that a small percentage of the profits is making a difference. Those same employees got excited about spending a day out of the office painting a room at a crèche or packing food hampers. These hampers would quite literally make the difference between a child going to bed hungry or not.
While many businesses simply made the donation and moved on, the relationships I built with those who got more involved had a positive impact on both their lives and mine.
I met people willing to dedicate every Saturday to teach children the foundations of English and Maths, so that school wouldn’t be such a hurdle. You need to understand that schools in the townships were typically overcrowded, with up to 60 children squeezed into a classroom designed for 25. Teachers could do little more than crowd-control, despite their best efforts, and the fundamentals were often lost. Having someone show up week after week, when so many people in their lives were unreliable, helped inspire those young people to believe they could become more.
Some of these volunteers had money, so they could simply have written a cheque and been done. But they chose to get involved, and many did both.
I also met older women who built new friendships as they spent hours sorting through donated clothing and other weird and wonderful stuff that came our way. Their hours of work made a difference to a mother who could then clothe her new baby, or to a young woman who could wear a beautiful dress to her school-leaving dance.
However, it was in my role as Business Development Manager that I truly began to understand the ins and outs of great philanthropy.
One of the most important lessons was the value of unrestricted giving. Being able to allocate donations where they were most needed was a gift. And yes, that often included paying the social worker who counselled the pregnant teenager.
I learnt the difference between funding projects with a defined start and end date and supporting programmes that ran year in and year out. The service an organisation provided didn’t stop simply because a funder had asked for an end date.
I also learnt that overheads are not a swear word, but a necessity. I challenged many businesses to think about how they would operate without their HR and Finance teams, the very people whose salaries might be labelled “overheads” in a charity.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, I came to understand the value of multi-year funding. Imagine if a charity knew by the middle of the year that the majority of its costs were covered for the year ahead, because grants received this year would continue into the next. That wouldn’t mean I could stop fundraising, but it would mean we could plan. We could make strategic changes or start a newly identified programme because we knew we had the money to do so.
Learning these lessons from the inside has given me insights that are difficult to appreciate from the outside. This experience, alongside my Masters in Philanthropic Studies, has led me to move into philanthropy advising. Not because I have all the answers, but because I know what good support looks like from the perspective of the organisation receiving it.
I believe I can help make giving more effective and achieve my own version of “Good to Great”, with apologies to Jim Collins.
If you’re interested in making your giving more effective, I’d love to share some of the lessons I’ve learnt along the way.