Your experience, your values

At the source of your giving is the desire to make a difference, to apply your unique talents to making the world a better place than you found it.   While these words may resonate, the specifics of why and how to give may have left you feeling overwhelmed.

The first step in articulating your passion for giving often rests in stating your own personal values.  A consideration of values should come before a review of proposals, before site visits with community groups, before budgets and well before grantmaking decisions.

Whether you work alone, with family members, or with a staff and fellow trustees, your giving will be made more powerful and satisfying if you ask first yourself:

• Why is giving important to me?
• What really matters to me or my family?

Exploring why giving is important to you can help you pinpoint your values.  Becoming clear about your values can, in turn, help you choose how and to whom you will give. 

In Inspired Philanthropy, Tracy Gary and Melissa Kohner write:  “Knowing what you feel passionate about is the first step in determining where your personal contributions of time, money, and energy will feel most effective” [2002: 20]. 

Like a muscle your body calls upon involuntarily, your values may be just as difficult to pinpoint.  Nevertheless, as with muscles, you have strengthened and honed your values over a lifetime of experiences and choices.  Now is the time to ask yourself, why do certain behaviors, organizations, activities appeal to me?  Why do others repel me?  Through the exercises in Inspired Philanthropy, Gary and Kohner can help you look at the people and experiences in your life that have shaped your values.  Try to identify the top 3 or 4 values that are most meaningful to you, without which your giving would feel empty and false.

Using tools from Inspired Philanthropy or other philanthropic guidance materials  is one way to begin to articulate your values.  As you work through the exercises described in these materials, keep a list of the words that best represent your values with you as you begin to plan your community giving. 

In considering what really matters to you, you may have thought of issues like:  education, safe homes, access to jobs.  These issues might emerge from a personal experience or knowledge that these are the keys to more stable communities.  Either way, these issues pull you toward them. Uniting that pull with your values can connect community giving to your soul. 

When this happens, your giving becomes a natural extension and expression of yourself and, while challenging, giving will be something you want to do again and again.

Connecting to community.  Obviously, you feel strongly connected to your community and to community giving or you would not be visiting this site.  But how can you make your giving a living, breathing example of your connection to community?  Think about the following questions:

• What community is important to you?
  This might be an actual geographical place—your town, a distressed city, a struggling neighborhood—or it could be a population of people—a community of elderly people, low-income workers, teachers, impoverished children, etc.
• Do you tend to focus on trees or the forest? 
  In other words:  Are you more comfortable giving give broadly to a region or issue or do you prefer to be specific?  Are you more fulfilled by seeing an individual change or by seeing community- or neighborhood-wide change?  By answering these questions, you can find a focus to your giving.

These questions help you define where you will give.  Don't worry about having a specific plan or solution right now. The first step is simply to narrow down the wide range of places where your giving can make a difference. 

Finding your mission.  Once you have considered why you give (your values) and where you give (your community and focus), you are ready to develop a mission statement that brings everything together in a few simple, direct and unambiguous sentences. 

A mission statement is usually no more than 2 or three sentences and in fact, can be as little as 10 words.  Your mission statement reveals the core purpose of your giving.  It reveals your values, your interest areas as well as what you have to offer.  A mission statement is often be followed a couple of action steps that will announce your giving plan. 

Let's go back to Dick Grey (see sidebar) for an example: Dick Grey believes local food production and therefore, local farming and open space are critical to the well-being of a community.  To ensure that this state continues to benefit from local farming, the Dick Grey Fund supports non-profit land trust organizations that work with farmers to conserve working farms and agricultural land. 

Dick Grey decided that his giving would comprise two main Action Steps:  The fund implements this mission, (1) by awarding grants to the operating budgets of land trusts that include conservation of farmland in their activities and (2) by periodically bringing together the Fund's grantees to learn from one another and from regional experts.

As you can see from Dick Grey's mission and action steps, it is best to make your giving plan as straightforward and specific as possible.  In a few sentences, one gets a sense of why Dick Grey gives, where he gives and how the giving will be performed, through both grants to operations and through networking opportunities Dick's status and connections afford.  While he has not gone so far as to state the exact amount of grants or exactly when they will be awarded, these statements offer a good starting point.  Logistical details may change over time, but Dick can feel confident that his mission and action steps can remain consistent for a long, long time.

Mission statements can take time to write and to refine.  Take your time and continue tweaking your's until you feel confident that it captures the spirit of your community giving while serving to help others understand why, where and how you give. 

Communicating about your giving.  One of the best things you can do is communicate openly and positively about why you give.  Why?

• You will be helping potential grantees understand why they should (or should not) appeal to you for support. 
• You will be sharing the mission of your giving with the larger community; this helps both you and recipients of your support be accountable to this mission.
• You will be setting an example of both generosity and openness to the rest of the community.
• You will be helping future generations of your own family understand your values, interests and commitment to community.
• You will be surprised and enriched by the number of community giving peers you meet once you begin sharing your own experience.

If you prefer to be anonymous in your giving, consider at least communicating your mission—and the values that inspired it—to members of your family.  Again, you will be helping family members better understand and perhaps, emulate your values. 

As always, your values and your unique personality will determine how you will communicate about your giving.  The following steps can help you cover the basics.

An exercise in communications. Try completing the following statements.  Once completed, these seemingly simple statements can help tell the story of your community giving.  Your story will help guide your giving decisions and help you share your approach to giving with community groups and future generations.  If you give through a group of trustees or along with other family members, try using this exercise to prompt a discussion.

Telling the story of your commitment:

1. If you knew... an anecdote or historical fact ...about my family or me, my/our reasons for giving would make a lot of sense. 
2. I or my family loves this community because it...  a characteristic of that community, an experience you've had or a historical fact about your community.
3. The 2-3 most important things to me or my family are... your values, such as fairness OR a topic, such as housing.  It might correlate with the anecdote you placed in the first statement.  For example, because of our family history as teachers, education and literacy are the most important things to my family. 

Telling the story of the impact you hope to have:

1. As a result of my or my family's involvement, I/we want to feel...  an intangible feeling you hope your giving will create for yourself and/or your family.
2. As a result of my or my family's involvement, I/we want the community to feel...  an intangible feeling you hope your giving will create among recipients and the wider community. 
3. As a result of my or my family's involvement, I/we want to see... 2 or 3 tangible changes you hope to witness as a result of your giving.  These changes can be incremental steps, simple signs that something good is happening, or might be relatively large in scale.  They can be changes in behavior or in the physical environment.
4. Over... a period of time ...the goal of our/my giving is to ... 1 or 2 longer term results you hope your giving will help achieve. 

Share your story.  Now that you have a story about your giving, share it! 

If you give anonymously, think about the steps you might follow without losing that anonymity.  You could work through a charitable adviser or your local community foundation to share your giving interests in ways that protect your identity. 

Otherwise, consider these steps:

• Put a concise version of the mission statement, action steps and your “giving story” on one piece of paper.
• Share this paper with potential recipients of your support, either directly or through outlets like local media or nonprofit associations.  Of you develop a more formal application process and giving program, remember to include your giving story as background.
• Be willing to talk about your personal reasons for giving.  Whether you have experienced poverty, a health crisis or grew up in a particular neighborhood, your willingness to share your story will be highly valued and will lead to a more trusting and successful relationship with grant recipients.
• Encourage one-on-one conversations between you and a prospective recipient before requests are submitted.  Be willing to visit potential recipients on their own turf. Most community leaders are proud to share their work with others.
• Talk about past gifts, especially those you consider very successful, with potential recipients.

One last suggestion:  Remember to share your “story” and your giving interests with other donors and foundations in your community.  Creating a network of peers can help you learn about activities and leaders in your community.  Your local Regional Association of Grantmakers as well as the Community Giving Resource can help you find other donors and foundations in your community.

Now that you have a mission, a few action steps and a giving story, you are ready for the next step:  Learn more about your community.  Learning about the strengths and challenges of a community can help you hammer out the design of your giving program. 

Learning about a community This section will give you tips for learning what you need to know about your community.

Designing a giving program This section will help you establish a systematic grantmaking approach.

Related Reading

Resources

Discovering the meaning in your philanthropy: The Philanthropic Initiative (TPI) offers additional advice for families engaging in giving.