Megan

Over the past week, our class has been dealing with the challenging task of determining a mission statement for our fund and determining the way in which we want to spend the $10,000. On Tuesday we were given some sample mission statements of other funds, ranging from large, billion dollar organizations to ones that were giving much smaller thousand dollar donations. This provided us with a good framework to base our own statements off of. We were then divided into two teams in order to make the process easier and each developed a team mission statement.

After coming up with our statements, we then met as a whole class to discuss what each team had developed. Despite having completely separate discussions from one another, the two mission statements were actually similar. The main similarity was that both teams wanted to focus the funds we have on a youth organization. One of my team’s reasons for this was that we felt giving to a youth organization would have the most lasting impact. One of the main differences between the two mission statements was that one team wanted to limit the focus of their funds by only giving to an organization in Prince George’s County. The other team was open to giving to an organization in either Prince George’s County or Montgomery County, but they wanted to limit the funds focus by only giving to an organization with a budget of less than $100,000. At the end of class we discussed how to resolve these differences, possibly by compromising and including both limitations in our final statements.

Next week we will be discussing whether or not to combine our mission statements and donate the $10,000 as a whole, or to keep the statements separate and each give $5,000 to separate organizations. I personally feel that we should give try to resolve the statements, since they are not all that different from one another and giving $10,000 will have a much greater impact than $5,000. This seemed to be the general consensus of the class as well, so hopefully we’ll be able to develop a statement that will encompass both groups’ main goals.

The readings we did this week discussed what things should be considered when giving money as well as the various forms of grants that can be given. From the readings I was able to see how very important the work we did this past week truly is, as the values we have established in our statements will need to be referred to throughout this entire process. We will most likely get many applications seeking grants for many worthy causes, and without having the guideline of these mission statements, it would be next to impossible to decide who to give to. This makes establishing a concise mission statement all the more important, and I look forward to seeing what our teams come up with in the upcoming weeks.