Dor

Roman’s mention of the money-splitting idea in his blog post from last week makes for a great segue to this week’s hot topic. It is true that we had initially agreed to make one large sum donation of 10,000—but that was without seeing the details and features of the actual organizations we’d be funding. About a third of us (including myself) saw some positives in splitting the money and decided we’d at least be open to doing so. The idea was that although a larger sum could go farther with one organization, in this case some of us felt as though splitting it into, for example 1)half for actually funding a full organization, but for 6 months instead of a full year and 2)hiring a staff member in a another organization would bring about greater impact.

This brings about a few issues that we had to debate over. First, does it really make us look bad, as if we chickened out of a making the tough, yet clear-cut decision and relented to splitting the money? In my opinion, no—if we look at the details and believe that it makes greater impact to split the money then that’s the opposite of being lazy, because we were all just about ready to vote for one of the organizations anyways. Does it set an iffy precedent, seeing as we are the first group to do this? Once again, we need to worry less about our image, because we are trying to help the kids here, not our image. The notion failed, which I don’t mind at all seeing as the organization we did choose (hurray, fireworks) is an amazing program that I fully support.

However, I must express my disappointment in the fact that we did not fully think through the splitting notion—we could have done much more to ensure that our money does 100% of what it can. We could have called the places and seen what they could do with the money for example, which we ruled out. Overall, though, the amount of enthusiasm the class has shown throughout the whole process has been fantastic, and I’m proud to have been a part of it.