In the past couple of messages Vikas Nath has posted some great
demonstrations of e-Governance and Steve McCarty has suggested "There
should not be one umbrella organization for all well-meaning initiatives
in a certain field". He went on to say something we all too painfully
know. "At present, many worthy projects end up as competitors for
insufficient grant funds. "
While I agree that "Dot Force needs to be sold to world governments, as
mutually beneficial and as an effective approach", I feel that we ought
to be integrating some of the e-Governance concepts and this
understanding that there are too many good ideas, too much need and not
enough dollars.
All over the world we are going through a gigantic trasfer of wealth
from the post WW2 generation to their children, to charities and to
government taxing bodies. In America an initiative has been formed,
called New Ventures in Philanthropy. This is a multi-year project that
aims to create new foundations and corporate giving programs, and
encourage new donors to endow philanthropic funds whose income and/or
principal will be used for grantmaking. New Ventures is being
implemented and managed by the Forum of
What I find over and over again as that we who are trying to do good
work and are always short of funds are simply talking to the chior. We
don't have enough of those who could be bankrolling our work in the same
discussion threads. I lead a non-profit called the Tutor/Mentor
Connection (T/MC). It's based in Chicago. If you review my
www.tutormentorconnection.org web site, you'll see a consistent effort
to reach two groups of people. The first are those who are leading
tutor/mentor and mentoring-to-career programs anywhere in the world. We
have tremendous power if we find ways to work together. The second are
those business leaders and philanthropist who want to see poverty
reduced, or want to see the "costs of poverty" reduced.
If we can help groups like New Ventures in Philanthropy create greater
philanthropy capital, we have a chance of getting a share of those new
donors into our conversation. If we can do that, we only need to be
linking and creating "libraries" of who were are, where we are, what we
do, why it is important, what we are achieving, etc." to give those
donors choices of whom to send a check to.
It would seem that all of the talent represented on this GKD list could
be working to help New Ventures in Philanthropy succeed, while working
to pull a greater proportion of those new donors into a "GKD
list/library" as I envision for tutor/mentor programs. While it would
be nice to think that governments and bureacrats would find a way to
deliver long-term, flexible funding, that would help each of us innovate
to the great programs and outcomes we envision, I'm not so sure that
will ever happen.
Vikas has demonstrated what can happen when people decide to take the
lead.
Daniel Bassill
President
Cabrini Connections
Tutor/Mentor Connection
www.tutormentorconnection.org
PS .. a link to the New Ventures in Philanthropy site is in the HOT
LINKS section of the T/MC web site.
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