April 20, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Honoring the forerunners

Tonight I helped Intersections International to celebrate its 10th anniversary and honor a forerunner in the Christian LGBTQIA and social justice movements.

Dr. Randall Miller, now at the Arcus Foundation and formerly of both the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and the Pacific School of Religion, grasped decades ago that religion can be a positive force in the world. Then he put his life’s energy into demonstrating it.

He started working with affirming people of faith, first in his own Christian tradition and then beyond it, to engage clergy, to grapple with theology, and to increase the public visibility of marginalized people—all with the ultimate aim of making justice our collective lived experience.

On our communities’ behalf, I presented Randall with The Intersections Award for Courage in Pursuit of Social Justice. It’s absolutely well earned.

Believe Out Loud, the leading digital platform in Christian faith and LGBTQIA advocacy, wouldn’t exist today but for Randall’s vision and leadership.

And what better way to honor his work and the contributions he and his colleagues have made over the decades than to sustain and build on it?

Donate to Believe Out Loud today to help us continue to proclaim the good news of God’s expansive love!

April 18, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Save the date: Give Out Day 2017

Give Out Day | 04.20.17 | Believe Out Loud — Photo credit: Alison Amyx, Believe Out Loud

All day on Thursday, April 20, 2017, LGBTQIA organizations across the US will participate in an annual 24-hour philanthropy campaign called Give OUT Day.

This giving event is hosted by the Horizons Foundation, and is now in its fourth year. It allows the nonprofits that are part of the LGBTQIA movement to showcase their work, connect with donors, and enjoy a little friendly competition with colleagues in other organizations.

This year, I’m participating with Believe Out Loud.

We’re counting down to 12:01 a.m. on Thursday morning—and you can participate now by scheduling a donation ahead of time! (If you donate using a debit or credit card, click “Charge Date” to confirm the date when money will be withdrawn or billed against your account.)

Whatever you can give this week, remember that, as Charles Fillmore once wrote, “a person increases his blessings by being grateful for what he has.”

I’m grateful for you. Thank you for giving with us!

June 30, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Power beyond the org chart

An organizational chart is somewhat like a designer’s blueprint: it tells you how leaders expect information, authority, and people to flow. It doesn’t tell you how information, authority, or people actually do move around the system.

An organizational chart also focuses on the personnel who keep a system running day-to-day. It doesn’t include the people in the system’s wider network: the people it serves, the people it addresses in external communications, and the people who fund its work as customers, investors, or donors.

When we interpret an organization exclusively in terms of its chart and the administrators and staff inscribed on it, we miss a lot. And when we frame people’s possible institutional contributions only in terms of their impact on hirings, firings, demotions, and promotions, we’re radically underestimating their value to the whole.

Most donations to charitable organizations come not from foundations or benevolent corporations but from individual people. In the U.S., foundations gave $57 billion last year, and corporations gave $18 billion, but individuals gave $268 billion. Individual people, many of them earning less than $50,000 per year, gave 71% of all donated dollars in 2015. And, because so many organizations are still structured as pyramids, most of those donors weren’t part of the staff or boards of the organizations they gave to.

There’s power beyond the org chart. People on the org chart are wise when we recognize, engage, and enable our communities’ power rather than imagine that all mission progress depends on us. And people off the chart need to recognize our ability to empower the organizations and causes we’re giving to, no matter whether we’re sharing our raw dollars or simply volunteering our skills and time.

Our value isn’t dependent on our institutional role. This insight is especially critical for people who participate in and give to religious organizations. Religious organizations receive over 30% of all charitable contributions, but, unlike most 501(c)(3) organizations, aren’t legally required to report on how they use the investments that donors make.

With no legal accountability requirements to compel organizations, religious donors are at the mercy of treasurers and leadership teams that choose to share fiscal and programmatic information. Of course, transparency is best consensual! But when organizations treat information and decision-making access as the currency of power, donors can’t easily make good decisions about when or how to contribute.

If you’re a decision-maker: Look beyond your staff and the sources that have traditionally supported you. Not only do you need to engage the energy of the wider world, you’re already part of that wider world and need to watch that you’re not blocking community relationships.

If you’re giving from outside the org chart: Remember that you’re part of the flow of resources. Ask the staff of the organizations and initiatives you care about for information you need to choose how you add value. You’re essential! Remember that.

June 25, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Investing in imagination

Whatever our philosophy on money, however much we give or save, and regardless of how we rationalize, we’re still left with some basic practical realities.

No matter how lofty your spiritual ideals may be, no matter how many powerful affirmations you can speak by rote, you still have to pay your bills.” —Eric Butterworth, Spiritual Economics

We still have obligations. We still benefit from others’ talents and resources. They need to be paid. We need to be paid. In a world where currency is the language of trade, we eat, drink, clothe ourselves, and shelter ourselves by getting paid.

These facts don’t change for people in the social sector, people who spend their prime waking hours and some nights too helping, teaching, guiding, or counseling others.

Our beliefs about sharing resources don’t change those facts. Beliefs about tithing or donating to good causes and other people in need don’t change the facts.

Wherever we draw benefits from other people, and we all do, there’s that rule: we still have to pay our bills.

Don’t worry (be happy)

A short teaching on worrying about life’s necessities is tucked into the middle of the Sermon on the Mount:

So I tell you, don’t worry about the food or drink you need to live, or about the clothes you need for your body. Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothes.” —Matthew 6:25

Food, drink, and clothes are really great things. I love them all! I don’t seek out involuntary hunger, thirst, or nakedness for myself and don’t wish it on others close or distant. That anyone in our world doesn’t have these basics of life is a testimony against us all.

In Matthew, I don’t see Jesus arguing that people should seek out experiences of lack. But I believe he was right to caution us on worry.

Worry shows up in my life as a creativity vampire. When I think of all of the times during grad school when I stalled on my art or struggled to deliver work I knew I was capable of, I can map those periods to straightforward survival insecurity: health concerns, for instance, or having to trade-off groceries and mandatory federal fees.

Beyond those kinds of binds, worry drew my attention away not only from my routine work but also from the vision and energy that I might otherwise have devoted to co-building a world where no one need be hungry, thirsty, naked, isolated, or purposeless.

Many people don’t even believe such a world is possible: we do have 7.125 billion people to care for. But I think this sense of futility undermines our imaginations and, combined with the low hum of worry, discourages us from taking action.

When we believe there is not enough, that resources are scarce, then we accept that some will have what they need and some will not. We rationalize that someone is destined to end up with the short end of the stick.

When we believe that more is better, and equate having more with being more…then people on the short end of that resource stick are assumed to be less smart, less able, even less valuable, as human beings. We feel we have permission to discount them.

When we believe that’s just the way things are, then we assume a posture of helplessness. We believe that a problem is unsolvable. We accept that in our human family neither the resource-rich members nor the resource-poor members have enough money, enough food, or enough intelligence or resourcefulness to generate lasting solutions.” —Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money

Investing in imagination

People of faith and ethical philosophy have a responsibility to set the mental and material stage for people living and choosing every day: we need worlds of experience where people don’t feel so powerless and aren’t so under-resourced that worrying makes sense for them, for us.

We need to live. We need the basics to live well. And we need them as a baseline for building thriving lives of trust, hope, and constructive action.

There are enough resources on Earth to feed, water, and clothe everyone here. We don’t lack because there isn’t enough. People lack because we don’t care for each other enough to distribute what we have effectively.

We can change those realities because we created them. We can change them and replace them with a world of enough. And we can change and challenge the circumstances and doctrines that got us living in futility and learned helplessness; we can change them one conscious gift at a time.

Support people and organizations whose contributions nourish you and build the world you plan to live in.

Divest from people and organizations whose contributions shore up fear or futility, or teach you that what is is all that can be.

Give your time and skills, networks and attention to the work and world you’re drawn to, because only through our imaginations and investment will that world ever bloom.

June 22, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The gift of presence

This week, I’m in a class on philosophies of philanthropy and reading Eric Butterworth’s Spiritual Economics and Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money.

Butterworth’s book was first written the year I was born (some of the content shows that), but Twist’s book combines her reflections from a career in non-profit development, fundraising, and work on tough social issues like resolving global hunger and helping Amazon residents preserve their forest. Not all of Twist’s anecdotes resonate with me, but it’s clear her thoughts are grounded in her life and professional experiences.

Butterworth and Twist agree that we thrive as we practice giving, living generously (“contributing whatever [you] have without fear of loss”), partnering with others, and pouring our energy and affirmative attention into people and projects that we fully believe in.

They also agree on what now feels like a basic life principle: expecting one’s beliefs to be beneficial. They don’t mean that our beliefs should turn us a financial profit, necessarily. They mean that there’s no point building our lives around beliefs that leave us fearful, anxious for the future, or invested in the assumptions that violence, poverty, and hardship are inevitable and that efforts to resolve them are futile.

What if I could be radically present in my life, appreciating the beauty and challenges of existence moment by moment, giving my full attention to the people, work, and opportunities to contribute that come my way, and centering myself in who I am, not merely what I have or can get? What if I judged my choices and contributions, as Butterworth says, “out of the expanse of [my] wholeness, not at its expense”?

When I was about to complete my last year of college in Jamaica, I had a series of life-disrupting health events. I withdrew from school with a letter to the registrar—still one of the hardest letters I’ve ever written—and spent nearly 9 months back in the UK recovering. It wasn’t that I’d been living my life in getting mode and suddenly understood what giving meant; that’s not my story. But the experience did teach me a lot about what it means to simply be, even when I’m not in a position to meet cultural expectations and frenetically produce.

My presence is the greatest gift.

In the decade and a half since that experience, I’ve only become more inclined to spaces where people are valued for who they are, not primarily for what they can give, how much they possess, or what they can get for themselves or for others. When we show up in these kinds of spaces, we do bring all of our gifts and skills and perspectives and community resources with us, but we aren’t valuable for the gold in our backpacks. We are the gift.

From that perspective, imagine the power of entire teams of people who know who they are and bring their whole selves into collaborative relationships. Imagine communities filled with people who reach out to other people they respect and whose work they love enough to amplify without drama, score-keeping, or the hope of extra credit. Relationships win the race!

In a you-or-me world, reciprocity and collaboration don’t fit. A you-and-me world is full of collaborators, partners, sharing, and reciprocity… Collaboration becomes the circuitry through which the energy, attention, and resources of sufficiency flow and are continually renewed. Implicit in collaboration is the trust that says there is enough and we will figure out how to use it together wisely.” —Lynne Twist and Teresa Barker

These are counter-cultural priorities, yes. But they yield innovative, financial, and relational results that are far better long-term than living small-hearted, grasping, isolated, and suspicious.

May 30, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Three ways to preserve the innocence of giving

Ever received a hand-made card from a child? The drawing might be bright and the handwriting might be inscrutable, but neither of those things are why we display children’s notes on our fridges or treasure the gifts they make.

There’s an innocence in the act of open-hearted giving and receiving, and that innocence is worth preserving in professional fundraising as well as between adults and children.

Keep three things in mind as you connect people and organizations who have resources with the other people, organizations, and causes that need them.

1. Assume abundance.Over the last several years, a lot of people have suffered financially. Some have lost long-held jobs or been unable to find steady work at all. For so many, the decade has been a season of scarcity, and so talk of abundance seems alien.

But an assumption of abundance is especially important now. Those of us who didn’t come from wealthy backgrounds and still aren’t flush get to practice holding the energy of plenty as we work with resources on behalf of causes we care about. We practice not centering board fears about the bank balance or worrying that good work won’t find advocates.

Be willing to guide program leaders in breaking projects into more fund-able increments, or revising projects in ways that leverage other resources the team already has. In the context of abundance, and assuming that change is about the long game and not the short-term, there’s no reason to be inflexible about the next step!

2. Remember why you’re raising resources, and don’t get distracted. The foundation we use for fundraising campaigns, invitation letters, and appeals has to be able to bear the love for humankind that philanthropy is all about.

It’s possible to raise a lot of money on other grounds—hatred of Others or fear of what they might be doing in the big wide world—and both crowdfunding platforms and traditional fundraising programs do that all the time. But if you love the cause and you want it to run smoothly for a long time, why fuel it that way?

A world that works for all won’t run on misanthropy, so don’t plan on using it to drive your fundraising. Be willing to design resource initiatives around the outcomes and representations of people that you want to see more of, and don’t allow desperation or fear to seep into your resource-raising work.

3. Stay grounded: people trump the numbers. Development can be grueling because it’s essential: resources allow people who care a lot to serve others and make change, and without resources that simply doesn’t happen. Because balance sheets are tangible but our assumptions about and vision for the world usually aren’t, it can be tempting to focus on things we can see and count: how many dollars a campaign yielded; whether a pre-launch deadline was met; how many members served ever give back.

But people have to trump the numbers: a non-profit organization converts in-flowing financial and human resources into out-flowing service, programming, and content for the sake of the community and wider society. It’s not about activity for the sake of activity or income for the sake of income. Whenever that focus and balance is lost, we risk losing the simple heart that keeps staff and donors rightly oriented to each other and to their common mission.

If you’re ever tempted to lose the light spirit of giving, take a cue from Banana Kid. This home video isn’t captioned, but the star teaches us all we need to learn through his body language and openness.