Life Means Hope
With the world wide financial crisis and the fear it has begun to cause, I wonder how the nonprofit sector will fare. Already I have encountered small philanthropies that are shrinking their giving because of exceptional stock market fluctuations. Their income from stock has begun to dry up, so they can’t see donating money they don’t have.
This morning I sit here researching grants for a small nonprofit that helps orphans in Africa. It’s a very worthy cause and I am quickly growing committed to its mission. However, I am finding it surprisingly difficult to find funding from the small philanthropies, perhaps because the need is so large (over 2 million youth in Africa alone) that it looks hopeless. So I have begun scratching the surface of the enormous, often government-led grantors. For instance, I have looked into the World Bank’s giving, which is mostly to developing world governments or charities that work on a national scale. Here is the World Bank’s statement about their giving as displayed on their website:
Over the past ten years, the DGF supported some 150 priority programs with a Bank contribution of US$1.8 billion, catalyzing about US$1 billion annually from major Bank partners i.e. other international financial organizations, regional development banks, bilateral donors, UN agencies, foundations, grant recipient organizations and private sector.
You can see that even the World Bank’s enormous economic clout is in peril from a world wide financial collapse, and even a world-wide credit freeze. Expectations are that the billions in the coffers of the World Bank, which is loaned on contingencies, could shrink by 50%. That would mean funding would be spread more thinly and to fewer people who suffer from river blindness, starvation from crop failure caused probably by global warming, the man-made death and destruction of war, and myriad preventable or treatable tragedies world wide.
I am personally rather bitter about this turn of events because I realize that I live in the most economically successful country in the world, with all its privileges. Yet, despite our extraordinary advantages, we are crumbling. And because of our mistakes and moral failings, and because we must maintain our consumer economy, it looks like we will have to abandon the neediest. I’m talking about the children who will die without knowing that life means hope.
This morning I sit here researching grants for a small nonprofit that helps orphans in Africa. It’s a very worthy cause and I am quickly growing committed to its mission. However, I am finding it surprisingly difficult to find funding from the small philanthropies, perhaps because the need is so large (over 2 million youth in Africa alone) that it looks hopeless. So I have begun scratching the surface of the enormous, often government-led grantors. For instance, I have looked into the World Bank’s giving, which is mostly to developing world governments or charities that work on a national scale. Here is the World Bank’s statement about their giving as displayed on their website:
Over the past ten years, the DGF supported some 150 priority programs with a Bank contribution of US$1.8 billion, catalyzing about US$1 billion annually from major Bank partners i.e. other international financial organizations, regional development banks, bilateral donors, UN agencies, foundations, grant recipient organizations and private sector.
You can see that even the World Bank’s enormous economic clout is in peril from a world wide financial collapse, and even a world-wide credit freeze. Expectations are that the billions in the coffers of the World Bank, which is loaned on contingencies, could shrink by 50%. That would mean funding would be spread more thinly and to fewer people who suffer from river blindness, starvation from crop failure caused probably by global warming, the man-made death and destruction of war, and myriad preventable or treatable tragedies world wide.
I am personally rather bitter about this turn of events because I realize that I live in the most economically successful country in the world, with all its privileges. Yet, despite our extraordinary advantages, we are crumbling. And because of our mistakes and moral failings, and because we must maintain our consumer economy, it looks like we will have to abandon the neediest. I’m talking about the children who will die without knowing that life means hope.
posted by Schultz and Company | 10:45 AM
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