Monday, November 25, 2013

Celebrating Our Growing Cohort of Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy

By: Clarkie
Clarkie has volunteered with Allowance for Good for over two years and serves as an advisor to our educational programming.

It has been an honor to co-lead the Autumn 2013 session of Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy. Throughout the past ten weeks, we have explored all things philanthropy -- from the philanthropic landscape to international development and non-profit accountability. We discussed individual giving, corporate philanthropy, and the different types of foundations. Our students listened -- and asked thoughtful questions -- to speakers from the field: Stephanie Denzer, from our partner Spark Ventures; Sharmila Rao Thakker of The Siragusa Foundation; Sejal Shah-Myers of The Springboard Foundation; Jenny Daugherty of AbbVie; and Maya Cohen of GlobeMed. On October 30, we attended a talk by Princeton professor of Bioethics, Peter Singer; as leaders, we were especially impressed by the critical way our ELP students responded to his opinions on effective altruism.

Moving forward, our students are going to work together on their own philanthropic project to increase awareness of Allowance for Good, share their newly developed knowledge with their peers, and raise funds to send to our partner Spark Ventures in Twapia, Zambia. The ELPers will use the skills they have learned and the ideas sparked from our weeks together in the classroom to develop ideas and execute what we have faith will be an informative and successful project. I cannot wait to follow their progress, and we look forward to sharing their project with our AfG family. 


Our group is filled with engaged learners and future philanthropic leaders. They understand what it means to be a global citizen and are true AfG Catalysts. We hope they will continue exploring and asking questions as emerging leaders and are excited to announce that they will have the opportunity to keep learning with Allowance for Good in our Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy second level course. In ELP Level 2, we will delve deeper into non-profit organizational structure, grant making, the relationships between grantee and grantor, and assessing the good governance of non-profits. ELP level 2 will be offered in the Spring.

Members of our second cohort of Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy with their certificates in Global Philanthropic Leadership. 

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Assessing Worldwide Human Rights

By: Jackson
Jackson is participating in Allowance for Good's autumn 2013 Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy program.

This week at EPL session eight, we learned about the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. These eight goals were set in the year 2000, to be completed by 2015. These goals include: eradicating extreme hunger and poverty, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and women’s rights, reducing child morality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and creating a global partnership for development. A great deal of progress has been made towards achieving these goals, but there is still much work to be done in order to accomplish them by 2015. Whether or not they are entirely accomplished by 2015, these goals have set us on the right path towards bettering the quality of life for all, all around the globe.

This week Maya Cohen, the executive director of Globemed, visited us in class. Globemed is an organization that partners groups of university students with local organizations in less developed countries looking to better their own communities. These partnerships last through multiple generations of students, and focus on creating a tight bond between the students and the organization. The students typically raise funds for the organization, but also contribute physical service in an annual trip to visit the partner organization. Ms. Cohen explained this to us, as well as how Globemed’s focus is not only on the health of a community, but the quality of the community as a whole. Different organizations working within the same community can often achieve a greater affect than one organization alone.

It has been said that true philanthropy is done through the donation of one’s time, talent and treasure. This made me skeptical of Globemed’s credibility as a truly philanthropic organization, considering it is difficult to donate anything but treasure from thousands of miles away. What sets Globemed apart from other organizations though is the unique one on one partnering of students and organizations that lasts well past any one student’s time at their university. Unlike other charitable organizations, Globemed follows the money they raise and help the local organizations find the most efficient way to spend it. This truly makes it a philanthropic organization.

At the end of class, we partook in an activity titled “What is a Human Right?” In this activity, we brainstormed ideas of what are basic rights all humans are entitled to. Responses varied from basic necessities such as food, water and shelter, to more idealistic answers such as a right to representation, a right to fair compensation for services and a right to freedom from persecution. It struck me how many of these human rights we take for granted in the U.S., and how even if the U.N.’s millennium goals are accomplished there is still a long way to go to moral and social equality. Many people worldwide do not have access to what we consider basic necessities, and it is our job to advocate for equal rights for all.

This was one more excellent week at EPL, where we all learned a lot and engaged in meaningful discussion. There is no doubt in my mind that next week will be even more productive than this week was.
Jackson presents to his fellow ELP students.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Evaluating Effective Altruism with Peter Singer

By: Leah
Leah is participating in Allowance for Good's autumn 2013 Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy program.

Hi! I’m Leah, I’m 17, a senior at ETHS, and I’ll be writing this week’s blog post.

On Wednesday night we heard Peter Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton, speak at Northwestern on the topic of effective altruism.  Peter belongs to a utilitarian school of thought and generally approaches issues through a secular lens.

At its core, Peter’s argument was that we should find ways to make each dollar we donate go as far as possible. This seemed based on a hierarchy similar to Maslow’s pyramid, guaranteeing all people their basic rights and necessities before addressing the non-basic needs of others. One of the examples Peter used to effectively show this point revolved around the problem of blindness. Cataracts are an incredibly common and treatable cause of blindness, especially in the developing world. A cataract surgery, giving someone the gift of sight, costs within a range of $20-50. Giving a seeing-eye dog to a not preventably blind person in the first world costs around $40,000.  Peter argues that the obvious choice is to cure many more people of preventable blindness rather than assist one person who will remain blind for the rest of their life.

Peter stressed the fact that he believes all human lives have the same value, which is something a think a lot of us coming from privileged backgrounds overlook too often. I think we need reminders, like Peter’s lecture, that we are people in exactly the way that people from Cambodia, Laos, Botswana, Uganda, Columbia, and Nicaragua are people and that we cannot assign their lives any less value than we assign our own. This is a topic we discuss a lot in ELP and I think it merits our attention.

Some of the Northwestern students in the crowd asked questions that were frankly kind of stupid. Through my learning about the world (in ELP and elsewhere) and by simply listening to Peter’s talk, I felt confident enough to answer. Hopefully more students in my generation will learn what I have the privilege of learning now in ELP and the power of listening so that we can avoid silly questions and truly get ot the core of helping our world.

Leah, left, shares her group's venture philanthropy idea during one of the Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy sessions.