With our work in the community
coming closer than ever, we have a lot to consider by the way of what issues we
want to focus on putting our efforts towards. For our upcoming project,
Professor Campbell has made a list of issues for us to consider in relation to
Broome County. The eleven issues that have been pinpointed are as follows:
- · Education
- · Children
- Literacy
- Food Insecurity/Hunger
- Poverty
- Health/Health Care
- Sustainability
- Sexual Health and/or LGBT
issues
- Housing/Homelessness
- Immigration
- Domestic Violence
The question that I am interested
in posing to the class is how will you balance the conflicting ideals of your
head and your heart to pick which issue to focus on? Additionally, will you
make your personal decision of which nonprofit to support based solely on the individual
organization, or will you pick an issue and then try to find a suitable
nonprofit that supports it?
Because I can tell in advance that
our class will have some very passionate arguments involving how best to
allocate our funds, I have been considering my personal plan for how to decide
on my approach to the situation. I feel as if putting the issue first will
allow me to be more objective when deciding which nonprofit I wish to promote
to the rest of the class. If I were to try and look at each and every
organization without having recognized the issue I am most passionate about
first, I would get distracted from the facts of the application by my bias
towards caring more about the issue. If each person in our class were to focus only
on applications from nonprofits focusing on the issues they are most passionate
about, I feel as if we will have better discussion in class regarding which are
the most effective organizations.
Obviously we have spent a lot of
time in class discussing the head versus heart debate, but in our situation, we
have to take it a step further. Not only do we have to reconcile the conflict
within ourselves, but we also have to convince others that our cause is the
best using both logical and emotional argument. If each person is passionately
fighting for a few organizations that they have done an extensive amount of
research on, supporting an issue that they are knowledgeable about, and overall
doing something that they care about on a personal level rather than just a
cold intellectual one, I feel as if the debate will be much more interesting
and capable of convincing others to back your cause as well.
One final reason this approach may
be the one that works best for our class is because we have produced a detail
application form, there will be a lot of reading to do and many organizations
to consider. After reading 50+ applications, they may all start to blend
together, but if everyone reads carefully only the applications of the
nonprofits that are relevant to their key issues and skims for a general idea
of the rest, we will have a class that is more knowledgeable as a whole. I
encourage everyone to start thinking about my suggestion for how to improve our
process of consideration – if anyone has any better ideas or suggestions,
please comment! I think it is important for us to start thinking about this now
so we have the most organized approach and so our class might actually be able
to come to a decision as a whole.
Amanda, I think that this is and interesting and a pretty sufficient approach. People will be interested in very different cases, however I'm sure we could find a majority vote on several causes. This approach was something I was thinking about as well. On another note, I do not at all think that one's predisposition or passion for a specific issue can be seen as a negative bias in reading through the applications. I think it gives you the upper hand in knowing about the topic, and deciding whether what the non-profit is doing is an efficient approach. Rather than thinking about these as biases or struggling with the heart over mind toss-up we should just focus on what we are passionate about and what we know. Have we experiences the issue ourselves, are we closely connected to someone who has, or do we happen to know a lot about a specific cause? These should be the main questions we ask ourselves when making decisions about who we'd like to give to within this class. I am not shooting down giving to places, people, and causes one does not directly understand, I am only highlighting that it is more efficient of us to root for the issues that we know rather than an issue we are clueless about. Philanthropy towards a relatable or familiar cause will be more efficient because its supporter knows how they should give and to what specific aspect to help the issue most efficiently.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes time to vote on who to give our grant to, I will fight bitterly to convince you all that a single organization deserves all our money. That is unless an organization is specifically asking for less that $10000. But regardless, I will choose an organization that I logically find to be the most deserving of and in need of our funding. This is because I fully believe your head, not heard, should make these important decisions. That said, I recognize that most people do give with their hearts rather than heads. So in trying to convince everyone else of my opinion, it's imperative that I employ both logic and emotion in order to appeal to as many others as possible. Something I fear is that too many of us will become too emotionally attached to the causes we are defending to make more logical decisions.
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