The Nobel Experience

This was strange.  Being on the other side of the interview is defiantly a new an experience.  I chose to do my mom.  She is a stay at home mom who thinks Philanthropy is just for people with millions of dollars and giving a ton of money to a charity, but she also said that it is a “noble thing to do.”  I choose to interview my mom because even though she didn’t know it when i interviewed her that she is one of the biggest philanthropists i know.  What surprised me was that my mom didn’t relies that she was such an exemplary philanthropist and until this interview i really didn’t think about it ether.

Fundraising

My group is having a very hard time to make our Fundraiser happen.  Its not that we don’t have many ideas its that we have to many. Like first we were just going to sit in front of target and just ask for some money but when we asked target they asked for some papers that we didn’t have it so it put us in a strange situation.  Then we had the idea of selling fresas con crema or strawberry’s with cream but it turns out we can’t prepare the food for legal reasons on campus so that idea got shot down too.  Now our idea is too sell chocolate covered strawberries and i think we are starting on Friday so that’s good.

Calling

During this week we were supposed to call organizations and ask them information about it to see what the staff was like and if it seemed like they really cared, the only problem was the organization(that i called twice…) never got back to me so this was kind of hard.  Lucky i just asked my friend Annie how her experience was and she said that after talking to the founder of her organization and reviewing the tax form it was very easy to decided that her organization was poorly maintained and that without a high amount of donations her non profit would close in less then a month. :/

Taxes

To me this section of MSP has been the most eye opening.  Not only did i love crunching the numbers to change quantitative data to qualitative I also found that at the rate my organization was spending there money they weren’t very responsible and careful.  For me in the future when I do more philanthropy i’m definitely going to ask for the 990 tax document because you can really get a lot of info out of it and without doing it you could just be throughing cash at someone who isn’t really helping anyone but themselves.

My Experience in discover my purpose, vision, and mission has been eye opening to say the least. Starting this M.S.P project has made me realize that philanthropy is not just signing a check for some random charity(Well for some “Philanthropists” it is) but there is a lot of research and care that goes into choosing the right organization making sure your dollar goes along way. Some thing s that I believe that I will encounter when search for the right charity for instance are scammers or people setting up fake charities, charities that put little money into the actual cause, and unkind people who don’t really care, but I do believe that are some good quality charities that can make a difference for unfortunate people.