third sector

We are so pleased to connect with Vivien Trinh and Nathan Harris of the Oregon Food Bank, where they are changing the way our sector works, by developing practices that center love!

• Vivien Trinh is the Community Philanthropy Associate Director of Operations at the Oregon Food Bank. With 11 years of philanthropy experience, her career has taken her through the many aspects of philanthropy including direct mail, digital fundraising, donor relations, database management and prospect development at non-profits of all sizes. As the daughter of refugees, she is deeply committed to building inclusive communities that honor the dignity of each individual. You can reach out to Vivien at vtrinh@oregonfoodbank.org.
   
• Nathan Harris is the Director of Community Philanthropy at Oregon Food Bank. He has nearly two decades in philanthropic development, working at the intersection of love and generosity to realize transformational change. Before coming to Oregon Food Bank in 2019, Nathan served as chief development officer at Freedom for All Americans, an organization dedicated to securing nationwide LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections by 2025. He previously served as director of leadership gifts and Centennial Campaign at ACLU of Northern California and was the Director of Advancement at Transgender Law Center. You can reach Nathan at nharris@oregonfoodbank.org. 

References and Notes:

• Learn more about the Oregon Food Bank and follow them on socials: Facebook, Insta, Twitter, LinkedIn and donate here! OFB has a budget of $34M, with 200 staff, 63k annual donors, and 40k annual volunteers. 
• OFB Community Philanthropy: Theory of Change, Strategic Priorities, Key Hallmarks of Love, Staff Bill of Rights 
• bell hooks defines love as “the extension of one’s spiritual growth  'the will to extend one's self for the the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”
• Focusing on Fundraising Goals is Harmful, Let’s Measure Love Instead by Vivien Trinh
• How to Measure a Year. What about Love? On the OFB website
• “Seasons of Love” from Rent!
• Risk: We talked about risk and Nathan names that “risk”in changing the practices and tools of doing the work, is to be questioned. That one perspective is the fear of change or fear of something different. Vivien invites us to think about risk, as defined by who might be harmed by our practices and tools...and to center the healing of those folx. 

Process: 
Here are some of the processes and practices OFB discussed within this episode...

• Vivien and a few folks started an Equity in Fundraising work group within their department to casually explore community-centric ideas. They later created a “Love” working group as well.
• When Nathan came on 2 years ago, they began to focus their work towards building new practices
• Vivien mentions that unpacking “love” as a word through introspection and team conversation, was the kernel that helped them move forward in designing the “how” of measuring love. They focused on how love might inform their values and how it could change what philanthropy could mean.
• OFB celebrates Shiree Teng, who they partnered with in the design of the staff self-assessment. The creation of the tool was influenced by her brown paper, “ Measuring Love on the Journey for Justice. (we didn't talk about this on the pod)
• Performance Metrics: 
  One tool they developed is a staff self-assessment, with the purpose of the assessment focused on reflecting on a staff person’s individual  work over the past 6 month period. 
  
  Their assessment asks questions like: Do I feel like my work as a relationship manager or a gift entry specialist is values-aligned with myself in this moment? Do I feel like I am making meaningful change in the world? Am I having hard conversations with donors? Am I bringing them along a political journey?
  
  In their database, OFB has the ability to code contact reports that our relationship managers have with their donors around these indicators of love.
• Vivien shares: “...the hope is that we're collecting this information so that we can pull it out and analyze, not like in a punitive way of like, you're not having enough hard conversations with donors, but, if you're not able to code your contact reports with these indicators, what is that telling you about where you are in your professional career at this moment? Do you feel like you're engaging in the work in a way that's meaningful to you and if not, how do we make it happen? What do you need personally, in order to grow, in your career in a way that is pulling away from that centralizing of money?” 
• They propose is to rethink what data we capture and to encourage behavior toward financial goals and encourage behavior toward growth and self-reflection.
• In creating a collective definition of “love” they identified aspects of love like growth, shared values, care. They later shared that  they have a full “Love Indicators” list complete with a Bill of Rights and definitions! These include: Actions for the Common Good, Care, Client Centered, Community, Engagement, Equity, Growth, Partnership, Respect, and Shared Values.
• Nathan points out that they have also created other instruments to assess other aspects of love.
• Another tool is the donor survey, where they ask in 10-15 contexts, whether and how a donor considers their gift to be a contribution of love. “...do you consider your donation...an expression of your love for the organization, the mission? For the vision? For your neighbors?...the systemic inequity that drives hunger? ...Do you experience your supportive Oregon, Oregon food bank as an expression of love? And I think on average 60% or more of our donors agreed strongly, like, yes I do.” 
  Vivien mentions that the donor survey allows the team to be bolder and confident in their work. Nathan mentions that they can be bolder and more strategic in their messaging to facilitate the political journey and facilitate “love” for other (in one example, the love of their surveyed community towards immigrant communities could be increased by political education.)
• Another practice involves prospect development/portfolio management. In this field of practice, OFB is starting to ask themselves questions around the transformational outcome of a relationship. 
  
  “It doesn't have to be money. It can be a sharing of a story that helps us move, our donors through a political journey, because they have either lived experience, with hunger or with, discrimination or lived experience of systemic oppression. It could be, they have a rich network of, or they have a community that we haven't engaged with in the past that they can introduce Oregon food bank to. It provides an opportunity to recognize all the different ways that people can contribute to their community that can take action.”
  
  Nathan also talks about how they operate with equity not equality, so they are not able to “treat everyone the same.” Instead they focus on increasing the likelihood that an individual will have a love-centered and transformative experience. Transactional to transformational. They later shared that they’d like to celebrate Justice Funders and ongoing collaboration with Mario Lugay, Senior Innovation Director, and they acknowledge the Just Transition for Philanthropy (and Just Transition) framework.
  
  They mention decreasing the size of portfolios to allow staff to spend more time connecting with their donors, and paying attention to wether these relationships are being tended to with mutual care, respectful interactions and community-centrism.
• Nathan notes that OFB is in the silent phase of a large campaign and as such, they are prioritizing donors that can have high capacity, but within that, they are looking at and prioritizing values alignment, love, and vision.
  
  Vivien mentions cross-referencing amongst multiple (databases and platforms) places, to better understand how the community member(s) engage with Oregon Food Bank. Are they interacting in multiple ways? Have they donated, volunteered or taken a political action? Vivien mentions that when an individual is engaging on multiple platforms/ways, they are a better candidate for connection/portfolio work.
   
• Vivien and Nathan alluded to other tools they are using internally, but we did not have time to discuss in the show!

Big pieces of wisdom:

Vivien ”you can move quickly and you can leverage the sense of urgency that I think sometimes I shy away from that urgency is important when it is focused on justice. And in that urgency, the point is not to bring everyone along is to center people at the margins.”

Nathan “the power of our people and the wisdom of the collective and the possibilities that live at the intersection of the power of our people and the wisdom of our collective. Like we have so much opportunity in this profession to do something extraordinary, transformational and very, very different than what's been done before.

We're the ones in these roles keep your best practices. I'll take my better practices. They haven't been designed yet, but I believe in the wisdom of our collective to do that kind of designing. If those best practices don't seem to be working. And I don't think the limitation of that is just how we work. I think that our field can transform philanthropy by working differently than we ever have before. Like take back that power. We absolutely have it. And in doing so, I think our communities can be and will be better served.”

“I don't think we talk enough about how money is a tool for and against the movement…” In this juicy conversation about money, Michelle talks with the very quotable Phillip Chavira, about why Capitalism is trash, where white supremacy shows up, why we need to talk openly about racism and where we have power to make decisions that center our communities and our values. You are going to love this conversation!

In this episode, Michelle talks with Phillip Chavira, an award-winning non-profit leader based in the Bay Area of Northern California where he currently is a finance director of Point Reyes National Seashore Association in beautiful West Marin County.

This highly quotable, lifelong advocate for all the things we love, Phillip Chavira can be followed on Instagram @phillipchavira Connect with Phillip on Instagram @phillipchavira and LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/phillipchavira

Phillip can be heard on TheUpNUp where he shares his journey to becoming the first person of color to be an Executive Director for the ’Intiman Theatre’(@intimantheatre). From witnessing the inequalities within the arts early on in life to working his way up to co-producing the Tony Award nominated Broadway play ‘Eclipsed’. Check out “Keep c o l o r on stage”

Learn more about Point Reyes National Seashore Association’s work with the National Park Service and working with local Bay Area nonprofit organizations focused on community building and mentorship primarily in Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and low-income communities. https://ptreyes.org/youth-in-parks/

References:

• Phillip mentions Vu Le and his blog Nonprofitaf.com as a useful resource and recommends using consultants to help navigate difficult conversations within staff, (including Michelle!)
• Here is a list Phillip created, of things an organization can do to start their journey
• Michelle lists Beneficial State Bank and Amalgamated Bank as two socially responsible banks with social justice related missions…
• Check out The Ethical Rainmaker interview with Heather Infantry, as an example of a badass advocate talking with community foundations about their payouts and inequity
• Phillip mentions The Pride Foundation in Seattle as an example of spending down reserves and becoming share holders of local organizations (around minute 24)
• Spend-down organization aka Sunsetting = When a foundation decides to spend out or spend down all of its assets and close its doors. There is usually a date associated with this term. (see The Chorus Foundation and their plans to sunset)
• POSE is the show Phillip talks about 
• Phillip mentions Vu Le and his blog Nonprofitaf.com as a useful resource and recommends using 
• We talk about Northwest Immigrant Rights Project as an example of an organization that can never close its doors due to systemic injustice, while other nonprofits can

Stats Dropped:

• 60% of wealth in the US is passed on generationally, mentions Phillip
• between 1983 and 2013, White households saw their wealth increase by 14%, and during that exact same time, Black households’ wealth declined 75%, and then Hispanic households from a median perspective, that wealth declined by half.
• In 2000, the Federal Reserve stopped collecting information on reservations with indigenous houses!
• “One of the scary things I think about with this racial wealth inequality is that if it remains unresolved, if we keep going at this pace, this trend is going to lead to the median household wealth for Black folks in the year 2053 to be zero. We could potentially see that. Then in 2073, it's projected that LatinX households will be at zero for median household wealth. This comes from the Institute for Policy Studies that utilizes the information from the Federal Reserve.”
• 86% of billionaires since the pandemic are now $5.1 trillion dollars richer while 76 million people lost their jobs.

Phillip Recommends These Resources on Race and Money

• The Racial Wealth Gap from The Balance
• The Native Wealth Gap by The National Indian Council on Aging, Inc.
• Bernie Sanders’ Twitter

Brilliant Quotes:

• “Capitalism is just trash. The way that it has evolved over time and how just had it disproportionately affected people a lot by race, it infuriates me and it torments me as I study capitalism. You mentioned the education, and I like that you put that footnote in there...I want to take that and put that on my business card because centering around dollars, I feel that when a human does that, they can exploit others at a cost.
   
• There's always a cost you gain in that dollar. That dollar was received from your family and it was passed on and how did your family ethically received those dollars, how are organizations making high profits off the backs of Black and Brown people around this world.”
   
• “I think that what drives me crazy about the fact that we hide from our finances, I do this in our family, I see it in our family, I see it in organizations, I've had executives tell me, "Well, I don't really look at the spreadsheets, I'm told the numbers," and as somebody who looks at the numbers every day, I'm like, "There's so much room for change."
   
• “...people said make as much money as you possibly can, pay as little as you can, get as much money as the consumers are willing to pay, and it just was driven into a generation where they think that money equates love, money equates success, money equates fame. That's one of the biggest lies that I feel has been applied through entertainment, it has been applied through social media. There's documentaries about how social media has affected us, so this belief that money is going to save the day, is a fallacy. I think that this divide that is going to continue to happen is terrifying and we have to do something about it.”

Timestamps:
(01:32) What is get2gether?
(03:49) What members have learned at get2gether and why this matters.
(11:35) Sex education for people with learning disabilities.
(16:42) Why people with learning disabilities often have low expectations of relationships.
(22:32) The barriers to making progress.
(24:13) Relationships and The Keys to Life.
(28:32) What policy changes do get2gether ambassadors want to see?

Podcast Description

Following on from Pride Month, in this episode we’ll be looking at the landscape in Leeds for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA+) people and will discuss the important work delivered by Community Organisations in supporting these communities across Leeds. 

In a recent report by the Leeds LGBT+ Mapping Project, which captures the landscape of the LGBTQIA+ Community within Leeds, 82% of respondents said Leeds was an LGBTQIA+ friendly city. 

The work that goes on within Leeds for their community also allows people to feel part of something larger with a diverse range of activities, support and platforms to raise their voice available, with there being a wide range of steering groups, sports groups, support and social groups also available across the city.

We're joined by Cllr Hannah Bithell (@hanbithell on Twitter), Leeds City Council’s LGBT+ Champion, Maggie Dawkins from  Leeds LGBT+ Forum  and Susan Phillips from Leeds LGBT+ Consortium two Community Organisations we’ve had the privilege of supporting. 

As part of our ongoing work to support LGBTQIA+ communities, we recently launched the Connecting Older LGBT+ People - Micro Fund, in partnership with Leeds Older Peoples Forum, to support older LGBT+ people in Leeds and confront loneliness and social isolation.

Learn more about the fund here.

A full transcript of the podcast can be found here

Leeds Community Foundation is an organisation that supports thousands of charities across Leeds and surrounding areas, addressing inequalities.  We invest in these groups by distributing grants and sharing advice - acting as a catalyst for positive change.

Learn more about Leeds Community Foundation in this short film which captures what we do, who we are, and how we're making an impact.

Subscribe to our newsletter. 

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @LeedsCommFound.

Reach out below for LGBTQIA+ Support:

https://www.mesmac.co.uk/our-services/leeds/support-social-groups 

https://www.meetup.com/cities/gb/45/leeds/lgbtq/ 

Contact Leeds Community Foundation

• Call us on 0113 242 2426
• Email us at info@leedscf.org.uk
• Tweet us at @LeedsCommFound
• Sign up to our newsletter here

Teddy Schleifer is a journalist for Vox’s recode, covering what billionaires in the Silicon Valley are doing with their money. 

• Teddy works for Vox as a journalist and hosts the podcast Recode Daily
• He’s active on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/teddyschleifer
• He says his reason for covering billionaires = 
  “just as reporters cover poverty in America, reporters must also cover and uncover wealth in America - offering the scrutiny that informs essential debates about income inequality, money in politics, and the role of private philanthropy. If we don’t have a common set of facts about how the wealthiest people in society spend their money or live their lives, then we are just shooting in the dark - arguing based on press releases, unfounded suspicions and our set-in-stone prior beliefs.”
• Teddy would love to hear from you with hot tips about badly behaved foundations or billionaires! Or anything else alarming in philanthropy. Hit him up.

References:

• During the pandemic, the number of billionaires spiked by 30%. Around the time of this podcast recording in Spring 2021, there is a record high of 2,755 billionaires. 86% of those billionaires are richer than they were a year ago. 
• We discussed the relative wealth of MacKenzie Scott who has given $5.8B (the single largest gift in the history of the US), but still gained in wealth in 2020.
• DAFs: As Teddy explains, a Donor Advised Fund, essentially serves as a place to set money aside for charity, “and the money then goes to charity later. It could be much later.” (it could also be never and keep power in the hands of family members.) There is over $140B sitting in Donor Advised Funds in the US. 
• Of the billionaires he covers, he recently spoke with who was relatively surprised to see how he could influence the presidential election with his donations
• This is where Silicon Valley is.
• Larry Page, is listed as one of the billionaires ($80-$100B Net Worth in a given day) that places the minimum 5% payout from his foundation, into a DAF, literally with no benefit to society at this time. He’s the worst case scenario. He’s a cofounder of Google.
• Teddy warns us that we have very little information about what billionaires are doing with their money, and that this lack of information is getting even worse!
• Effective Altruist Movement
• Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook “...is probably the most prominent billionaire philanthropist in effective altruism, and he's in his thirties, but he has a clear point of view on what he wants to do with the money and is working on it.”
• Here is the interview with young Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried who talks about influencing the Biden election
• Stephanie Ellis-Smith of Philanthropy NW/The Giving Practice in Seattle, was listed as a philanthropy consultant who talks about “analysis paralysis”
• Jack Dorsey has a new charitable effort called Start Small, which is taking a lot of criticism because of its gifts to other celebrities.
• What Americans Really Think About Billionaires During The Pandemic is the Data for Progress poll Teddy mentions

We are self-funded. So. If you’d like to inspire this beautiful series through your financial contribution - we’ll take it on Patreon! 

Subscribe to this podcast to get the best of what we have to offer.I promise there are more incredible episodes on their way - every other Wednesday.

The Ethical Rainmaker is produced in Seattle, Washington by Kasmira Hall, and Isaac Kaplan-Woolner, and socials by Rachelle Pierce. Michelle Shireen Muri is the executive producer and this pod is sponsored by Freedom Conspiracy. 

Akilah Richards shares several great resources that we’ve listed below...here are links for content and references mentioned in the show:

• Michelle talks with Akilah Richards of Raising Free People and the Fare of the Free Child podcast, based in Lawrenceville, Georgia...part of the self-directed education movement!
• Akilah is the author of ten books including her most recent,Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work
•  ...and she hosts the Fare of the Free Child 
• If you become a fan and want to support her work, check out this fresh link and her Patreon.

References then Definitions: 

• Unschooling: “... a child-trusting, anti-oppression, liberatory, love-centered approach to parenting and care giving. It also is about creating and expanding communities of confident, capable people who understand how they learn best and how to work collaboratively to learn and solve things. Because it really is, before you talk about learning, it's about trust, it's about looking at what liberation means intergenerationally, which includes learning, but not only that. And it's about love. What does it mean if love is not just about my intention, but about something that's actually surrounded by this ecology of accountability where I'm actually listening to the people who I'm loving on and what they're saying and what they need, and then my love in action is shaped by that. All of those things are really what I understand unschooling to be.”
   
• Deschooling: ”.....shedding the programming and habits that resulted from other people's agency over your time, body, thoughts or actions. It's also ... Yes. It's also about designing and practicing beliefs that align with your desire to thrive, be happy and succeed. And those are the opposite of what has happened and continues to happen, because it's happening still, colonization.”
   
• Student hood vs Personhood: “Much of what we do is to think about what would it mean if I wasn't thinking about my child just from the perspective of student?.....So, when you start to do that work on your own self, in part by not focusing so much on your child's studenthood, then you start to make the connection between the actual human, the child human, and some of the things that they're advocating for or the things they're pushing back against. You just start to really humanize your relationship intergenerationally in a way that makes it so that you can partner with a young person around their learning journey, which may or may not include school. It still might include it, but it brings in other things that are usually not a part of school, like consent and agency, confident autonomy, the nuances of what it means to collaborate in an environment that tells you that if you help somebody, you're going to get in trouble and they're going to get in trouble. Which is the most anti-humane thing ever.”
  “And what we're talking about now is moving away from young people needing to perform studenthood and their right to be violated as humans, and instead looking at a way that integrates the same stuff we talk about as adults when we're in our 30s and 40s and 50s trying to get to who am I? What are my boundaries? How do I show up in the world in a way that is both affirming for me and welcoming for the sort of energies that I want to be part of? What happens when I'm super uncomfortable with someone or I don't understand or don't like, yet we have a common goal that we need to work through? These are real life situations that we do not get practice with in school.”
   
• Schoolishness: “The ways that we together are so colonized. We want a leader, we want somebody needs to be right, one person's talking, the other people are listening. We do a lot of inhumane things that have become so normalized. And they didn't just appear in adulthood, they didn't just happen when you got that job with that one person. These are things that happen throughout our schooled lives. I call these things schoolishness. Not because they are rooted in school, but oftentimes school is where they are perpetuated.”
   
• Ecology of accountability:  “...we find that in the self-directed spaces that's often one of the things that's missing. It's like your intentions are there and then you have some resources and you see a need the way that you define it, so you go do something. Okay, but you need to be involved. So, we talked about this a little bit at the top of our conversation. Whoever it is that you feel like you want to impact, how can you get into community with them? Right now. How can you get in community with them?” 
   
• Here is Akilah Richards’ Ted Talk
• Lane Santa Cruz https://www.tucward1.com/about
• Developing the Disrupters Ears https://www.rfpunschool.com/p/learningtolisten
• Crystal Bird farmer https://crystalbyrdfarmer.com/   
• Free joy experience https://www.thefreejoyexperience.com/
• Mighty Networks https://my-reflection-matters.mn.co/  
• Chemay Morales James https://www.linkedin.com/in/chemay-morales-james-5707764a/
• Thea Monyee https://www.theamonyee.com/
• Shawna Murray-Brown https://www.shawnamurraybrowne.com/
• Gratitude to Trick Candles for our theme song, called “I’m Gold"

The thing about this podcast is that it is self-funded! So if you love it, consider joining us on Patreon, and passing along to your friends and colleagues. Of course, it is super helpful to us too, when you subscribe on your fav pod player, and rate us! Write us any time at hello@theethicalrainmaker.com or visit us at theethicalrainmaker.com

Building on the previous episodes on power and leadership, in this episode I examine the place of institutions in organizing, discussing what is an institution, what makes for a healthy institution, how and why institutions are central to the kind of place-based, relationally driven democratic politics organizing undertakes, and why without them the individual is left naked before the power of the market and the state. Also reflected on is a key rule of organizing, which is that all organizing is in the first instance disorganizing.

Guests

Martin Trimble is Co-Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF).  He is directly responsible for the IAF’s organizing work east of the Mississippi River. He has organized for 25 years with IAF affiliates in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington D.C., Virginia, and North Carolina.  Prior to organizing with the IAF, Martin was the founding director of Opportunity Finance Network which supports and provides standards for financial institutions that invest in affordable housing and community development work nationwide.

Rev Patrick O’Connor grew up and received his theological education in the West Indies. He is currently the lead pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, a multicultural congregation in the Presbytery of New York City. He has served this congregation since 1992. Under his leadership, First Presbyterian is involved in the development of the “Tree of Life” a $74 million dollar affordable “mixed income” housing development that includes a community space and a health care facility. His leadership extends beyond the congregation to the Presbytery of New York City and the General Assembly of his denomination.  And he is Co-Chair of the Metro IAF Leadership team, Chairman of Queens Power, a Director of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, and Chairman of First Jamaica Community and Urban Development Corporation and a member of the board of Trustee for the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Resources for Going Deeper

Michael Gecan, Effective Organizing for Congregational Renewal (Skokie, IL: ACTA Publications, 2008). Good introduction to organizing and how to use organizing as part of congregational development and institutional renewal;

Harry Boyte, Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert (New York: Kettering Foundation, 2009). A clear-eyed reflection on how to re-imagine institutions that serve the needs of their members, build up the ability of people to act together to achieve public work, and the need to dethrone what Boyte calls “the cult of the expert.” Free to download: https://www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/product-downloads/Civic_Agency_Cult_Expert.pdf

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Marion Boyars Publishers, 2001);

Sheldon Wolin, “Contract and Birthright,” The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution.(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), Chapter 8;

Hugh Heclo, On Thinking Institutionally (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011);

Lee Staples, “‘Keeping it all together: Organizational Development and Maintenance,” Roots to Power: A Manual For Grassroots Organizing, 3rd edn (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 221-263.

• For more information & relevant updates follow me on Twitter: @WestLondonMan
• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast

While many awful nonprofit practices exist, Andy and Tom are doing their work as responsible white men in our sector, to unpack what is really happening in nonprofits and philanthropy and use their platforms for good - so that we can all do better. So many great assets mentioned in this episode, here are links for content and definitions mentioned in the show:

• Michelle talks with the gentlemen of Fixing Fundraising podcast in the UK, Andy King and Tom DeFraine
• Hear their interview with Michelle and Vu Le, about Community Centric Fundraising!
• LinkedIn for Tom and Andy

References then Definitions: 

• Here is the article by Baroness Stowell, Chair of The Charity Commission, titled: “If you want to improve lives through charity, leave political fights out of it” (posted on the conservative site, The Daily Mail)
• (And here is an article by my colleague Cami Aurioles title “Nonprofits Can’t Engage In Political Advocacy At All, You Say? Wrong. We Can And We Must” as posted on CommunityCentricFundraising.org)
• London’s 2021 NYE Drone/Fireworks display was really amazing. This link is from BBC.
• Saddiq Khan, Mayor of London, took a lot of shit for allowing “political” content into the NYE celebration, there are dozens of videos and articles about it.
• Captain Tom (Moore) and his recognition that the NHS (National Health Service) wasn’t resourced well enough during this pandemic, as well as his instigation of a mega fundraising campaign (1.5 million individual donations totaling over $32.79M Pounds ($45.47M Dollars), was one of the topics we touched on. Captain Tom, at 100 years old, passed away from COVID-19 related illness on February 2nd, 2021. May he rest in peace.
• National Health Service Charities Together (NHS Charities Together)
• Andy recommends listening to the Do More Good podcast, and specifically, Episode 62 with Ellie Orton and NHS Charities Together
• The Royals: Prince Andrew’s fall from grace, Prince Williams is the patron for Centrepoint, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle moved to Hollywood and started this pod we haven’t listened to yet...
• Andy refers to this article “Having a royal patron doesn’t pay for charities” (open in incognito mode for easy access)
• As a side, Tom mentions that Tea came from India, but he probably meant that a lot of tea has been imported to the UK from India from the late 1800s on. Deeper history = England’s involvement in tea actually originated in China. Check out this riveting quick history. I promise it's worth it. You might learn that the East India Company intentionally got Chinese addicted to Opium in order to get tea for a price they could afford, which was the colonization of India. The story involves mass murder/war and slavery. Fucked up. And the reason why certain tea-growing regions (like Assam) are some of the economically and socially devastated places in the world. Sarah Rose’s has a brilliant book about it, called For All The Tea In China. It's okay. The way I grew up I thought tea was Iranian. #themoreyouknow

Definitions:

• The Charity Commision as defined by Andy: “...it's’ the gov’t body that checks that charities are doing with their money what they’re meant to be doing. They check that there’s no fraud, they check that there’s no corruption, and they check that everything is operating as it should. In principle, that’s a brilliant body to have. It should really help public trust in charity and it should be something that really keeps everyone moving towards the right goals. And you will notice that I have said should, rather than does.”
• “Fiat Money” as defined by Wikipedia is any money accepted by a government for paying taxes or debt, but is not pegged to or backed directly by gold or other valuables (fiat money systems have no gold standard. Fiat money does not have significant intrinsic value or use value (inherent utility, such as a cow or beaver pelt might have.”
• “Barmy” as defined by Urban Dictionary, means eccentric, daft, insane, crazy, not quite right in the head
• RAF = Royal Air Force
• “Knighthood” Here are the “Orders, decorations, and medals of the United Kingdom”
• Brexit = In case you have been living under a rock since that awful day in 2016, the UK voted itself away from the EU for probably racist reasons including anti-immigrant sentiment. Here is an article about it. Oh and just like in the US after Trump’s election, racism became more overt in Britain as racists felt empowered by the move.
• “Fag packet” is really just a pack of cigarettes. Not a slur.
• “Patronage” = check out this definition
• Mothers’ Union! We found out what it is.
• Gratitude to Trick Candles for letting us use this song I love called “I’m Gold"

The thing about this podcast is that it is self-funded! So if you love it, consider joining us on Patreon, and passing along to your friends and colleagues. Of course, it is super helpful to us too, when you subscribe on your fav pod player, and rate us! Write us any time at hello@theethicalrainmaker.com or visit us at theethicalrainmaker.com

In this episode, Prue Monument, Director of ACNC Compliance, explains the ACNC's approach to regulating charities. We discuss the things that the ACNC can and can't look into, the powers that the ACNC has when investigating charities, and the importance of education and guidance when looking at issues in charities.

ACNC Compliance Reports: acnc.gov.au/compliancereport

www.acnc.gov.au