Unit 2 420-S22

Mhm.

Hello, welcome to unit two.

I'm so happy you're here, you made it through unit one and now we are moving forward,

there's only six of these but they're big so I'm sorry that

it took a little bit longer this week to get this posted.

I will beat that next time you still have a full week to get through this unit.

So I think you should be okay if you're looking at this and you're like oh crap,

I have a lot to do. I didn't schedule in this amount for this time period.

Go ahead and send me an email in the next couple of days and we'll work something out.

But ideally you can keep everybody kind of on the same pace.

One facet of this unit is going to be um You're

going to actually interact with one other person in this class,

in the real world, well or on zoom, it's up to you.

Um You can meet them if you're around and that's safe

and you want to or you can meet on zoom,

that would be just fine too.

But you're gonna at least get to synchronously talk to one another

which is kind of fun these days. So um

I'm going to go through a couple of reflections

about the previous unit and then preview this unit,

which is what I'll do every single time.

Um This is kind of important stuff.

It's where I kind of clean up any misinformation that got out there.

Um And also address your actual questions sometimes when I'm grading,

I'll go ahead and put responses to you right in.

Um, but other times I will say I'm going to respond to that in this video.

So that's what we're doing here. So you'll see um,

your names.

But also, um, we're gonna talk about the things that you asked questions about.

So the first was nick and Libby, you talked about donor advised funds.

This is incredibly important concept and I appreciate y'all zooming in on it.

It more than anything,

puts rules around particular types of money.

So that organizations often have a hard time, um,

pulling from different buckets of money.

So for example, at this daily school, there are some

programs

under this daily school umbrella

that are really well funded

and others that are not really well funded.

And often that's caused by

donor advised funds, donors that have particular intent

at K state. You see that right? It's all one institution,

but we have a new business building

and the new leadership building.

And if you're ever in waters hall,

you probably don't have air conditioning or something right?

Like, so we have this huge dichotomy.

And so from a strategic point, you're like, well,

we should fix waters before we build a new building.

But because of private dollars meaning donor advised funds,

they dictate kind of the priorities and people would much rather

give money to build new buildings than to fix waters.

I'm not trying to pick on waters, but you know what I mean?

Um, so don't advise funds have those features. Um, now

a donor advised fund is going to have a contract associated

with it and it's usually only gonna apply to large donations.

But whatever you outline in that contract,

I think Libby you asked this like what exactly can you put rules on and

really you can put anything in the contract and both parties agreed to it.

So they could say,

Um,

I want this $20,000 to K state to go

to student scholarships and then keep it that broad.

Or they could define that the elements of that,

an engineering student from Colby who loves hunting, right?

Like you could really define that a lot more or you could keep it really broad.

Um, it's whatever is defined in that contract and really if there's no contract,

there's really no donor advised fund other than kind of word, you know,

keeping your word.

And that's important because you want to keep that donor happy and be ethical.

So, um, oftentimes will say, well, does this represent the intent of the donor?

And intense,

really important because a lot of times folks will donate when they die.

Right.

So it's in their will that they leave something big to a nonprofit organization.

Well,

what if they didn't really sign a contract for that,

that donor advised fund that they want to set up with their really big donation.

Um,

oftentimes organizations and I think the

most ethical organizations will try to represent

their the intent of that donor rather than being able to ask them.

So I hope that helps on that for five oh one C three.

This is our really important concept because it applies to over half

of every non profit is a five oh one C three.

And the five oh one C three I remember is the tax status.

And truly it's about the only way to say is it a nonprofit or is it not?

Um, a nonprofit is not defined by whether you like them,

by whether you think they do good in

the world by whether you think they're charitable,

um, it's defined by their tax status.

And so Katie was kind of asking, you know,

do they have to donate a percentage of their budget so

that they maintain that tax status and stay a nonprofit.

And the answer is sort of, there's not a hard percentage and it's up to the I. R. S.

Um, whether to approve

Their tax status. Again, there C3 status.

Um,

and what would the code reads something like

a substantial amount of their activities have to be

charitable, educational or religious,

Um, which is the C3

rules so

substantial is, you know, kind of interpret herbal, but yeah,

you can lose your tax status if you don't do anything

that's charitable educational, religious.

Um, the things that are outlined in the C Three status for watchdog groups,

interesting that two of y'all frank and Harrison

zoomed in on that watchdog groups are particularly important for nonprofits

because a greater level of transparency

is expected from nonprofit organizations.

So there's all sorts of watchdog organizations,

many of them are nonprofits themselves,

who are checking in to make sure that nonprofits are,

are good or following the rules in their opinion.

So there's organizations like guidestar is a big one.

Um, there's, there's a bunch of them that where you can search,

is this a good nonprofit sort of thing.

Um,

and you know, they use different metrics and I have kind of critiques of,

of different ways in which they measure goodness for different organizations.

But more than anything is to say there are groups watching nonprofits in

the way that I think there are fewer or lower percentage watching businesses.

The reason for that

is that people care

what nonprofits do with their money.

So think about this for a second, Go to wal mart,

you buy some shampoo and you pay 10 bucks,

I don't know, expensive shampoo. And

After you buy that shampoo, you're done with that transaction, right.

You don't really think about what's Walmart doing with

my $10 or the $5 they made in profit.

What are they doing with that? I hope they're right, you're not following up for you.

The transaction is over, right?

You paid the money and you got the thing

that you thought was worth that amount of money.

Now, let's say you give that $10 to a non profit organization,

but you didn't get like a product in return, you just gave it as a donation.

Now you have a different, that's not the closed transaction for you anymore, right?

It's still open, it's still like I wonder what they're doing.

So you wonder and you need these transparency organizations to inform you of,

is that a good organization?

Is the Salvation Army doing what they said they would do with my money.

Um So with donations,

if you're always kind of tied to them in a way that

with a business transaction you're not

necessarily always tied to that transaction.

Finally, Trevor asked about altruism, which is a huge question that I can't answer.

Um where does altruism come from?

And you know, some people don't even believe in altruism at all.

Um

There's a friends episode where

or Phoebe let's a bee sting her um to kind of

show that there's really no such thing as altruism at all.

Um That the bee stinging her was the thing that she

could think of that was no benefit to her at all.

It wasn't selfish in any way, but she was just doing it

for the goodness of her heart

and then the friends tell her that he died and

you know it's a whole sitcom thing. But um

altruism stuff, right? Do people ever act in a way that's totally

disconnected from their own being

um you know it's a philosophy question, it's a big one,

but I appreciate y'all asking the questions about the terms.

This is our language. This is the language of nonprofit organizations.

So it's really critical.

It would be really sad for you to get through

this class and not know some of these things.

These are the critical language that if you walked into any organization,

uh they all know this,

this is their world. So it's a language of the sector

that I'm glad we're spending time on and I'm glad we're kind of diving in too deep. So

Katie asked a question in a different assignment that

I thought was worth pulling out on its own.

What are the differences between nonprofit and

for profit or nonprofit and business?

This is critical. So I would break these down into a couple areas,

one

democratically governed.

And what I mean by democratically governed is that a board?

So a collection of people are ultimately in charge

of the nonprofit rather than a single person.

So when an organization is democratically governed,

it's slower and more cumbersome and there's lots of features of that,

but that really distinguishes the nonprofit sector

um, from the business sector

because you can design a business where one person is in charge.

Um

another way is that

the

the way and the purpose,

the way in which the mission is driving

everything rather than the profit is driving everything.

Alright. Some missions are really hard to achieve,

right? If the,

if the answer is save the rainforest,

how do you know when the rainforest is saved or when you've done a good job that year,

saving some rain forest.

It's difficult to measure,

whereas profit,

it's hard to get.

So don't let me, don't misconstrue that.

It's hard to get profit, but it's easy to measure profit, right?

You have a dollar amount,

It's a numerical figure and every time it goes up it's better.

And every time it goes down it's work.

So it's very clear, there's a number tied to your success

with, with nonprofits.

There's often not a number tied to your success or the numbers that

are tied are very hard to obtain are really difficult to understand.

So, um, that's the second way.

So democratic governance and the difficulty of the mission.

The final feature of this is,

it's hard for nonprofits to know when they need to leave when they're done

when they're not making a good impact anymore.

Um, a business knows when you lose money for so long,

you probably shouldn't be a business anymore.

Right?

Um, but nonprofits always do a little good right?

Like, so if I help 10 people, I can pat myself on the back and say that was a great help.

10 people,

but

Maybe I should have been helping 1000. Right? So really difficult to know.

There's no mechanism to push you out of business

to say you shouldn't be an organization anymore.

The last thing I want to pull out from y'all is something nick said,

which is a big question about, you know,

whether nonprofits can ever kind of solve everything and

I wanted to pull this out because there's a

big debate going on and has been for a

long time where there's a critique of nonprofit organizations.

Um

are they just

papering over so kind of hiding or masking

really big systemic problems?

And

should we just

let those problems play their course out and then

we would build systems to solve those problems.

So like if you take, you know, poverty for example, this enormous problem,

um

maybe they're just american probably let's just kind of like

hone in on something

and you have this problem of american poverty

are non profits just kind of keeping people afloat and allowing

the rest of us have a system

that,

that keeps people just barely alive,

like we don't have people starving in the streets.

So

do we have a new nonprofit kind of buoy this unfair system?

Like keep people just barely above um, you know,

starvation levels and is that problematic?

Should they just let everything go to hell and maybe

then we would design new systems to make sure people don't

um go hungry, right? So you can do it with kind of any issue. But

the thing is what does that let things go to hell look like, right?

It's really terrible and people die.

Um, and you know, I don't think anything any of us want to actually live through.

So there's this debate going on of like,

do you let it crash and build up like a more radical look

or do nonprofit And do nonprofits kind of prevent that from happening?

Or do you do you let nonprofits do the wonderful work they do,

but maintained kind of systems of

inequality and power?

Big questions.

Think about it, wrestle with the answers.

So the last thing I want to do is give you a preview of what's to come.

Um,

more than anything. I just want you to plan ahead this week.

So what we did last week was kind of set the stage talked about nonprofits, um,

what they are, how they're distinguished, how many,

how big all that stuff kind of painted the landscape

for this week.

We're going to dive into an issue

that

um, many nonprofits and

the stereotype is all nonprofits, but many non profits deal with this issue.

And it's poverty,

right? And you can say food insecurity, but poverty, right?

We're talking about people who don't have enough money for basic human need.

Um,

it's a big enough issue that it's worth spending an entire unit of this class on.

So what we're gonna do is dive deep into the issue of poverty.

Um, it ain't a fun subject, I'm sorry, but it's important.

So, um,

the way this week works is there's a few resources and then you're going to talk about

it with someone and then there's also another set

of resources and you're going to write about it

and turn it in.

So it's less of an individual assignment little thing and you kind of do

everything and then do a bigger kind of connection type type of assignment.

Um So check out who your partner is.

Find their email,

email them um and try and set something up and

as always let me know if you have any questions.

Um It's asynchronous. It doesn't mean I'm unavailable so I'm still here

in my office at all times basically so just email me and I'll get

back to you really quick and we'll figure out whatever issue you're going through.

Um Thanks for the work you put into the first week and

I'll see you on campus.

Unit 2 420-S22

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