Record of Account

What we do for ourselves benefits no one. What we do for others benefits all humanity.

One of my friends sent me an email this week wondering why I had not recently posted an update. Thank you, Bob, for prompting me to get this done.

On my last post (click here) I committed to tying personal consumption to helping others in need. I laid out a simple plan where I choose several charities that were tied to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and every time I spent money on myself I committed donating money to one of these charities.

I also promised to be transparent, so here goes. In the last couple weeks, we have gone out to dinner with friends four times, bought wine from two of our favorite wineries, and bought a new laptop. It seems pretty extravagant. The laptop was in some ways a necessity since both the home laptop and home desktop both died within a week of each other. Nevertheless, a laptop is a purchase on ourselves.

Because of Bob’s email, this morning I took stock of these expenditures from the last couple weeks. I have prepared a spreadsheet (hey, I’m a tax attorney by training—I never met a spreadsheet I didn’t love). I’m calling the spreadsheet my Record of Account—as in being accountable to my conscience and to the needs of others. I’m listing every expenditure on myself (eating out, clothes, grocery shopping, electronics, etc.) and keeping a running tally of what I spend. When I give to each of these charities, I keep a running tally of what I give. There’s a column that calculates what I give as a percentage of what I spend. I’m starting out with a target giving of 10%. It may seem low but it’s in addition to our other giving, and it’s a place to start. At the top of my Record of Account is the above quotation to always remind me to put my spending in perspective. (It’s a paraphrase of this Albert Pike quotation: What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.)

Because we bought a laptop, we gave a laptop at www.laptop.org. This is a nonprofit organization (One Laptop Per Child) that provides durable, energy-efficient laptops to children in the third world to help educate them and bring them out of the cycle of poverty. Check out the website, it’s a fascinating organization started by an MIT professor with a grand vision that every child in the world have a laptop. We have a laptop now, and so does one more child.

Because we indulged in food and wine, we gave to several of the other charities I mentioned in my last post. We gave a Flock of Hope at Heifer International. This provides chickens, ducklings, and goslings to a third world family to provide the beginnings of a flock that can provide eggs for consumption by the family as well as sales of eggs for income production. This flock can grow and produce more food and more income. We also gave to the Health Fund at Episcopal Relief and Development which provides for the health needs of individuals in the third world. We made two micro-loans to women entrepreneurs in Peru at www.kiva.org. If you want to view the details on the loans and loan recipients, click here and view our personal page lending page. Finally, since this week was the week I had to fill out my United Way forms at work, I designated the other two charities I mentioned in my last post as my recipients (Operation Breakthrough and Episcopal Community Services Community Kitchen). These serve the needs of children and the hungry right here in our own neighborhood.

Happy spending, but more importantly happy giving.

Compassion Requires Action--What We Can Do

Awhile back (July 26th to be exact) I said that I would start blogging about compassion but that it could take months to collect all my thoughts and get them posted. Six weeks into this I’m reminded at how slowly my thoughts evolve. That being said, I’ve had this post more or less written for several weeks now. Most of the delay was wondering whether I had the courage to live up to what I was going to say. But two events yesterday spurred me to take the plunge and put this out there.

The first event was choral evensong at our church. My parish (St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church) offers Evensong the first Sunday of each month at 4 pm. My close friend Bede Mudge, an Episcopal monk, describes Evensong as the Anglican Church’s gift to humanity. (Visit Bede’s monastery, Holy Cross Monastery, and his blog, The Prior's Column.) If you have never heard Evensong and you live in Kansas City, come to St. Michaels on first Sundays. If you don’t live in Kansas City, visit the website for St. Thomas Church (on Fifth Avenue in NYC). Other than the great cathedrals of England, where this ancient rite found its fullest and grandest expression, St. Thomas offers one of the most profound and sublime experiences of this service in the United States—and if you can’t visit in person you can listen every week online at their website.

But, admittedly, as great as Evensong was, it was the dinner afterwards that put the final touches on getting this post out the door. We had dinner at our Aunt Diana and Uncle Jeff’s house with Gail, our priest, and Ken, our organist who was the architect of the beautiful Evensong. We had a spirited discussion covering many topics but the discussion of the Millennium Development Goals and how to help achieve them (and the various websites I post below) put the finishing touches on this post—not to mention Aunt Diana saying she gets up every morning to see if I have a new post only to be disappointed most mornings. Given to hyperbole, the Grande Dame and Matriarch of the family did guilt me into this.

The second event was church yesterday morning and the New Testament reading from James 2:14-18:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have belief but do not have action? Can beliefs save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not give them clothes or food, what good is that? Belief by itself, if it has no action, is dead. Your actions will show your beliefs.

This ties nicely to my last post (Compassion Requires Action) and the various sayings from contemporary Buddhists and ancient Jesus about testing our beliefs in the crucible of action. But, in the spirit of James, enough about words—even words by such venerable Buddhist monks and Jesus himself. What about action?

Well, here’s my three-step action plan on what we can do to change the world.

Step One: Personally embrace one or more of the Millennium Development Goals (learn more about the MDGs here, here, and here):

· Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

· Achieve universal primary education

· Promote gender equality and empower women

· Reduce child mortality

· Improve maternal health

· Combat HIV/AIDs, malaria and other diseases

· Ensure environmental stability

· Develop a global partnership for developing countries.

Step Two: Pick a favorite charity (either local, national or international) that directly achieves one of these goals (soup kitchens, homeless shelters, HIV/AIDs clinics, battered women and children shelters).

Step Three: Whenever we spend money on ourselves (going shopping, going to the store, eating out) let’s also give something to the charity (or charities) selected in Step Two. Maybe it’s dollar for dollar, maybe it’s 50 cents on the dollar, maybe it’s 10 cents on the dollar. The amount doesn’t matter, the action does. By tying our own personal desires (shopping, eating out, buying groceries) to the needs of others, we can take one step towards transforming the world. Five dollars here, $100 there, pretty soon we’re talking about serious money, serious change, and serious transformation (for us individually, as well as the world). Sure, we all give to our favorite charities on a regular or infrequent basis, but tying a gift to improve humanity to every moment we spend money on ourselves, I think, serves as a powerful springboard for personal and global transformation.

Here’s my personal plan:

Locally in Kansas City, I’m choosing Operation Breakthrough (an organization helping children living in poverty) and Episcopal Community Services Community Kitchen (which feeds the hungry). Globally, I’m choosing three organizations working to achieve the MDGs in third world countries Episcopal Relief and Development, The Heifer Project, and Kiva (Kiva allows you to make microloans to third world entrepreneurs so that they can become self-sustaining).

Every time I buy groceries, go out to eat, or buy something for myself that is not a basic necessity (which pretty much describes everything I buy), I’m going to give something to one of these charities. I don’t know how much yet, but I promise to be transparent and keep you posted about how much.

I hope you join me in the 3-Step Plan.