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.