How to Increase the Resources Available to Charities by $500 Billion a Year

By Tim Cimino

Since most nonprofits and charities rely on donations and volunteers to help them accomplish their missions, I thought of a way to boost the donations and volunteer hours for charities by about $500 billion dollars a year.

Think of all of the charities in your city or town. Most of them rely on volunteers and donations. Now think of all the people in your city or town who donate money or give time. Together they form the pool of volunteer hours and donor dollars in that city or town. For the most part, all of the charities draw from this pool for their needs. If a few charities become more successful at getting money and donations, they do better at accomplishing their missions. Unfortunately, this leaves less for the other charities. So the others have to work harder to get the same amount of volunteers or donations. In other words, money or time that you give to one organization is money or time that you can't give to the others. So, unwittingly, the charities are competing for the same dollars and volunteers.

My idea increases the overall pool of volunteer hours and donor dollars. Since time management workshops can increase the time that volunteers have to give, and money management workshops can increase the money that donors have, charities should offer these workshops to their volunteers and donors. They should say to them: "Here's a way that you can be more generous to us and the people we help, and have more time and money for yourselves, as well!"

That "perk" would be better than many current volunteer perks and appreciation events.

At first, volunteers and donors may initially resist the idea of taking workshops, since they might just want to give time or money, rather than do a workshop or training. But charities need to coax their volunteers and donors by explaining how this is a way to be more generous, and also have more for themselves. Once people understand that increasing the volunteer and donation pool is one of the few real ways to increase the overall good that can be done, they will start to appreciate this idea.

Charities themselves might resist this idea. That's because, even if the workshop participants produce more time and money because of the workshops, they might not share it with the charity. They might keep it, or they might give it to another charity. But the workshop can be set up to make it clear to the participants that they are expected to share some of their increased time and money with the charity. The way to prove that this idea works is to do an actual study. But how could it not work? If people are generous enough to give time and money to a certain charity, most of them will certainly give more to a charity that helped them create more time and money. Besides the volunteers and donors they already have, charities could even attract people who always wanted to give, but never had enough time or money.

There are two other ways to coax the charities to use this strategy.  First, foundations can point out that charities that don’t do this aren’t being forward-looking; they’re not acting for the greater good of the whole community, only for their own narrow mission.  Second, trainers who present the time and money management workshops will coax the charities because they can make money doing the workshops.  And if a charity can’t afford trainers, they can have someone from their own staff use readily available self-help books and materials to do the workshops.

This idea is so simple idea that I can't imagine that a charity somewhere in the world hasn't done a time management training as a perk for their volunteers or a money-management training for their donors. Nevertheless, there's still a difference between their idea and mine. My idea is to make this a new standard for the nonprofit sector. To have it be known that this is a higher and better way to give, one that yields increased long-term benefits for all—the volunteers and donors themselves, the charities, and the people that the charities are trying to help.

Here's where the $500 billion figure comes from: The richest one-tenth of the world's population would be 600 million people, mostly the middle class of the wealthier countries. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume they are all just middle class people. If these people can save just $100 more a month through money management, that would yield $360 billion a year. $100 a month may sound like a lot, but in an actual small group situation, I led a group of participants to trim monthly recurring expenses like insurance and utilities, producing savings of up to $1500 a year. Now for the other part of the $500 billion: In the United States half of all adults who can volunteer do volunteer. Therefore, imagine that only half of the 600 million people volunteered an extra three hours a week, using time gained through time-management. If this time were valued at only $6.75, that would yield $150 billion dollars a year. Thus, the total of donations and volunteer time is worth over $500 billion a year.

How soon could this happen? As soon as a charity creates a time or money management training and presents it to some of its volunteers and donors, the process has begun. A charity could ask for half of the time or money that is gained during the first year and then track the results. If charities fully embraced this idea and took a year to plan and test their trainings, it is conceivable that within five years charities could have easily trained over half of the potential candidates, yielding half of the $500 billion a year.

Someone might criticize this idea by saying that most of the $360 billion that people save is money that would have been spent on other things. Therefore, this will shrink the for-profit sector and cause a loss of jobs. But any job loss in the for-profit sector will be more than compensated by two things: job creation in the nonprofit sector, and an increased safety net that will make the transition easier for those losing their jobs. In other words, because the nonprofit sector is built up there will be more job training, counseling, and other services available to those in transition.

One way to summarize this article is to explain what $500 billion a year could do.  Of the six billion people on Earth, one in six is in dire poverty.  All of the $500 billion would never be spend on hunger, but let's pretend that it would.  That would give each hungry person $500 more a year to live on.  Used judiciously, and combined with what they have, it would be roughly enough.  In other words, the firepower of this one idea is on a scale that could end world hunger.  I'm not saying that it will.  The comparison is only for helping people imagine the scale, the firepower of this idea.

The superprogram concept is actually about 25 to 50 times more powerful than the first idea.  That's because this idea only increases time and money among a tenth of the world's population.  But the superprogram idea can be used with at least half the world's population (not infants and small children, and not the elderly and infirm.)  So that's a fivefold impact in power.  The other five to tenfold impact comes from noting that the one idea increases time and money, but superprograms can increase savings and efficiency through time management, money management, ecological action, political action, economic action, "lobbying" charities to be more efficient, and choosing the most efficient charities.  

An added bonus is the synergy for people in poor nations:  The first idea gets more resources (food, farm tools, medical supplies, books, computers) to the poor nations, and the superprogram idea gives people the ongoing support and learning environment to learn and use the resources.

If you acknowledge that the one idea has about enough firepower to address one world program, and the other idea is 25 to 50 times more powerful, then you can imagine that together these two ideas have roughly the firepower needed to address most if not all major problems—on Earth.