[Foundation-l] Board letter about fundraising and chapters

[Samuel Klein]

Hello Birgitte,

Thank you for these comments and edits/suggestions.  [all: please also
post suggestions on Meta. most people are not subscribed to this
list.]

This Board letter was published on short notice.  Once it was clear
that the issue should be raised and discussed this year, we wanted to
share our thoughts immediately.  There is room to improve these ideas,
and suggestions are welcome.

On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 3:07 AM,  <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> ** The organization's current financial resources are not enough to fund
>> proposed program work.
>
> This would be best to be written up as only applicable so long as WMF's current financial resources are not enough to fund proposed program work using the same criteria.

Perhaps.  A regional organization can often do things more
effectively; and there is also value in some level of decentralized
and duplicated effort, to avoid single points of failure.

>> ** The Foundation can confidently assure donors to the chapter that their
>> donations will be safeguarded, that our movement's transparency principles
>> will be met, and that spending will be in line with our mission and with the
>> messages used to attract donors.
>
> [This] should be a trade... with WMF providing the chapter with the equivalent paperwork
> and the chapter doing it's own fiduciary duty by seriously reviewing it annually and of
> course vice versa.

Yes.  I would love to see Chapters or other movement entities making
specific suggestions to the Foundation about how to improve its own
transparency, or align its spending better with our [shared] mission
and the messages [we all] use to attract donors.

> Best case scenario is that each chapter/WMF can view this not only as an opportunity to ensure > that their current partner is being held accountable to these shared principles, but also as an
> opportunity to lay the groundwork to see that these principles will by upheld by the heirs of
> both organizations whoever they might be.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes :-)

> I would argue all involved hurt the development of *successful* new chapters by
> setting up such perverse incentives.  I would urge all involved this time to keep in
> mind the chapters-yet-to-exist and all current parties-under-unknown-future-leadership
> rather than only thinking of securing an agreement for your party-as-it-currently-exists.

+1
It is certainly important to have a system that could survive the
foundation or any individual chapter being coopted for a time by
leadership misaligned with our mission.

Sam.